Finn slapped his thighs. “Okay, that’s it then. Before I head home I think we need to check someone out. And then, poof, I’ll be gone and it’ll be your road trip again.”
I could see by the way she inhaled that Isobel was running out of patience with him. Earlier, I’d heard them having a just-friends discussion when I was pumping gas. She’d told him that it was our road trip and even though he was a great sport it was time for him to go. She squashed his remaining hope by saying she would never date him again, and that he had to move on. She invented a Québécois boyfriend who she said she was going to hook up with in Montreal: François Saucisse.
“Who wants to bring a sandwich to the buffet?” she said to me in the gas station can. We both knew the percentage of hot men in Quebec was astronomical. I was fond of Finn. It was mean to relegate him to the sandwich category after all he’d been through with us.
“If you guys come with me to the Winnipeg festival, there’s this singer we can see. Apparently she’s mind-blowing. Life-changing. Remember, Dan Bern told me she’s the most dynamic live performer since James Brown,” Finn said.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Ani DiFranco.”
“Is she Italian?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, but I’ve been talking to people, and she’s supposed to be unbelievable! Don’t you remember Dan mentioning her during the interview, toward the end?”
Finn knew he could always woo Isobel and me with stories of some musician-god that we just had to see. He had witnessed and even participated in our ritual of getting new music and having listening sessions together. We had strict rules: Lie on the floor. Eyes Closed. No Speaking. Careful Listening to All Lyrics. Discuss and Replay to Catch Nuances. Lots of music was grower music, the kind you had to play over and over until it clicked. Sometimes it was that music you ended up liking the most. The kind you struggled to like at first. Other music was obviously just loin-dazzling, mind-whirling, kneecap-buckling on first listen. What we specialized in, what really got us going though, was pathos. Little notes that struck big portentous moods. Over-the-top Janis Joplin–type scratching voices, screaming with hunger. Yearning and moaning. Lying around listening carefully to music was what we did when we weren’t at the cinema, or the bookstore. We’d been doing it since we were fifteen. Maybe that’s why I fainted; it was such a habit to be lying down, to better hear the music.
Lots of wannabe participants had failed over the years, had been banned from our music-appreciation club over breaking the No Speaking rule. Not a lot of people were as devout as us, or as precious about it, I guess. And many people didn’t like being shushed aggressively during our holy rituals. Part of our weirdness probably came from our parents: my dad was a Dylan fanatic and had every album, every bootleg recording, every interview, article, and book in print, and Isobel’s mom was big into all the crooners, but especially Tony Bennett. We weren’t churchgoing families; we were raised with this version of sacred.
Isobel glanced at me then in the rear-view mirror to ensure we were on the same page about going to the Winnipeg Folk Fest. I cherished our non-verbal way of communicating, but I saw Finn feeling excluded. I wriggled in my seat.
“Oui, on y va!” Isobel said. “We still have four days before Annie needs to be on that mountain.”
“Great, I think it’ll be wild! I should be able to find some Edmontonians to hitch home with there too.” He would’ve sounded almost serene if he wasn’t speaking so rapidly. Maybe he’d given up the idea that Isobel was going to fall in love with him again. He had literally gone the distance, almost sixteen hundred kilometres, to find out what he needed to know—that she had never been in love with him.
But he was acting with a kind of grace and generosity of spirit that made me want to make her love him, force her somehow. I loved that he organized adventures, even hijacking a rock star for us. I don’t know why Isobel couldn’t fall for him. He wasn’t mysterious enough, I guess. He was an open book. A book with lots of great pages, though.
When I tried to psychoanalyze her, I never got very far. She was immune to men on some level I couldn’t begin to relate to. I saw her detachment as the strength and independence that I was lacking rather than emotional incompetence.
She was driving because my foot was asleep and there was a strange nervousness in my stomach. I could feel the end of summer and the season turning in the melancholic winds of late August. When I was little I used to think of the last two weeks of August before school starting as two straight weeks of Sundays with the Monday doom looming over your head.
We mostly bypassed the small towns of southern Manitoba with Isobel reading and relishing the French-named places from our trusty roadmap: Portage la Prairie, St. Boniface, Dauphin. Manitoba was the country’s heartland; even colder than Alberta in the winter and definitely hotter in the summer. I was starting to get sick of the drive, it was feeling like the Wednesday morning of the workweek. Our collective bums were numb and our joints were aching from sitting in the same position for hours.
It was the driest time of year. I was parched, and we were out of water and there was no gas station in sight. The sky was baking blue. I imagined the farmers, in their plaid shirts and GWG overalls, sitting on their verandas thinking about going out into the field to do one big collective rain dance.
We listened to Neil Young because it was Neil Young’s province not just Winnie-the-Pooh’s. We tried to imagine Winnipeg bars back in the day having Joni Mitchell and Neil gigging together. No wonder people made great art here, there was nothing else to do, nothing to clutter their young imaginations, just big sky. I watched the fields passing by. More prairie, endless prairie.
Finn stuck his head out the window like a dog—looking like happiness personified. Finn was the dog that yapped at everyone’s heels, doing tricks, rolling around, playing dead—anything to win affection. From the backseat I could see Isobel look at him sunning himself out the window. She smiled; half amused, half irritated.
Eventually we found the festival, forty kilometres north of Winnipeg. It was in beautiful Bird’s Hill Provincial Park. The whole layout had a great mellow vibe despite there being upwards of sixty thousand attendees. And the usual scene was there. Hippies, dippies, old-timers, Hacky-Sack-playing teenagers, toddlers, earnest folkies, patchouli girls, tie-dyed natty dreads, and hempy people. We roamed the grounds and sat down on the grass in the beer garden. Finn went off to get us beers and mini-doughnuts. I was happy to be lying still with the sun on my face with my best friend at my side. Lying on our backs always led to truth sessions—being horizontal meant being intense.
“Are you sure you couldn’t fall for Finn?” I had to ask.
“Well, honestly, j’ai essayé. And I do wish I could, seriously. I don’t know why I can’t . . . I guess I’m like some kind of self-contained unit.” She looked sad confessing this to me. It occurred to me then for the first time that her inability to love Finn wasn’t just another non-event in her long line of contenders contending. It was a failing. Not unlike my own failings. I went too far; she couldn’t go deep enough.
“But feel free to go for him, Annie. You know you and Finn could make a good pair!” Isobel added with a cheeky smile.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous! No way. But . . . he is great, you know,” I said.
The mainstage show was coming on in ten minutes so we tried to get closer, but the field was filling up quickly. A man in drag was on stage doing a shtick about the discomfort of porta-potties: how when you go into one later in the day and it’s at capacity and you’ve had a few beers, you somehow gotta try to hold your purse, plug your nose, and negotiate taking a whiz—it’s tough to hover in those conditions! And you’re truly screwed if you had the god-forbidden hot sauce with the green onion cakes and your intestines are in a hurry to evacuate.
There was something different about this crowd. It took me a few moments to clue in that it was because it was mostly women and girls making up the whole area. They w
ere mobbing the stage. Dan Bern must have been on to something with this Ani Diwhatever.
Isobel wasn’t comfortable with lots of women around. Was she threatened? God knows why, she was a Queen Bee. But I was pretty much her only female friend. I could see her bristling at other good-looking women. Women were looking one another up and down all right, but in a women-are-beautiful way, and don’t they wear nice things. Like raccoons drawn to sparkly objects. In this crowd I think she was the only one doing accounting; everyone else was smiling. I didn’t care that we were road-trip grubby.
It was hot. Hotter than Alberta and more humid. Mosquito count was not too high. They must have sprayed. Bumblebees whizzed over the crowd of femaleness. I glanced over at Finn; he looked pretty happy. Lovelies of all descriptions surrounded him. It was a short-haired, long-haired, curly-haired, Sinead O’Connor shaved-headed, bead-wearing crowd of women smiling in anticipation. Only a handful of men joined the throng. Most of the other guys stood back, watching from afar.
I had never been around this many women before in one place. It was a different energy than at a male performer’s gig: Isobel elbowed me to get my attention and nodded toward two women arm in arm, shaved heads, and only wearing black PVC bras underneath their denim overalls. They had big black stompy boots and a kind of girl warrior chic I had never seen before.
“Psst, Finn . . . psst . . . is this some kind of lesbian event?” Isobel asked.
“Lesbian event, what do you mean?” Finn repeated.
“Shh,” came from someone behind. I turned to look and it was a ten-year-old girl with braids and an orange T-shirt with the words QUESTION AUTHORITY written on it. She was standing beside an older girl who looked like her sister whose T-shirt said READ CHOMSKY.
A roar surged through the crowd. There was no one on stage yet but thunderous clapping, ground-stomping, and cat-calling came bursting from the audience. Whooping went on for minutes, building a tidal wave of suspense. The excitement was contagious. I was filled with anticipation for I didn’t know what.
And then—a small woman walked on stage.
She was five-foot two-ish, like me. She was wearing a motorcyclist’s black leather vest, low, hip-riding jeans, and clunky workman’s boots. She had muscular arms and a tattooed collarbone. Ani DiFranco was wearing an Alvarez Yairi WY1, Finn told us. It looked like it might overpower her, but she had a good grip on it, curled in the curve of her breast. She had big, full lips, super-white teeth, a shaved head, wide sparkling blue eyes, a nose ring, and hairy armpits. She was gorgeous!
She started to tune her Alvarez guitar, and the crowd quieted down, anxious to hear her. She spoke up: “You know, people say I’m an angry girl, but uh . . .” She giggled. “I just got a few things on my mind is all.” Her laugh was charming. I could see that she had black electrical tape on her fingers and I wondered what for. Then she hit the guitar with this crazy Spaghetti Western fury, crackling through her galloping chords. It wasn’t a matter of her warming up or the crowd warming up to her. Everyone was hooked straight up and straight in. I could understand the tape now, it was so she wouldn’t get raw, bloody fingers from playing so crazily hard; like she was trying to break the speed of sound. She played like thunder to her adoring crowd of shaved-headed young followers, hippie girls, suburban preppies, mothers, sisters, and grandmas. Girls, girls, and more girls danced in the front rows, danced so hard the sun-baked ground rose in a dust cloud among us all.
She sang anthems. I looked around; all the girls knew all the words and were singing their hearts out:
I am not a pretty girl
that is not what I do
I ain’t no damsel in distress
and I don’t need to be rescued
so put me down punk
wouldn’t you prefer a maiden fair
isn’t there a kitten
stuck up a tree somewhere
There was no leather-trousered male in sight on stage, but I was falling in big-time heart-throbbing love. A new kind of hero worship had hit me.
She had breakup songs. She had revolution songs. She had fuck-you songs and fuck-me songs. She had the gift of the gab. I had never seen anything like it before. She was no earnest folkie. She was no ridiculous Madonna serving up her sex on a platter, pretending it was original. She was fresh and raw and playful and flirtatious with her shit-disturbing politics, her vulnerable love songs, and her way of playing guitar that sounded like she was twanging all our collective nerves and veins and ligaments. It was visceral and incandescent. I could see fire and mountains and lashing rain and gyrating bodies and tranquil seas, trembling desires, lusty encounters, and brave acts. It was all there, coming out of her little body and mighty fingers.
Ever since she started playing, I’d had a tingling feeling at the base of my skull. A creeping feeling of well-being. It was new, tingling instead of twitching. I was connecting, part of something, and proud. I wasn’t even conscious that I had lost Isobel and Finn. Mouth agape, I just let it all pour inside me through every orifice and pore. It felt like watching a natural disaster, from a safe distance.
Between rocking songs, she played some jazzy improv music and just started talking while jamming, like Van Morrison does sometimes: “You know, there’s a lot of bullshit out there in the world for girls to wade through . . . I was in a clothes store the other day and I was shocked to discover the latest fashion crime: size zero. Have you heard of this? I’m serious . . . it’s for real. I mean, what the crap is that? No really, what the hell is that? I was just trying to buy like a gaunch or something . . .”
“Whooooooooooo,” roared the crowd, egging her on. She stopped talking and lost herself and put all of us in a trance with the wacked acid-jazz medley she played on electric guitar.
“Since when are women built to be a size zero? And is that the point, that as women we should strive to do nothing but spend our time starving ourselves just so we can be a zero? You wouldn’t see a guy buying a pair of size zero pants, now wouldya? I mean, God . . . But anyways . . . we got way more important shit to do . . . like world domination! Ha! . . . I’m no zero, are you guys zeroes?”
“Noooooooooooo . . . woo . . . woo . . . woo . . . rrrrrrrrrrrr,” whistled the crowd.
“I don’t want to preach at y’all, that stuff just pisses me off and I gotta get it off my chest!” She laughed again and snorted in an endearing donkeylike way, hamming it up. She must have been the class clown. She finished tuning, and a few chords into her next song, the crowd went nuts. “Blood in the Boardroom,” it was called. The audience was euphoric.
Sitting in the boardroom,
the I’m-so-bored-room,
listening to the suits talk about their world
. . . I wonder can these boys smell me bleeding thru my underwear.
They can make straight lines out of almost anything . . .
I can make life. I can make breath!
I was in the throes of the crowd, celebrating bloody underwear! Lifted by the group’s oozing exuberance, I was transfixed. I had been moved; just like all these women beside me had been at some point or another when they first heard this woman. My body was a fusilli noodle, at one with the crowd and tunes, swaying and bending, contorting and springing. Ani DiFranco sang in the sun for an hour, driving us crazy with her percussive finger-plucking. People threw roses and incense, T-shirts and books and lipstick and food and panties on the stage. We danced through her twenty-song set. The music went straight to my hips. I was deep in the heart of this crazed crowd. We danced so hard, we were dirty and dusty and smiling big. Her final rock encore was so intense, the dancing so enormous, the sky clapped and a sun-shower came down on us and washed the dust off our faces and made some mud for our feet to play with and splash up our legs.
The crowd wouldn’t let her leave the stage, so she took a swig of water, sat down, and put a tam-tam between her legs. She sang Prince’s “When Doves Cry” a cappella. Just her ragged voice and the brooding drum. It was hair-raising and beautifu
l like a swim at dawn. I was listening so acutely, almost gulping in all those lovely sounds she made. I saw her biceps beating the tam-tam and I understood how important it was to be fully alive, fully engaged with life. It was like sunlight, after years of candlelight. I’d been too much of a night owl, spent too much time indoors with the curtains drawn.
I had been rapturously inspired before, many times, but I’d never had a female hero before. I made a run for the record store tent. I had to restrain myself from pushing people out of my way to get to her stack of CDs and tapes. She had several albums, but I could only afford two of them. I chose her first one and her most recent release on cassette because then we could play them in the car. I read some of her liner notes while I waited to pay. She was only in her twenties. She had her own record label: Righteous Babe Records. Behind me there were dozens of young girls trying to get their hands on her music.
I made my way back through the crowds, heading to where we had been sitting before the show, figuring Isobel and Finn would know to go there. I was buzzing with excitement, dying to share the experience with them. So excited, I could barely breathe. What a rush to see a woman do it like that—get up there and kick serious musical ass.
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