the sound of white

[Author's note: this is an extremely old post that I never published because I didn't like it. I have another celebrity story though, so I thought I would just give this to you anyway. Besides, I don't think it's as lame as I originally thought...]

Meeting a celebrity might be one of the most underwhelming experiences a person can have. Here's the story. I guess first of all, you should know that the person I met is essentially not a celebrity to basically anyone who would read this blog. However, Australian pop music fans might be impressed to learn that I met Missy Higgins, the up-and-coming Aussie Sarah McLachlan/Anna Nalick type singer. It happened like this...

Way, way back in the month of June, I saw this singer on some random TV show. It was a recording of a live show Missy Higgins did. This woman has pipes - of that there can be no doubt. I refused to allow my dear friend, Mark, to change the channel while she was singing (remember my road trip? it was on that very adventure). Anyway, I bought her album and was duly impressed. First of all, she sings with the accent, which is quite cool. Secondly, aside from a few fairly standard love songs, many of her songs are of a quite personal nature and express a lot of loss - a song confessing an infidelity, a song mourning the loss of a loved one, that sort of thing, all in a highly non-cliche way (at least in my opinion).

One day a short while ago, I went to her website, just to see if she would be performing in the area anytime soon. I was pleasantly surprised to find that she was playing a number of shows in the Bay area and the northwest throughout the early part of August. At first, I was really happy because I thought she way playing in the city on a Monday. I was all excited about the possibility of a Monday show because I had nothing going on and my friend that lives in the city could go as well. Enter The Problem. The show was actually on SUNDAY. Now, for those of you unaware, our good friend Oneway was wed a week ago this past Friday, so I had to be present at that (btw, it was amazing. Oneway is soaking up some sun on a beach somewhere with his new bride, so you will be w/o his services for a while. Anyway, back to the story). I was flying back on Sunday - thus The Problem. Also, my friend had a birthday party to attend on Sunday. So she couldn't go to the show and I was going to be in the air when the show was going on, but just to torture myself, I decided to see how far away from the airport the show was. I was surprised to learn the answer - 15 minutes! I scribbled down directions, put them in my bag, and decided to make it a gametime decision.

So, fast forward to last Sunday night. I was sitting on the plane considering how tired I was and if I had enough energy to go 15 minutes out of my way to check out this singer. Just before the plane landed, I decided the answer was yes. 20 minutes later I walked down the stairs of Cafe du Nord to hear the chorus of track 7 from Missy Higgins' latest album. I followed the sound all the way to the back of the establishment.

And there she was. She sat behind a keyboard on the smallest stage I've ever seen, with only a guitar player as accompaniment. My sense of decorum and consideration for the sight lines of fellow fans kept me from closing the 20 feet of distance between the two of us, but some other fans, perhaps classifiable as "hard core", decided to be essentially all up on the stage, which was sort of odd because there was all of this space between them and the next bunch of people several feet back. Anyway, what followed was about 30 minutes of Aussie-accented pop folk goodness.

I had come in half-way through the show, so before I knew it, she said her farewells, played another song, and left. Our enthusiastic little bunch convinced her to come back on for one more. Someone to my left shouted a request for my favorite song off of her album. I didn't say this myself, for fear that she had already played it. Much to my delight, she acquiesced. I was officially in Celebrity-Ogle-Mode throughout the entire song. I might have blinked, but I doubt it.

She was signing CDs afterwards, so maybe like 10-15 of us went up and got signatures. But then I was struck by this thought. She played those songs exactly as I had heard them on the album. The piano solos were essentially the same, the voice inflection and syllable emphasis were as close to the album as I think it would be possible for a human to do. I admit this is an impressive feat, in the sense that she is a brilliant live performer. But then I realized that she had taken the job of a human juke box. She could, on command, sit at the piano and tell her brain to play a song, and then this incredible performance would come out, no problem. The problem with this is that I realized I didn't really care about the performance. What interested me was the original intention of the song, or something like that. In other words, what I was truly in awe of was that ephemeral moment of creation, where the personal loss or victory, tragedy or triumph becomes external and tangible. A something, made from nothing, that is extant only because its creator scribbled down a few words on a page, stealing it away from returning to the nothing from which it came.

Somehow, maybe during the 15th show in a row at some pub in Australia, or opening for some group in a civic center in New Jersey or something, that moment had become "left hand G chord, right hand do this, sing these words on this pitch." I was very saddened by that thought.

As I left, I pondered the unmarked, extra large tour bus parked next to the club. What a strange place to call home. The show was everything I expected but nothing I wanted.