Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

gina

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Everything has taken on its own sheen in my room as the fan sucks in cool moist are from the outside. Elise is sitting on my bed trying to tune her clarinet, Jack and Karen are somewhere else in the house observing the ‘thon action from a safe distance, and Lindsay and Kate left to pick up groceries for the dinner i’ll be mooching off of later.


All this activity is so strange compared to last year when Gina would stop by my apartment every so often with a guitar or butterscotch cookies. This year i have an entire handful of people who want to contribute to my songs, and i have roommate and friends who donated to my charity, and i have a state of the art 8-track mixer so that i’m not singing into the miserable little speaker in the front of my moniter. It’s still a little lonely, though, even with my obsessive checking of statistics and having surfed halfway around the ring already.

Well, at least i found two new linkers: Speechless and Lynne @ Ursie, who specifically complimented Lindsay on her harmonies. Go L-dawg!

It seems that the delerium has set in…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85288649/

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Tiny blonde girl, six or seven maybe. The mic stand was as low as it would go and she kept twisting it back and forth trying to get it even lower, her eyes crossing every time it centered in her field of vision. On every chorus her father would glance at her and nod, and she would grab the microphone and softly sigh into it – recoiling after each phrase with her hand over her mouth, giggling. Half babbling child’s nonsense but half assured harmony, after three songs she was done and she crossed her eyes at us a final time.


Every open mic i’ve ever played has been a little different from the one before it, and this was no exception. Northeast Philadelphia has an eerie quality that it lends to its residents, world worn and weary as they are, so that you can read their lives off of their faces without even needed to hear the songs they had chosen for that purpose exactly. One man, in a faded blue shirt with strong biceps and a cracked and weathered guitar channeled Tom Waits with his slow gravelly delivery, not a surprise at all. A woman, her long blonde hair trailing her and a half apologetic smile on her face, playing self-consciously narrative songs on her full size piano. A thirteen year old girl dressed like a gypsy, holding herself as though she was twice her age until she took the stage behind another piano, this time to play swirling piano compositions she meekly announced that she had “written when she was eleven.” Not so long ago for her, the MC reminded us.

Gina and I must have presented them a conundrum, not betraying our world in our faces. First Gina, shocking them as she revealed her range note by note, first tickling the very highest and then descending to a nearly bass hum as she slowly circled the most basic chords in Bb. And me, i suppose, energetically bounding up and back from the microphone with each line, sticking out my tongue when i missed my riff, and making steady eye contact with anyone who was bobbing their head along. I can’t imagine that we telegraphed our moves, our voices, our emotions as well as the regulars, because our faces just don’t have that quality. Even the tiny blonde girl in her staring cross-eyed at the microphone in front of her face told me all i needed to know before she ever opened her mouth.

I don’t know if i can go back.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85206127/

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I sit just off the set on Stage Right on headset, right at the foot of the stairs that the actors use to get up to the second level of the performance space. I have the perfect profile shot of them as they aim their intentions at the audience, so that i catch the tiny flinches and thrusts they are making that don’t ever make it out past the lip of the stage. Tonight Gina climbed the stairs to close out the first act with her a cappella lullabye, and there was something about it that just sent a hush over our typically active end-of-act headset conversations. At first she was unsure and fragile, but as the chorus rose her voice did too, until it crested as it poured out of her in waves of perfect vibrato, only to slowly fade away again afterwards.


The first thing i said on headset when she closed her mouth was “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what convinced me to do theatre.”

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/02/9508190/

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After spending so long implicitly pushing so many different people away in so many different ways, it’s strange to slowly get back to having anyone i’d consider a “best friend,” but somehow it’s happening with the most unlikely of people. You only get the chance to be someone’s best friend if you see them enough to get past all the petty catching-up-with-each-other bullshit enough times so that whenever you go back to that it actually means something, and that’s a phenomenon i unusually only experience with Gina.

God, could i be any less literate today? Excuse me while i go take an hour long essay test…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6758738/

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Yesterday was a day of everything in pieces. In Literature we watched a fuzzy academic film about the art of the Mexican Revolution, and it was as if all of the bright murals on the screen traded places with my campus so that their shaded in people were all round and real while mine were strangely flat. Everything in my world was little mosaic bits of mural… like looking close enough to notice that the shading of a cheek is really just a couple of dashes of black paint. Eventually i wound up giggly and in charge at the office because we were doing territory management via email and i was the only person who knew how to make an href so we could have spiffy links (i think they just thought that it happened by magic). Then there was some inbetween time… a quick $20 shopping binge with Gina at K-Mart so we could have costumes for the party. And then the party. But, the less said about that the better.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6666102/