is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
If you love someone, set them free. And hope they leave behind their CDs.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 Many years ago when my brother was still living in Chicago, managing a Great Harvest Bread store while he put himself though school, he dated a fellow dough-kneader named Anne.
I worked for him when I was home on breaks from grad school, selling loaves of bread to Lincoln Parkers while I let the feminist theory slowly seep out of my brain for a glorious month of nothing much else. On one of those breaks, I met Anne.
She had long, brown, stick-straight hair and a simple face with tiny pink lips. She seemed nice enough but she was a little strange. She wore mittens at a play and dinner with my parents. With a short-sleeved shirt. My brother liked her because she was quirky and because, although she was quite frail looking, had some junk in the trunk. That's how he said it, I swear.
I remember scraping the dough off of the hardwood floors one night while we were cleaning up at closing time. Anne and my brother and I were the only ones in the store and he put in a CD that Anne brought in a few days or weeks before. He wanted me to hear it and as soon as I heard the first few lines, I was hooked. Soon, we were all dancing around the locked store and I knew I had to have that CD.
It was the Barenaked Ladies. It wasn't the first time I'd heard them. I'd actually played one of their early CDs when I was a DJ -- I mean on-air personality -- at my college radio station. But their music had evolved and so had their audience and my taste in music was changing too.
I was off of a year or so of hating but listening anyway to the Grateful Fucking Dead and just coming out of a mandatory Women Studies period of listening almost exclusively to acousticy female folk singers my brother called women's whiner rock. I was willing, at last, to hear a little man music. I was praying for something lyric-driven and please God, no guitar solos that last longer than it took me to whip up a microwave popcorn dinner.
And there they were, Barenaked Ladies, courtesy Anne.
It's no surprise Anne wasn't around much longer than it took me to memorize the entire CD and get tickets to see them with my brother at the Aragon. It turns out she was not only quirky, she was also pilfering cash from the register on the sly (and that's not easy in mittens, my friends). My brother caught on, and she quit or was fired or something, and Anne's services were no longer (oh dear, I have to)kneaded (apologies).
My brother and I saw Barenaked Ladies many times in concert, sometimes standing in front of the stage and once way up in United Center and once from the way-back of what I think was Poplar Creek a bezillion years ago and is now named after a soda company or something. We had fun listening and seeing and dancing more to BNL, and today, so does Lil E.
In that time that we've acquired many more CDs and MP3s and then decided we liked them way more when they were insistent upon smaller venues, we've also talked about how that first song - I am pretty sure it was If I Had a Million Dollars, which gets the newbies every time - came to us.
We talk about kooky Anne with her thievery and eccentricities and how maybe, just maybe she stepped into that store just to deliver that music.
OK, so it's a stretch. But the real point is that people come and go. Sometimes, though, they leave behind some music that sticks. For that, we will always be grateful to Anne.
Last week, someone else stepped out of the store where I am standing. And one of the reasons it's OK is that he left behind one song that has turned on some new music for me that I really love.
Turn up some Jeremy Fisher (who one friend called, quite aptly, I think, a "young Paul Simon") today and dance along with me while I work some more.
The first one's bittersweet. The second one's a bit more quirky. And that one's just for you, Anne, wherever you're shaking that booty and baking that bread these days.
