Sunday, April 15, 2007
13 going on 30
I was at a bar mitzvah this weekend. Excuse me, I was at an ostentatious display of wealth, posing as a bar mitzvah this weekend. I was there, not as a guest, but as entertainment: singing for my supper, as it were.
Hired to dance, I found myself spending more time doing mental push-ups: fielding questions from horny 13 year olds, and having my teen-pop culture trivia challenged. Due to my perpetual struggle with a Rip Van Winkle-esque quest for enlightenment and media fasts, I was sorely lacking in my relatable topics. Since when, I asked myself, had the quality of conversation been contingent merely on consumerism? The pattern of these conversations were painfully traceable and remarkably similar to boarding school.
Approach. Introduction. Some interest in what I have to say. Try to impress them with my career. Ok. I got their attention. They ask for proof. “Tell me a joke” they say, one after another. The pattern is always the same. The answers change. As the night goes on, it gets better. My teen culture answers.
What the hell am I doing? If I show that I’m up on the trivia, I will be “accepted”, which means ‘ka-ching!’ at the end of the night and more events where I’m booked. At what price, though? Will I have to now go back and listen to the hideous music, watch the denigrating shows and learn the limited dialogue? This was the reason I went to sweat lodge to begin with. To purge myself of all of these illusions.
Something is different and wrong with the new generation, I thought. Children fed on the milk of instant gratification grow in to spoiled and materialistic adults. Housed in the gentrified neighborhoods of privilege, are nary concerned about ground water issues. Clothed with the sweat of third-world country children, they can never be truly be concerned about the world around them. Supplemented with a stream of gossip posed as news, have no choice but to be obsessed with celebrity. This is my generation.
The hostess is wearing a designer gown. She is a social x-ray. Painfully thin and over tanned, she runs around with a Di Vinci porcelain veneer smile, coordinating with the MC to hand out party favors, which are PSP’s. One child is complaining, “Can I change this for an ipod, I already have one of these?”
There is a mocktail hour. Mini alcoholics in training. Out of a sea of blue blazers and khakis, one child with an impish grin and flat Asian features and spikey hair, stands out. One of the children says, “Well, this one has no opinion on this subject. He’s poor.” All of the children laugh cruelly and say, “It’s true. He’s poor. Aren’t you?” He nods, dutifully, and answers the same. Immediately, I’m reminded of Kenny, the impoverished character in the SOUTH PARK cartoon. They have no idea what that is.
After a DREAM GIRLS show, the time approaches, again, to face off with these little turds. One brags of a party he went to in absentia of parental supervision. “The house was trashed and the parents arrived to a child peeing on the wall in the living room!” Another one whines, “I didn’t appreciate Devon taking a picture of my butt.” Yet another is in the bathroom, crying, because she defended her friend and the boy called her a tattle telling ‘douche’. She does not know what that word means, but bawls, “I’m so embarrassed. I feel as if I ruined your party and you are going to be mad at me.”
Recommitting to my conversational agenda, I realize that I am being paid to talk to children who are 13 going on 30. They emulate their parents by conversing about yachting this summer in the Riviera and Hillary Duff. Very close to giving up, I look around the room. I see the “poor” Asian child looking as sad as I feel. I approach him and whisper in his ear, “You may be poor in material wealth, but you are rich in the experience of being a survivor. Don’t ever forget that!” I walk away, and I see a group of children surround him. Later, he is on the dance floor and they are chanting his name while he raps an Eminem song. I may have to take my own advice.
Labels: bar mitzvah, Celebrity, parties, poverty, pride, Rumi, sobriety, teenage
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Good vibrations
As the base pumped, I felt a throbbing in my heart. I looked above me, and the majestic chandelier streamed light, which at my dancing vibration, seemed to emit prisms of light. I spun around and felt my wild locks swirl like an oscillating fan. The still shots that my mind’s eye focused in on, captured an awkward 16 year-old in faded low rise Diesel’s shaking what her mama gave her. A 20 year-old who was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt’s lost younger twin (circa Kalifornia, 1993). An East Village celebrity (lead singer for a popular band), a recognizable model and Lindsay Lohan look-a-like circling around a graceful African dancer and far-out Bohemian. Light surrounded the dance floor. Votives were carefully placed around the room. Beads of perspiration made their way from my scalp to my forehead, to cascades down my back. I took a sharp breath in and felt as if I had come home for the first time ever. I exhaled so much love, that I felt dizzy after. This was no dream. This was the heightened state that I first experienced in the circumference of the leather tee-pee this Fall…
I was directed to sit in the back…behind the elder. The smell of bear claw and sweet sage filled my senses. An athletic, chiseled Aryan man wearing Levi’s 501’s and a smile, carried large, heated boulders in to the center, where a circle had been dug in the Earth. He gently placed the scalding granite in the hole, and sparks flew. The elder calmly said, “Migwich” and gave him tobacco. He bowed in appreciation and retreated beyond the light. The woman sitting to my left let out a sigh after the steam filled the room. The woman to my right began to tremble beneath her wool blanket. A strange light warmed my spine, and I reached my hand out in the darkness and held it 8” from her neck and cooed, “The light will heal you, let it in”.
The pulsating base from the speakers seemed to lift the room to a new level, and everything became alive again. Light streamed from each body before me. I felt a large palm touch the base of my spine. I turned to the left and there, in the room full of light, stood the man I had seen from afar as I had counted days a year ago. He said, “Do you feel the vibration?” and smiled his broad, caring grin. I felt myself melt for a minute, and reminded myself that he was just singing the refrain from the song. In that instant, my girls came racing towards me like the teammates do to a quarterback, and as I was taken away in a jumping screaming frenzy…I could honestly say, “It’s such a…good vib-ra-tion-huh, it’s such a-sweee-eet sen-sa-tion-huh!” Feel it, feel it!
Labels: Celebrity, parties, Rumi, sobriety, Sweatlodge