girls just want to have fun

One of my fondest memories as a child was going to my dad and stepmother’s studio apartment in DC when I was 5 or 6, blasting ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ on the record player, and literally bouncing off the walls while singing into my hairbrush. I LOVED Cyndi Lauper just as much as I loved Boy George, and that’s saying A LOT. I loved their hair, and their clothes, and their attitude. They were so unique.

Last Saturday I got to see her Live for the first time and it was everything I could have hoped for and more. The woman is a vocal freak of nature. Her songs are HARD to sing, she sings at full volume much of the time, and a lot of her songs enter the head voice breaking point. I did a cover of ‘When U Were Mine’ last year at TT’s and nearly blew out my voice singing it; I had to warm up religiously before even thinking about the song.
She comes on stage prancing, practically running, and just wails. Perfectly. No faltering, amazing breath control, it’s as natural as breathing to her. There was one point when she was literally lying flat on her back and singing at the top of her lungs, right on pitch.

God, it was awesome.

I had pangs of jealousy when Amanda from the Dresden Dolls came on stage to sing ‘When U Were Mine’ with her. Fuck, really, this song out of all songs? Oh well, she gets that privilege because she’s worked her ass off for several years. I haven’t.

I’m having feelings of ‘where has all the time gone, it’s June 20th?’ I’m starting to freak out. I need to get disciplined again, I need to make time, say no to going out and to occasions, it’s just…….. it’s just………..

I really love being alone. I really love living so close to everything. I love walking out of my apartment and being 3 minutes away from a relatively major square. I love walking to the square, and then continuing to walk to the next major square, and then continuing to walk to the next and then the next, just because I feel like it. It’s a whim. I was just getting iced coffee at my favorite coffee shop and kept going.
A few weekends ago my day went like this:

-Woke up at 8am, put my hair in pigtails, washed my face and all that other morning stuff, and walked to Diesel to sit and have a sesame bagel with avocado and tomato (no cheese), and a large iced coffee.
-Sat at Diesel for an hour reading ‘Confederacy of Dunces’. Decide to go check out some bikes.
-Despite spitting rain, I walk to Porter and then to Harvard, stopping in two bike stores, and my fave mod furniture place, Abodeon. If I hadn’t had the bagel I would have gotten a Japanese doughnut filled with red bean paste at the Porter Exchange.
-Get to Harvard at 11am and decide to check out movies. The Namesake was playing at 11, I had read the book and my mom had recommended I check it out. I go. I’m the only one in the theatre and it’s awesome, I can’t stop smiling. I have a fleeting thought about how it would be so cool to have someone to make out with in this empty theatre, but then the movie starts. I watch and cry every time scenes of India come on the screen. Dear god, I hope I get to go there someday. Please, Please.
- I leave the theatre hungry and can think of only one solution – I go to Central Square and feast on a typical Saturday Indian brunch: veggie samosas, baingan bharta, shahi paneer korma, saag, kheer, all washed down with a hot milky glass of masala tea. I read my book. I am in LOVE with the day.
- I go grocery shopping at the co-op
- Go home, take a nap, eat a small dinner and go to Berklee Performance Center to see Feist by myself.

That was my day and night. Alone. It was probably one of the best weekends I have ever had.

Ok, so the point of this tangent is that I’m not living in this apartment forever. In fact, I’m moving in September. I’m moving out of the center of things to an area that is borderline suburb-ish. It is something that I Never Ever Ever thought I would do until I was at least 45 or so. Why I am losing my mind?
Basically, so the logic goes, I am going to be moving into a house that has a lot of space. I will be living with someone, but there is enough space so that it will also give me some alone time. I will have my keyboard/possible piano in a separate room rather then next to my comfy bed, and in between the mountains of clean and dirty clothes on my floor.
I love where I live, but I can get very distracted by the people around me and by the close proximity to awesome things and drinking establishments. I need some order in my life. I can’t write anything besides one verse and one chorus. I have at least 7 musical ideas in my head; they’ve been here for a while, and no lyrics to go with them. It’s maddening. It can all be justified by ‘I need to enjoy this for all it’s worth, because I might never have it again’. But you can say that with anything really, and not have it hinder your musical productivity.

The other thing is that I haven’t felt like myself in so many years. Myself, uninhibited by anything or anyone, without questioning or wondering what the person I love will say. …Me. Sarah Joelle Rabdau. It’s really exhilarating. I am slightly nervous for September, fearing that I might fall back into someone that withdraws and is chronically unhappy unless ignoring or running away. I don’t want to be that girl ever again. It saddens me to know that I was submerged in that stifling realm for a long time; through no ones fault but my own. I was too scared to admit things weren’t right and to lose so much that I loved.

But…..fuck…..I have so much work to do.

Oh, but I just got my Netflix…………..

flesh and bones with Nick Cave

Last night I had a recurring dream that left off where my last dream did a few weeks ago.
I was in a hilly desert with Nick Cave and a Mexican hunter/poacher, and we were on a search for rare and exotic flowers. It was highly illegal, we were searching on sacred and preserved land, and I have no idea how I got involved with either of them.
These flowers, it would seem, grew beneath the sand and that’s why we needed this expert to help us. He had the nose, much like a pig for truffles, for finding these rare breeds.
Nick had come to Mexico on some crazy personal mission. Whether it was to escape, drink tequila, and write songs while sweltering in one room of a shanty motel room, I’m not sure. But while he had been in the country, and being Nick Cave, he had come in contact with this botanical poacher and had obviously been intrigued by him and wanted to experience his work. (Ok, yes, this sounds a little like the Orchid Thief, but this is when things go awry.)

A few weeks ago I had started this dream and I got as far as sitting at the bottom of a sandy hill in the 115-degree heat while watching Nick loom above me. Our sweaty and dirt smudged hunter was leaning over, digging for something good, when we heard some people approaching. I somehow knew it was my job to divert these people.
Nick had probably originally found me sitting outside at a café table somewhere, drinking a sweaty Presidente, dressed in white, and thought I’d be perfect for this position. I was the light to his dark. I could play the innocent.
So there I was, preparing my story for these visitors, a story that all of us had collectively made up so that it would be believable, when all of a sudden I hear the hunter get up and grunt. I look up with just enough time to see him pull out a pistol and shoot the two men approaching with two shots. Bam Bam. Done. Dead.
I was shocked speechless, my stomach turned, I looked to Nick, and he looked back to our Mexican cohort who just bent down and started digging again.
That’s where my dreamed ended before.

Last night I found myself at the bottom of the hill again, seeing the two men on horses breach the horizon and gallop closer to us. It all came flashing back to me, and I looked up as the hunter was once again holding his pistol and aiming. Two shots. Down.
This time I screamed, ‘I have a fucking story! We’re not supposed to be killing people! What kind of sick fuck are you!? I have a fucking story!’ Nick and the hunter looked at each other and started walking down the hill, straight past me but bumping into me. They went over to the bodies and started dragging them to a location more discrete.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I implored. That’s when they both told me that we would have to get rid of these bodies so that no one would find out. They were going to cut them up into tiny pieces and put them in the vases of these flowers as an organic fertilizer--bones and flesh. What remained we would burn. I felt dizzy, my mouth was dry, and I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe it had all come to this, I had the story,
it was all planned.
The scene cut to a few hours later where flowers were starting to filter down the hill and I was arranging them into vases. Before the flowers went in, I would cut up small pieces of flesh and ground bone matter into the bottom. I was humming to myself and had somehow, probably out of shock, convinced myself of my innocence. I had no part of this. This was all their doing.
Over the course of the next few hours more men would come by feet and horse, and our friend with the gun would shoot them down, always with two shots. It became no big deal, and I kept on arranging and cutting up flesh.

At the end of the day, things got sort of frantic, and we were all stuffing flowers into vases with no discretion. Nick kept on saying things like ‘more flesh, more flesh’, and we would cut bigger chunks to try and hide all these bodies quickly. That’s when a pickup truck came with a dashing and slightly overweight dark-haired man driving. He got out of the car and seemed fairly friendly with the hunter and Nick, but not in a way that let me believe he knew what was going on. I started to get nervous as I began to realize that I was not an innocent after all. That even though it was not my intention to kill these men, I still took part in their slaying, I covered it up, and I would someday pay for this.

I looked over at the flowers, seeped in flesh and bones and hanging out in the dessert sun almost all day. They were dying. I turned to Nick and asked ‘should we just throw out the flowers?’ He nonchalantly responded, ‘yeah, might as well’.
The dapper man that had been talking to the guys, I realized, had come to pick up the flowers. He didn’t seem to have a problem that we were throwing them away. They did look wilted.
He walked over to the table where the vases were sitting and offered to help us. ‘No, that’s ok’, I hesitated, ‘I can handle it’. He refused to listen, grabbed three vases, and we both walked over to his truck. All the while, I’m running options in my head; how am I going to get rid of these flowers without him seeing what’s inside? Panicking, I start throwing the flowers into the bed of his truck and dumping the evidence of the day-gone-wrong into a black trashcan. I have frantically taken the vases out of his hands so that he can’t see; I’m flirting and chatting him up, anything that will save our asses. I think we are done and I’m tying up the bag when out of the corner of my eye I see him looking into the bottom of one of the vases. ‘What’s this’ he asks, ‘organic material?’
‘Uhhhhhhh, yes’, I mumbled as I grabbed the last of it and shoved it into the trash.
‘Thanks for the work you did today, maybe we can resuscitate these flowers when I get them back home’, he says.
‘Ok, great.’

The dream cuts and I find myself sitting on the hood of the truck with Nick, the hunter is driving us into the dusk. The cactus and desert landscape are lit with the blue light of the moon rising. Nick’s skin is glowing, pale, sinister, and peaceful. I realize that I can never take this back, and I will never be the same.

This is my life now.

Me and Nick Cave.