Penny Post #43: Patio Concerts & Hairbrush Magic
Reviving childhood dreams in the wake of Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour.
It started while I was sitting at Cameron's desk, trying to write something coherent while watching Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour on Disney Plus. It seemed like the perfect backdrop for writing about dreams both forgotten and found as a 23 year-old who quit her corporate job and moved home.
Not even the fluffiest blanket wrapped around my body could prevent the goosebumps spreading across my skin when Taylor emerges on stage during her entrance. No amount of watching this concert - either in person or in a movie theatre or at Cameron's desk - will stop the butterflies in my stomach, the fireworks in my soul, or the hair standing erect on my arms. And I'm very much okay with that.
I remember sitting in the theatre while watching this movie for the first time and sinking into the thrown-away childhood memory of pretending my backyard patio was SoFi Stadium. I would grab a hairbrush, close the door behind me, and put on the ultimate show for my neighbors. The steps up to the patio door would separate me from my loudest fans, including one golden retriever puppy whose barking was slightly off-pitch.
I sang everything I knew how to. I performed Justin Bieber's Baby, Selena Gomez's Naturally, and unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. The crowd loved it. In fact they roared for an encore of which I had no business denying them.
There I went. Pretending my hairbrush was a glittered microphone attached to an elaborate sound system that surrounded my backyard and that my dog was one of the many thousands who had travelled from all over the country to watch me sing. Nothing's as powerful as a child's imagination.
Except maybe the inhibition of adulthood.
In the years since the patio concerts, I've abandoned that dream and lived vicariously through Taylor's. I tried a couple of singing lessons and a couple of dancing classes, none of which brought me anywhere except for warranted insecurity and homework. Neither of which I particularly enjoyed: I was supposed to be ready-for-the-stage at 8 in my backyard, not in need of tuning nor choreography nor interference from the so called experts. Eventually the classes and lessons fettered out as did my dream. Nothing was as divisive as my mortifying audition for New Canaan High School's production of The Wizard of Oz where I butchered Idina Menzel's Defying Gravity. And yet no one was more shocked than I when cast as the faceless tornado that blew Dorothy from Kansas. I wanted to be the one who clicked my ruby slippers together wishing for home, not the blob of gray cape that leapt and skipped around her. My family and friends were nice enough to buy me flowers and applaud my leaping and skipping as the best they'd ever seen, yet I found I never wanted to sing in front of an audience again. For the next three New Canaan High School productions I was in, I only mouthed the lyrics to the musical numbers while on stage. My microphone could've died and no one would've noticed. After all, I was only the tornado in an otherwise stormy sky.
The glittered hairbrush-as-microphone splintered. I wouldn't end up on stage in front of tens of thousands of fans, but I might end up on a screen in front of just as many.
I began acting lessons and memorized lines and majored in film, television, and theatre. I decidedly could not sing on a stage, yet somehow I thought I could act on one.
Nothing was less true.
During my first acting class in college I was cast as Anton Chekov's Masha in Three Sisters. It didn't matter how well I thought I had read my assigned scene nor rehearsed with my scene partner, our staged rehearsal was misled, disingenuous, and proof of our failings according to our professor. She proceeded to demonstrate - using me as a de-facto doll - how the scene's subtext was sex, sex, SEX! It didn't matter what she said in any of the classes or rehearsals afterward, I went blind and deaf to all tone of feedback. The hyper-visibility and embodied work felt completely incompatible with my shy, unsure, disembodied self.
The glittered hairbrush-as-microphone cracked some more. Stages six feet under, I found myself following the whispers I had long ignored in my efforts to shine under the spotlight.
In the silence and solitude of my dorm room in Cavanaugh Hall at the University of Notre Dame, I recorded several voice memos that birthed my very first podcast. Our University's president had announced that COVID-19 had spread during our first week back on campus. He threatened us with exile should we continue contracting the virus and enacted a mandatory two-week shutdown. This included online classes, isolated meals, and worse of all: no air conditioning in the blistering August heat. Needless to say, it was a hellscape. I fell asleep each night whispering to myself in the dark and woke up each morning haunted by the pool of sweat soaking my sheets. My one saving grace through it all was the conception of Heavier Than I Look, a podcast that would liberate me from the silence and shame my eating disorder demanded. Despite the cracked and splintered glittered hairbrush-as-microphone, I was ready to soar.
And soar I did. I spoke to magazines, to support groups, to television hosts, to podcast narrators, to friends and strangers alike about my until-then silent eating disorder. I shouted it from the metaphorical roof of my imprisoning dorm room. Many voices of newfound friends and survivors echoed my own: suffering has no place in silence. Heralded as a triumph, I thought the glittered hairbrush-as-microphone finally delivered me somewhere. Until, of course, one voice silenced all of the others:
I don't believe you.
This isn't real.
No one cares.
Don't share this.
This will haunt you.
Suddenly my podcast became a burden instead of a freedom. After thirty five self-produced, self-hosted, self-written, self-directed, self-edited, self-distributed episodes and over five thousand downloads, I quit. Nothing would be worth the weight of those words.
The glittered hairbrush-as-microphone broken in my bruised palms.
I traveled to Toledo, Spain where I lived with a host family for several months. I couldn't find English words for the pain, so I didn't bother finding Spanish ones. I rolled my r's and held my tongue yet (inevitably) couldn't hold my pen. These words, unlike the ones that had come before them, wrote themselves. Instead of trying to find my special, I found my truth.
I wrote about my anxiety which made it "difficult to clear my head and still my hands". I wrote about how my pain was "greater than my ability to withstand it". I wrote about how I was "running from an old Kiera while simultaneously trapped within her".
The truth's ink stained my hands.
Just over a year later, I launched A Penny For My Thoughts.
The writing which begun in Spain churned into a nameless tornado that leapt and skipped around my ruby red slippers. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I duck-taped my glittered hairbrush-as-microphone hoping no one would notice and immediately got to work. No longer do I have a loyal golden retriever puppy pretending to be my biggest fan. No longer do I perform for unwitting neighbors. No longer do I cheaply pawn other artists' work as my own. I sit, with keyboard or pen in hand, stroking the lion's mane as I do, and pray language will deliver me to truth. I answer the calls - even when they come at three am - to steward my story into the world.
I guess what I'm trying to say to you all, whether you are a recent post-grad like me or somewhere far beyond it, is not to forfeit the childhood dreams that once excited you. Your imagination and intuition at a young age are not to be ignored. Yes, an adult's inhibition is extremely powerful. And yet maybe there is a way to recover a childlike sense of wonder and awe as well. Your dreams have not died. Maybe your hairbrush is similarly broken and bruised, forgotten in a heap of childhood dust. Go into your junk drawer, fetch your duck-tape and make your broken hairbrush whole again.
The crowd is roaring for your encore.
As am I.
Until next time,
Kiera