My Eyes are Open, Dancing Woman

This past Friday, I had the honor of performing with my husband Charles at the St. Louis Zoo. It was a physically tortuous gig, about 100 degrees and in full sunlight starting at 5:00 p.m., which meant Charles and I were hauling equipment to set up at 3:00 p.m. I felt like I was melting, but I was glad to do it to help Charles, there is just no way that he could have done it by himself. But it’s not the physical aspect of doing this gig that I want to talk about right now, it is the emotional and psycho-spiritual part that I have to speak on.

Being a woman and being an artist, particularly a musician, can be very difficult, especially if one is African-American. We start out with one strike because we are Black – it is assumed that we are not as musically educated or experienced – I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked “Can you read music?”. There is also a fair amount of “testing” that goes on while gigging: I have had other musicians ask “What key?” for stock standard tunes even after I have told them the key, or try to make things more complex than they have to be in order to make me feel ignorant and/or unwelcome. Please note: This has been my experience for over 10 years in this town in this business, so I am only speaking for myself and my perceptions. I really don’t want to hear how I have a “chip on my shoulder” or any other such nonsense. Believe, I have already been through all that and come out the other side.

In addition, my second strike is that I am a female and of course the only way that I have been successful is because of who I sleep with. I have been on gigs too numerous to count where it was made clear that I was only tolerated because my husband was running the gig. The condescension with which I have been treated would infuriate a man, I assure you, but as a woman, my only choice has been to “grin and bear it” or risk being labeled a “bitch”. I chose “bitch” after a while, I promise you. It has only been recently when I have been very, very selective of my band that I have had a different experience, and I miss them so much when I don’t get to work with them. It is such a gift to work with people that not only respect me, but support me artistically.

These days, I usually can be on a gig and just deal with it and realize that everyone is not going to 1) get me, or 2) respect me, or 3) be anything like interested in supporting me artistically. However, on this particular gig, it really bugged me. I think because I got used to having my own group and that environment, it was a shock to be dealt with differently. I’m not going to revisit it here, but suffice to say, it was not an artistically nurturing environment and the gig was not at a level that I was personally happy with. I bring all this up because of something else that ties in with this: Dancing Woman, who opened my eyes. Please forgive me if I wax poetic in the following lines.

Dancing Woman apparently attends all of the Zoo musical functions and just like it sounds, she dances. She has a sign on her chair -- “Dancing for Life” -- and she is to say the least, an unusually attired woman. She wears layers of skirts and ties scarves from wrist to shoulder so that they will swirl about when she dances. She is in the early autumn of her life and wears a tiara tucked into her wild and scraggly mane. She also has other accessories for her dance: Spanish fans, blue and white pom poms. She brings a small square of linoleum to mark her center, but she does not limit her dance to that area, and that is where the story really begins for me.

Partway through our first set, management came and asked us to stop playing so that they could speak with Dancing Woman. You see, many of the audience members had children who were dancing as well and they were afraid that Dancing Woman would strike one of their children while dancing (apparently she did hit a child a few weeks ago at the Zoo). Management went to her and told her to confine her dancing to a smaller area. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but I assure it hurt Dancing Woman deeply. I didn’t realize until that moment that I was no different than her. She just wanted to express herself and her art and she was basically told that she was unwelcome. Of course, many people came to stare and laugh at her, to ridicule her, but she kept on dancing. Dancing Woman had to dance, no matter what. (I have video from my cell phone but it is too distorted to show you).

It made me think about Hair and my part in the tribe, as well as who I really am and how I express myself. I want to be as bold as Dancing Woman, I don’t want to get caught up in what others think or feel about what I do. I think that the hippies were the same way, they believed so much in what they felt about the nature of the world that they had to share it, had to try and make a change – no matter what names they were called or how they were treated.

Why is it that if you talk about love, peace and happiness, communing with God, or anything like that you are “a flake”? Why are we so afraid to really be ourselves and be vulnerable? Why do we make fun of those who may seem odd? Why do we slowly suffocate our true selves under the weight of proscribed behavior? Why are we so afraid? I learned from Dancing Woman what it means to let go of fear and just be who I’m here to be. I saw in her eyes a commitment to living her truth, and in the face of her bravery, how can I do less? All of the little remarks and digs along the years, the derision, the condescension, the experiences that have caused me to stuff my spirit down and hide from myself are like dust on the wind. My words are not doing a great job of expressing this, they just don’t suffice right now. All I can say is, thank you Dancing Woman. My eyes are open. Wide.