The musical "HAIR" and other observations

Hello Stephen,

How are you doing today?  I'm still getting over the creeping crud congestion and sinus cold that we've all had this past week.  It's mostly gone, but not quite all gone yet.  Still taking Mucinex.  I said to Pete yesterday, "I wonder why God claims to love humans, when all we really are, are bags of hot air, pus, mucus, snot, pee and poop."  Why would anybody love something as foul as all that?! I just don't know.

Anyway, so the way I look at it, and the way I look at celebrities and famous people is, you're all just a bag of excrement and goop like I am, and ya'll put your pants on one leg at a time just like I do. Ya'll burp, fart, and pick your nose, you're all just gross, disgusting, grimey and HUMAN like me." I tell ya, it was my worst pet peeve while working at the Museum when somebody would come up and say, "Don't you KNOW who I AM?" (when we said, "Sorry no tickets left for today.")  I'd just look at the person, up and down, and say, "Nope. Sorry. No idea. Still don't have any tickets left for today though."  It would totally piss the person off, but I didn't care.  I mean, the whole point of the entire Museum is to say, "We are all human beings, and should be treated equally." So why then should I give anybody who visits this place special treatment??  Buncha retards.  Just because you have buttloads of money in the bank and might be rich, famous, snooty or "elitist" compared to me, doesn't mean I'm going to bow down and lick your boots.

.......I have been interrupted like 12 times since I tried to sit down and write this damned blog post......

You have no idea just how annoying it is for me to try and sit down and have FIVE MINUTES of ME time to do that.  My mom says, "Go get Florence's glasses." I stop what I'm doing, go to her room, and can't find them anywhere. Wasted five full minutes looking everywhere, and came out empty handed. My mom then goes in to try and find them, then tells me to come and clean out her kitty litter box.  Then Florence sits here in the living room telling me a list of things that she wants to buy today while we're out. Now she's talking to me about ear wax and how to remove it. She's got psoriasis and "the stuff from my scalp goes into my ears," then on and on about how she can't use Q-tips to get it out, and she needs some ear drops or something, etc. etc. etc., and I'm just sitting here going OH MY GAWD SHUT UP FOR JUST FIVE MINUTES AND LET ME DO THIS.

Jeebus, now she's complaining about the blackheads on her face. GOOD GAWD IN HEAVEN. She's got more ailments and gripes about her hair, her face, her joints, her fingers, her incontinence, etc., and all she talks about is that stuff, all day long.  Frankly I feel the need for some intelligent conversation. I guess that's why I try to sit and keep my sanity by writing on a blog.

Anyway, that's always how it is, whenever I sit down to write to you, or check my email, or do some data entry for Pete on the computer.  I never can just SIT and do it, uninterrupted.  Drives me crazy.  I'm the type of person who needs to focus on one thing at a time, to finish it, before I move on.  Now, when I'm in CREATIVE mode, that's a bit different, I tend to flutter around doing five things all at once.  But sometimes I just need ALONE TIME, to do what I want to do, and just relax and enjoy it. Ya know??

Ah well, moving on.

Last night Pete took me to see the musical HAIR, which was quite interesting.  I wasn't even born in 1967 yet, so it was kinda like watching a history documentary or something.  It really did capture the hippy era, quite well I thought.  The most interesting thing I observed during the play was the audience. I mean, there I was, surrounded by older people than me, and they're just sitting there like lumps on a log, tittering amongst themselves at how "raunchy" and "offensive" and "ghastly" some of the things were in the play, which completely puzzled me.  I turned to Pete and said, "Funny how all these EX-HIPPIES surrounding us now have totally forgotten who--and how--they themselves once were."  But by the end of the thing, everybody in the audience was standing up, clapping their hands, dancing around singing "Let the Sunshine In."  Now THAT'S what I wanted to see.

People shouldn't lose sight of who they were when they were younger. That's what makes you OLD.  I would have LOVED to have been a hippy-chick back then.  I've dressed up like a hippy once for Halloween, but other than that, I've never been able to do it for real.  I mean, sure, the hippy's of the 60's are a strange concept to me, but I get it with the 90's version of "Goth" people in my high school. Same idea, just different outfits.  And so many 20-something's now think they are so "non-conformist" if they get a tattoo or a piercing...but it's so overdone now, it's like common place and totally CONFORMIST. Kinda cracks me up, when they think they're all badass and "different," but they hang out with about 20 others who look exactly the same as they do.  HA!!!  Again, I say, "buncha retards."

There were some favorite quotes from the musical that I loved..."Jesus had long hair too ya know," (I wish I had said that to my DAD when he made fun of YOU when I was a kid, "he's got long hair like a GIRL," he'd say, and "Johnny Cash never had long hair," etc).   Another favorite line was a pregnant hippy chick saying, "As Mary Magdalene once said, "Jesus, I'm getting STONED!" And when the black guy yelled out, "You white people are sendin' us black people over to kill yellow people who stole land from the red people." (Viet Nam).  I think the writers were brilliant.

I also loved the part where one of the main characters (who got drafted into the army) had a hallucination and a hippy chick walked up to a man with a rifle and put a flower into the end of the barrel.  I knew from studying history that that really did happen, at Kent State University, during a war protest where students took over the administrative building, and the National Guard came out and started shooting, killing many students who weren't even involved in the protest at all.   So, for me, watching the play was like a history lesson.  Very cool.

To think that the original cast of the off-Broadway production were actually ARRESTED for being naked in the play back in 1967 just makes me roll my eyeballs, I mean, in the world NOW, it's so totally different, and nobody gives a rat's ass if somebody's naked in a movie.  Ya know?  I can totally understand though, how people were shocked by much of what was in the play---white girls singing about well-endowed sexual black men?! Holy CRAP!! And white boys singing about the big asses and titties of black girls?!!  GADZOOKS!  And a GAY COUPLE---a transvestite actually pretending to be an older woman who just married some whimpy looking old man who doesn't KNOW she's a he... yeah, I can see how people might get their panties all in a bunch over those things.  Jokes about Jesus, burning draft cards, wearing the flag as clothing, ripping it, throwing it around and stomping on it....oh yes, I can definitely see how it would piss off a lot of people back then.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that there are just too many people trying to tell other people how to live, but at the same time, they ignore their own imperfections.  If they just turned that energy on to themselves, instead, perhaps they could change and grow into a better person, and THEN make a more positive mark on society. But see, it's much EASIER to sit and criticize others, to tell other people what they are doing wrong, to judge and condemn, to throw stones while sitting in a glass house.  Much easier, to just focus on everybody ELSE'S imperfections, and ignore their own.  Lazy buncha retards.

But that's not changed much, really, over the decades since the 60's.  I mean, first Elvis changed the 50's completely, and then once the Beatles hit the US, that's all she wrote---the world was completely transformed.  It was never the same after that.  People were suddenly discovering that they COULD break some rules, they COULD wear whatever they wanted to wear, they COULD grow their hair long, my GOD what a revelation---they could even try drugs, have sex with anybody they wanted to, and protest anything that they felt needed protesting.  A newfound freedom really, is what they discovered.

But the irony is, they also created their own prisons by doing so.  The freedom they discovered was used so recklessly, and irresponsibly, there was no planning for tomorrow, there was just living for today, and it was so TEMPORARY...so fleeting...even the "flower child" was symbolic of the whole hippy era, because it grows slowly, blooms quickly and dies almost immediately afterwards.  The prisons they created were more laws, more government interference, AIDS, drug-related deaths, and eventually the worst prison of all........forgetting where it all started from, growing old and out of that phase, turning into the same exact kinds of people they used to rebel against.

Ah well, I didn't mean to sit here and have a philosophical discussion about the symbolism of the 60's, but what the hell.  It was intriguing to watch the play, through the eyes of someone who wasn't even born at that point, learning from it, remembering history lessons about it, and observing those around me in the here and now who lived it, but forgot who they once were then.  Very interesting evening.

My friend Joe (a guy I once dated many years ago) sent me a Facebook link this morning, to the song "Just the Same Way."  My friend from high school, Nancy, wrote to me yesterday on Facebook and said, "Every time I hear a Journey song, I think of you," and she sent me a link to a kareoke version of "Faithfully." So, it's an every day occurrence in my life, either I hear YOU singing to me on the radio, or on a CD, or I hear your voice overhead on speakers in department stores or in restaurants, elevators, etc., or I see signs with your last name on them when I'm driving, or I have friends send me links to Journey songs and tell me that they think of ME whenever they hear YOU.  So, every single day of my life, you have BEEN THERE, somewhere around me, comforting me, making me smile, cheering me up when I'm down, giving me an invisible hug with your words....every day of my life.

I just wanted you to know that.  I know I'm not the only fan out here in la-la-land who would claim such a thing, but for me, it's true and it's real and I love every moment of it.

Love, Rebecca