December of 1987 I had just turned 20 and my life was a sad and terrible mess, but that is not what today’s write is about… I had made a friend that previous summer, who had worked at the gallery where I did, who was a “normal” girl who went away to college and lived in a dorm, had friends and went to parties, and not like me who was recently divorced with a baby about to turn two, and a full time job and community college at night, and lived in her old bedroom next to her sister’s at home with her parents…and so on and so on and so on…SO…when this friend asked me to come spend a couple days with her in New York and see her college, and then take the train into the city to stay in her dad’s apartment while she took a class at the School of Visual Arts I said okay and yes please and thank you all in one breath…
My parents, my patient and kind and generous and ever loving parents said it would be good for me to go and be around people my own age, see what college life was really like, and good to get away…they are still, just as an aside, EXACTLY as loving to me now at 55, as they were to me then at 20, yes, go, explore, get away from the life that you have, has always been their encouragement to me…AND so it was I got into my ridiculously uncool Ford Tempo four-door “I have a baby car” and drove myself, with black magic marker directions written on white typewriter paper laying on the passenger seat, to Purchase New York to a place called Manhattanville College. I pulled up to a building that looked like a castle and saw people my age wandering around, laughing, talking, walking, BEING 20…and I felt like I was in heaven.
WHEN I walked into the dorms however, I felt like I could die, as there were food cartons on televisions and pizza boxes on beds and clothes on floors and bathrooms with hair dryers and towels all over the sinks…I felt immediately, almost literally within an hour of arrival, like I could not get out of there fast enough…dorm life did not feel like a good fit for me and it was a good thing that we were going to the train station that evening and I was not staying in my friend’s dorm, but I digress…While I was waiting to use the Jack&Jill bathroom that connected her room to another, she handed me an empty cassette box and said “wait til you hear this, she is going to be the next big thing” and on the cover of the cassette was a girl, who looked about my age, with pale skin and a shaved head and when my friend pressed PLAY on her boom-box, my head buzzed…this voice was WOW…this voice was RAW…this voice was ANGER and CELEBRATION…this voice was tender and fierce at the same time…this voice was Shuhada’ Sadaqat, known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, and my friend had handed me her first album, which had just come out, called The Lion and The Cobra.
NYC was great those next two days…I wandered around by myself the first day, completely clueless as to where I was and if I was on a “good” block or a sketchy one, but I found a paper store where I lingered for more than an hour, that sold note cards and journals and I was so happy, and spent money I did not have to waste on blank books and book marks and cards because I simply love a quality paper store. That night my friend and her friends took me on a many-blocks-walk to a Mexican restaurant, and I had never before that time had Mexican food, so that was special for me too…small town girl gets out of small town is ALWAYS a fun story, no??? Getting out of south Jersey and having a few days off of work was a big deal for me and I had, before that time, only been to the city a couple of times in my entire life, so I loved that excited feeling you get when you are somewhere else, particularly New York City…THEN the visit was over, we took the train back to her college, we went to the sculpture garden at the Pepsi headquarters and then it was time for me to go home, but for my drive to home my friend gave me that cassette, The Lion and The Cobra, and said, take it, she could get another, and so I took it and for those hours on unfamiliar roads through unfamiliar towns, I listened to an unfamiliar voice over and over and over, and by the time I arrived back to my bedroom and my baby and my parents and my sister it was a voice I would love from that week on…
When I first got itunes this was one of the first cds I loaded into my computer. I listened to the album for all of the years of my adult life really, and even, some years ago, when my granddaughter was little, one night at my house, sitting on the bar stool at my breakfast bar, she said “what a dumb song why is she singing about edamame” and I did not know what she was talking about, until I paused to listen to the music with the ears of a little kid “put em on put em on put em on me” is the chorus to a song I Want Your Hands On Me, and to her little ears she did not hear putemonputemonputemonme, she heard edamam edamam edamame…and so that my gentle readers is my favorite Sinéad O’Connor story really…and I felt rather sad when I read yesterday that she had died. Lots of artists and musicians will write about her and what her words meant to them and for me, honestly, my first listen to that album was during one of the most fun few days of my young adult life, and for the rest of my days on earth, as it has been since that night, when I eat it, or read the word “edamame,” I will think of Sinéad O’Connor because of what my little granddaughter’s ears heard (and truth be told, I now can’t recall which granddaughter it was??!!) in the chorus of a song that I first heard when her own mother was just a baby. Give it a listen today I Want Your (hands on me) in fact, listen to the whole album if you have not before, and I promise you will be as captivated as I was, that winter that I had just turned twenty…
RStar's Common Grounds 