A Life in Color

Last night I saw Indigo Girls and Matt Nathanson in concert. Turns out that uberhottie Matt Nathanson is both impossibly cute and utterly charming on stage. And his singing...OH MY GOD HIS SINGING! It's a yellow brick road, it's magical, it's angst and unrequited love and lust and sex HE HAS SEX WITH THE AUDIENCE WHILE HE'S SINGING! but a sweet sex, a wanting sex, erotic and soulful and virginal and I'm like Dorothy in Oz but I never want to go home. HERE is that sweet something with a heart and a brain and a winsome, brazen courage and I am dazzled.


I'm telling you, more than one lesbian changed channels, changed networks, CHANGED SERVERS watching him perform tonight. [Did I mention it was an INDIGO GIRLS concert? If you're not familiar with their following, let me just tell you that it's colorful. Rainbow-Brite colorful. Gay Pride colorful. I've seen them like six times with my sis and we've evolved from a mutually HORRORified, standing-at-arm's-length-from-each-other-so-as-not-to-be-mistaken-for (...) to The Screaming Dancing Girls TWO ROWS FROM THE STAGE (you can't get any closer without flashing your gay card!) who could care LESS if anyone thinks we're gay.]


Anyway we're both wearing heels, earrings, and designer jeans so, even though we are right there on the front lines of Raleigh's Lesbian elite, I'm still thinking no one's mistaking us for them because I've seen enough episodes of The L Word to know that two lipstick lesbians are about as likely to couple as, I don't know, Anne Coulter and Jimmy Carter. And we're DANCING. We're all like Shakira and Beyonce up there (did I mention TWO ROWS FROM THE STAGE!) and I have learned that (STEREOTYPE ALERT!) lesbians are the least inclined of ALL WHITE PEOPLE to dance. (YES I JUST PLAYED THE RACE CARD AND THE GAY CARD! Quick! Call a Conservative! Because Tolerance is the new Red and they are all quick to remind you that many of them have A Black Friend and one of them even has A Gay Daughter.)


So the concert was amazing. Galileo, King of Night Vision and Insight, spun among stars in orbit. The Earth turned beneath us to shade us in cloaks of gray and the Goddess smiled on the singing, dancing women of Booth Amphitheater. We sang hymns to old lovers and past lives; we drank wine in splendor and quantity (and spilled it--oops!--on the hair of the nondancing short haired Person of Questionable Gender in front of me WHO NEVER BEFORE IN HER ENTIRE LIFE CARED WHAT HER HAIR LOOKED LIKE UNTIL I SPILLED WINE IN IT!) Jenny and I met (MET!) Matt Nathanson and I got one step closer to getting my gay card.


But back in Kansas, I can't sleep. I dream, I wake, I weave bright, clashing hues into a scratchy tapestry of anxiety and restlessness. My sleep it stutters, starts, tics, swears. (Can a precise alchemy of alcohol, caffeine, and B vitamins induce Tourette's? I'm thinking YES.) And so this morning I am wicked, disheveled, tornadic in my exhaustion. I have lost my ruby slippers. There are flying monkeys in my living room.


My world has lost its scent and texture. The ocean lies still and scentless, its salt a memory. The sun hides darkened, shying behind clouds. There is, there is...a sterile scentlessness born of fatigue, excess, and disappointment. (WHAT HAPPENED TO LAST NIGHT'S MAGIC? HOW DO I GET BACK TO OZ?) My fingers callous. My tongue numbs. I see the world in shades of gray that startle only in their clarity. (Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before....)

So I'm feeling, as I rouse my own Munchkins from their much-untroubled slumber, totally, technically, vertically, atomically, synthetically, pathologically, neolithically, telepathically, anatomically, illustratively, architecturally, irreversibly, symbolically and undeniably dead! I stumble to the coffee pot. I pour. I stir. I sip.

The world unfolds in technicolor majesty.

(You're out of the woods, You're out of the dark, You're out of the night. Step into the sun, Step into the light.)

I'm an ordinary mom. It's an ordinary day. (That's okay, right?) The Earth circles a sun in a spinning galaxy and I...I plug in my iPod and sing my heart out with Matt, Amy, and Emily as I take the yellow, bricked route to school.

I wear ruby-red lipstick all day long.