After last week’s ditty about being letting myself be in the right place at the right time, I’ve been there regularly. How ‘bout you?
For each of the past two Wednesdays, I have sat within the womb of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, weeping through a KN95 as someone I don’t know sang songs I’ve mostly known for my adulthood, none of which has historically evoked much emotion from me.
My trivial knowledge about Alanis and Jagged Little Pill is soft. She is Canadian. Her interview of More Business of Being Born is endearing and relatable and so worth watching. We once crossed paths at the 1440 Multiversity when I was dealing with slight insanity and a whim-based trip to the Bay Area to see Rolf Gates. Others had paid to see her speak and sing, and I ended up next to her in a line at the dining hall, making silly sweet conversation about this whimsical and bizarre former bible college-turned duck-serving yippie retreat, having no idea who she was until someone summoned her away.
Like you do.
Or I seem to.
A month or so ago, inside the context of a completely different conversation, a dear friend asked me if I liked Alanis. Because the preceding chapter of banter was related to hosting a retreat event for her work group, I thought maybe she was considering inviting Alanis to speak. (Or sing?) I’m not sure which she does more of these days. But it was a non-sequitur, and it was an invitation to partake in the musical Jagged Little Pill which is a fictional story assembled from songs from the album of the same name, which went quintuple platinum back in the 90’s.
Through the 90’s and most of the decade that followed, I had the radio playing. Not albums (which I did have) but the actual radio which played many songs I did not own. Through these decades, it felt important to know what the Top 40 songs were in America, and so I listened as though my religion wrapped carefully around my parents’ Catholicism. Sunday mornings as we left for church, I the recorded broadcast radio onto cassette tapes to listen to later, so as not to miss out on the countdown (and also to fast forward through the commercials). I’d zip back over my favorites to re-re-re-listen, with the scary rewinding sound only an audio cassette can make. Play forward. Rewind. Play. Backwards. Forwards.
For all of these reasons, I was more familiar with the music behind Jagged Little Pill than I might have expected, and Wednesday last as I gleefully occupied the chair my friend’s husband relinquished, I found myself knowing most of everything.
Later, while evaluating the analytics of my biohacking ring, I would learn that my biorhythms appeared sleep-like as the musical began. I can promise you, dear reader, and dear Oura algorithm maker, that I was fully conscious and coherent, surprising myself with familiar lyrics until I disintegrated into a puddle of highly visible emotion.
There is a song that I must have heard before that had never reached into me before. Heidi Blickenstaff starting moving backwards, and then singing, and then her voice crawled out of what anyone would consider a reasonable volume or range and right into some calcified bit of my soul, smashing it into pieces.
She moves backwards, which is a horrifically tedious way of describing the choreography, and she sings the chorus
While I know that the words ‘recovery’ and ‘sobriety’ are often polarizing and charged and laden, and I know that many who have ceased their use of a particular substance balk at those of us who have merely attempted to put down a process, I’m here to tell you that the terrible petrification inside me cracked by the performance was one of utter relatability.
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