Alan Ilagan

‘A 21st Century Renaissance: The Resurrection Tour’ will have its first official stop in none other than Amsterdam, New York – my hometown. (Go Rams!) It’s actually a rather bittersweet beginning, as I’ll be visiting two dear old friends – one of whom is just out of the hospital, and another who’s still in. They’re the mothers of two of my best friends from high school – Ann and Jessica.

I’ve known Ann since 7^th grade, when we both began attending the Wilbur Lynch Middle School – all the way back to 1988/1989 – so we’ve been close for over two decades. In those days she had a one-foot-high shock of blond hair – think of a modified version of Cher’s infamous Oscar-do and you have an idea. She loved the heavy metal hair bands, and brought me to my first Guns n’ Roses concert. Despite appearances, she was the smartest and most clean-cut person I knew – though her entire family smoked, she never took one drag of a cigarette, and I never saw her touch a drop of alcohol. We made a strange pair, but our friendship was immediate and binding. I like to think we helped save each other through the gloomy vats of high school ignorance and college experimentation – she certainly saved me more than a few times. It was her Mom Ginny who just returned home from a stint in the hospital thanks to a brain aneurysm. I’m told she is doing well considering how bad it might have been.

In a way, that this is the first stop of my next-to-last tour is extremely fitting. Ann was there for the start of my very first one, back in 1995. I visited her at her dorm room at RIT (in evergreen-hued silk pajamas – I slept in the top bunk). That was also the tour where I was mistaken for a clown in Ponderosa by a couple of inbred kids, and attended an evening carnival in silk pajamas and a marabou-feather robe.

In high school Ann had introduced me to Jessica, another Southsider who became a good friend in high school. Her Mom Janice is now in the hospital due to the lung cancer that has spread to her brain. It is devastating news to her family and friends, and I’ve only just found out about it.

I don’t think I can put into words how much these ladies mean to me. Not just the daughters who are my age, but the mothers as well. In a way, they became surrogate mothers at a time when I was having difficulty with my own family. Every weekend there would be a card game when the ladies would gather at one of their homes. The game was called dimes – I’m not even sure it’s a real game as I’ve never heard of anyone else who plays it. (I think, at its most basic, it’s similar to Gin Rummy, but since I don’t know what that is, I could quite possibly be wrong.) The game didn’t matter as much as the company, and as odd as it sounds for a teenage guy to be hanging around a group of fifty-something women, it was exactly what I needed.

Those women never judged me. No matter what I wore (and during the last of my high school days it was pretty insane) they never criticized or found fault with any of it. Sure, they found it strange, but at that point in their lives they had adopted a live-and-let-live stance about much of the world, at least the part that concerned me, and that’s saying quite a lot. I was then, as I remain to this day, not the easiest person to love, but they saw something in me that let me into their sacred circle, and I felt, for one of the only times in my life, fully accepted.

Even after we went away to college I would attend a few card games during vacations and summers, and after college was complete and I had my own home and a grown-up life I still managed to stop by on Sunday nights for a card game. When they stopped playing a few years ago, those games were sorely missed, but I stayed in infrequent touch with those ladies throughout the years. When I heard of the latest developments, it was with a sad, sorry heart.

Most of the time, I welcome change. Hell, I thrive on it – I seek it out. I am forever searching for a “new thing”. I just don’t want things to change this much.