I Wake Up Slow

I wake up slow, so slowly that the single storylines on repeat in my brain have time to get tangled up with other somewhat related storylines. It’s been just about a fortnight of Covid-19 quarantine. In my little co-op apartment it’s the same as it ever was. I’m “working” from home and my husband is actually working. The building is oddly quiet considering that everyone is supposedly holed up. I’m lucky not to have any children or live adjacent to anyone who does and income is still coming in at the staccato pace it had been. I must have played this one right. My mom is old but way out in the country where you’d be hard pressed to get within 60 feet of another human and has her own, I suppose, support system and plenty of food. Our lives have little to do with one another since I left home at 14. So same as it ever was. 

But then I thought about my father. Haven’t seen him in years, over a decade at least. Maybe a decade and a half. I couldn’t count how may times in my life we had to endure each other’s presence, maybe a few dozen. Totally, fine. I used to say in my act that he was a terrible person and a worse father, but at least he was consistent. No promises were made, none broken. The words that best describes up my parents’ parenting style is negligible but not altogether negligent. I had the material goods I needed, usually got the material things I wanted, and they let me be me. No strong bonds were created, which would have stung if I had not noticed early on that they both lacked any real attachments to other humans. Secretly, I think we were all hoping that it would all be over soon. Okay, maybe just me hence my insistence on going to boarding school—my backup plan was to run away and live in a yurt in the Pacific Northwest. (I had actually researched this. In the 70s there had been a robust market for books on alternative living in the woods.) But now in this time of apparent crisis in which we should all be lowering ourselves at the altar of being “all in this together”, as if that is a thing in a capitalist society, I thought that in his old age the bastard might be so mentally weakened or emotionally needy as to check on me via email. Alas, nothing. A relief considering.

Then I started thinking about Dory Previn, the late and fucking great singer/songwriter who was betrayed by her more famous film composer husband André Previn. She was the second of his five wives, so extrapolate from there. Okay, so I don’t have all the details but I recall from the friend who introduced me to her work via cassette mixes made from old LPs that André threw her Dory in favor of Mia Farrow (mark #3), who I resolved to hate immediately after learning this fact. Nothing irks me more than a waif gamine celeb. Eat a sandwich, quit it with the small voice, you can’t still be blonde.  She, again apparently, even wrote a song about how the lecherous pixie “admired her wedding bed” and (I guessed from the song) mentioned it to Dory on site. 

My friend, I’ll call her by someone else’s initial since we aren’t friends anymore, L didn’t need to tell me that Dory suffered from mental illness. In 1995 I was dealing with it, too and was drawn to work by artists that put their depression, mania, and anxiety on Front St. I still get angry when I am introduced to an artist whose work I fall for because I wish I had discovered them earlier. Dory was born in the 20s, she was no longer active and her work was hard to find, not that I was going to start visiting used record stores. They were on the decline by then to the point where the nostalgia of the their loss overtook the actual loss. The people who worked in them were off-putting collector types and bad musicians who always seemed annoyed that whatever gem was gliding off the shelf was ultimately falling into the wrong hands. Or they were genre aficionados ready to scoff. Really though those spaces, I see now, were just very male and very adult and those assholes kept customers at bay. Also, only about 3 people I knew had serious record players, one was my dad. I got a CD player my last year at boarding school. It was awesome, CDs were small and the stores were inviting. 

At L’s big old house in a rapidly gentrifying sub-suburb of Philadelphia populated by aging super liberal types, her parents had a lot of Dory’s work. Maybe they had even known her. It was an awkward visit in the wake of a death and I think the family was happy to have me there as a distraction. I was happy to be invited somewhere. I had stopped going home for breaks and non-essential holidays in boarding school and kept up the tradition of accepting weekend invites from friends. I was curious to see how other people lived. Also it was guaranteed that I would be fed a home cooked meal, have some great conversation, and generally acknowledged as existing, none of these were likely to happen at my house. Also, L and I were becoming good friends and that was just something you did. She had her own ride, a sweet mini pickup, and her mom was cool. Behind her house in a barn her mom had a pottery studio of things I couldn’t appreciate at the time—asymmetric dinnerware with figurines painted or sculpted on. Some of the pieces were so fragile that they didn’t make it out of the kiln. Someone was buying them or maybe she was just keeping busy as she dealt with tragedy. The house was big and strange and smelled like a farm even though they weren’t using their property for farming. It smelled like hay, not livestock. I struggled to square L’s rural upbringing with her urban sophistication. She wore dark MAC lipstick and knew the children of successful artists and entertainers. Her wardrobe was all black, I was only part of the way there with my outfits. She always found amazing thrift store items and not just basics, she had accessories and home décor. To me her dorm room suggested Sunset Boulevard, the film not the musical. Since we were at college together she couldn’t have been more that 4 years my senior but next to her I felt like I had a lot a growing up to do. In short, she had glamour and I glimmers. I still don’t have as much glamour as she had then and I could probably afford to get something together.

It was a wild weekend. Thrifting. Acting and writing exercises. Hanging out in gay men’s bars. An uncomfortable but rewarding eyebrow plucking session- mine were out of control. Some heartfelt conversations with her mom. Some incredibly awkward chats with her brother. Hearing and laughing at great stories about her dad, the deceased. He seemed like an awesome guy. I couldn’t imagine feeling sorrow, real sorrow, for that kind of loss. 

We were friends for the better part of a school year maybe three semesters. I think she just stopped talking to me. We never had a falling out or even a discussion or maybe I just forgot. I wasn’t the most observant person and figured that all relationships were short lived so if one faltered I moved on without skipping a beat. Maybe it was the grief. She did have a lot going on. Her sorrow was the closest thing to grief I have ever felt. I didn’t press the issue of our lapsed friendship. We didn’t have any classes together and I think I was living off campus anyway so we didn’t run into each other. L and I had a few friends in common but I was a rolling stone; I dropped out of school three times and people didn’t even know what class year I was in. Maybe we just lost touch. The only part of our relationship that remains aside from warm remembrances on my part, are too thin brows that now I have to pencil in until this two caterpillars on face fashion mandate fades, my love of dark makeup, and a keen awareness of Dory Previn’s work. Her song “I wake up slow” is the second track on We’re Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx. A great album.