making real

Here is what I'd tell you if we were at Earls on a hot summer night. Maybe not even a glass of wine in, still waiting for drinks.

Do you know Rachmaninoff?  It’s piano. Fucking hard piano. I have a grade 8 Royal Conservatory certificate it took years to achieve. Rachmaninoff is maybe grade 10? 12? I have no idea. It’s out of my league. 

The woman we bought our house from is a nut. A cool nut, but a nut nonetheless. Taught high school science, wife of a psychology prof who believed in energy levels and all kinds of envelope-pushing stuff. They were missionaries in India and bought the house from an architect who dropped acid so he could design better mental hospitals. She walks everywhere and used to write vicious letters to the editor and call the cops on the restaurant across the street if the music was too loud, even if it was a  wedding. She is direct and has zero time for bullshit, or what she qualifies as bullshit, which is most everything. Almost mean, but not quite. Twinkle eyes and not much tolerance for what you wonder about. 

She decided to learn Rachmaninoff in her 70s, and because she tolerates me occasionally, she played for me once in her piano room at her new condo. I turned the pages as her fingers flew. I can read music and still, it was difficult to keep up, her gnarled hands dominating the keys. That music is powerful and intense and it’s not even that you have to be highly skilled - you have to be strong.

For her 85th  birthday she rented the Shubox at the University. Know that theatre? Not the big one in Ridell, it’s the tiny little black box next to it. Weirdest thing. Adorable and cool. Like a vibey New York set. All black, maybe 100 seats. It’s perfect.

She also rented the famous $250,000 piano that I swear has its own full-time staff member plus special humidfiers and she wore a floor-length black jersey gown and let her grey hair wave around her shoulders and she played the shit out of the Rachmaninoff for her birthday party and then we all went out in the atrium and drank iced tea and coffee and ate cake in the sun. She had crumbs all over the front of her dress and she was the most beautiful person in that room. 

It was spectacular. 

She was alive, those blue eyes dancing. I know that’s cheesy - dancing - but they were, I swear it.

I decided I wanted to do something in that room. Something. And I didn’t want to wait to be 85, even though I could have a smoke after if I did.

A  couple weeks or so later I left for Halifax and within a day had to sign up to pitch my book project to a room full of strangers and famous writers and a woman who has been my idol for over twenty years. My voice was calm and measured even as my insides shredded and I realized ahhhhhh, I like this. 

I flew home and signed up for improv with a room full of twenty-somethings (at most; some were not even) and fell madly in love with playing. When it ended, I enrolled in stand-up comedy, even though successful comics swear you just have to do it. Thing is, I’d learned I had to fight for room for me, so I needed a receipt and a schedule to get it. I practised while the kids in the class mostly went on their phones. Sometimes they scoffed and occasionally, they laughed. Some of us are still good friends and I love them very much. I went early to practice and showed up by myself at the Cure on open-mic Monday nights, putting my name in the hat and watching as people dug deep and were vulnerable. I saw audiences turn away from me and felt others lean in. I took notes and revised and practiced like my life depended on it and I fell for a couple of drug addicts who sang and played guitar with a raw beauty I hadn’t seen for a long time.

I performed in a club in New York and the manager became a friend and he still messages me to go to parties in SOHO in the middle of the night and the comic I worked with emails to check in and she sent me a book in  the mail (which might be the quickest way to my heart). People came up to me after I was done to say hi and I loved that and thank you.

The stand-up class final project was a 3 minute bit in the Schubox, like I’d called it into being just like that. My own moment and not even 85. I stood on the stage in that intimate black room in the spotlight and adjusted the mic and took a deep breath and I did that thing almost - it felt like - without even trying. And fuck, I was magic inside. 

I’m doing it. All of it. What I used to lull myself with to sleep with, the what if’s and somedays, I’m now making real. I’m the Velveteen Rabbit. Shabby, but alive. 

Our drinks are here, I think.