I went to dinner last night with a friend I haven't hung out with in the better part of two years. I see her fairly often, but never in any sort of social, "Hang out and talk about real stuff" kind of settings. It was weird for me to realize how long it had really been since we last went out for drinks, partly because my brain registers physically seeing a person on the same social frequency as hanging out with them and partly because the last year has been kind of a blur. We had a lot to catch up on (not least of which was that I don't drink anymore), but it was good.
She's an old-school Austinite, one that's been here since before the dot-com boom, before it started its slow, cancerous transmogrification into another (desperately-needed) Dallas suburb, when it was just a wheat field with a school in it. She does some really awesome video work and has a pretty amazing portfolio of opportunities seized and lost. Her partner is a dance choreographer and they went to see a mutual friend who had an opening at the Long Center downtown. The woman's name is Sally Jacques, and I think I may have seen and or heard of her while at school, though I can't really remember. She told me about the opening, and how this well-trained troupe of dancers used the space of the building itself to perform some really beautiful and dangerous moves.
She told me about how Ms. Jacques doesn't perform on her own much; how she usually instructs and arranges others in some of the most intricate and elaborately choreographed post-modern dances out there. I've never been much into dance (largely because I can't do it) and I don't really understand it. It reminded me though, of something I saw a few years ago that I haven't thought about in ages.
I went to see Citizen Cope at La Zona Rosa with my mom, my sister and some friends. My family and I have impeccable taste in music and performances, but we're relatively impatient people, particularly when it comes to getting in the car and going home. We're not very big Stand-around-and-talk-ers; we're people of action and, besides, we're tired and our feet hurt and we're hungry. We had parked probably three miles away from the venue (because we also patently refuse to pay for parking) and were shuffling in a particular hurry when I saw a woman fall off the top of a building.
It was odd for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the building was incomplete and under construction and she was wearing what seemed to be some type of choral robe, as though she had just come from an Easter service or Christmas pageant. Stranger still was the fact that there was a spot-light being shone on her that followed her as she fell. But the strangest thing of all was the way she fell. She didn't flail through the air or scream. She seemed to glide, as though she hadn't a care in the world, as if the multi-story drop were an elegant display rather than a grisly end to a miserable life. In fact, it was less her own body that communicated this than the robe or gown (whatever) that she was wearing. It flowed behind her, almost as if it were a gigantic silken playground slide and she were skimming effortlessly over the top of it.
As she reached the bottom of her descent, that's when I noticed the harness and realized that she wasn't falling; she was dancing. She was lifted back through the air, the direction of her flowing robes now reversed, and proceeded this way for what seemed like an eternity. It was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever experienced in my life. And then my someone among my party who had drank about as much as I had turned around to ask what the hell I was staring at and tell me to come on, they were cold. I seemed to be the only one who noticed or was affected by it. And then we went home.
As I described this, my friend explained that she was there that night, standing near the spotlight, years before we would meet, seeing it all from a different perspective and the woman on the harness was none other than Sally Jacques.
I'm not sure what this means. I'm not entirely sure it means anything, except to say that it's good, sometimes, to stop and think about things you haven't remembered in a long while: friends you haven't seen or things you haven't done in a long time; an experience you had where you took a big risk and it paid off; someone you used to love or someone who hurt you; maybe it's an instance in your life that made a profound, if unintelligible, impact on some otherwise-insignificant moment in time. Some of the best memories I have in life are of things with no foreseeable purpose. They just are what they are and have somehow contributed to making me who I am. I miss having a family. I miss the things we used to do together. I miss seeing something incredible only to see something incredibler on the way back to the car. I miss dancing in a harness on the side of a building simply because nobody else would think to do it. It doesn't necessarily need to mean something. I guess it just is what it is.
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