How Hawking Helped Me Emerge Empowered

The Shy Girl

People might not believe it now, but I was once a very shy person. I was terrified of public speaking. I don’t know if it was because I was always the new girl and never felt fully at home in my classes, or what. I distinctly remember the time in my Junior year of high school English class when I had to give a talk about the poet Vachel Lindsay. I was shaking all over, my teeth chattered, and my knees literally knocked together.

Of all the Lindsay poems I read, the one I really liked and wanted to share was for children. I managed to get through my report because of sheer necessity. Do it or fail.

I finished up with the poem:

The Moon’s The North Wind’s Cooky (What the Little Girl Said) by Vachel Lindsay

The Moon’s the North Wind’s cooky.

He bites it, day by day,

Until there’s but a rim of scraps

That crumble all away.

The South Wind is a baker.

He kneads clouds in his den,

And bakes a crisp new moon that . . . greedy

North . . . Wind . . . eats . . . again!

When I was done, there was total silence. I was humiliated. They hated it! I sat down, ruing my choice of poems.

That same year, I took an elective class in Science Fiction and Horror. We were assigned a report on anything we wanted to do that fit into the genre. Everyone else did something about a book, film, or short story.

I, however, was an avid Alice Cooper fan. I decided I would do my report on their recently released album, Welcome to My Nightmare. I reported on the singer, the famed snake-loving chicken-biting* Alice Cooper himself, born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit, Michigan. Then I talked about some of the songs on the album, playing portions of the vinyl on a little record player.

I called him the “Edgar Allan Poe of Rock-n-Roll.”

If I hadn’t shown myself to be a weirdo before, I did then. Mind you, there were other Alice fans in the room. If it weren’t for them, I might have disappeared into the floor.

In spite of my terror of public speaking, I dreamed of being a rock star. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket and I don’t play an instrument, but there was a little tiny part of me that wanted to become famous and show those other kids how wrong they were to judge me as strange.

I wasn’t strange, I was creative!

I later took public speaking classes, which helped a little, but I was still afraid. When I started reading my poetry in public, I had trouble getting started, my voice would waver, and I never did get a good “poetry reading” voice going.

One year I attended a semester at the University of Houston, and for some reason decided it would be fun to take an acting class. It was low-key, in-class only. We spent the entire semester preparing to do one performance in front of ourselves. Nobody from outside the class would see it. We chose a play by David Mamet called Edmond. We were all assigned multiple parts. I got to be the Fortune Teller (“You are not where you belong”) and a police officer (no lines).

Ya’ll, even though we were a small, intimate group, I was still terrified! One of the main things I was afraid of, all along, was forgetting my lines. I’ve never trusted my powers of recall.

But, I did it. I made it through the class without dying.

I’ve managed twice to memorize one of my own poems and perform it without paper, but the fear inside me as I performed was palpable. I admit I’m no slam poet, but I’d love to be able to try a slam at least once in my life. I never thought I’d come even that far.

Hawking

Last year when I first started working at the Arizona Renaissance Festival, I was impressed with the outgoing nature and bubbling personalities of most of the Hawkers for the chocolate shop. For the uninitiated, a Hawker is a person who stands out in the lane calling out to patrons, enticing them to come over to the shop for a taste of the chocolate. Many of them dance, sing, and holler out silly verses to draw attention to themselves.

I always loved them when I was a patron, but I never thought I’d be able to do what they were doing.

Then one day early this season, I was suddenly struck with the desire to try it. Without much thought, I opened my mouth and told someone within earshot of the owner, Natalie.

That day, I Hawked for the first time.

I loved it! I was in the lane chanting, singing, and hollering about chocolate until my throat was dry. I used portions of some of the little rhymes I’ve been writing for the chocolate shop’s Instagram. I made up little rhymes on the spot. Suddenly my fear was gone.

Just gone.

I’ve Hawked a lot since then. Mostly, I worked in the shop itself dispensing chocolaty deliciousness. We did Hawk from the counter, of course. That way, we grabbed the attention of passers-by who don’t see the Hawkers. We were a rowdy bunch.

Was it me or wass it just The Blue Bardess?

When I was working at the RenFaire this year, I was The Blue Bardess. I was in garb, wearing lots of makeup. Was I hiding behind that makeup?

Part of me

Back in the 80s, my friend and I rebelled from normalcy after we both left abusive marriages. Part of that rebellion included multicolored hair, lots of black clothing, painted faces, and a whole lot of rock-n-roll. It seemed we had become other people.

But we hadn’t. It was us.

It was the part of us that survived the threats and violence of domestic abuse. It was the part of us that strove to move forward in strength and self-assurance.

The Blue Bardess was part of me. She was the part of me that diverges from societal expectations of women of a certain age. She was the part of me that keeps on going. She was the part of me that emerged in 1986 but instead of a black and fuschia corvid, she’s a bright blue bird of paradise.

Here to Stay

She’s been trying to come to life for forty years. After many starts and stops, she’s here to stay. Going forward, though, she will be known as Lady Blue, Bardess of the Lowlands.

I’m here to stay.

I think I’ll do a slam event sometime soon.

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*Alice Cooper never really bit the head off a chicken. Poor guy had no idea chickens don’t fly. When the audience in Toronto tossed a chicken on the stage, he tossed it back, thinking it would fly away. Instead, the crowd tore up the poor bird and threw the parts onto the stage. The next morning, the papers reported that Alice had bitten the head off the chicken and drank its blood. Frank Zappa advised him to let the story go on.

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This story first appeared in Bouncin and Behavin Blogs on Medium