...And it Was the Best Night Ever

Without going into a lot of detail because that is not the kind of blog this is, it has been a rough few months. I have never dealt well with change and back in July there was a week where several of the pillars I thought of as sturdy, stable, and constant in my life were yanked out from under me all at once. That forced me to confront a lot about myself that I had been pushing aside or explaining away, and I've been sort of swinging wildly in the wake of all this ever since, trying to get my bearings.

I've learned more about myself in the last three months than I thought possible. I've changed and grown and gotten stronger. I'm proud of what I've done and I'm feeling optimistic about the future. I'm starting to really get to know myself better than I ever have before and for the first time I'm starting to like what I've found. It's been hard and it will continue to be hard but it's also been incredibly rewarding.

One huge reason why this process of breaking down and building back up has gone as well as it has is Doomtree and in particular, Dessa. Right before all this change went down Kathleen, one of my oldest friends, told me to listen to A Badly Broken Code and right after it all fell apart I downloaded it and started listening. I haven't stopped. I already had a couple of Doomtree CDs (from my excellent friend Kelly who deserves equal credit in introducing me to this fabulous world of Minnesota rap) that had been in my regular rotation but I bought more and more and for the past three months I have listened to almost nothing else. Some days those songs were the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning. I found strength and meaning and inspiration in the lyrics. As my situation changed new songs would emerge as my favorites, verses I had heard without really listening to the day before would suddenly cut straight to my heart and show me a new side of my situation and myself.

I don't want to sound like an insane fan or religious zealot, I just want to explain my frame of mind when I went to the Doomtree show at the Minnesota State Fair two weeks ago. Screaming the lyrics and jumping up and down with hundreds of fans was everything I'd imagined it to be and I felt better and freer than I had in months.

Knowing what that felt like made me even more excited to see Dessa last night. The show was in La Crosse, an hour and a half away but a small price to pay to get that feeling back. I hadn't known when I bought the tickets that I would be scheduled for work at 4am that day and the day before, so by the time I got to the concert I had gotten about 8 hours of sleep in the past two nights but again, that was not even really a consideration in my mind. I chugged some Red Bull and settled in.

Annabelle Lee, the opening act, was fun. Aby Wolf was gorgeous and soulful, but I was impatient for Dessa. The venue was probably the smallest I've ever been to. The performers could see every single person in the crowd, and Dessa was not shy about calling people out on what she saw. She called out a guy for looking bored the whole show until she sang "The Man I Knew" ("Post-cocaine confusion song?! Yeah, that is my jam!"), and a couple of others for miming girly excitement for another song ("Guys don't look any cooler when they're really into a song." She said, doing an impersonation of a cool hip-hop guy rocking out). My favorite was a girl who actually raised her hand to ask a question. Dessa was really excited that someone raised their hand at a rap show like they were in school, and even more excited that she could immediately tell the difference in hand-raising, but then the girl started to ask a question about the setlist and Dessa shut her down immediately ("The setlist is mine and mine alone! Now let's do some sad shit!").

All this makes me wonder what she saw when she looked at me because I was not the only one right up at the stage singing every word with her, I was not the only one holding up my phone to get pictures and video, I wasn't even the one trying hardest to get her to notice me. I got a high-five from her with everyone else gathered around her feet at the beginning and that would have been enough, truly. Then I recorded her singing "The Crow", one of my very favorites and one that has meant a lot to me, and she leaned down and took my phone from me, recorded a few seconds of the crowd screaming, and handed it back.

That would have been enough. But then during "Seamstress" (another of my favorites. Basically they are all my favorites) she motioned to a few of us to make some space and she jumped into the crowd directly in front of me. She sang the song from a few inches away and I was in awe. She let the audience, especially those of us close to her, shout back and forth with her "It was a mercy kill" "NO" "It was a suicide" "NO" "It was an accident" "NO" "Well at least I tried". That would have been enough. But then she got to "It's a strange breed, a different kind of creature that looks for love through the eye of a needle but the creed of the seamstress is..." and put the microphone square in front of my face. I remember it happening in slow motion and I remember a second of panic and a flood of determination not to screw it up and I know for a fact that I yelled (but not too loud) "That you're pretty in pieces!" and then she moved on, finished the song, and climbed back up on stage. I know that I did sing it and someone next to me gave me the thumbs up and said "good job!" but at the time and in my memory I cannot hear my voice at all.

After the show she hung out at the merch table, meeting, greeting, picture-taking, and signing things. I bought both her books and stood in line. She hugged me when I came up to ask for her autograph. I stumbled a little over my Minnesotan anxiety about bothering her or sounding stupid but I told her that I had been having a rough time lately and thanked her for her music and told her how much it had helped. She said "Yeah, me too. It's been a hell of a year" and gave me another hug. We took a picture together and before I left she looked me straight in the eye. A small gesture but in the moment it felt huge.

I would like to point out that at this point I had been awake for 21 hours, having only gotten five hours of sleep or so the night before and even fewer the night before that, but as I stepped out into the mostly empty streets of La Crosse I found myself shaking and started to cry.

I had been looking forward to this night for weeks, idly daydreaming about getting a high five, trying to work out how I would express my gratitude for all she'd unknowingly done for me the last few months without sounding like a hundred crazy fangirls she'd met before, or, in my silliest moments, picturing getting to sing a line into the microphone with her. Never in any of my fantasies did I picture all of these things happening. I honestly have no idea how to deal with feeling this lucky, especially after this summer.

All day today I've been replaying the events over and over trying to make them feel real. My exhausted brain, now running on a total of 13 hours of sleep over the past three days, seems half convinced that I hallucinated at least part of the night. How else could I have gotten everything I'd wanted and more? The cautious humble Midwesterner in me wants to say that this is a sign of horrible things to come, that no one person could possibly deserve this much special treatment, least of all me, and the other shoe will drop any day now as payment for my ecstatic joy and recognition. But I'm trying to rise above those voices and recognize the far more likely truth: it is a charmed fucking life I lead.