Three years ago I put on a show that was sort of a high water mark. A birthday show in which I performed a set of covers I've always wanted to perform but never had the band to do so. We covered Concrete Blonde and Prince. I covered a song by my favorite Santa Cruz band of the 90s — "Narrow Band" by Dresden. I charged $5 admission and sold out the Metro Gallery. Musically, it was sending me in a direction I had wanted to go for a long time and I immediately started planning the next show I wanted to do, a show made up entirely of duets.
I wanted to build on everything I'd learned from my past bands, and from the covers shows I'd been part of — White Wing Dove, Divaween, the Rituals New Year's Prince Tribute, various Bowie tributes, and the Neko Case set with the Guided By Wire Big Band.
The pandemic put the brakes on that dream, but I persisted with the dream. I pitched it to some funders, and secured a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council to put it on. I originally had a date on the calendar for 2 July 2022, which was 20 years to the day from when I first set foot in Baltimore to make it my home.
But the universe had other plans. That show got postponed for myriad reasons. Producing a show now is harder than ever, especially when there are so many moving parts, so many variables. Some new folks signed on as some other folks dropped off the bill. The set changed. We got a new date: 22 October 2022 — miraculously retaining the preponderance of 2s in the date. That's this weekend. We're gonna put on a really fun show, and I'm planning to sleep the whole next day.
I love this work, even though it's emotionally and physically exhausting. When I originally planned it, this show was going to be done in July, which would have given me the rest of this year to do...something else. Instead, Doin' It Doin' It Duets has been my primary project this year. It also happens to be my only public musical performance this year, which is quite a change. Pre-pandemic, I was performing music at least monthly. Even during the early part of the pandemic I was doing an online show every now and then. My last public music performance before this weekend was the last Santa Librada show at the Y Not Lot last September. That's a long time for me to be away from the stage.
This week, not only am I finally getting to celebrate 20 years of making art in Baltimore, I'm celebrating another milestone that really sneaked up on me.
Today marks 30 years since I made my transition completely public. I'd started coming out in my first year of college in 1987, and suffered from being partially in the closet for a while until I decided that I need to set a deadline for myself, as well as the rest of the world. I chose my 23rd birthday in 1992 as the day when I would no longer answer to my birth name, and to engage the world openly as a transsexual woman. I did it and I never looked back.
Then, as now, I found myself terrified of working without a safety net, of not having enough resources, and of not being sure I was really going to pull it off.
Somehow I did it, and I'm still here, and ultimately, that's the story of my life.
I expect that once this Duets show is finally done, this blog is going to get much busier.
