Fun at Steamathon II in Vegas, debuting a scene from my show, "The Eccentrics" https://theeccentrics.net/
First, I want to thank you for reading about me here. I’m really excited to be a contributor on Steemit. I’m looking forward to getting to know you through your work here, learning more about life from your unique point of view, and sharing some of my ideas with you.
Since Steemit is so distinctly different from other social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I’m going to share some things about me with you that I’ve never shared in any of those other places. I hope you find it interesting and that it helps you to know if you’d like to read more from me.
Today I found a journal from a few years ago. I skimmed through its pages to discover the half-mad, frequently euphoric, occasionally depressed musings of a Los Angeles jazz singer/composer/cabaret artist/playwright/international upstart.
Photo by Hussein Shaban, taken before a show in Cairo, Egypt
OK... Who was this overly dramatic woman, and why had she scrawled all these crazy confessions of wild love affairs, dazzling opportunities, dashed dreams and philosophical meanderings into one of my notebooks?
Well, I’ll tell you one thing. It wasn’t always so fantastic, such a wild ride of excess, exuberance and other kinds of x’s. Here’s some stuff I remember…
My pre-existentialist self, enjoying Summer vacation with a moth friend
I was raised in a small suburb of Chicago, called Lombard, where I never quite felt at home. The Summer after my 14th birthday I read every book on Egyptian and Greek mythology in the Helen M. Plum Memorial Library. The next Summer I read every book on psychology there. Years later, I read the back cover of my copy of Personality and Motivation by Abraham Maslow, which I loved so much that I couldn't bear to return it to the library. I was surprised to learn that this book was "standard reading for all upper-level and graduate courses in motivational and humanistic psychology." I was fifteen when I read it and I treasured every word. What a crazy kid I was, huh?
After some piano and guitar lessons, I started to write songs. My sister would sing harmonies with me and we'd debut my latest compositions for my Mom and Dad. This was the greatest joy of my childhood. I still compose music and write lyrics, by the way. The sad thing is that my sister lives in the suburbs of Chicago, while I live in Los Angeles, so we don’t sing harmonies together much anymore.
In school, I never felt very inspired, until one of my English teachers assigned us "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whoa. This guy was writing about the meaning of life. I read the essay again. And again, underlining my favorite passages. A whole new world opened up to me. This was "philosophy." I was in love.
...crushing hard on this guy. And it's not about the 'stache.
I commenced torrid affairs with Socrates, Plato, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I ravaged Sartre and Camus and longed to have lived in an era when the great, brooding existentialists bantered dark proclamations about the state of humanity, between sips of absinthe, over boisterous laughter and cabaret music, in decadent little Parisian cafes...Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche became my bible. I carried it with me wherever I went. I wore a lot of black and lined my red lips in black eyebrow pencil. But I was never really a Goth. I was just a weirdo.
My folks played mostly Elvis Presley, Karen Carpenter and show tunes during dinner. And I still love that stuff.
Coolest/hottest male singer. Ever.
When people at my school started saying “Disco sucks,” I decided it was a good time to see what all the sucking was about. Another kind of music I loved. I began listening to black stations exclusively because it seemed to me that they played the coolest music. I felt the funk. My sister and I saw Michael Jackson’s first solo tour at Soldier Field and were the only white people we saw there.
At about 16, I discovered Ayn Rand. The proud American, the immigrant, the self-taught genius, with the impossibly complex vocabulary that required a dictionary by my side as I devoured her pages. I enjoyed the challenge. I almost became an Objectivist.
Ayn was also a cat fancier. Of course.
Soon after, I discovered the Sufis and their playful philosophical teachings, spun through jokes and stories. I read every book ever written by Idries Shah. The Sufi embrace of music, dance, euphoria ~ what seemed like madness to others, resonated with me. These were my people!
I moved to Chicago and sang in the subways to pay my rent. I learned more in the subways about being a performer, than playing with any band in any major city in the whole-wide world. I got to know true humility. I learned to trade off spaces with the other performers. We kind of had our own little community down there.
Feeling super-cool and legit, black-lined lips and all
I figured out how and what to sing for an audience, even if that audience was one lonesome person who couldn’t make eye contact with me. I learned how to get that audience of one to smile. And that smile became the spark that kept me going. I sang through the winters and wore three pairs of socks, long johns under my cargo pants, fingerless gloves so I could still play my guitar and thick-soled army boots. I was still afraid I’d get frostbite in my toes one day.
Eventually, I took my act above ground. But that’s another story for another day.
I hope I made you smile at least once as you read this. Even if it’s the kind of soft smile you feel inside and other people don’t see. I hope you come back again to hear a story or listen to some idea I have about something. Thanks again for sharing your time, heart and mind with me!
And if you're in Berlin in September, let's get in touch. I'm lining up some shows there now and would love to meet a real, live Steemian in person!
Spreading my voluntaryist wings in Los Angeles
You can also find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JulietAnnerino and my artist page: https://www.facebook.com/JazzyHouseCat/ on twitter @JulietAnnerino or Instagram @JulietAnnerino You can find my music at my site: https://mataharimusic.net/ and on my Soundcloud where you can hear more of my house and chillout collaborations with producers from other countries: https://soundcloud.com/juliet-1 Here's my beatport page: https://pro.beatport.com/artist/juliet-annerino/295698
PS: Feel free to leave me Steemit advice or makeup tips in the comments below. My three cats and I will read every one of them!
At home with my youngest, "Freddy", named after you-know-who ;)