Category Archives: Music

When last we shared, I was in the bitter process of discarding a few ferns that had failed to perform this summer – a fitting end to all that may have seemed superficially pretty in this summer’s blog posts and pictures. Rather than end on such a dour note, let’s have a brighter bit of music and whimsy, and nothing lifts the soul in as ridiculous and glorious a way as this camp ditty from ‘Candide’ as performed by the brilliant Kristin Chenoweth. This is ‘Glitter and Be Gay‘ ~ a mantra and way of life for those of us who haven’t quite given up yet. 

Harsh necessity brought me to this gilded cage.
Born to higher things, here I droop my wings,
Singing of a sorrow nothing can assuage…

And yet of course I rather like to revel,
I have no strong objection to champagne,
My wardrobe is expensive as the devil,
Perhaps it is ignoble to complain…
Enough, enough of being basely tearful!
I’ll show my noble stuff by being bright and cheerful!

Pink reigned for the summer – in the face of all sorrow and tumult, we always had pink. Pink dresses, pink shirts, pink pants, pink curtains, pink towels, pink tablecloths, pink straws, pink pastries, pink jewelry, pink shoes, pink hats, pink fascinators, pink ruffles, pink frills, pink glitter… 

Pearls and ruby rings…
Ah, how can worldly things take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate for my fallen state,
Purchased as they were at such an awful cost?

Bracelets…lavalieres
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?
Can the brightest brooch shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?

Returning to the innocent beginning of our coquette summer makes me realize how much has actually happened over the past three months of the season. A banana tree has unfurled a dozen or so leaves. The cup plant has shot up, out, flowered, and gone to seed. It provides the finches with a current feast. The hydrangeas have had a rightly-renowned banner year after a mild winter. All the flower buds survived, so the show was bodacious and beautiful. And somehow, throughout its entirety, I never quite felt like part of it. 

And yet of course these trinkets are endearing,
I’m oh, so glad my sapphire is a star,
I rather like a twenty-karat earring,
If I’m not pure, at least my jewels are!

Now, with summer’s closing act coming next weekend, and fall’s dramatic descent already in motion, I find myself trying to hang onto it a little longer, taking an extra stroll around the yard, sitting in the sunshine. Reconciling and returning to the frivolous finery in which it all began, the coquette theme offers a balmy escape, a way out of the ever-darkening world, even if it was all make-believe, even if it could never last.

Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!

Our coquette summer is quickly drawing near its end, but there are a few more days of sun and warmth (even as the forecast for this morning and day may veer to the more melancholic side of things). With that in mind, it’s the perfect backdrop for a coquette moment – a wistful sigh of longing, a restless reconciliation of losing – and a little coquette song that tries to make up for a rainy gray day. 

You were a sunflower
Grown in the wild like a weed
Could be a blessing in a way
That’s what I’ll see (what I’ll see)

I’m just a wallflower
All of the words just won’t come
Oh, what’s the use of calling it quits?
Before I’m done (before I’m)

It’s been a summer that has run the gamut from hopeful innocence and freshness to weary, wary, jaded defilement – a strangely awful trajectory that sets this blog up for a fall unlike anything that’s ever been written here. You are definitely not going to be ready for this jelly. So let’s make the most of these summer days – wretched and rainy though they may be – because this fall is going to get very dark. 

Fading like the end of August fades, a candle is barely discernible as pink in its solitary light. The final faint whispers of a coquette summer rustle along a night breeze – how it slipped away so quickly is the saddest recurring mystery. On this last day of August, here is another song to keep the summer going – this time from our early summer pal Mitski. It wasn’t on any of our previous summer coquette playlists, and while I don’t have a fourth one in the offing, there is still time for a song or two before the summer finally departs. 

I’m beautiful, I know cause it’s the season But what am I to do with all this beauty? Biology, I am an organism, I’m chemical That’s all, that is all I’m liquid smooth, come touch me, too And feel my skin is plump and full of life I’m in my prime I’m liquid smooth, come touch me, too I’m at my highest peak, I’m ripe About to fall, capture me Or at least take my picture

On the cusp between Leo and Virgo…

On the cusp of the half-century mark…

On the cusp of the cusp of something more…

Today I turn 49 years old. I don’t quite know what to do with that, other than to play this song, and to pray. Yes – I pray. Every night. At every moment of doubt, at every moment of worry. Little prayers, little offerings, little exercises in superstition or faith and what’s the goddamn difference?

You wake to greet the brand new day
Wake up, realize you’re late
Rush out to make your plane
Can’t find your keys again…

You need to reawake, now
Listen to the words
I’m saying in this line, and
That your life will be just fine, and
Your troubles do not stay
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life
Smile as you walk by
Thinkin’ ’bout the day

Born of fear, born of trauma, born of need and desire and survival – we all come into this world in such similar ways – messy and wet and crying out of lonely desperation, clinging to whatever is immediately around us, grasping at something or someone to take care of us – for protection, for security, for comfort, for love. Some of us never learn how to stop crying. Some of us never learn how to start again. 

This body, the only body I have ever known, the only body I will ever know, this shell of my physical existence, breaks down a little more with each passing year. The lithe and limber days of carefree, flexible, quick-to-bounce-back forgiveness calcify and become brittle at the turn of an almost-half-century. This body – it cracks and crinkles now, it whispers and laughs and collapses – it betrays this mind, disconnecting from what I think I can do, what I once could do, what I lost the ability to do… and today of all days I can barely formulate a coherent sentence. 

It’s late, your legs won’t rest today
Your body seems to ache
Your mind will win the race
Burnin’ by your sleep again

The light blooms from the sun
The long dark night undone
Another day of fun
Waiting for some luck to come

Should I fear this year then? This final year of my forties, death knell to any far-fetched and barely-feasible semblance or pretending of youth? Maybe… maybe. Strangely it’s not fear I feel, nor the rush to get on with it. It’s really just another day, just another year, and the way we mark the days and years is just some silly system of numeric designation, as if 49 means something more than 48 or less than 50. There is nothing at all different today from yesterday – even if nothing is at all the same. 

You keep hoping for a day
When things will go your way
When all decisions have been made
And karma’s finally found its way

The drinks, they pass the time
They help me to unwind
The guilt is killing me
Inside your eyes

It’s gray, the rain pours down my face
The tears become erased
A cleansing of my face
Splashing down into my grin

My eyes become alive
A feeling left behind
A hidden world untied
Creating all you see today

The clouds, they went away
Forever, did I wait
And karma finally found my plate
And now I’m smiling by the sun

And so I step gingerly back into the river of life, the banks on which I have probably paused more than most – shy and skittish, scared and scarred from that moment of birth, and never quite having been able to get completely over it. I watched more of it go by than I ever took part in, and though it’s not regret I am experiencing, there is a sense of loss, even if I can’t be mad about it. It’s never helpful to be angry at who you used to be. Instead, I offer thanks, even for those days when I didn’t want to be part of it, when I swam to the shore, coughing and spitting out the anxiety, crying out the salty worry, spent and exhausted from trying to swim against the current. All these silly mixed metaphors have me feeling a little muddled, and what I originally wanted to be a contemplative birthday post has turned into something slightly different. The unexpected accident, the messy inconvenience of being human. What I most wanted life to be – something pretty, something perfect – is precisely what a human’s life can never be. 

We’ll meet again someday
We’ll smile and then I’ll say:
“When it rains, it pours all day
Until love can find its way”

Now, listen to the words I’m saying
In this line that your life will be just fine,
And troubles, they do not stay,
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life,
Smile as you walk by
Need to reawake now
LIsten to these words that
I’m saying in this line
And your life will be just fine
Troubles, they do not stay
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life
Smilin’ ’bout the day…

Our coquette summer rides giddily and mightily into its final month on a pink pony, with all the pink flowers and frills and trimmings that this glorious season has promised, and largely delivered. To buoy the impending hints of fall, here’s a fun and frivolous distraction, perhaps less moody than the typical coquette offering, and certainly no less joyful for that. Cue our Midwest Princess Chappell…

And I heard that there’s a special place
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day…

In my daydreams and night-dreams, I can dance without the annoying tinge of a bothersome and aging back. I can sing without the heaviness of loss or lamentation. I can ride a pink pony into the summer dawn, bounding along shores of ocean and gliding over edges of sky. Summer is so largely imagined, so grandly envisioned. Summer… so much in my head.

I’m up and jaws are on the floor
Lovers in the bathroom and a line outside the door
Blacklights and a mirrored disco ball
Every night’s another reason why I left it all…

God, what have you done?
You’re a pink pony girl
And you dance at the club
Oh mama, I’m just having fun
On the stage in my heels
It’s where I belong down at the Pink Pony Club

All sparkle of sun and sea, all shine of dew and drops, all summer sweetness and soft sighs. A melancholic meter keeps steady time – the hollow cadence of minutes and hours droning on beneath the welcome heat of the sun, already different than it was in June, already less. And so we dance, and we keep on dancing, and the pink pony prances…

I’m gonna keep on dancing at the
Pink Pony Club
I’m gonna keep on dancing down in
West Hollywood
I’m gonna keep on dancing at the
Pink Pony Club, Pink Pony Club

When a COVID cough has me up all night, and I’m isolating in the attic, where I’ve been in solitude for the past five days, this cradle song – ‘Yurikago No Uta’ – is the only spot of solace or semi-comfort there is to be found. It’s a traditional Japanese lullaby, often sung to babies to help them sleep. Physically, I am feeling better – a slight side-effect has me in the bathroom a bit more than I’d like, but if it means I don’t die from lack of breath, it seems a fair trade-off. Still, I wasn’t expecting the plunge back into social isolation to take such an emotional toll, and I understand it’s the culmination of the weeks and months of this summer, which had me helplessly hoping that the anniversary of Dad’s death might bring about some sense of closure, some somewhat-happier-ending of that dreadful year of firsts, all the while knowing such an arbitrary deadline of grief was a fever-dream. Born out of desperation and survival and coping, it was a wish that I knew in my heart was foolish, but that same heart couldn’t do anything but hope it might prove true. When at least it came and went, and there was no real relief, no erasure of emptiness or loss, it proved a different sort of chill than when it first happened. A lonelier chill. And then I placed my finger on the root cause of the periodic crying spells that have unexpectedly cropped up at the strangest times this past week: loneliness. 

Loneliness in the very real sense of being isolated and alone – when I spent my days and nights secluded in the cozy little attic room I made for our home a few years ago – a room that now functioned as bedroom, office, dining room, living room, reading room, lounging room, dressing room, every room – where largely-sleepless nights were only partly drowned out by the hum and occasional rattle of the window air conditioner, where rain would sound almost melodically on the roof right above my head and rather than sour the mood it would give me comfort because it meant maybe the rest of the world would slow and stop while I was gone instead of carrying on in cherry, sun-drenched summer fashion. A selfish notion, but sickness brings out our selfishness, as much for survival as for pettiness. 

Here, in this little room, I fitfully try to sleep without any comfort of Andy beside me. Here, I sip on tea and lots of water and take the occasional meal – eating alone without a husband or companion. Here, I study the bouquet of flowers my Mom left on the front porch along with some breakfast rolls and a dessert, touched by her love and care, realizing how much a son still needs his mother, and shocked at how sad this bout of sickness has suddenly made me feel. 

What a ludicrous scene I have painted: a man who will turn 49 years old in four days, weeping like a baby and listening to a cradle song, looking at the animals on the cover of the video and remembering his childhood bedroom. Is it sacrilege to wish it away if it meant a lesser sting of missing it? Is it wrong to wish any of our days away? 

Well.

The folly of youth.

Or the folly of middle age… assuming this is somewhere near the middle. We never really know, do we? 

My therapist told me at our last session that just about everything had aligned for me to have a mid-life crisis at this moment. I looked at her incredulously, my jaw literally dropping, then said perhaps a little testily, “Umm, when I started seeing you four years ago it was because I was having my mid-life crisis, so I thought I already did that.” She laughed a little, and I fear it’s because I thought there would only be one. 

“You know,” I continued, “I survived the one and I’d rather not do it again.”

She acknowledged all the work that went into those early months of therapy, and was rather flippant and nonchalant about another one coming, when my quizzical look of concern must have registered, because she then said I shouldn’t worry about it because I was at a place where I could handle it in a healthy manner. 

Huh.

That was when I gave myself a rare internal pat on the back. 

It’s one thing to pretend I’m strong and great and amazing – quite another to even partly believe it on the inside. 

That was a few weeks ago. It already feels very far away. Like those fun first days of summer… like those carefree days of childhood… 

The moment is demure.

The moment is mindful.

The moment is considerate.

And the moment dovetails perfectly with this season of the coquette.

Light, lovely, and just the tiniest bit forlorn, the aesthetic is lace and delicacy. It’s the ideal way to see us out for this final month of summer. The coquette vibe has proved especially popular in these parts, and along with some bulging Olympic support, this twenty-one-year-old website is experiencing a boon in hits – clocking a million for July and on track for two million in August. I’m not a numbers coquette, but if I was I’d be a happy one. 

As for moving through the rest of the summer on a demure and mindful note, I can’t think of a better way, especially since I’ve been feeling anything but those things of late. As I write this, I am holed up in the attic with a bout of COVID, trying desperately not to give it to my husband in the likely-vain hope that my upcoming birthday might be a happy one. So let’s focus on some music with a coquette slant, like this ditty from current Femininomenon, Chappell Roan and this gorgeously-ambivalent take on coffee. (Because it’s never just coffee, and coquette is never just demure.)

Sitting in solitude in the attic, I’m having a moment of loneliness – a rare phenomenon for those of us who adore our time alone. Sometimes that makes the loneliness more searing – the sheer unfamiliarity of the feeling like a stunning shock to the system, like something doesn’t quite compute, and it’s the pain and hurt of it. 

What is the lesson here? What am I supposed to glean from this suddenly-annual turn of events? I don’t know. 

The beverage of choice is tea. Hot tea.

The sipping is demure.

The sipping is mindful.

The sipping is considerate.

The vibe is coquette. The moment is almost over. The last month of summer is at hand. 

Maybe I shouldn’t be quite so ready to turn the page on this season.

All apologies – I can’t help it. It’s never what we thought it was going to be. Those summers are done.

Two Augusts ago
I told the truth, oh, but you didn’t like it, you went home
You’re in your Benz, I’m by the gate
Now you go alone
Charm all the people you train for, you mean well but aim low
And I’ll make it known like I’m getting paid

That’s just the way life goes
I like to slam doors closed
Trust me, I know it’s always about me
I love you, I’m sorry

The blush is mostly off this summer’s coquette rose, but we’ll always have the music. And as long as we can hear it, the beat will go on. And as long as the beat goes on, the heart has the capability of feeling full. A coquette summer leads with longing and ends with something else… this post is leading us to that something else. This post leads to what might be next. My niece Emi tells me this next song is coquette. I listened to it – well, the quick snippets of it that she had the patience to play. I sent her a text asking her to send me more coquette song ideas. She never replied. Silence and a song.

Two summers from now
We’ll have been talking, but not all that often, we’re cool now
I’ll be on a boat, you’re on a plane
Going somewhere sane
And I’ll have a drink
Wistfully lean out my window and watch the sun set on the lake
It might not feel real, but it’s okay, mh

‘Cause that’s just the way life goes
I push my luck, it shows
Thankful you don’t send someone to kill me
I love you, I’m sorry

Summer sunsetz… August on the cusp of waning. This strange season of healing and hope, where deluge has followed dream, leaves me with an empty and dull ache. A classic coquette conundrum: balm of beauty and hurt of heart. There is no extricating one from the other. Summer winds around itself like some self-defeating vine, twirling tendrils and unfurling flowers that have only ever appeared in fantasies and fables. We weave our stories with summer’s light, retelling tales and rebuilding the past. 

You were the best but you were the worst
As sick as it sounds, I loved you first
I was a dick, it is what it is
A habit to kick, the age-old curse
I tend to laugh whenever I’m sad
Stare at the crash, it actually works
Making amends, this shit never ends
I’m wrong again, wrong again

An August sunset is a story in and of itself, but you have to learn how to listen, and you have to know how to wait. Entire books can be written in the time the sun takes to put itself in hiding for the night, but that’s a secret I’ve only glimpsed in bits and pieces – the whole trick remains elusive and out of reach for my greedy hands. I want it too much; my thirst is too desperate ~ another aspect of the coquette. 

The way life goes
Joyriding down our road
Lay on the horn to prove that it haunts me
I love you, I’m sorry
The way life goes (you were the best but you were the worst)
(As sick as it sounds, I loved you first)
I wanna speak in code (I was a dick, it is what it is)
(A habit to kick, the age-old curse)
Hope that I don’t, won’t make it about me (I tend to laugh whenever I’m sad)
(Stare at the crash, it actually works)
I love you, I’m sorry

The sunset behind us, we drive into the deepening night of a darkening summer. The fade to black is beautiful at this time of the year. 

We have arrived in August, and our coquette summer continues with its underlying melancholy vibes. Strange rains and tumultuous storms lend their atmospheric moodiness to a week of emotional tumult. August and its goldenrod hint at changes in the air. In the subtlest of shifts, the sun slants differently now. To buoy the spirits and remind that it’s still very much summer, with almost two months still to come, I present this coquette-lite ditty.

When the day that lies ahead of me
Seemed impossible to face
Ooh, when someone else instead of me
Always seems to know the way

Then I look at you
And the world’s alright with me
Oh, just one look at you
And I know it’s gonna be

A lovely day