The Sunday before Thanksgiving was the wedding of my friends Liz and Andrew. They had it out on Bee Caves at a place called the House on the Hill. The super cold wind had come and gone and it actually felt like November.The invitation asked people to bring things to place on the altar (or puja). I’d known about this idea for months. I’d tried to get myself sewing something interesting and meaningful for them, but I may have blown my wedding wad on the Talking Fish of San Francisco for Sarah and Matt’s quilt this July (warning: this is a BIG image). Liz is the inspiration/dedication for the Kali mat in the currently hypothetical Altar Guild. (Oh my God, this post is getting into some of the “serious” subjects’ that I’m supposed to be writing about and that SOTD has provided a fantastic spiderhole in which to hide. This could be trouble.) Liz and Ruth are my Kali friends–Liz very knowingly, Ruth according to my interpretations. Kali must have something to do with music, rock and roll more specifically, because they’re also the ones I can’t not talk about music with. I am very lucky.
Anyway, I had frittered away all the time left to me and I had to make something for the puja FAST. I pulled out some stuff, but there just wasn’t anything great there. Mazie and Emma used these beautiful scrolls from our friends’ Meetash and Barb’s Hindu wedding in Florida (as opposed to their non-Hindu one in Hungary) that Chris got the weekend before to make special messages of love. Mazie made all of the these “Just Married” vehicles–a sailboat, a blimp, a convertible–fantastic.
So, it was puja time and all my materials would have been nice cast in concrete out in the yard, but that wasn’t going to dry in time and les petits mains have been not so much dormant as obsessed with getting the yarn out–making a bunch of weird scarves that I’m going to try to sell next weekend, so I won’t have this yarn around that makes me feel, oh, take your pick, guilty, irritated, embarassed, overburdened, frivolous, stuck, poor, frustrated, horrified, stymied, obsessive, and, oh yeah, like a big fat failure.
So I’ve been knitting in some sort of penitential way, which has stopped all applique, embroidery, and other needlework that I dream of mastering. (I really do dream about sewing.) That, of course, makes me feel like a big fat failure as well, so I’m fucked. But that is my existential condition–never making the right choice, always working on minor things, when all my dime dancing is through… . I am doomed to a life of unfinished projects because I am so busy–NO! I reject the end of this sentence. I am not doomed to a life of unfinished projects. I make stuff and finish stuff all the time. I have so many ideas that it’s like a riot going on around here. I try to stop the ideas. But they just keep coming. I can barely keep up wth them.
So, I was in the bath (when all else fails, get in the bath), thinking about the puja. No, Chris was in the bath and we were having this intense conversation about marriage and weddings and traditional ceremonies and I was sounding like Rush Limbaugh. I was very upset because there’s always this thing in me that believes in the power of the old words, and I knew this wedding would not have those words. It had these other, incredible words, and I knew they’d be good (cry-worthy, it turns out), but I was feeling upset because I love the old words. They work for me. I am a fan of ritual. A big fan.
Then I got in the bath and started thinking. Like I said, Liz is a music friend in that she is as involved with music as I am and we talk about it. I got to know Andrew while driving to Houston for this yoga workshop exactly a year ago. The trip led to making a mixed CD and an essay called “Weekend in Houston” which got the ball rolling on writing about music. Liz gave me a CD a couple of weeks earlier of the songs that she and Andrew were thinking about for their wedding. Love Songs.
In the bath, Eureka again. (Archimedes, I love you.) We’ll make a CD (I’d been contemplating it for a week or so) and put it on the altar. It will start with “Love Makes the World Go Round” from the musical “Carnivale” that I know about because we had the cast album. It starred Anna Maria Alberghetti of Good Seasonings Italian Dressing fame. In fact, I believe I am the only person in America my age who might have known that Anna Maria Alberghetti had a career other than selling salad dressing at the time she was in fact selling salad dressing. This tidbit of knowledge might just push me back into the Baby Boom, although I’m still sticking with oldest bitch of GenX.
The CD will start with “Love Makes the World Go Round” and have Robert Indiana’s LOVE on the cover.
And it did. iTunes had the song. It had the song! No, you can’t get any Beatles, but there’s the cast album of “Carnivale” and there’s Anna Maria. I can buy it. I then do a keyword seach on all my iTunes songs for “love” (which also brings up the entire Lyle Lovett catalog) and go from there. Then Chris can come home to his CroMagnon wife, check out the list (I was in the bath at this time–when did I take this bath? I guess I put the songs together before getting in the bath while he was off doing some thing he would do on Sunday afternoon and climbed in the bath before heading out to help set up the wedding. I also climbed in the bath hoping it would help me out of my old ritual mourning.) He liked my songs. He liked my songs! He came up with some of his own, but it was up to me, No fighting, just choosing songs and moving them around. Then he found the image, let me pick the version (so many versions of everything now), and made the cover.
Chris put it on the altar when he and the girls arrived two seconds before the ceremony. It looked incredible–a square of LOVE in the midst of little talismans and Cornell-like art made by Andrew’s brother-in-law.
Love makes the world go round. My life was saved by Anna Maria Alberghetti.
Post a Comment