Stage Fright. Stage Life.

Every time that I get on stage I feel more alive than I do in the rest of my life. The audience's expectation surges before me, my own nervousness and severe displeasure at the raspiness of my voice surge behind me.

But then I open my mouth, and magic happens.

The best part of the performance is the introduction. Or maybe the middle, but definitely, most definitely not the end. I love the "oh hey what's up, this is me, I'm gonna sing for you, hope you know this song, if you don't, it still applies to you...somehow".. Because when I'm on stage, it's as if everyone knows that I am super awkward and a little clumsy and I say weird stuff. But tonight, on this stage, it's a plus.

By day we try to disdain the frivolities of our night lives. But when we're at a performance, we're ourselves. Or at least I feel I'm myself at my most basic level, whether I'm on the stage or in the crowd. I always feel as though the layers have been peeled back in the hush before the first note. Whether I'm ticked off because I'm at a performance supporting a friend when I REALLY have work to do, or I'm the person at the microphone, fingering the chords for the song I learned how to play two hours ago, and am about to perform.

Every time I get on stage, every time the light comes on, my cells go haywire, firing across synapses willy-nilly like some kinda hot mess computer or an electronic device in water. Actually, I feel just like an electronic device in water. Whatever the crowd is feeling washes all over me. And the only I can do in that awkward greeting moment is introduce myself. "My name is (Keri) I'm (so very) glad to meet y'all. Thanks for coming out, it's cool to see such an awesome crowd in action. Y'all just so excited, and from what I can see, you're looking cute too. Shoutouts to (anyone who actually knows me)."

I LOVE PERFORMING. if i had to do anything until the day i fell off this earth by mistake, i would sing and talk to everyone everyday. People finally let their guard down and just kick their feet up.

what a life i'm living. i need to get money so i can be doing these shows for free tho...

The Return...A Truth

I haven't been on blogspot since I graduated from high school. Literally, Graduation Day, June 11th, was pretty much it. At least that was it in terms of that incarnation. I am back...but indefinitely, per usual. I am thinking about a lot of interesting things that my mother urged me to blog about, but that I would usually just say fuck it, whatever, and not do. I've been thinking a lot about the world I live in, or rather the worlds that I live in. That feeling of space-traveling hasn't changed post-high school; it has intensified. The difference between my Ivy-League life and my ENY life is pretty insane...don't know which one I prefer, Ivy because it's more fun, or ENY because I know that Ivy life only lasts for eight semesters? Who knows. Anyhow, this is an excerpt from something that I'm working on right now.

Let me preface first in saying that what I have written is controversial. I can hear the counterarguments swirling on both sides. That makes it interesting to present this viewpoint. It is a valid viewpoint, because I believe that there are several truths within any given story, perhaps like there are an infinite number of lines that can run through any given point. What I have written is a truth that I am searching for within myself...I have not consulted many people on what I have written. I have taken what I have observed from others and attempted to think through the implications of the subject. This, which is just a part of a very long entry in my moleskine, looks to be a promising part of an essay. After all, as Montaigne defines it, essai is to try, and therefore an essay should be an attempt to puzzle through something worth puzzling. I think this is worth puzzling...

Wow, this is an awkwardly long preface. Here is the excerpt:


I’m on the J train platform and I’m puzzling through some of the oddities and incongruities of our culture. A girl just said something about not letting her boy be locked up. She then mentioned casually…ride or die. The guy with her replied with my favorite one-word quip: word. I couldn’t look at them, because my mind was simply spinning with thoughts that contradicted her statement. I thought, what is it about our culture that has perverted cultural norms, twisting them into empty sound-bytes for the next installation of Menace II Society? When did loyalty and not being a tattletale in the schoolyard extend itself to becoming an unwitting accomplice in crime? When did everything we stand for, like the ability to achieve your dreams, or even the house with a white picket fence, become the driving desire to do absolutely anything to achieve the material goods described, while ripping apart the community that one meant to join? For so many years, African Americans have striven to be seen as “worthy” possessors of the American Dream. After first being told that we couldn’t have it because we were less than human, we proved our humanity. We were acknowledged by the world at large (except South Africa) as human beings equal to any other “race” engineered by White theorists; yes, we were even equal to Whites. But our proof of identity as human beings was not enough.
Now that we were permitted to sit at the same tables in the same classroom, the truth of the matter became clear: we were not wanted at those tables. We could see it in the fear in our white classmates’ eyes as they looked at the Negro up close for the first time. These children perhaps were not the issue so much as their parents who saw behind the flash of our eyes the chaos that Richard so skillfully created in the personage of his black boy, Bigger Thomas. We watched as the fear became so visceral, so real, and so controlling that we gave it a term to be bantered in the courts, “white flight”. And yet, we were determined to be permitted our time in the sun to show what we could achieve when granted the same opportunities. We were bused in from our formerly mandated ghettoes to show our oft-maligned faces to those who did not understand our struggles. But through we were proving our resiliency, we did not seem to prove the point that we had intended: that we were worth as much as anyone else, and that we were entitled to the same respect and dreams as anyone else. (We should not forget that for every black face in a sea of white faces in a classroom, there were likely to be far many more black faces bent, cleaning the tiles that proved that other people were achieving the American Dream. Correction: white people were achieving the American Dream.

Hope this was interesting!