From Oscars to Gypsy

My baby pink silky top and puffy white skirt stood out against the skin tight black, checkered occasionally with a solid red za-za-zing dress whose owners maintained consciously unaware expressions of how great they looked. Rather than my own inner self-acknowledgement adding joy to the night's event, knowing I looked pretty was the only thing that kept me from fainting as the room was crowded and "I can only take three or four people in a room before I start to feel uncomfortable," I admitted to a former classmate afterward. Feeling the night's impending claustrophobia fifteen yards away at the coat-room, I attached myself to two fellow Italian 1 former cohorts, but not without asking meekly first, with a touch of desperation in my voice.
It was an advertising awards ceremony. A professor whom I'd never met had entered a photograph I had taken for a class last semester and it had won a prize. She emailed me and said it was a great honor, and had said "it's like the Oscar's of the marketing world." I bought a pretty pink shirt just for the occasion. I had thought it would be the high heels that would bother me that night, but when I looked down several times throughout the event it was to make sure I didn't see too much flesh against pink.
The next two hours was a pattern of announcements, followed by clips/prints, followed by claps, with fifteen to twenty seconds in between the clapping. I tried to clap queenishly.
I respect the accomplishments, talent and hard work of the winners, but I'd surmise this event was more about being seen than to be honored.
There were a few funny commercials, a few inspiring advertisements and a few pretty pictures. Mine came on, and went off in a blink of an eye.
Next came the long-awaited ordervs, when the hand clapping was over. I had three helpings, but piled the second two on one plate. Delicious but also free! I believe the winners in the 'Student' category appreciated these the most, and I tried my very best not to "stuff my face."

I had actually almost skipped out early of this event because I had another concert to film for my film class that was scheduled a short time after the black tie affair began, but as luck would have it - the concert was playing on the first floor of the same building!
The name is Hewn. Look them up. They're a band, headed by a young man I know/knew a few years back.
I checked my gypsy bag out from the coat room wherein I deposited my baby-pink clutch (/wee purse). I made my way downstairs.
Hewn was playing to such deafening levels, all I had to do was follow the cavernous sound. Immediately the tension I had felt leading up to and throughout the black tie event ceased without my noticing it. Gypsie punk rock music assimilated itself into the dimly lit room tinting the listeners blue and the stage players a rebel red. I was again out of place, but this time over-dressed. I didn't care. I scouted the crowded theatre for a good angle to shoot from with a good view of the stage and my eyes landed on the steps leading up to the balcony seats. Halfway up would afford me a good view of the stage, I decided, and made my way up the steps, but didn't get more than four steps up before my heel caught onto the step. I pulled myself back up and made it another step before it happened again. And then again. And again, almost pulling me down each time. It was obvious I wasn't going anywhere on mini-stilts. I whipped off my heels, stuffed them in my satchel and pulled out my camera from the same, filming from my darkened corner on bare feet covered by a thin layer of ancient tights. No one would care about the runs down my stockings in this venue.
I got some pretty good footage, I think, and the hardest part was not only being unable to get out on the floor to dance and go crazy, but I couldn't even tap my foot without upsetting the camera. To be around music and not feel the beat was torture, but my camera-capture was the priority, so I made the sacrifice.
The music ended three songs after I arrived, but I had recorded enough, and skipped away happy as a clam, after whipping out my handy ballet slippers from the same pack, so I wouldn't be thrown out on my way out.

Urgent Care

I stared at the puke green wall opposite me. It was the only non-white walls of the four that surrounded me, with standard probing tools lining them. I stretched my neck around me out of boredom, trying to find something my thought life could land on, as I sat there alone, waiting for the doctor.
The pain was ebbing in my right hand, wrapped in a small white towel and sitting on the desk that held the computer where all my updated information was kept.
Apparently, last time I'd been to Urgent Care, I was jobless and living in a different location.
Random bits of conversation flooded through the bottom of the closed door with microphonic audibility, as nurses and patients passed through the unseen hall. This wasn't the ER, so there were plenty of Pleases and Thank You politenesses being swapped around by masked patients. A woman had walked in cheerfully requesting an ice pack for her injured fingers, while I was still in the waiting room.

The doctor walked in. I had already talked myself out of the suspicion that they had forgotten me. A tall, middle-aged man, with silver thin-framed glasses. Nice enough, and not the worst "bedside manner" I'd experienced.

"Any lasting scarring?" I asked.
There would be none.

"Any nerve damage?"
Nope. Second degree burns don't do that.

No prescription was written as I thought I could make it at this point with ibuprofen. All I have to do is put special goop on it for the next few days until the blister heals up.

Here's what happened: It's a Friday. After a few weeks we're finally going to learn FinalCut, the software that allows one to do professional film/video editing. It's been a few weeks of messing with cameras and talking about interviewing, but this is when the good stuff begins.
I've got a half hour between work and class, so I treat myself to a cafeteria salad and hot tea (It's Friday, after all). Walking cheerily to my class on this prematurely beautiful February day, I've got my paper tea cup cupped between my wrist and my jacket, holding my to-go salad. I squeeze the cup a little too much on accident and the lid tips up, allowing a drop of hot water to hit my hand. Ouch! My reaction is not to drop what I'm holding, so I squeeze tighter. More steaming water spills onto the base of my thumb knuckle. This time I scream, and drop everything I'm carrying, tearing off my glove. I look at my hand. It appears that a top layer of skin has melted off around a nickel-large area.

Nothing but mounting pain could have torn me out of that class. But it did. Within a half hour I took the advice of my classmate and drove myself to the nearest Urgent Care. On the way there I cried because it hurt so much, but by the time I got to the front desk (where I was told by the receptionist that an ice pack on a burn was a mistake) it had started to abate, and by the end of the night I barely felt it, and was preoccupied with homework, groceries, and calling people to let them know I was okay. 

Catfish Stevens

His black leather hat, his black leather pants, and his black leather boots curved up to mid calf, almost matched his leathery face and black mustache that curled round his face. He had sunglasses that helped him see, but all of this shielded him from being seen himself. It didn’t matter though, his personality was so strongly portrayed in his demeanor,  you didn’t need to look in his eyes. 

Catfish walked over to us sitting in that tiny bar and pulled up a chair. I had never met him before, but my upstairs neighbor, Rob, was friends with him. Rob looked like he could be Catfish Stevens about forty years younger. Rob’s girlfriend Jessica, aka HoneyBee, was there also. She had a sweet heart-shaped face that would keep her eternally young, with large-rimmed round glasses and a long side pony tail. The small group could be described as down-and-out-and-proud, a few degrees contrast to my Batman hoody and jeans. It’s the first time that hoody has failed to be cool. 

Catfish talked to Rob genially, I only dropped in on hearing the conversation after taking in his appearance; he was talking about getting his driver’s license picture taken - his fingers rolled a cigarette with methodic rhythm, as he never looked down from conversation to oversee this ritual. 

“You can’t have glasses on, or my hat. I always wear my hat! The only time I don’t wear my hat is when I’m at home!” he laughed. 

I suddenly imagined a police officer pulling him over on his motorcycle Catfish said he rode from Wyoming to northern Wisconsin and not being able to recognize his photo ID. 

“You could always wear a bandana,” Rob suggested.

In response, Catfish suspended his hat above his head to reveal a purple bandana tied comfortably around it. It looked like it lived there. 

I was getting up the nerve to ask if I could film their performance, but didn’t get around to it until Rob stepped out for a smoke, and Catfish later walked past me before their set began. 

“Oh yeah!” He said, almost excitedly, “I welcome all free media, you know! Totally,” he added, “and even if you wanted to post it on facebook, or something, you know, go ahead.” He was so generous, I was immediately at ease. 

The set began. Old-time country with a lick of American folk. The lyrics were usually about some woman who was either mighty fine, or equally as mean. 

My camera sat upon my lap, taping. I practiced zooming slowly, and panning from one solo to the other. There were five musicians in all, including Rob, who sat in to play the harmonica. The bass player (not the base guitar, mind you, but the jumbo violin looking thing) looked either he was made for the instrument, or the instrument was made for him. Everything about him belonged in a sea-side saloon, from his thick leathery skin, to his thick prematurely grey hair that was held in unmoved waves upon his forehead. He had a small trimmed goatee above a neck to rival the thickness of a giant oak. Something about him was entirely endearing. Maybe the few lines of tattooed sheet music, displayed on the forearm raised to fret the strings. Or the skull and cross bone emblem stuck right in the middle between fingerboard and bridge underneath the strings. My camera had to pan up when I shot over to him, giving a classic “larger than life” angle; he didn’t need it. I had heard him plucking the strings of his boatlike instrument as a warm up. I realized a few seconds after he walked away from it toward the bar, that it was the baseline to the song booming in muffled toxins throughout the bar. 

Rob sat in to his left as they played, between him and Catfish. Rob knew what to play and when to play it, and when he did it was with soul. It was a Mary Poppins moment as I watched slack-jawed as he pulled out nine harmonicas from his bag while we were still sitting at the table, and they now lay on the musician’s sound box within easy reach. 

Catfish had two main guitars. One was a shiny metallic, with moons encircling stars around the center. He had a glass finger case, that Rob had once shown me how to use to give it that distinct oldtimey twang. Catfish sang also, his voice comparable to Johnny Cash only of a less heavy timbre. He moved his boots slightly, and hung back in the shadows of his coverings letting the soul pore out into the microphone, the bassist and the second guitarist bookended the group, their voices complimenting his. 

The drummer can only be described as a balding leprechaun. Long hair pulled back behind his head, his beard long with a reddish tint. He had a rounded V-necked T-shirt and almost seemed to mouth the words as he kept the beat that embodied him. I don’t mean Leprechaun as any sort of heedless insult. It was the mischievous glint he held from behind the drum set that made the mental connection more than anything. 

The second guitarists name is Boo. Hearing Rob talk about them before that night, I had thought that Catfish and Boo were just the same person with two nicknames. I was more or less correct, although Boo had less leather on. At one time he was playing a sort of a miniature zither. His solos matched the center guitarist’s in skill. 

They announced their intermission as a “quick smoke” at which time I made my hoodied exit, needing to get some sleep so I’d be awake enough to edit my filming in class. 

I stood in awe of these men. They knew who they were, and their music settled itself into the very grain of the wooden fibers decorating that interior. My head was filled with it, and it’s an easy thing to let take you.