I had been earbudding about the city for days. With Disco Corona I am doorknockered and totally gyrational; belly bopping atop a megalith as my three-foot ponytail combs the sandy air. Blade Runner’s Vangelis chimney-sweeps me across a sparkling Long Island City skyline. Internal comicstrips ensue. Rhythm Is A Dancer.
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The coffee shop downstairs from my mother’s house on Front Street has become a daily destination for me and the most unseemly revival of fifth grade ensembles. I parade down the stairs, in search of caffeine, but what the baristas encounter—and what I receive—has been a startling symbiosis. An aboriginal middle schooler for them, and a hearty arty lot of nice guys for me.
My look, appendaged on a first come first serve basis, is completely inappropriate. Most of the clothing I have scavenged from my mother’s house was last worn when the space between my shirt and pants measured a full six inches. The jeans I wore in eighth grade were a lower Broadway find. (Necessary Clothing and Mystique Boutique were stores that carried the company Suaré, my brand of choice.)
The zipper on a pair of Suarés had about as many teeth as the Chinese woman who picks bottles out of the garbage on my street, which is three.
So now when I get my coffee, I appear stylistically as an overgrown trollop. And in all honesty, it may not be far from the truth.
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Crossing through City Hall Park, coffee in hand, I am standing in front of the microphone to hum the beginning of Sinead’s cover Why Don’t You Do Right. I am sultry and the lights are very low. At the piano, Nicholas Kennedy’s head lolls and rolls with the opening bridge, as the first words syrup onto my palette.
Sometimes I circle back on my pod to replay a particularly powerful part, in case my mental video showcase didn’t move my body the way it should, or I didn’t fly high enough. Flight usually happens at the most spastically raging intervals of a song. Like in Fire on Babylon. In this scene, I am wearing a baggy white T-shirt and my hair is bleached and reaches my bum. As we scream the title words, I lift into the air and slam back on stage, with the force of a giant’s step. Or the power of someone who has just been flying. In tiny jeans.