home_and_away | I'm glad to be back in my own bed.

I spent my sleeping hours last night listening to Ani DiFranco music that hasn't been written yet.

The album felt a little like Reprieve and a little like Out of Range--very aware of the political climate, but more mature than to just rail against it. Speaking of personal responsibility for creating beautiful things and recognising beauty, personal responsibility for doing right things and knowing what Right is, our responsibilities to ourselves and eachother to live honestly and daringly. You could hear the products of the introspection that motherhood has brought her.

I spent the night listening to the music and working on visual interpretations of it. Not quite music videos, because MTV and VH1 would never touch something so clearly intended to poke people in the eye for listening to their televisions. But video attached to the music.

It may have been a thing independent of Ani's work, because I don't remember working with her, but I do remember working with a small classroom packed with kids of varying ages and temperaments. I remember the brainstorming sessions that went into planning the visuals. I remember helping kids gently cut Barbie dolls apart and watching them trimming and dying the dolls' hair into very punky styles, then running wire through their limbs and rejointing them into very mobile marionnettes. I remember watching them melt some of the untrimmed dolls' faces and reshape them. I remember watching the finished product of that one--rows and rows of Barbie dolls, dancing the same strange ballet. At first, you think it's cookie cutter beauty and Culture You Should Appreciate, the dancing equivalent of a subdivision where all the houses are from one of two blueprints. But then the camera moves to show each row of dolls, and the delicate movements their little hands can make when you give them a mobile wrist joint...and you see the hair. And you see the faces. And you see the modded makeup. And it speaks--you may have the same basic equipment as everyone else, but you've got your own intuition to show you how to use it: there's NO REASON not to do what you can with what you've got.

I remember being amazed at how personally my little group of outcasts and misfits took the project, and proud of their creative drive.

And I remember sitting across from Ani, both of us perched oddly in those old half-desk chairs that pretty much forced a kid to write righthanded with her book on her left knee, and playing the videos and displaying the paintings my kids had made. Watching her blink and nod and find this cool. Watching her blush at my students' gratitude--thank you for your inspiration! Trying not to squee like a fangirl, myself.

Then I remember dragging Mark through an unfamiliar city--it felt like Houston, maybe--walking the streets and sidewalks following someone else's music, peeking into alleys and up fire escapes and down manholes and finding beauty in the oddest places. Mark was game. He didn't understand it at first, and was coming along to keep me from putting myself in harm's way all unthinking. But by the end of the day, he was tapping my shoulder and pointing wonder out and following the navigator in the back of his head that says "Turn here and talk to the second person you meet" but doesn't tell you what to say.

And the second person was the wife of the woman whose music we were chasing. She was just back in town from a business trip, and was terrified that she'd just missed her lady, who was due to leave for a tour that same night. She was blocks from their apartment, it was getting late, and she didn't know whether she'd missed her window to say goodbye, good luck, I love you. Somehow, we took her under our wing and back to the apartment we were staying at--a living-space trade we'd made with a stranger--and asked whether her lady had a cellphone, and if she did, here's our phone to call her.

Just as we're unlocking our door, the door three down from us opens and a familiar-feeling woman comes out and turns to lock it behind her. And there's laughing and there's crying and there's happy to see eachother--because this is our stranger's lady, and just in time.