Let Me Entertain You

I'm almost recovered from last night's gig. It was a typical club date -- typical in a way I hope to eventually move past in my career. Standing on stage for four hours in heels, dancing my ass off, singing my voice out and blowing my hearing -- despite in-ear monitors -- is not all it's cracked up to be, let me tell you. It is so dang hard to get the monitor mix right. Terrie, my fellow lead singer, turned to me after every set and asked, "Are you deaf in the right ear? Because when I take my monitor out my right ear is like blocked or something." Unfortunately I was suffering the same problem -- and we weren't ever able to resolve it last night (to the best of our knowledge it was not a question of balance or panning on the board, although that would seem the likely culprit). In the last set I took to putting an ear plug in my right ear just to give it a break.

Someday, over the rainbow, I will have a dedicated sound engineer. He will follow me everwhere, scattering rose petals before my cushioned feet, adding reverb and the most ideal EQ to my voice and lovingly tweaking my monitor mix.

That said, I am not an ungrateful diva. Because you get me on stage, you play me some funky music, you give me a mic, and something happens to me. I become a conduit for the music and the rhythm, and I receive the energy from the dancers and I reflect it back. It's like a triangle of prismatic refraction. There is energy from above, energy from the band and energy from the audience: a feedback loop. I don't always feel that. Sometimes it's a fleeting climax that I strive for but am always just beneath. But performing is a skill, too. The best performers seem entirely authentic to themselves, I think, but also know how stoke that feedback loop.

When the show was over, a man I had virtually danced with (I was on stage, he was on the dance floor) came up to compliment me. As the new, recession-fueled CD-selling machine that I have become, I immediately said, "If you like what I do, I know you'll love my CD." He bought it! We ended up talking for a bit and he said something that I'm still thinking about now: "You are a great entertainer."

As Stanislavsky said, "There are no small parts, only small actors." For musicians, it might be modified: "There are no bad gigs, only bad performers." Many, many, many, many, many times the gig sucks, and always, always, always, something is not working the way it should. All too often it's not my night. But I am glad that sometimes I do my job well, and that someone notices.