Ani Difranco - No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

I remember being on stage once in a tight little dress, the bottom of which kept riding up my thighs... all the way to my crotch as I moved around and sang (why was it doing this?!!)... my face growing hotter and hotter as I tried to hide behind my guitar.

I remember once walking out in New York City to get some kind of queer award and getting booed... for not being queer enough... before I even reached the podium.

I remember seeing something warpy and reflective from stage, it was in Amsterdam, and saying on mic, What the fuck is that?! only to walk over and see it was a young woman in the audience living with such severe palsy that she had to lie back in a special wheelchair with an elaborate series of mirrors in which to see the world beyond her knees.

In other words, Ive had many experiences of being on stage and wanting to die or disappear. Ive had many experiences of being trapped in spotlights and time suddenly slowing way down, the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears taking over from some distant sonic background in which angry words are being flung at me from a deep darkness.

Somehow this was worse.

It was not just crying but sobbing. It was Carnegie Hall, spring of 2002, and the sobbing from the third balcony was getting louder and louder until it began echoing around the room. Plus, she was not even the only one crying. A moment of paralyzing trepidation came over me and I heard my voice falter and begin to move into a distant slow motion. It was the culmination of so many recent moments of paralyzing trepidation. Having been in Manhattan on 9/11 (months earlier) and having breathed in the acrid blue smoke of the towers. Having hit the road mere weeks afterward when everyone else was canceling their tours and staying home behind closed shutters. I traveled around a country in a state of emergency. I played to half-empty houses that took months to slowly fill up again. I felt, all the while, a great pressure to lift up the small audiences that were brave enough to come out. A pressure to make sense of it all. To make hope happen.

I was confronted nightly with an impossible task: How am I supposed to make a whole show filled with all kinds of songs about all kinds of things when there is just one big thing pressing down on all of us? How could I possibly sing or talk about anything other than the all-encompassing panic in the air or the ominous march to war? And even if I could magically, suddenly make a whole show around this one looming thing, what the hell would I say? It was a challenging time to be a folksinger, at least, if you take your job seriously. The message that it was unpatriotic to criticize the president and his just go shopping while we bomb the shit out of em rhetoric was everywhere. Even from people and sources where you wouldnt expect it. It was weird, watching what fear did to people. Unnerving numbers fell into lockstep.

I tried to make myself into a lightning rod for critical thinking and accountability. I studied and I made notes and I got my facts straight. I stayed up debating and discussing late into the night with the most politically astute of my friends. I consulted trusted sources like Noam Chomsky and The Nation for guidance in sorting through the mainstream media quagmire. I traveled around the country and I talked to people everywhere I went.

I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. On each stage, I unfolded a different permutation of a poem that came to be called Self Evident. I attempted to engage people directly with this poem in real time. But now here I was, laying a poem about 9/11 down on the very people who had shouldered the brunt of the violence, the brunt of the loss. It was Carnegie Hall, it was only seven months later, and I was alone on stage when the question of How can I possibly talk about anything but this right now? suddenly wheeled around and became How dare you talk about this right now?

It was too late. I was trapped again. The spotlight was on me and there was no time to rethink my decision. I heard my distant voice finish reciting the poem. I think it may have even sung a few more songs. Then I was back in a dressing room full of smelly lilies and roses and there were pats on the back and congratulations-you-just-played-Carnegie-Hall hugs. Time inexplicably kept going.

I will never know what is the right balance in art between painful truths and painful silences. There is no right balance to be known. It is a question to be asked of every moment and its answer pertains only to that moment and no other. Its the spontaneous deal we strike with others, the conversation or lack thereof. Having played my part every which way, Im not even sure what Id recommend. I just know that we need to be willing to make mistakes. I know that we need to allow for our differences. I know we need to forgive each other.

Ive managed to transcend my own trepidation many times and Ive lifted whole groups of people up with me and, of course, Ive also failed miserably. I have caught glimpses along the way of something very powerful and Im not sure that I can tell you what it is but if you give me a chance maybe whatever it is will show itself.

Which brings me back to that night in the mid-nineties (I was quite young at the time) when that gawdawful dress kept riding up my ass. It took me about four songs before I decided that the only thing to do was to take the dress off. There was no fixing of the problem, only the conquering of fear.

Get ready: The truth is too valuable to put safety first.

Get set: No amount of exposure is unbearable unless you let it be.

Go: If you get caught with your pants down, take em off.