Notes from Center Stage

The house lights go down. A fiddler steps into the circle of light on the stage. The audience shares a hushed, anticipatory moment with her as she places her fiddle under her chin, picks up her bow and begins: a few quiet notes, during which she seems to meet up with herself and all of us. Then, with sure hands, she unwraps a tune. She offers up a gift which, however traditional, has never been here before in quite this way, at quite this time. Will there be a welcome from this particular crowd of blue-jeaned strangers?

Our listening is a sort of devotion. We hope to be ferried beyond ourselves, wrapped in the folds of her fiddle notes, thrilled or comforted. We sit like children, hands folded in our laps, watching her intently. One song elates us, another saddens or soothes. Her wild red hair is pretty, her eyes shine merrily above the gleaming wood of her instrument. We trust her to take us someplace important tonight. I feel like I’m in church.

At least once a week I come to the music coffeehouse where I began volunteering a while ago. In exchange for lighting candles, stamping hands, and discarding mineral water bottles at the end of the night, I find myself in the company of some of the most powerful women in the country. Most aren’t well known, at least outside music-listening circles, and they don’t look like anyone’s idea of Superwoman. Women folk musicians and singers necessarily spend a lot of time on airplanes, or driving themselves and their equipment in bad weather to house concerts in Des Moines and Madison and Fresno, at the mercy of the GPS Navigator. It’s a hard job with late hours and little downtime. They tote along babies, or a reluctant husband, and a friend who plays the mandolin and can sit in for a song or two. At the end of a night, after the CDs are signed and the instruments packed up again, the women must find food for everyone and get them all to bed for awhile. The next day, it’s a rush to the next gig in the next town. Some women hail from Sweden or Africa, speaking eloquently from the stage by way of their music, a language we understand without words.

Performing is always a gamble. Some nights there’s a full house, while other nights, only a handful of people slouch in the wooden chairs. Yet the women come fearlessly, show after show, dedicated to making music. They keep the deeper conversation going. An Appalachian miner’s tune, sung simply and austerely, carries a message of faith and fortitude between the plaintive notes. Singing about a failed romance, a young musician from Quebec reminds the audience of our foolish, loyal hopes, our humanity. The women and their instruments seem surrounded by light more ethereal than the spotlight’s glare—they speak directly to our souls, reminding us of the power of each of our inner voices.

My friend LaBarbara, sabotaged early on by an overly-protective mother, spent decades learning to hear herself and act on her own behalf. Trapped by paralyzing indecision, she let dozens of promising opportunities slide right by. As a child, she had loved to dance and sing and act out stories she’d written, but her adult self remembered too well the day her mother flat-out refused to let her audition for the school play, so fearful that her daughter would fall on her face that she broke LaBarbara’s spirit instead.

Now my friend accepts that making mistakes and arousing controversy is a consequence of becoming a powerful, creative woman. I think of her as a risk-taker, forgetting she wasn’t always that way. Propose a picnic on a grey morning, a radical business plan, a bellydance class, or a spontaneous one-day trip to the mountains, and moments later, she blurts out, “I’m going to have to say...yes.” At the very times when everyone else is stalling and hedging, or hiding their unwillingness behind a measured “maybe,” LaBarbara infuses the air around her with a kind of electricity by jumping in to find out what happens next. Odd, exhilarating undertakings put down roots and germinate, nurtured by her sudden, surprising yeses. A Chihuahua? Certainly, she’ll take one. Fencing lessons? Of course, sign her up for the whole eight weeks. Indian food? Seven a.m. walks around the lake? Help Gloria’s cousin sell aromatherapy candles all weekend at a festival in another town? Yes, yes, and yes again. A mother of three, she rides a motorcycle, sleekly attired in skin-tight leather pants and jacket, when she’s not running errands in her red Prelude. A couple of years ago, she married a fellow tenant in her apartment building, a much younger man, after knowing him for exactly a month, and they incurred an avalanche of bitter disapproval from both families. But her oldest son walked her down the aisle, looking proud. When her new husband suggested skipping an expensive honeymoon so they could buy a small restaurant and learn to cook, her answer, very naturally, was, “Yes.”

Doubt, that tight-fisted weigher of odds, is as crippling as impossibly high expectations. My brother and I joke about it now, but my father’s favorite, oft-repeated phrase—“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”—followed us like a noisy, sad-eyed mongrel for as long as either of us can remember. Dad was a lifelong worrier, his frown-creased forehead conjuring up a stack of unpleasant consequences at every point of action. I pretended to be more certain of my decisions than was ever actually true, throwing him off the scent with glib assurances. But I never really knew— had I chosen a sound car, or was it a lemon? Had I fallen in love with a loyal man, or a jerk? Was it the right town, the right college, the right job? I had no idea and didn’t dare confess it. A fugitive on the run from his second-guessing, I lost myself again and again.

Women, by nature, are excellent listeners. We can hear a baby’s hungry cry from an upstairs bedroom, a parent’s labored breath in a hospital bed, a lover’s murmur in the middle of the night, or a brother’s disapproving tone. We have taught ourselves to listen for a car in the driveway, the postman’s truck, the clink of a bottle under the sink. We can detect, with exquisite discrimination, the sound of a window unlatched and raised, the quiet in the playroom which means it’s too quiet, and whether a fight is real or pretend. But the sounds we need to listen to most urgently may be the hardest to hear —the gentle, steady directives of our hearts. The voice of our own authority, which often starts as only a whisper. The hush before the music begins, and afterward, the resounding applause.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune and other publications. She has also written for National Public Radio. ContactStacy at ­WordWork101@aol.com­.

~Stacy Appel