The Renaissance of 2012 Women

If you decide to read my midlife crisis blah-gh you may get where I am coming from and find yourself there, too. There seems to be a new renaissance of sorts with those of us born in the '60's starting to figure out we're mortal. At least some of us made it this far. Between AIDs and the Wars, hepatitis 3, and those crack-n-poppers from drug czar alley, well, some of us lived.

The days I sang in
the mid 1980's.

In the 1980's- feels like last century, right?- that's when most of us were making our plans to take over the world. But, reality and Reagan were the biggest emotional speed bumps. Whilst some figured out personal computing would take over, others were wearing Madonna lace, painting Cyndi Lauper hair, learning how to Rap, and trapping boy toys with teen parenting. Time Magazine told us our generation was going to use punk music to corrupt Religious Rightists, (I hope we did). In the 1980's a lot of us were becoming the Violent Femmes, Jim Jarmusch, or Tom Waits in response to post Disco, middle eastern post-kidnapped, war, free flowing creditors. And there was Phil Donohue, In Living Color, and sickeningly sweet bouncy Tiffany and Debbie Gibson tearing into our skulls as AM radio got replaced with college and alternative stations.

But women were rocking hard in that decade. Chrissie Hynde tore it up, as Debbie Harry owned the new rap waves. Heart made Led Zeppelin fans out of girls like me, as Kate Bush, Exene, Patti Smith, and even the B52s let the world in on the secrets that we write, perform, and own the stages. Lene Lovitch, Lydia Lunch, and so many other alliterations there were giving voices where none existed. Madonna despite my personal disdain of her "music", made clear our business was that of show. If 30 hours a day you're working to become the biggest name in the world, I suppose earthlings such as myself don't really have the reserved right to hate that stuff, (but I do).

A lot of us believed in the adage that hard work would pay off. I guess time wakes up all to greed and corruption left to us from the Love Generation. So strange that they tuned in, turned on, then discovered white collar crime. Meanwhile, artists are doing something in retaliation, and for most of us, it became clear we needed to earn livings if we expected to ever get to or through the 1990's. By day we were moms, geeks, and working for Fortune 500's, but by night a lot of us kept at those dreams and wrote music, created and waited for the world to let us be artists "for real". SOMEDAY would be just around the corner....

Now, it's 20 years and much more sobriety later. I keep running into women in their 40's and 50's thinking the same thing - NOW counts. We spent decades thinking that once we earned enough we could afford to live our dreams, but the truth is, dreams are free. Everyone from Pegi Young to Heart to even Madonna are making art, music, Kate Bush is doing film, Exene is doing poetry, Jane Weidlin is comic booking. They didn't stop either. You can look at any art event, and find women beaming brightly above the masses, being the subculture of the newest age of "in".

I am the Waste Band. I did stand up for years, did Ren Faires, did web sites, and always had some toy boy or went schooling for degrees hoping a better check would somehow fairly appear. So, I learned "fair" and "just" seem to agree for white men, but rarely enjoyed a marriage for art geeky gals with multi colored hair and tattoos. I went from being that proverbial skinny bitch, who never bred, had lots of men, worked hard, and then, married a great guy- lost that petite figure to time, thyroidism, and chocolate. My waist is larger, and I've wasted enough time. I started writing under the moniker of RatManDo, (no one can do like a rat man do), and publishing my songs, registering them with BMI. (Not Body Mass Index, but yes, I selected them for irony.) I started recording music I wrote in 1978, for the first time, and stuff I wrote in 1994 for the last. (Come on, how many Cobain songs do I need? Really?)

For years, I believed that there were too many people doing what I wanted to do so my "billet" wasn't available. PJ Harvey exists. There's already comic artists with bands. Stand up comedians who perform music are showing up everywhere from Margaret Cho to a dancing Ellen. Cathy Ladman, kudos for the voice. So, where would I fit in? I would fit in being me, and not being them. It took me a lot of years to figure that out. It took me a lot of years to understand I deserve to do art as I want to, and not to fill in a blank in the planet's need. It's for me, not for the world. If the world likes it, great, if not, I didn't waste (get it, waste? yeah. ho hum), time, I just did the best me I could do at the time, and if the rest of the world gets it, great, and if not, some day they will, or someday, whatever gets ignored will be the extra fluff in someone else's movie of life, and that's all good.

Catch that crazy eye?
And, Different Hawaiin shirt..

This blog is an introduction to the Waste Band. It's the goal for me now, not to live a life of waste. It's not to be so mired in the past I forget to be present. My favorite writer, when I was a child, was Henry David Thoreau, (his last name is pronounced Thorough, so it means more to me than you'd expect). He wrote about people living their lives in silent desperation, and never achieving goals because they always had "somedays" and not "nows". Walden gave him a Now. As a child I wanted to be Arlo Guthrie, hair and all. I wasted a lot of years not practicing my guitar, and let colitis dictate my ability to be on stage or not. I should have been in a dozen bands, but only managed to form or audition for a handful. I wrote hundreds of songs, but only recorded a dozen. Not anymore, that's the past. I live now. I'm in the Waste Band. Just call me RatmanDO. Who are You?