I…am a sparkling beacon of bright red sequins.
The last time any woman found the perfect dress was years ago in a small village in Italy, but today lightning has struck once again.
I can’t believe I found this dress! I am playing for a Las Vegas themed night back in Tiny Town, fronting a ten piece band, complete with horn section, and I am in one of the most perfect event gowns I have ever had the luck to secure, a simple V neck sheath with spaghetti straps which are also sequined. Form fitting with almost a foot fringe at the bottom which is comprised of… guess?? Even more red sequins.
I love this dress. I LOVE THIS DRESS!
Have I mentioned I love this dress??
I have found the Royal Flush of casino dresses, and I’m swinging my hips to move that fun fringe as much as possible. We are absolutely smoking this gig.
Impossibly, my hair also turned out great. The last time any female had her hair turn out well AND had the perfect dress was during the Cretaceous period (yeah, I know there weren’t really humans then. Don’t care. Also, if you are a woman reading this, you fully understand the remote odds of finding an outfit. If you actually get what you’re looking for, your next stop should be a lottery ticket counter.) and I feel particularly lucky tonight. My hair is absurdly extended to near waist length, and as I sing I can feel the weight when I move, swaying from the back of my head.
Dancers move in the kind of synchronized steps I never really quite learned…rumbas and foxtrots and tangoes (tangos? Tangoes?) all swirling into the night. To top off the perfect evening, my tuxedoed son is playing keys, and Mom could not be more proud. His sister is at DX’s house, waiting for us to finish, she never did catch the music bug and has her own pursuits. They are both doing pretty darn well. We are very close, during the years I was a young adult leader I saw a thousand ways this relationship can go sideways, so I am extremely grateful. My son and I exchange smirks as he pounds out Sweet Caroline, a song he knows I hate but the crowd, always and absolutely baffling to me, just LOVES. “ SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!”
Fuck you, Neil Diamond.
But I’m not performing for me, I’m here serving them, and I’ll belt the hell out of this dog for the bouncing crowd of Neil lovers. After the Neil absurdity, it’s breaktime, and the band splits into two competing groups. One races to the restrooms, the other to the bar for fifteen minutes of speed drinking. I am in a mad dash to find a glass of something not offered in the ballroom where we’re playing, so I’m down the hall to the main restaurant, another 50-yard dash on stilettos. Is there a high-heel race held anywhere? I bet THAT would get some spectators.
I make it to the finish line, place my order, and catch my breath.
I turn around from the crowded bar…walking directly into Pastor Almost, flanked by his wife.
The last time I saw Pastor Almost was the night we met to tell him I was getting divorced. The next day, I was fired.
Right now, faced with them for the first time in six years, both have the same big passive-aggressive smiles I couldn’t trust. If they feel awkward, their expressions do not betray it, but their faces never betrayed anything. That’s how passive-aggressive people work. Smile like the sun, kisses for everyone, as Ann Wilson damn well knew and as I have sung a thousand times now. I have never known quite what they were actually thinking, both of them crocodile smiling their way through conversations, only later to discover they were seething at me behind the toothy grins.
I don’t trust smiles anymore.
I have so many immediate feelings. I am Hester Prynne bearing the scarlet letter. I am a victorious castoff having reworked my life better without them.
I am a sinner. I am free.
I feel simultaneously ridiculous and triumphant.
I feel like a two-bit whore and a rockstar.
I have just exited the stage from what I do best, doing what I always knew I could, free from being under the thumb of the restrictions that kept me married and trapped in a life I never wanted, yet I know the judgment being executed as I stand there in my slinky red pile of sparkle.
I know what these people think because I lived and breathed it for twenty three loooong years. I totally understand that I look like the Big Bad World to them, but it has been six years of rebuilding, and what I am is absolutely 100% Monica, ridiculous or not. They are in their usual greyscale hoodie-and-jeans combo, and look exactly like they always did. Plain. Churchy. Black-and-white. I mean, that’s what they chose, and that’s fine for them, but is NOT the world I wanted to live in. They are pre-tornado Wizard of Oz; I’m dancing on the other side of the rainbow in Technicolor. We chat shallowly. I explain I’m playing down the hall, some niceties are exchanged, and I excuse myself away from the dust and ashes I left behind.
That was weird.
But then I go back out to the hall and immediately run into several couples from the same church. People I once knew well, my old acquaintances. I have a strange wow-this-is-what-I-would-have-been feeling. My son is observing all of this, a page out of Modern Bride seated in his tux on a bench in the hall. I catch his eye as well as his sardonic grin, he knows exactly what I’m thinking. He went through our abrupt eviction from the church, too, and is just as weirded out as I am with this out-of-left-field reunion. Then it hits me.
This is a Valentine’s day event, that’s why the flood of couples. I am happily unpaired, bearing the ring I bought myself as a Valentine’s present last year. They all look the same as they ever did… older, greyer, but exactly the same. I chat with them a bit, and not a thing has changed. Tiny Town is still… tiny, a Norman Rockwell portrait of horses and buggies, a snapshot of unchanging hands on a clock, five thousand people at the intersection of two roads and a lake. I feel time-warped back to my church days for a moment, and the old subservient me, the wheelbarrow resident, threatens to break the surface. Thankfully, she doesn’t make it past the strong self I have built, and I continue to stand tall in my heels and red sequins.
We all awkwardly chat.
It’s a very odd feeling.
A picture comes to me of an alternate universe, one in which I never divorced, never took the huge risk of losing everything and leaving TIny Town. One in which I obeyed, and stayed, and am on the other side of this conversation, because this was the congregation of the final church, and I know damn well if I hadn’t left, tonight I would be with them… older, greyer, and not a speck closer to my dreams. This was my social group at the time and the fact is, if I hadn’t been tossed out, this is exactly where I would have been tonight. I stood there faced with the vision of another Monica, plain and meek… head down, spirit broken, crumpled from the confines of the wheelbarrow that was once my home. Another possibility stared me in the face that Saturday night, what would have been had I taken the easy road.
But I didn’t stay. And when I was tossed, instead of remaining in town mouldering in sour grapes, I got the hell out and rebuilt an entirely new life. And here I was standing tall in my stilettos, a shining tower of red-carpet material, feeling so good about it I almost feel bad.
This throws a monkey wrench into the pious mind. This isn’t supposed to work. If you divorce your Pastor husband, everything is supposed to fall apart. I’m supposed to be a failure, a Les Miserables Fantine having lost it all, lying down in the gutter singing one more melancholy dirge before exiting life. And I left knowing that this is exactly what would be expected. It was my fear from the very beginning, perpetually checking over my shoulder for the inevitable lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky to prove to everyone that I was horribly wrong. You don’t leave your husband, much less your Pastor. If you do, you will crash and burn and die.
But that’s not what happened, and these church people are looking at me with dismay, because I shouldn’t exist. This isn’t how this story is supposed to end. I’m a mirage, an impossibility.
But I am real. And I did escape. And I am far more confident, and know who I am, and have been headed toward a far different destination for a long time now.
I finish the bizarre small talk and my son is there and we both agree, this was pretty weird. And we go back down the hall, resume our places onstage, and the band fires up and I belt out the final set, finishing with a rousing horn-section amped version of Hey Jude. I’m out on the dance floor arm-in-arm with the audience belting out NAA na NAA NAA nanana NAAAAA, anthem sung together as one.
As I drive home I consider the events of the evening, the contradiction of who I was as opposed to who I am. I now know you don’t have to remain a shell of yourself just because others, or even an establishment, thinks you should. Play small, and no one gets upset, and you can live in relative obscurity, under the thumb of other’s expectation and obligation. But take a chance on building up who you know you really are, on becoming all you can be, and the mediocrity around you will pick up their rocks and throw them at you. There will always be people who want to shut down your light just because they have none of their own.
But my red light shone brightly that night, for all to see. They can say what they want, I have no control over what others say, and don’t care.
I escaped, and have my own empire.
I am free.
I want to tell the world that this is possible.
And then I decide I will.
Worship Leader Gone Wild 