Episode 30 - Engaging with the Culture

I met Joi Razinha, known professionally as Tamra Henna, in high school. I had a couple circles of friends, one that smoked, drank, skipped school, and got into other miscellaneous teenage hooliganism, and one that was artistic, academically successful, and sat on the edge of the pool talking about Sylvia Plath and whatnot. Joi was in that second group, although she told me she maybe would’ve preferred to be in the first.

After reconnecting on Facebook many years later, as high school friends are prone to doing, I first saw Joi belly dance at a hookah lounge in Addison, I believe, around 2013 or 2014. I had never seen it before and had no idea how to react. She hung out and chatted with me between dances, and I realized that she was not the shy, quiet person I thought that I remembered from high school. She was smart, funny, and charming, and I’ve loved watching her adventures through the lens of Facebook ever since. As she says, I could do a whole series of episodes on her and her life.

Thank you so much, Joi, for the time and energy you brought to this project. If you like the result, we should definitely collaborate again. Hearing smart, thoughtful people talk about what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it is the best way to grow, and looking into universes in which you yourself don’t live is the best way to expand your worldview and develop your compassion.

You can find Joi at:

tamrahennabellydancer.com

Instagram: TamraHenna_Official

TikTok: TamraHenna_Official

Facebook: Joi Razinha

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Music from Audiio: “Welcome to Us (Instrumental)” by Sebastian Kauderer; “The Slowest Journey (Instrumental)” by Good Weather For An Airstrike; “Bang Bang Bang (Instrumental)” by Moarn; “Acceptance (Instrumental)” by Frankie Orella; “Intertwined (Instrumental)” by As Tall As Pine Music; “Enter” by Christopher Galovan. Music from YouTube: “Arabic Wedding (arabic instrumental)” by Boris Skalsky; “Sahara Rains” by Hanu Dixit; “Shesh Pesh” byJR Tundr. The song “Ya Tamra Henna” was originally performed in the 1957 film by Fayza Ahmed, and this version was commissioned by Joi Razinha from, and performed by, Matias Hazrum. Other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the tabla and the outro music, which I put together from instrument loops on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Joi: Well, it's funny that the name of your project is Caterpillar Goo. And that really made me smile when I saw it because, I think I had seen recently the whole thing about how, when a caterpillar transforms it essentially disintegrates and comes back together, and I resonate with that quite a bit actually, and I kind of feel like I'm always in a state of goo. I'm not sure if I've ever actually become a butterfly. I'm just always kind of gooey. Maybe that's not the same for everyone, but for me it's true. I'm always changing and trying to figure out who the hell I am just in general.

If you don't have any experience with belly dancing, it's okay to look at the dancer. It's okay to interact with the dancer. The whole point, if you're ever at a place and a belly dancer shows up, is for the whole evening to be more fun. No matter if the dancer doesn't look like what you expected them to look like, or if you are weirded out because you're not used to that, it's just all about having fun and enjoying the moment. I like it when my audience interacts with me. I want them to yell and scream and applaud, and they can tip, and they can get up and dance with me. I don't want touching or anything like that, obviously, but I want interaction. That's really one of the biggest things about being a belly dancer is that you are there to facilitate the party. And there is not a worse crowd ever than one that is I not looking or just refuses to be into it. It just sucks every bit of energy out of you. It is so hard.

I've done a lot of shows, and I've had a lot of people tip me in a lot of different ways. Depending on where I'm at, in the nightclub where I first started, in the beginning, they did not allow anyone to touch the dancers. So you could not accept tips in your costume. They could hand it to you, but it was mostly, they would come out on the dance floor, and they would do a money shower and they were allowed to dance with you a little bit, but the bouncer would escort them away from the stage if they stayed too long. That was awesome. I felt like such a rock star back then. But other places where I danced, where it was maybe a smaller restaurant, I would accept tips in my costume. And usually what I do is I tell them where I want them to tip me and, side of my hip, maybe I'll have an arm band, and I'll point to my arm band if… Maybe I'll let them do it in the front of, like in my strap. But a lot of people go straight for the front of the bra, and you just have to block it off. But, mostly it's Persian grandmas want to shove $20 bills down your bra, and I'm like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing now.

I've had very, very few incidents where people were really handsy, or I've had real problems. Occasionally you get somebody who decided they want to dive down the front of your costume to give you that whole dollar that they had in their hand. And you know, it's like, you just get really good at evasive maneuvering. But mostly people are respectful. The worst problems I had were probably with 20 year old college girls trying to twerk on me.

My dad is a Muslim, he's a white guy, and back in the seventies when everyone was converting to Islam, that's what he did, and him and my mom got divorced when I was really young. I was about two. And so I never, he wasn't in my life a lot because he went off and did his own thing. Spent some time in Bangladesh I think. And then got married again and married a woman of the faith and then went off and lived someplace else, and just wasn't a very present person in my life after that. He's lived in Turkey and Cyprus and places like that.

But I think the fact that he became a Muslim kind of in the back of my mind peaked my curiosity about the Middle East maybe. And so the story is that I was signing up for classes at community college in Austin and there was a course called Mideast Dance. So there was a connection there and I think that's what kind of peaked my interest. But I quickly realized that you're not going to connect with your Muslim family member by becoming a belly dancer. That's just not the best way to do that. And he's very religious, and there's a lot of tension in the Middle East between people who are very religious and people who are more secular, and the dance is definitely frowned upon in religious communities in the Middle East, because it's not how traditional Muslim women would behave, right?

So yeah, I started taking Z-Helene's class and, her name is Z-Helene, and there was, they used to have a show at the Student Union, and so that was where I went and I kind of saw my first actual belly dance show, and I was so enamored with, you know, the ladies were beautiful, and their costumes were sparkly and everyone's dancing and everyone's free. And, you know, I'm 19 at this point, 20, and I just thought it was amazing and it was so different from what I had been around growing up, that I was hooked. I really wanted to do that thing. And I really fell in love with it. I fell in love with the music, actually, is what happened. And it really did change my life. I mean, obviously it took me in a direction that I never would have gone if I hadn't taken that one class.

So yeah, I took a couple semesters with Helene, and her style was really a lot different from what I do now. She's a very American, hippie, goddess kind of thing. And as I started studying the dance, I kind of became a little bit more interested in how it related to the cultures that it came from. And, so I wanted to do more of the Arabic style. I loved the Arabic music. I wanted to use that kind of stuff and learn.

I had a job at a hardware store off of 29th Street. And I was a cashier for a couple years and one of the guys that worked in the paint department, people would come up to me and say, hey, do you know Jonathan's girlfriend is a belly dancer? And I was like, yeah, whatever, because this is Austin. And like the hippies used to dance at Eeyore’s Birthday Party in their patchouli and their broomstick skirts. And they were like belly dancers. And I was like, that's not a real belly dancer, you know, I'm just like, yeah, right. Whatever. And when they would go to Jonathan's house and see his girlfriend, they would go, hey, this other girl, she's a belly dancer. And she would go, yeah. Right. Whatever.

So then we met each other, and I don't even remember how we met, and she's probably been the biggest influence on my life. We're still best friends, like 26 years later. She was dancing at the Student Union. She was teaching through the Student Union. She started doing workshop productions and things like that. And I was just kind of her tag along buddy. I would do whatever because I was broke and she would let me come to things if I worked for her.

So I just, I was doing it as a hobby, really, only. And there were a couple of restaurants that I started dancing in, in the late nineties. There's a place called Ararat, a restaurant called Ararat on North Loop. And that was one of the first places that I gigged at. And then there was another little Persian place called Best Middle Eastern.

So I danced at a couple of places, but it was really intermittent. And, then in 2001, my ex and I ended up moving back to Dallas. And that really changed my life as far as actually becoming a paid gigging dancer and really, teaching and all of the things that I've been doing for the past 20 years.

I started working, Dallas had the clubs, it had bigger nightclubs, it had a Greek restaurant, it had a Lebanese club called Al-Amir, and it had Persian nightclubs. So it had things that Austin did not have. It had nightlife and it had paying gigs. So I started dancing in the clubs and either… I think I did my first professional gig in Fort Worth at a restaurant called Byblos, which is still around. It was New Year's Eve. He probably couldn't get any of the local dancers. And I was probably cheaper than the going rate because I didn't know what I was doing, but that was my first paying gig.

And then after that, a good friend of mine that I ended up dancing with for a long time in a professional troupe, she got me a job at Al-Amir, which was the prestigious club. It was where all of the Arab families went, and it was a really great international club. She got me a job there, and I started working on the weeknights when it was slow because you gotta work your way up in this business. And I think it was 50 bucks on the weeknights, and sometimes I wouldn't even dance because there was not enough customers to dance for.

But then the weekend shows were amazing. And it was a three level club and there were, it was packed with people. We had bouncers that would walk us through the crowds to the stage and it was just amazing. And so yeah, I danced there, actually danced at Al-Amir. That's actually the job that I've had the longest, my whole adult life. I worked at that club from about 2002 until I moved here to Ohio in 2021.

I have a website it's tamrahennabellydancer.com. I have an Instagram. It is TamraHenna_Official with an underscore. So my TikTok is TamraHenna_Official. And I'm on Facebook as Joi Razinha. And if you, I'm less politically vocal on Facebook than I used to be because I've been Zucked a few times and I figure I'm going to lose my privileges if I say anything more about what I really think about things politically on Facebook anymore.

Rod: I'm glad you said the Tamra Henna part, because I was going to ask you that. Where did the name come from?

Joi: Tamra Henna is a movie character, and she was in this movie. She was a dancer. She danced with the family circus, and It's kind of an Egyptian My Fair Lady story, like rich guy comes to the circus, makes a bet that he can take this girl and make her acceptable to society. And the dancer that plays the role, she was actually a dancer and an actress. She was one of my favorite of what they call Golden Era dancers, the dancers from the ‘50s, like the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema. The title of the movie is Tamra Henna. And the song is “Tamra Henna”. And the character is Tamra Henna. And I loved the song and the dancer so much that when I decided to pick a name, and this was back when it was the thing to do to pick an Arabic name if you were going to have a stage name or some kind of stage name, I decided that I would pick that name because it's a fictional character, and I figured I'm not passing myself off as an Arab woman. I'm naming myself after a fictional character so anyone who hears the name, who is of the culture, knows that's not my real name. And the song's a great song. I still love to dance to it.

Rod: With the belly dancing, what was it about it that resonated with you? Like how, how did it get it hooks into you so fast and deep?

Joi: Honestly I think it was the permission to move and to be kind of free. And I think that's what really draws a lot of people into it. And unfortunately it does tend to draw a lot of people who've had, you know, trauma, bodily trauma in their lives and have not been able to express themselves physically because it's so much about personal expression and expressing your sensuality, your… it's not so gendered as it used to be, but like when I started it was all about expressing your femininity and the whole goddess angle, and being a woman and yada yada. As of 2022, we've kind of moved past that somewhat and realized that both people who are male and female and everywhere in between, like to express those sides.

But I think back in the day, it was definitely marketed quite a bit towards women and freeing, kind of give a space to express yourself, physically and to dance and be sensual. And to feel beautiful. And I think that's initially what drew me to it. And there's a lot of orientalism in that as well. Like it's exotic, it's sparkly, it's a persona that you can put on. I think the thing that really kept me was definitely the music. It was deep and complex and it really struck me. And then when I started learning about how did people move to this music, it was also really different from any dance form that I had seen before. And I think that just kind of captured my imagination and really pulled me into it.

As you go along, you start creating, not necessarily a persona for yourself, but in a way it kind of is a persona for yourself. And I became a belly dancer, and that's who I was and what I was. It's not spiritual, but it is. It's very, very physical. For me, it was the way to get in touch with my body, and it's like that for a lot of different people.

Rod: I get the sense that you think deeply about how you engage with belly dancing as a white person.

Joi: I do. I definitely do more now than I did. I mean, there's racial bias everywhere, and it's just when you have people that start pointing it out, people who are of other races and say, hey, this has been our experience in this community, it's really kind of, it was a challenging time, and I think it still remains a challenging time. When you're a white person engaged with the world in general, you really look at it one way and then you have an idea of how the world is. And then when you start hearing other people's experiences, then hopefully you realize that it's not the same for everyone.

It's really easy as a white person to get sucked into, “I'm so put upon; nobody likes me because I'm white,” and I've seen that conversation happen. I know how people get sucked into the resentment of woke culture because I've seen it happen within the belly dance community. I have felt it within myself and had to wrestle with it and go look, this is not the road you want to go down. This is not going to uncover a part of your own personality that is good, so check yourself. But it's easy to do. And it did make me take a step back and try to be a lot more introspective with how I'm engaging with other people, with the dance form, the cultures.

And so I did have to be… I don't think I had to be; a lot of people have chosen not to. But I became a lot more introspective about what it means to be a white person in a space that is not mine. It's not my culture. I think a lot of dancers who spent a lot of time in this space just assumed we're getting these jobs and we're gigging, and it's because, always it's because of our ability or whatever it is that we have that is appealing to the audience and to the venue owners, whoever's hiring us at the time. And so we assume that we're getting jobs because we're the best person for it. And a lot of other people having found their voice online, were able to come in and say, hey, I'm a dancer, I'm a black woman. Or I'm a man, or I'm a trans man, or whatever, and I'm trying to get jobs. And I can't be hired because of racial biases that exist and people who are gatekeeping and who have a lot of say on who gets to dance and who doesn't. And sometimes it's because there's racial bias in the owners of the venues, and they tell you as a scheduler that they don't want certain kind of people. I know I have been told, I did the schedule for Al-Amir for many years and other clubs, it wasn't just there, but I've been told so and so looks old, don't have them back. I've never been told specifically, we don't want black dancers, but black dancers on the schedule have felt like they weren't welcome.

And I heard that from people who were in my community who said that that was the way that they had always felt. There's a lot of racial bias, all over the world. Anti-black racial bias all over the world. It's not specifically a white American thing. I've seen other biases, size biases, people being told that dancers were too overweight, too old, too this, too that, whatever it is. And some of it was in the professional spaces, where I was more familiar, and in other situations it was members of the community, say a teacher would make comments to her students about who looked right, or dancers being too dark for this or too light for that, you know, just whatever.

And so I think people started talking about the biases that they had experienced in this dance form. And it caused a lot of consternation, and a lot of people weren't ready to hear that maybe some of the things, the ways that they had behaved themselves, were problematic for other people. And there's a lot of controversy around it. I think that there are a lot of people who felt like it went too far. There was a lot of talk about canceling certain people, and some people needed to be canceled because they had really hurt a lot of other people and didn't really seem to care. But it's really interesting because it's kind of a microcosm of the same conversations that you may have seen happening in our culture at large over the last year or so. It happened within the community on a smaller scale, and with everyone being home and being online, people were talking about things a lot more.

So it did make me have to think about what was I doing? How was I engaging with other dancers? How was I engaging with the culture? You can't help the skin you were born in, on either side, but you do have to recognize how have I benefited, how have we benefited I should say, from being the right color or at least not being the wrong color.

And do I even really need to be practicing an art form that belongs to a different culture? And it took me a while. I never thought that I would give it up, but I really thought that if I'm going to do it, I need to be thoughtful about it. I've engaged with the communities personally for a long time. I worked in nightclubs that were owned by Lebanese and Syrian people, and I heard the conversation from their end on what are they looking for in entertainment, so I understand why am I making the entertainment choices that I am making. I don't present the dance form as a cultural exercise. It is very based in the traditional styles from the Middle East, but there's also an element of Las Vegas showgirl happening. And for some people, they feel like it invalidates the, like a lot of people want it presented as, this is a thing that I have learned, and it's an academic exercise, so I am doing this dance from this region and I'm, you know, and it's very specific. Whereas I come from the entertainment side of it, whereas I kind of know what the traditions are, but they've asked me to do fire. So, which is not necessarily traditional, but my boss is saying, hey, we want the New Year's show this year to be like, what can you do to make it bigger than last year?

So it's a real balancing act trying to stay somewhat traditional and always be respectful of the cultures that I am interacting with, but understanding that Friday night is Bollywood Night at the Arabic nightclub and the crowd wants me to dance to Bollywood music. And so I do, because they tip when you do it, because they're happy that you're dancing to music that they like and enjoy, you know what I'm saying? So it's real interesting. But if I posted a video of myself doing that, somebody online who has been studying belly dance and has some really, ideas about, what is appropriate and what's not, and are you being orientalist and are you doing all of that? They may look at that completely without context and go, what are you doing? You're just contributing to the muddying of the waters. And as an outsider to the culture, I have to understand what I'm doing and make sure that I'm not going too far, if that makes sense.

The teaching world, the hobbyist world, and the professional world are sometimes really different. And a lot of people made their living as dance teachers and had studios and taught a lot of people and put on a lot of big workshops and made money and produced other dancers. But depending on what area of the country you were in, you might not have any real opportunity to engage with anyone from any of the communities where the dance is native to, or where the dance is from. So if you're in some small town somewhere and there's no one who's from the Middle East, but you like belly dance because you were exposed to it, like you could open a studio and teach everyone that you know how to do this dance. And no one has met a single person from the Middle East.

So I think in a lot of cases, that's where there's some divorce from the reality of engaging within the communities and just a bunch of Western people, in a lot of cases a bunch of white people, doing a dance form that they can tell themselves a lot of different stories about that aren't necessarily true. Like there's a lot of incorrect history of the dance and how it came about and what it was for. If you've ever done any Googling of the history of belly dance, and I don't know why you would have, but if you ever do, there's a lot of stories out there that it was goddess worship, or it was birthing rituals, or it was this or that, or the other thing.

And none of those things are true. Belly dance is not thousands of years old. It's from the turn of the last century. And it kind of came out of, what we see today as being placed on the stage entertainment in nightclubs and in the movies and things like that, kind of came from the cabarets that were started in Egypt in the early 20th century, late 19th century, mostly early 20th century, but was kind of a result of colonization. There were nightclubs because people wanted to see Western style shows. And they were kind of catering to their own culture, but also trying to emulate the colonizers, perhaps, in putting these things together.

And then you get the movies which were heavily patterned after Hollywood. There would be musicals where, or any movie, didn't matter what the movie was, had to have a belly dance scene because it's what, people wanted to see stuff like that. So there was a lot of cross pollination even back then, but what we do today came out of that time. So what was happening before then, the dances that were the entertainment that was happening in people's homes, at weddings, at gatherings and things like that looked a lot different than what we see today.

And so, no, it wasn't thousands of years of birthing rituals and, and goddess worship, but when you're in a little town someplace or some place in California or whatever, it sounds really cool, right? It sounds great. And it's appealing to your customers who are middle aged housewives, and it sounds really awesome, and I want to worship myself like a goddess, or I want to take part in this dance that's as old as the pyramids. And so there's a lot of stuff going around out there that we made up. And now it's possible to be confronted with somebody who is from North Africa and says, wow, that's a bunch of bullshit. What are you doing?

So we're being confronted as Westerners with our own colonizer ways, I suppose. And it's not always fun. It's not always fun to hear. So it's been a tumultuous time within the community. And I don't know how that really has changed what I'm doing. I think it has caused me to think more about how I've benefited from my own privilege and to really examine, am I doing anything to help people who haven't been, for whom it hasn't been as easy to participate, am I doing anything to help those people feel more welcome? Am I making sure that the choices that I make don't stray too far and go into the realm of disrespect.

But I've been doing this for a really long time. I can do something else, and I guess that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm not ready to do something else yet. Gigging is an addiction, truly. Performing is addictive, and steady income is addictive too. This year I'm turning 50. How many 50 year old belly dancers gigging in clubs are there is the question, and the answer is probably more than you think. But you know, there are younger dancers coming up and you don't want to be asked to leave, so it's better to leave on a high note. I don't quite look my age yet. And I can still teach, and I think I'm not too bad at that. I've done okay with the teaching, and I'd like to do more of it. I can still do it physically. I can still do everything that, almost, that I used to do before. I don't have any physical limitations yet. In this business, it's more about, does your client perceive you as being the right age to be entertaining them? Because ageism is a thing, yo. Everyone at the nightclub is still 21 and I’m not. But I do have to start thinking about what do I do when I'm not a dancer anymore full time. What do I do with that? So it's like the next chapter. And do I try to stay a dancer as long as possible? Or do I just chuck it and open a restaurant?

So I've talked about what I've been doing, but I really haven't talked about how it changed me, I guess. Like how did I change from being a really, really shy teenager to, I don't, I'm not shy anymore. I was really shy, or maybe I wasn't shy. I think maybe it was circumstantial. Um, you know, it's, I was always the new kid because we moved a lot. So I never had really the opportunity to make friends, you know, and this is when I'm going to get emotional. So just bear with me. So when you come from a really shitty situation, you, I personally don't want to bring that, like I don't want to burden other people with that I guess like how do you talk about it? I just wanted to go to school and get away from it. And I certainly didn't want to make school life for the friendships that I found there about my personal drama, I guess, so it was just like, I don't have anything good to talk about. So I'll just be really quiet.

I guess that's kind of where I was at at that point in time. And really, I, I don't know that dance changed me. I think it just drew it out what was already there, if that makes sense. I think maybe if I hadn't had the experience of becoming a belly dancer and having all of the different experiences that I've had through that, I might have stayed more reserved. I don't know, or just would've gone a different direction. But this was really a way for me to figure out who I was and who I am and really just express that. And like I said, I don't think I'm different. The transformation has been in allowing me to become who I am. It's like the butterfly isn't any different from the caterpillar. It's just the final form. It's the same DNA, right? It's just whether it's able to figure out how to fly.

Episode 026 - Relief in Silence

I spoke to Alfredo Gomez after he spoke at a Circles of Men Project gathering. The theme was “If you know yourself, you can move past fear.” It was his first time at a Circles of Men gathering, and he was inspired to share. When I later asked if anyone would be willing to speak for a podcast, he contacted me to share his story in a little more detail.

Thank you so much, Alfredo, for sharing. I think it means a lot for men to be able to model openness and vulnerability to other men, and your story was moving and definitely relatable.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music in this episode was made by me using my new toy that I’m having so much fun playing with and learning: Ableton Live. So much fun! I hope you’re all finding ways to learn and grow and connect while we’re staying the hell away from each other.

Here’s the transcript:

I was born in Mexico. I was born one of 12 kids, and my mother had kids kind of like in a row, like almost every other year or every year. And so there was 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters before I was born, and then the rest of them followed, so I’m the 5th kid. Well, I felt like because of the number of kids that my mom, the large number of kids that my mom had, she just couldn’t, didn’t have the time to attend every one of us, and she neglected some of us.

And my father was a federale in Mexico, which is kind of like the Texas Rangers used to be back in the day. And he was rural, which means that he had machine guns, shotguns, .45s, carrying, you know… So he was very aggressive, and he would take some of that aggressiveness to the house. And he had a horsewhip for us. Sometimes he used the handcuffs on my older brother that I saw that he did. He handcuffed him to the window and whipped him with the horsewhip.

My mom, she would try to stop him from beating us, but then she would become a victim herself. He would push her out of the way, and then he would, that would really, made him more angry than anything because he would continue the beating, and then he would hit her after that for getting in the middle or trying stop him.

And so all those things made me fearful. I mean, I got horsewhipped too, but more than anything, what scared me the most is watching a lot of the stuff, my mother getting beat. It was just a lot of trauma. For me, just watching that and even my older two brothers were fighting at one point, and I went and told my dad so he could make them stop. They were hurting each other, I mean, there was blood. So I went and told my dad. I said, “Hey Dad, you know, they’re fighting.” So I wanted him to stop the fight. So he goes and stops the fight, of course, and whips both of them, and then he comes and whips me for being a snitch. And as a 6, 7 year old, you don’t understand what you did wrong. I didn’t understand what I did. And so it was, to me, very brutal.

And then so when we came to the States when I was 12 years old, the whole family. My dad, my mother, and all my brothers and sisters. We all came. Well my father had a job. He first came in and got a job here in Corpus Christi. He did a lot of construction. And then he brought us after he got settled, he brought us into the States.

I couldn’t speak English. I went to the school, and next thing you know, people don’t like me. They’re being mean to me, and they’re telling me, I don’t even understand what they were saying, but they kept on repeating this word “wetback,” and I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t know. That was my first time… Living in Mexico, there’s no, everybody’s the same, you know? There’s no racial tensions or any of that stuff, and so when I came here, that was foreign to me and a different culture.

So things didn’t get better for me. And then going to the school and then not being able to speak the language, the teachers would get mad because I was speaking Spanish. But what else was I going to speak if I can’t speak English, right? So then I would get in trouble for that.

And my English teacher, we were reading, everybody was reading out loud, and then she called me to read, and I had a really heavy accent, and she made me read out loud, and if you can imagine, the rest of the kids laughing at the pronunciation, giggling and all that. It was really hard for me. Being there, kind of like in front of everybody so everybody can laugh at.

So then I was 15, and my father had a gun in the kitchen, and I knew where he kept it, a small .22 revolver. And I decided that I just wanted to just finish this, finish with this anger, this anxiety, this hate that I was feeling constant. So I went to the kitchen and reached for the gun. And I looked in the chamber, and it had bullets, all of them. So I put it on my head and decided to, started squeezing the trigger. Well, being that it’s a revolver, and it’s, you know, as you’re squeezing the trigger, the hammer was all the way up, and I figured OK, it’s got to go off any time, and then there was a little pause in my mind that said, OK, what are you doing?

And then I stopped and thought for a second, and I say, maybe this is not what I should be doing. So I took it off my head, grabbed the hammer and put it back into place slowly. I put the gun back in the kitchen, and I went and picked up a Bible. Just a Bible. I just wanted to read something, something reassuring. The first thing that I read, I just opened it at whatever it would come up, and it was a scripture that I read somewhere along these lines. “God gave you life, thou should not take it away.” And then from then on, any time I felt that that was the answer, I knew it wasn’t the answer, taking my life out. So I decided that was never going to be an option.

It’s kind of funny because my father talked about the Bible a lot, and he said he had read the Bible, but it seems like he was choosing the things that kind of stuck, like using the rod and not letting kids get away with anything, but instead he used the whip, the horsewhip and belts and whatever. And then, I never saw him go to church, but he would send us to church. 

And there was a bus from the church that they would send by our house, and so I really enjoyed those times because they called it the Joy Bus, and so we were all singing church music and church songs, and it was really nice. I really enjoyed that growing up. But still, I always felt like I was alone, because I couldn’t talk about the stuff that was happening at home anywhere else. This is kind of like a secret, or a family secret. Still I felt alone during those times.

Then I got into athletics. I kind of decided that athletics was a good thing for me because I felt a lot of anxiety, and I felt like by doing athletics, by exercising, by running, by playing a sport, it would get my mind off and concentrate on something else than all the stress and all the anxiety at home and at school and so on. I tend to be competitive, if I couldn’t depend on people, I could depend on my own self by being the best that I could be on whatever sport that was.

And so the abuse with my father still continued, but I joined the track team when I was a sophomore, and I became a very good runner. I was a naturally good athlete, and they put me on the JV team, and because I joined like a week before the first cross country meet, and I was training by myself on my own, I had no knowledge about training, but I would just run as fast as I could for as long as I could, and that was my training. So my coach puts me on JV not knowing anything about me. And he told me before the race, Alfredo, if you get tired, just walk. He did a prayer also, before the race, and that was really neat, and I really liked that.

And when the gun went off, I ran into the guys in front of me because they were going like, they weren’t racing, they were jogging. So I went to the front with the frontrunners, and they were doing the same thing. They were jogging. In my mind, it’s like, you run as fast as you can. It’s a 3 mile race, cross country. So I’m like, OK. I ran with them for about 2 or 3 blocks, and then it’s like, I have enough. I just took off. I took off. I tried to relax as much as possible, but I ran at 90% effort, 85% effort, and then if I got tired a little bit, I would slack off a little bit and then resume again. That was my first 3.1 mile race, a 5K, and my time was a 16:08. As a sophomore in JV. And the winning time for varsity was a 16:06. So then my coach was just so happy, he’s like, oh my God, who are you? Tell me more about you! So the next time, he puts me on varsity.

So then I felt stronger, too, as a sophomore, and I started working at Kentucky Fried Chicken part time after school. And so my routine was to go to the gym at 5:30, go for a 3 mile run or lift weights, and then be at the school at 7:30 to start the classes at 8. And then after school, and after the track training, I would go to the house, and then get ready, go straight to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then get off at 10 o’clock, do my homework, and then get up early in the morning the next day. And that was my sophomore year.

But then one day I decided, they were having something where they had some balloons that the manager said, hey, you want to take these to your brothers and sisters? Three helium balloons. And I said, yeah, I have a little brother and 2 little sisters I can give them to. So I took those helium balloons to the house, and I gave them to each one of them. And then my younger brother wanted the balloons, the girls’ balloons. And I told him, no that’s, you have yours, and you have yours, and you have yours. Now my dad was spoiling kids now. Now he wanted to change his ways, I guess. So he spoiled the youngest one, and he told the girls, give him their balloons. And I’m like, no Dad, that’s, everybody has a balloon. And he got really mad, and he started yelling and cursing at everybody, saying give the boy the balloons.

So he walked away, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and popped all 3 of them. Well, if you can imagine my father. He goes, oh, you see what you're going to get. So he goes inside to the bedroom, comes back with the belt. I’m 16 years old already. And he’s coming towards me, and I stopped him. I put my hand up, and I said look, Dad, if you hit me, we’re going to fight. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. I’m going to fight you. I’m probably going to be on top of you most likely. I’m just letting you know, and I don’t know what’s going to happen after that. I’m not going to let you hit me again.

Well, he looked at me, and he saw that I was very angry. He knew that I wouldn’t have it any more. He looks at me, he says, well just don’t do it again, turns around and walks away. That was the first time I felt some relief. I felt some relief that that stopped. My father was never going to hit me again, and now I could stand up to him.

I mean, it was still the struggle. And my father was still very loud and aggressive and abusive with my younger siblings and with my mom. But he knew that he couldn’t do the stuff that he used to do to me. So I felt safe, but I would see what he was doing with everybody else.

And then my brothers, my brothers used to drink and do drugs. And I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, and one of them was more aggressive than the other towards me and everybody else. He was more angry. And one day, about the same time that I stood up to my dad, he came in, and I was playing with my youngest sister, and I was sitting on the floor with her playing, and he was sitting on one of the couches behind me. And then he told me to leave her alone.

So I looked at him, and I saw that he either had been doing drugs or he was drunk, one of the two, so I said, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just playing with her. And then he kicks me in the back of my head and tells me again, I told you to leave her alone.

So when he kicked me, I got up, and I felt that anger rise out of me, and then I hit him. I just hit him one time. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, turning off the lights, but I did turn off the lights on him. He couldn’t see. I didn’t knock him out or anything, but I hit him like right on the temple, and he could not see for like 15 minutes.

And I just had so much anger already, and I just had enough, everybody beating me up, and everybody… And I couldn’t talk sense into them, so I just felt like I had to use physical aggression. And now that I was running and lifting weights, I felt like, you know, I’m going to defend myself now. And I don’t feel good about it, but that’s what I did as a 16 year old. I hit him.

But you know what? That was the last time he ever tried to hit me again.

So then, it’s like I feel OK. I feel better now. They can’t mess with me anymore. But I felt like a lot of the damage was already done. But running would help me get out of the house, and I became one of the fastest, like I said, I won district in the mile, the two mile, in cross country. My sophomore year, my junior year, and senior year, in a 5A, which was the biggest division there was. And then I went to regionals and won the mile, or the two mile at regionals, and then I went to the state. I ended up 4th my senior year, and I think it was also 4th in the mile and two mile.

So I started getting scholarship offers, and I could go anywhere in the country, basically. I never thought about going to school. Well, with that, being that my brothers were also working construction, my dad worked construction, I’d be the first boy to go to college. My grades were OK. But my coach said to me, Alfredo, you ought to try it. Try to go to college, and if you don’t like it, try it a little bit more. And if you still don’t like it, try a tiny, tiny, tiny more before you… What I’m saying is, just give yourself a chance. And once you give yourself, you tried, and you didn’t do it, and you couldn’t do it, and you tried again, you couldn’t do it still, then you can say, at least I tried. So I said, well, I’ll try it coach. And next thing you know, I graduated from Rice.

But going through Rice and going through college, I found myself with a lot of anxiety. Doing presentations, I would feel that anxiety getting in front of groups, large groups in front of the classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety.

R: Did you think about those kids laughing at you in high school, and that fear of being laughed at?

A: Yeah, being laughed at, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t belong there, almost kind of like I felt like I didn’t belong in the States, coming here to the United States, because I was a wetback. I felt like I didn’t belong at Rice, that I shouldn’t be there. Same old feelings. And then getting in front of a classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety in speaking in front of, in doing a presentation.

But then after I graduated from Rice, I decided to teach there at Lamar High School in Houston. And I was teaching there, Spanish and coaching soccer, and I did that for one year, but again, I felt a lot of anxiety being in front of, in the classroom. And Mondays was like my worst day of the week. Well, actually Sundays, like the anticipation of Monday, and then Monday was terrible my first hour or two, and then I felt better towards the end of the day. And then Tuesday was better than Monday. Wednesday was better than Tuesday, and so on. And then Friday is like, what the heck was wrong with me on Monday, right? Well, the weekend came, and then Monday came again, the same feeling again. I felt awkward. I felt insecure. I felt, and I’m like, OK, it’s going to get better, right? And people say, well, it’s natural. You know, you get over it after awhile. It just wouldn’t go away. And I’m like, what’s wrong with me?

R: Why do you think you were drawn to that profession when you had such anxiety about standing in front of people?

A: Well, because I care about kids. I wanted to help kids. Helping people, even like love and affection, or caring for your students, showing them that you care for them, and that kind of thing. I really liked that, but I didn’t like to be in front of the class all the time. And I know that that was what I was signing on for, and I thought that I could handle it, being that I’m not talking to a whole bunch of professionals. These are high school kids, right? But then still I felt that anxiety of being in front of the class, like I said, Monday through Friday. And it was a cycle. It never got better.

So I moved to Austin from Houston. I started working for Texas Employment Commission, and I did a lot of good programs for them. I did Communities in Schools, which is a dropout prevention program. And I also did the Job Corps program, helping kids get education and training, and a lot of those kids had problems with the court system or with the law, and they were on probation and trying to get their life together. So I was trying to help those kids, and I did that for awhile, altogether for like 10 years working for the state.

But then I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what that was. I found myself that I couldn’t breathe, and I was breathing very heavy and hard. The breathing would not slow down. So I’m like, what the heck is wrong with me? So then I started getting light-headed, and I felt like I was going to pass out. This is at the office. And so somebody said, you’re having a panic attack. You need to go to the doctor about it. And I went to the doctor, and they said, yeah you did have a panic attack, and he prescribed Xanax.

I was doing the Unemployment Services also for the Texas Employment Commission, so I was always doing presentations at which I felt anxiety, but it was a little bit more controlled, suppressing some of those feelings. And I would still do my job, but it got to the point where it was kind of like putting stuff under the rug all the time and just piling and piling. I mean, the medication would help me, but it never solved the problem. To me, it was just kind of masking my feelings and my emotions.

So after the Texas Workforce Commission, I got a call from a new program that was starting. It was Steve Jackobs from Capital IDEA. Capital IDEA is basically getting people into careers, not just a job, but a career. So we provide the training, the education, everything that they need so they can get a good quality job with benefits and the whole 9 yards, not just a job. It was 5 of us that started that program from scratch, and we started recruiting, we started doing presentations. I worked for Capital IDEA for almost 5 years.

But it got to the point where I felt that I’ve taken a deep dive, and I was running out of oxygen. And I could see the surface, but I didn’t think I had the energy to swim all the way to the top. That’s how I felt when I left Capital IDEA. And they offered me all kinds of different options, work from home, part time, don’t leave, what about your benefits, and all this and all that. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I went into a deep depression, anxiety, paranoia.

R: Were you doing anything besides the medication, like seeing a therapist or counselor or were you involved in church or anything?

A: No, not at that time.

R: Just on your own, huh?

A: On my own. So when I had, I call it a nervous breakdown, I mean, because I totally went under the radar after that. I just stayed at the house after that. I didn’t want to leave. I even felt embarrassed going to the mailbox to pick up the mail. So I just kind of stayed in one spot on the couch or whatever and just stayed there all day. And it was really dark for me.

That lasted for about 3 years, until I just felt that I needed to get a job, get back on my feet, and I got some medication. They thought I was bi-polar, and then they thought maybe it’s just anxiety, and then depression, so I was taking medication for just about everything for a large number of years. But it wasn’t doing anything for me. I mean, I would gain weight, it made me foggy, and it wasn’t just doing the trick. I had a lot of side effects that were kind of worse sometimes. I felt worse.

So I tried everything, and so then, so what is the answer? What can I do now? I started to look at more manual work, more using my hands more, and trying to ease the anxiety. So I tried to look for work that was less involved with the office and meetings and stress and the anxiety that I felt and working more on my own. So, and then for the next, I don’t know, 15 years, I would get a little job here and a little job there.

So then I started reading more about... and reflecting. Why am I so nervous? Why am I feeling so anxious? What happened to me that’s causing me… Is it in my blood? Is it passed down from my mom or my dad? What’s going on? Why do I feel so awkward? Why do I feel so much anxiety? So I started reading more about it, educating myself more about it. I went to church too, praying. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. More prayer. Maybe God, I need to get on my knees more often. So I was trying to do all kinds of things to help me deal with my anxiety, but I wasn’t finding a lot of positive feedback from a lot of that stuff.

My girlfriend and I were looking at documentaries, and we were looking into yoga, and then she was telling me, because she's been into yoga a lot herself, and she was telling me about it. And then we were looking at some documentaries from some of those masters, like the Dalai Lama and all those guys that are very deep. And then we saw Thomas Keating. And I'm like, oh, who is this guy? I don’t know, So when I saw the documentary of Thomas Keating, a guy that gave his life to God basically when he was 5 years old, because he got really sick, and he heard the nurse and the doctor talking about his condition that he might not make it. OK, I want to know more about it. 

So I started watching the documentaries, and I started, and then we start buying books, so we started reading about Thomas Keating and his beliefs and his findings and all of that. He studied all religions, not just the Catholic Church, or Christianity, but all the religions around the world. And at the end, you know how we have this little, something is missing in our lives? Everybody’s got that almost, like maybe you think it’s money, maybe you think it’s a relationship, maybe you think it’s a hobby, or a house, or something that you’re always trying to get to fill that little empty hole, that little empty thing in your heart. And what I’m gathering is that it’s the union with God, that you have to have that union with God in order to fill that empty hole there.

So then I started to do that for myself. I want to feel close to God. How do you get that union with God? Well, through prayer. And silence. So then I started doing some meditation, some prayer, and I started looking into yoga. And I started looking at Thomas Keating for answers, and I felt like that was one person that I could trust. One person that I know I can trust because his intentions were good from the beginning. He could have been a millionaire, he could have been whatever, if it was about money. But he saw that that was not him. So I found a little bit of a relief reading about him and what he's saying about our intentions, and to be kind to yourself, you know, and I've never been kind to myself. I hated myself for the longest. I hated falling short, not measuring up, and I’ve never been kind to myself.

But I started thinking about all that. And then, so my understanding of prayer was that you pray, and you’re always asking God for something. God, can you help me with this? God, can you give me this? Always asking. And I felt, and thankful, you know, thank you for the health. Thank you for helping me today, for this, with this.

But then when I started listening to Thomas Keating, he was talking about more, you kind of surrender to Him in silence, and you want to connect with Him in silence. You do that for like 20 minutes, most of the time, because of my anxiety and all the things that I'm always thinking about something, it's very hard for me to get anywhere because always, he talks about not getting on the boats that are passing by because your mind goes somewhere, and get off the boat and go back to the word that you, for the prayer. I find myself that for the first 20 minutes I was thinking the whole time about something else. And then the little alarm that I set up goes off. It's like, Oh my God, I didn't get to do the silence as much as I wanted to.

But it takes practice. It takes practice. So then I would do like, I'll try it again, and then I would get somewhere. I did it one time where I actually did 20, about 20 minutes of totally silence, and I felt getting deeper and deeper with union with God, and I felt the connection of almost kind of like stages as meditation and being in union. I felt so much peace. And I'm like, I want more of that.

So now one of the things that I'm beginning to realize in being kind with myself is that I do get a physical reaction with stress and anxiety. I do. I don't want it, but it happens. It's kind of the fight or flight sort of deal response for me because it happened to me for the first 16 years of my life. Even though I understand that is what is happening, I have to acknowledge that and not try to change it, but accept it sort of, and be kind to myself and tell myself that, yes, this is my body reacting because of my trauma, but it's not really who I am.

And so I joined the men's group, the Circle of Men. It's like 30 people in a group, 25, 30 people. And when Clay Boykin did the introduction about, OK, we're not here to judge anyone. We're here to support everyone, and this is not a group. This is a network. And we love each other. We care for each other. And what’s said here, stays here. And I felt a lot of love from everyone.

And I'm still, with my fear, with my anxiety, my fear’s always on guard. I always have my hands up for whatever happens. So then I started dropping my guard down, and I started listening to the stories or the conversation. I felt that I needed to come out, and I told my story in short, very compacted, but just basic, I came from Mexico, and all the things that happened to me at home, my dad was very aggressive and abusive and my brothers and sisters, and so on, and growing up and then coming to the States. And I, oh my God, my nerves were just, I felt it all over me. I was shaking inside me. I was sweaty. My body was reacting, and I was like, what is happening to me? as I'm talking and telling my story.

And the group was just so understanding and so compassionate with my story. And then I put my head down, and I said, I'm sorry guys, I'm feeling this way. And everybody's like, no man, there's nothing to be sorry about. There's nothing. They were giving me assurance and acceptance for the very first time in a large group like that. And I still, I was, I felt embarrassed. I felt the shame. I felt all these negative feelings about myself because I just kind of like, I've been carrying this load of rocks and I just dumped it right in front of the group. And when I did that, I was apologizing for that because the group had to hear it. And everybody was so understanding and caring, and loving and supportive and all that, that it was the very first time. I've been afraid of men for a long, because my history and everything that I experienced in my life, and I was angry at men.

So being in a group of nothing but men and feeling a little bit of acknowledgement, acceptance. Validation. I just felt like, ah, man. After I finished doing my spiel and feeling embarrassed and all that, I usually, when something like this happens, I tell myself that was stupid. Don't go back there. You're an embarrassment, sort of thing. I tell that to myself, so my natural reaction is like, OK, I’m out of here, I'm not coming back. I'm so embarrassed and so ashamed, I’m not coming back. But I told the group, you know what, I am coming back.

We are harder on ourselves. I've learned that, and for me, people are nicer to me than I’m nice to myself. And, and I realize that, and I realized that that's how we are. I tell my daughter who's 15 years old, that has some of the, as a 15 year old girl going to school, and the friends and all of that, and being very critical of themselves again. It's like no mama, just, it's like, I don't even tell that to myself and then I'll tell her, and it’s like, I should listen to myself when I'm talking to her. It's easy for me to tell her that, but it's hard for me to tell myself.

That helped me a lot being in that group. But still, I'm always going to come out with my hands up, guarding myself, especially the first 5, 10 minutes. And then I feel more at ease. Now can I stop my body from reacting? So far I haven't been able to stop my body from reacting. I don't want to fight it. I just want to be kind to myself and saying, it's OK, Alfredo. You've been through some hard, it's OK. Don't be anxious about being anxious. But I just have to be kind to myself, accept it.

And maybe sharing. Maybe others might feel the same and maybe I can talk to them about it, compare notes and help each other out. This past meeting, we were talking about free will and what is God's will. But I really believe that God's will for everybody is for everybody to be nice and be the best human they can be. You got struggles? We all have struggles, some worse than others. But at the end of the day, God's will for us is to be the best person that we can be. Help each other out, be there for each other, give somebody your hand so they can lift them up, and maybe they'll lift you up next time.

Episode 024 - Pants and Kilts and Dresses

Amy Haden-Knost talks about her military service during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, online dating, same sex marriage before Obergefell v. Hodges, and becoming a grandparent. My thanks to Amy for sharing her time with me, especially since I don’t think talking is her favorite pastime. This was the first interview I’ve done long distance, so it was fun figuring out a recording solution, and a backup solution for when that fails, which it did! But I still got the audio. I’m always grateful for learning opportunities.

Amy and her wife Renee (who is also my sister) rescue, transport, foster, and adopt Rottweilers throughout the southeast. It’s a cause that’s very dear to their hearts and to the hearts of the houseful of dogs (and cats), so if you’d like to support that work, please check out Florida Rottweiler Rescue Ranch and Sanctuary, in Dover, Florida, and consider supporting their mission.

And as always, thank you to Flora Folgar for her love, support, and voiceover talents.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

8:09: “Higher Up” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

11:50: “The Rise Of Heroes” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

15:05: “Acoustic Guitar 1” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com

18:22: “Black Knight  by Rafael Krux” - https://filmmusic.io/song/5617-black-knight-

22:03: “Can You Feel” by Nordgroove</a> from Fugue

26:17: “Alone Lonely (Instrumental”)  by Michael McQuaid from Fugue

29:23: “Call to Adventure” by Kevin MacLeod

33:41: “Blue (Instrumental)” by Rojj from Fugue

37:27: “Danse Macabre” by Kevin MacLeod

43:53: “Blue Ska” by Kevin MacLeod

Here’s the transcript:

In theory, everybody thinks that I’m the one that quote/unquote “wears the pants in the family” and all that other fun jazz because, well, I may look pretty good in a suit and tie or a shirt and tie. But that doesn’t mean I’m more manly, and honestly, in our type of relationship, that’s the whole idea is that there isn’t that male person in the relationship.

I mean honestly, she’s the one that says walking down the street, people are like, oh yeah, you’re gay. And they look at me. You’re gay. But she has to come out every single time. She passes. She passes as a straight woman. I mean, it’s one of those, she’ll even say it. She’s like, yeah, you totally pass as gay. That’s not a problem. People look at you and go, yeah, ding, you’re done. She’s like, where people look at me and go, so who’s your husband? And she’s like, actually, that’s my wife.

Renee’s telling me to go upstairs, so… See? I told you I don’t wear the pants in the family.

Well, actually, in this family, we’re pants and kilts, but then again, some of the big, burly, hairy dudes that we hang out with wear kilts as well, so that’s an OK thing. What’s more dainty and feminine than doing bench presses and back squats and deadlifts? And in all actuality, every woman should be doing that anyway, because it’s good for their muscular structure as well as their bone growth. Being sedentary is not good, ever. I mean, I hate that I have to work behind a desk and work with a computer all day. But that’s only 8 hours out of my day. After that, I usually leave, and we go to the gym, and we work out for at least an hour or so.

We do Weight Over Bar, Weight for Distance, well, Heavy Weight and Light Weight for Distance, Sheaf, Stone, whether it’s Open or Braemar, Hammer Throw, and then Caber. Caber is the small tree.

We’ve done the whole Ancestry DNA thing, and I’m like 93% British Isles, which covers England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in which I think 55 or 60% of it is Scottish and Irish. So yeah. I’m kind of heavy on that ethnicity. But yeah, we got into it because we decided, hey, there was a Celtic festival over in Gulfport, Mississippi, and we went, “Let’s go see what’s going on over there!” So we went, and we went and wandered around the festival, ate the foods, and had a couple beers, and we started watching some of the Highland Games, and I’m like was watching them do Weight Over Bar. And I was watching this, and I’m like, this is like a kettlebell snatch, but you let it go. I said, “I think I could do that.” And Renee’s like, “OK, then let’s get information and find out where the next one is.” And so the next one, because that was like in November, and the next one was in March in Dothan, Alabama. And so I was like, “OK, then we’re going to practice with whatever we can practice with.” And so we started, I took a couple kettlebells home, and I took just a sledgehammer to use as a hammer and went out to a baseball field and started throwing stuff and started figuring it out.

And then I competed that, in Dothan, and then afterwards, Renee’s like, “I want to do it too.” I went, “OK, then let’s both do it. It’s not a big deal.” And so the next competition was in April in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so we drove up there, and we both competed up there. And we’ve been just doing it since.

It’s fun. I mean, it really is fun, and it’s such a small group that are very supportive of one another, and around here, when we go to the games in the different areas, we see the same folks. And so it’s kind of like friends getting together. We’d all go out to dinner the night before, and then we meet on the field for competition the next day, and then have cold beer that night, the night afterwards.

We train together, so now, after doing this for about a year or so, we’ve actually gotten to the point where it’s like, OK, she’s trying to do Weight Over Bar, or I’m trying to do Weight Over Bar, and we don’t hit it, but the other person’s watching, go, “OK, it peaked at this point, so you need to take a step either forwards or backwards.” And so it’s like, “Oh, OK, cool.” And so we make the adjustment, take a big swing, and it makes it. And it’s like, “OK, there you go.”

I don’t really think about gender identity necessarily. It’s like, you have the 1950s stereotypes of what a mom’s supposed to be and what a dad’s supposed to be, but things progressed over the ages and the years, and I don’t think that is something that is a common thought now necessarily with gender roles. I mean, friends of mine at work, we were talking that being in a same sex relationship is common practice. You wouldn’t think this back in 1950 or 1960, but you see that every day now. You see Target commercials. You see airline commercials. So it’s not really a thing anymore. It’s one of those, you can be whatever you want to be, however you want to be it. You don’t have to be limited by what gender you were born.

I’ve got pictures of the whole class pictures of going through middle school and high school, and it’s like, no. No. I just… I mean, you can see picture after picture I am just who I am. I’ve heard about people, “I had a horrible childhood” or “I had a horrible time when I was in high school.” Yeah. I can’t relate, because I didn’t. And I know, most people would be like, “How is that possible?” It’s 100% possible, because I just didn’t have that situation.

I mean, I grew up right outside of D.C., and so it’s one of those, it was I would say fairly open, even my middle sister, which is 4 years older than me, her best friends were a whole bunch of gay guys. OK? She’d go clubbing with them and had a blast, and that was back in the ‘80s, which was way before anything blew up and exploded in reference to the same sex culture. I grew up there, and then I moved out to Colorado for 12 years. There wasn’t anything that somebody went, “Oh, by the way, you can’t be this way.” Or “you can’t be that way” or “you have to do this” or “you can’t do that.”

I pretty much wore whatever clothes I wanted to, except there were a couple occasions where my father was very, very stern with, “OK, this is a big event. You have to wear a dress,” and I went, “No, no! No, don’t make me! Don’t make me!” of course, because me and dresses were not a thing. And then I came home from school after getting class pictures in my dress and put on my jeans and t-shirt and my boots and went out and rode my motorcycle. So it all worked out. No harm, no foul. It was just the way it was. It was just me.

It didn’t matter who you were. Everybody played pickle with a baseball and hopefully you didn’t hit the window or hit each other. You played kickball in the park down the street. There was no, “Oh, well, girls get picked last” or “boys get picked first.” No. It’s everybody plays.I grew up in a really weird society, or maybe that was just my fog of consciousness of it. Maybe I just lived in that little bubble world or a cloudy day, the cloud over my head, and I just didn’t notice. It’s like, “OK, people are people. OK. We grow up, so that means we have to buy bigger clothes and bigger shoes. OK.”

I was actually stationed at the Air Force Academy. That was my first duty station, and then after being there for about 4 years, I got sent down to Peterson Air Force Base, which is on the south side of town. I was a contracting officer. So I got to buy supplies and services and did construction there. I bought their space simulation chamber for their physics department. And then I bought their lasers. It was a laser machine that actually helped the physics students learn about wavelengths. And then of course, I had stairs built on the terrazzo between the dining hall and the terrazzo with heating elements in them because they’re granite, and you can’t shovel granite. So they had to have heating elements underneath so when the snow and ice would come on, it would flip a switch, the heating elements would heat up the stone and remove the snow and ice.Those were like cool little moments at the Academy. But I mean, it was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a lot of fun doing my job, working and contracting, and then I went down to Peterson and did more advanced stuff. And then I also was one of the procurement agents for the Cheyenne Mountain facility as well, because that’s, Peterson kind of covered that too.

I was in the Air Force active duty for almost 10, and then I’ve been in the Reserves for just over 3. Air transportation. That’s like the official title. Pretty much anything that has to do with getting things on and off of airplanes, that’s what we do. Whether it’s people, cargo, special stuff, rolling stock, like if they had tanks or any type of vehicles that needed to get to a destination, we would load them up, and then the plane would take off. I drive a forklift. I can drive all the forklifts. I can drive Halvorsens, which are 25K loaders. Yeah, all that cool, fun stuff. 

And then I got out of the military in 2001. That was 15, almost 16 years. That was to raise my kids. And that was I was supposed to go on a 15-month “short tour” is what they refer to it as. A long tour would be a full PCS with family and everything. Short tours, in the active duty world, at least back then, I don’t know if they still do them, were just like little 12 or 15 month stints at an alternate location, kind of like a TDY, but it was a little more permanent. TDY is “temporary duty station,” so… And PCS is “permanent change of station.” So I was scheduled to go somewhere for about 15 months, and I went, “Eh, my kids are 2 and 4, and I really don’t trust their dad to actually raise them correctly.” And so I went, “OK. What are my options if I don’t go?” And they went, “Well, then you’ll need to get out.” And so I went, “OK, for my kids’ sake, I’ll get out.” So I did.

We were not married. We lived under the same roof, and we had kids together. One’s 20, and one’s 22. That was a long time ago. And now she’s a mom of her own, too. We are officially grandparents now. That’s crazy. And I actually held him the other day, and I went, “Oh my God, he’s so teeny tiny. What the hell?” I’m like, “How can a little human be so tiny?” And he, I mean honestly, at birth, he was as big as my first one. Same size exactly. I’m like, I’m holding him like, “Oh my gosh.” And I’m like, “Ooh, little tiny toes.” 

I’m like, I don’t… It’s a word, but it’s kind of weird, and I probably won’t feel that way until he says whatever. Because everybody’s like, “Oh, what are you going to be called?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” Well, that’s what Renee’s like, “Um, I’m just going to be Renee.” And I’m like, “You know what? He’s going to call you something, and you’re going to figure it out, and that’s going to be your name.”

You know, Nana is a banana. A Nana is what a small child calls a banana, and I do not want to be called a banana. So I’m like, you know what? If he utters the phrase ‘whatever’, I grew up with a Red Grandma and a White Grandma, because Red Grandma of course dyed her hair, so she had red hair, and the other one had white hair. It made total sense. So, again, it will be whatever is uttered out of his mouth. If he decides to just call me Amy, that’s fine.

Zero involvement, and Renee yells at me all the time. She’s like, “Oh my God.” But I know she was heavily involved in the whole AIDS thing in San Francisco, and she has people that were dying of it, and have died of it. That affected her a lot. It didn’t affect me at all. She goes, “You just turned a blind eye to everything. I just cannot believe you didn’t… like, you weren’t a part of any of that, and you didn’t know about any of that.” I’m like, “Nope. Sorry.” I mean, I didn’t know of anyone I grew up with or in the area or that I was friends with that had it, or have it now.

In high school, Renee of course, Renee and I have totally different views when it comes to high school and even middle school and growing up. She was “Errrr!” I mean, you know. Where I was just kind of like, OK, I was in band, and I played sports, and I had good grades, so yeah. And I hung out with the jocks. I hung out with the theater nerds, you know, the drama kids, the chorus kids, the band kids, even the rednecks. I was friends with everybody. It just didn’t matter. It’s like, if you were good people, I hung out with you. If you were bad people, I was going to tell you you were a bad person, and you need to shape up.

Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was slammed down and said, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is a hardcore policy,” it really wasn’t an issue. Nobody cared, and it wasn’t in the forefront of anyone’s mind. But as soon as that came to headlines that Clinton’s going to be, “Oh, no, we don’t have to ask this anymore. We’re not going to ask it; you don’t have to tell us. You just behave and watch your Ps and Qs.” Well, for the most part, we were all like, “OK, well if you’re not going to ask, and I’m not going to tell you, then I can kind of live my life as long as it doesn’t affect my job.” Where in all actuality, from being there in uniform at the time, it became a witch hunt. I mean, it was one of those, people were seeking out people doing wrong so they could go, “Oh no, no, no. He came out of his room!” or “She came out of her room!” It was more of that rather than, “Well, we’re not going to ask, so it doesn’t really matter.” And don’t even give them even an inkling of an idea that something may be happening, because someone’s going to go to OSI and go, “Hey, I saw Jane come out of Suzy’s room at 6 o’clock in the morning.” OK. And of course, now we’re wasting OSI money and time by investigating something that, “Oh, they were just studying together. Who cares?”

I mean, truthfully, yes, I was personally investigated, but it got tossed out. And I mean, they asked my roommate, because I had a female roommate. They even asked… They brought her in and asked her questions, and then I had several of my friends go up,  volunteering to say, “Hey, I want to put in a statement.” And so, it’s like, pretty much at that point it got tossed out, because I had probably at least a half a dozen people go up and go, “Hey, I want to voluntarily put in a statement for this person.” And once they see all that come through, they’re like, “Yeah, no, we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

I was very happy when that ended, though. It’s like, “OK. So you’re gay. So? And? Do you do a good job? OK. That’s all that matters.”

We’re almost 14 years later, so… But yeah, we actually met online way before all the cool dating sites like match.com and eHarmony. There was a wonderful little site that apparently I joined, and I was fairly new. It was actually specifically… It’s called ButchFemmeMatchmaker.com. As funny as that is, it was an actual real website way in the early 2000s before all of this other stuff has come out. And it matched more masculine and more feminine people together, if you… And you can pick and choose, say you were quote-unquote butch, which is the more of masculine visual. If you like other butches, you could say, “That’s what I’m interested in.” Or if you were more feminine, and you liked more feminine, then you could say, “I was interested in more feminine.” I mean, it just kind of curtailed you in your… You could refine your filters, quote-unquote.

And well, she messed up, because she was searching for new individuals that had joined the site to see if anybody intrigued her, and she forgot to put in a zip code. So she pulled up all of the new people on this website rather than just new people within a certain proximity of her. And of course, I popped up, and she just looked at my picture. I can even show you the picture. It cracks me up. She’s like, “That’s the one that got me.” I’m like, “OK, whatever. It doesn’t make any damn sense to me, but OK.”

And then she clicked on my image and went through the profile, and she went, “Dammit. Why you gotta be so far away?” And then she went back, and she revamped her search, and she did her own searches, but then she actually clicked on my link two more times. So she actually viewed my profile three times in the same night. I got home from work, and the cool part about this website was that if somebody had viewed your profile, you could see who had viewed your profile, even if they didn’t give you a comment or leave you a message. You could see who it was, and so you’re like, “OK, well who’s been checking me out?” I mean, it’s common sense. I look up, and I’m like, “Wow. Who are you?” So I clicked on her profile, and I read her profile. It was very, very honest, as was mine. And I was like, “You know? She seems like a really cool person. Hmm.” So I sent her a message, and I went, “Hey, I viewed your profile. You seem like a really neat person. I would love to chat with you more.” That’s it. Knowing she is 2600 miles away. It’s never going to happen, or at least the chances are like so far and few, I just, she seems like a cool person to chat with.

OK. And then all of a sudden, whoop! She sends me a message back, and I’m like, “Oh shit! She’s online! Oh damn, that was fast.” And we started chatting.

We chatted for probably 5 or 6 hours that night, just chatting on the web, just typing up words. That’s all it was. We were both very, very truthful, but I had not said my name, nor had I given her my phone number, and so, at the end of the conversation, I was like, “Well, I’d like to call you sometime.” And she goes, “OK,” and she gives me all of her phone numbers, so I picked up my cell phone and called her. 

She came across the country alone with the boys and the 3 cats.

My family’s kind of different. I’ve introduced her to my mom, and my mom’s actually come here to visit. But yeah, my parents are southern Baptists, and they don’t view this as a good thing. They hope that the good Lord will cure me of this.

Well, and the thing is, I was raised in a Catholic family. Even growing up Catholic, it was no big deal. It was just do what you do as long as you’re a good person. It didn’t matter. You know, be kind, be good. And then once my parents changed their faith and converted over to southern Baptist, they’ve been quite interesting folks, shall I say. There’s lots has gone on, so I don’t know if changing their faith pattern has modified their perceptions and their, the way they do things. I think it does. But as long as they’re not harmful to each other, I really don’t care.

But yeah, I remember when Renee introduced me to you all when I drove up with her and the boys, and apparently the first night there was that huge gathering, and it was, the chairs were set up in like a round circle she told me. And she’s like, it was so weird, because we all sat around in a round circle and talked. I was like, “OK.” And she says, “And I really wanted you to be there, but I really didn’t want this to be focused on Renee Day and oh my God, what crazy crap is Renee bringing into the family?” And I was like, “You know what? I’m fine. I’ll just hang out at the hotel and just chill. If I go swimming, I’ll go swimming. Don’t… It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Whatever. You know, I’m not going to push this.” And then apparently she finally got your dad aside and went, “I brought a friend.” And he went, “OK, who is it?” And so they had a chat and talked about it, and that’s when I met you guys at the Pancake House. And then I remember being grilled by Meg and Kathleen. They were sitting across the table from me, and it was like the fire, question, question, question, question, question, and I’m like, “Oh, crap! I didn’t know I’d have a kevlar vest for this shit!” Oh yeah, it was one of those… It kind of… Afterwards, it’s like, Renee’s like, “Are you OK?” And I’m like, “I think so. I’m still in one piece. I think I’m OK.”

We had decided we really wanted to get married after being together for a year, but we couldn’t because there were only like two states, I think at that time, that legalized it. And we’re like, “You know, we really want to get married at home. We really want to get married where our friends and family, blah blah blah blah blah.” Normal normal. Normal stuff. And 5 years later, I went, “To hell with this.” And she went, “What?” I said, “Let’s go get married.” And she went, “What?” I went, “Let’s just do this. If we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.”

I had proposed after a year. So it was a very, like 5 year engagement later. I mean I was just, you know, because we had talked about it, we had talked about it. I was like, “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting for Florida to get off their ass and do what they should do. Let’s just go get married, and then when Florida recognizes it, then Florida recognizes it.” And she went, “OK.” And so I went through every single state, because there were 6 or 7 states that allowed it. And I went to every single state and looked at their requirements, because D.C. actually allowed it, and we were thinking about going to D.C. to do it, but D.C., the problem was is time, being that our kids were all still young, we couldn’t leave them for like a week and a half. And with D.C., say, you went in and put in, requested your marriage license on Monday, there was a 3-day waiting period, so you had to wait 3 full days after that. So that meant you could pick up your marriage license on Friday and go get married, but you had to have that waiting period.

So, I mean, I went through each state that it was possible in, and I found Connecticut, believe it or not, there was no waiting period, there was no required blood test, and you did not have to have witnesses. So that means we didn’t have to bring anybody. The only thing you had to have was an officiant, and so I found a nice little lady up in Connecticut, and she was an officiant, but more so, just our photographer. She took some pretty darn good pictures afterwards. And we went to a little town in Darien, Connecticut. We show up, and I’m in a suit and tie, and Renee’s in her dress that she’s made, and we go to the Clerk of the Court, and the lady turns around and goes, “Oh, are you two getting married?” And what does my smart ass say? “Oh no, we dress like this all the time. We’re just here for like trash schedules.” And she looked at me and went… And of course Renee, at that point, elbow went right in the arm. I was like, “Ow! I’m sorry.” It was hard to resist.

So we got… I mean, we paid quote-unquote half down for our marriage license. You have to pay them like 20 bucks. And then when you bring it back after you get married, and you know, to get it actually officially certified and stamped and all that, then you pay them the rest of the fee. So it’s kind of like you have to pay a down payment on it, and then you pay it off when you get back. So we grabbed the marriage license, went down to a wonderful little park that we had explored the day before that our officiant suggested, and we found a cute little probably hundreds year old bridge in the backwoods area, and we went, “This is perfect.” And so that’s where we got married. And we went back, she took the marriage certificate back and signed it officially in front of them so they could witness it, and they stamped it and approved it and said, “There you go.” Done. And then we flew home a couple days later.

Yep, it was just me, Renee, and Mary. That’s it.Yeah. I mean, it was super easy, super fast. It’s one of those, Renee will gig me about the saying of the vows every time, because we originally had said we want the shortest possible, don’t make me talk a lot. OK. So I find the shortest possible. “Do you take… to be your lawfully wedded wife?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you…?” You know, very, very simple. We’ve already said that, and I’m like, “OK, we’re in like Flynn. Cool. We’re good to go.” And she went, “OK, Amy, repeat after me.” Renee stops, and she looks at me, and she went… she just started laughing, because I looked at Mary, and my eyes got like the deer in the headlight, and I went, “You mean I have to say more?” And she went, “Yeah, officially you do.” And I went, “Oh, damn. This is going to get rough. I thought I was in. I was done.” And she went, “Nope. You got more to say.” And I went, “Oh, crap.”

Actually, we didn’t have a lot of issues. I mean, even, you know, we’re down here in the Redneck Riviera, southern Alabama, whatever you want to call it. We’ve had two occasions that I kind of remember that I kind of laugh at and go, “OK.” There was one, we were going into Wal-Mart years and years and years ago when we actually shopped there on a regular basis. And there was an older white gentleman pushing a cart, and his wife was walking next to him holding her purse, and they were walking down the aisle, and Renee and I walk in. Of course, we’re a couple. We’re holding hands. It was no big deal. And we thought his head was about to pop off in like a total Exorcist moment, like totally cranking all the way around. And his wife turned around and took her purse and slapped him upside the head and went, “You need to look forward, sir!” I was like, “Oh, damn!” I mean, because it was very, very apparent what was happening.

And then, the second thing, oddly enough, we were in Mobile, because we hadn’t ever really gone to Mobile, so we drove over for a day just to kind of walk around downtown Mobile to see the sights and grab something to eat, just kind of relax and kind of be a tourist. We weren’t even holding hands. We were probably walking about two feet apart, just walking down the sidewalk, just chatting, talking. And this older black man, he was probably in his 60s, maybe early 70s, walking the opposite way. So he’s walking towards us. He just gets past us and goes, “All these goddamn gay people!” We both just kind of… Because we were just talking, and we weren’t holding hands. There was nothing that he would’ve seen. Just stopped and turned around, and he’s just shaking his head as he walked down the street. And we’re like, “I have no idea what the hell that was all about.” But that was actually really funny.

That’s really it. I mean, over 14 years, that’s like, OK. Everybody just kind of live and let live, and just don’t worry about it. But then again, we’re not the militant type. We’re not the ones that are jumping up and down on statues and flag waving and armband wearing and all the other stuff that you see on TV or you’ve seen on TV in the past. That’s not us. We just live our lives.

Bonus Story - The Veil Drops in Squaw Valley

I couldn’t resist another story from Steve Birch, one I cut from the last episode in the interest of time. I learned a new word from Steve in this one: Kenshō. For this story, recall that Steve is writing a book on discovering his family roots, a discovery that started with a family friend finding a photograph in a magazine of Steve’s great grandfather, a circus contortionist, which lead to discovering Steve’s long lost grandfather, Joe, and connecting with an entire branch of his family tree that he had never known.

Thanks again, Steve!

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive, including:

“Negentropy” by Chad Crouch at 00:00

“Superconnected sleep” by Soft and Furious at 03:50

“Multiverse” by Ketsa at 06:37

“Dream Catchers” by Lobo Loco at 09:35

Additional audio came from YouTube:

“Tibetan Monks Practice Multiphonic Chanting” by Wilderness Films India, Ltd. at 02:54

Here’s the transcript:

OK. I had finished maybe the fifth writing of the book, and I have all kinds of marked up copies of the book, and I was feeling like I was getting close, and I met with a friend of mine, she worked with authors, she put together book tours, and stuff like that. And she did a lot of marketing. And I went to meet with her just to share what I’d been doing and to kind of pick her brain. And what I didn’t know was that she had also done some channeling and stuff, and it had become just too disturbing for her, so she put that aside.

But we’re having lunch, and we finish talking about the book and possibilities of how we might market it, because it’s not… it doesn’t fit in a typical niche. So she says, “So what are you doing? You have some kind of practice or something you’re doing these days to get clear and to stay connected?” And I say, “I’m not that guy. I don’t meditate. I don’t put much weight in that.” And then I said, “But there was one time when I was in Squaw Valley, and I had this experience where my grandfather had taken me through a series of steps, the spirit grandfather. It was like he was taking me by the hand, and he gave me a Kenshō experience, which is a spontaneous, sweeping, life-changing vision.

I was leaving the valley, I was going to go into town to do some more writing at a cafe there that I had found. The Olympic rings are still there from when the Winter Olympics were there in the ‘60s. And I looked over, and there was just like a mist over this clearing, and I saw a grid start to form. It was about this high off the ground. and then it started to separate out and turned into like multicolors, stuff. And I started hearing, if you’ve ever heard the sound of the multiphonic voices of Tibetan monks. I’m hearing that, and it’s blowing me away. I pull over to the side of the road. I’m in tears.

And then the next thing that happens is the veil drops. I was looking at the mountains, the sky, and all of a sudden, it just rolled away, like the backdrop in a theater, and all I saw was energy, bursts of energy. And it was like I’m sitting here, with the sensation… It’s hard to… It’s the hardest thing to describe, but the sensation was like I was at the center of a lotus blossom. And I saw ley lines going up the side of the mountains, once I could see the mountains again, there were ley lines going from me up the sides of the, I mean the middle of this mountain pass. And I’m just broken up. I’m just sitting there in this rental car, and I look up to the rearview mirror, and there’s my grandfather just with a wide open smile, laughing.

And that was the experience. It was something that changed everything. After that, I started seeing auras. I started seeing rainbow rings around the moon. And then I started tuning into it, and I started seeing rainbow rings around all light sources when I was in that zone.

So, I begin to tell her about this story, and at that moment, I felt my grandfather come down through me, like to the base of my spine, just this electric energy. And I tightened up, and she dropped her fork and said, “Did you feel that?” I said, “Yeah.” But she gets disturbed by it, because my grandfather is coming through to her. We’re sitting at the table. and she says, “What is this?” And she was going, “I don’t know this, but it’s clear, and he’s saying that you need to finish this book. He doesn’t even want you to rest. He doesn’t even want you to sleep. You have to finish this.” It’s like, this has to be done. And so, and then she apologizes, so I said, “That’s OK, I understand. I understand you don’t want to be in that zone anymore, but do you know someone who I could go to who could help me complete the picture?”

So I get booked, we go through this whole thing. I talk to all my relatives who are gone who were part of that nuclear family and the extended family, and filling gaps about, that I’m later able to go and verify about what happened through those years. And she’s trying to shut down the session. It’s coming close to the end. She wants to do some healing on me and clear my chakras.

So she’s trying to bring the thing down to an end, and I said, “So, are they still here?” And she said, “Oh yeah, they’re here to witness the healing.” I said, “I want to do one more thing.” And then my dad bursts in, because my dad’s gone at this point. And so she said, “Your dad, he has a thing he wanted to tell you. He said it’s really important that you know this. And he said you need to know that when he was a little boy, he used to love the circus.” I was writing this book all with circus themes throughout. I had the manuscript in my computer bag next to me. I had never mentioned anything about it to her.

And then before we go into the healing, I asked her, “So, is Joe still here?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Ask him what is it that I saw in Squaw Valley?” And she, so she’s doing her pendulum and she’s talking to him and getting messages, and she says, “No, no, no. Don’t show me. Don’t show me. Tell me so I can relay it.” And so they start arguing and stuff. It’s like she’s arguing with this person she’s channeling. And he’s saying, “I can’t explain it in words! That’s his spiritual experience. And there’s no way you can understand his spiritual experience.” And she’s pressing him more for words and stuff, and one of the things he had said a couple times was, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.” OK, what do I do with that? And then it came up again. And she pressed him on that a little bit, and he drew a circle of energy. She said, “I’ve never seen this, but he drew this circle.” And she said, “I don’t know what that means.” But then he said again, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.”

So I went home. I slept through the night and then woke up about 4 o’clock, you know, lucid dream state, was encased in this like blanket of energy. But I started seeing these images. I wanted to stay in that state, so I closed my eyes, and I started seeing images flying by, and then they slow down and stop. And Cathy’s, she is like a sister from another life. She used to be the manager of the bookstore at the church. It was a picture of her just standing in the bookstore smiling with the stacks of books behind her. And then it stopped, and I woke up.

So I’m at the church, and Cathy is working in the bookstore. So I go, and tell her the whole story about everything, tell her about “you’ll receive the message in the book you’ll receive,” and I’m talking about all the family and all the pain in the family and finding these relatives, and the whole thing. And I mentioned… I said, “So let me know if that book appears.” And she said, “I know exactly what the book is.” So she went into the back room and came out with a book, and it’s called Remembering Wholeness. And she got this sly little smile on her face and said, “I’ve been holding this book in the back room for months. I keep forgetting to send it back to the publisher.” She said, “It came to us, and half of the book is bound upside down.” She said, “It’s contorted.”

And she went on to say, “There’s an exercise she does in the book where she has you draw a circle of energy in your imagination on the floor” I said, “Woah.” And she said the underlying message in the book is that there comes a time in people’s life, in some family’s life, some very broken families, there will be opportunities will arise where someone can step in and heal for themselves, for future generations, and also for the generations that came before. She said it’s a rare occurrence, but it sounds like that’s what happened.

So that was… But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. People sit down next to me in Starbucks or something and strike up a conversation. The next thing, we’re, God, we’re in another world. It’s like we’ve known each other. You know? That’s what lights me up. That’s what lights me up.

Episode 022 - Earthly Angels Bring Me Puzzle Pieces

Today we have Steve Birch, who is chock full of stories about sneaking into shows as a teenager and tracking down musicians at their hotels. He has been a musician, a producer, a songwriter, an author, and played many other roles on his journey through this world, and he shares a couple of those stories about the beautiful people who turned up in his life at the right time and in the right way to really make an impact on him. Here is my favorite quote, because it’s just what I need to hear at this point in my life, “That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open.”

My deep gratitude to Steve for spending the time and sharing himself and his experiences with me. I can’t wait to read his book.

My loving thanks to Flora Folgar for her help with the editing.

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive which, at the time of publication of this episode, has been acquired by Tribe of Noise and is not currently linkable. Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Trio for Piano, Violin, and Viola” by Kevin MacLeod at 6:49

“Kelli’s Number” by U.S. Army Blues at 12:51

“The Edge of Nowhere” by Scott Holmes at 16:17

““Driven to Success” by Scott Holmes at 20:14

“Sweet Spot” by Scanglobe at 27:12

“Bells and Vibes” by Michael Brückner at 35:23

“I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” by John H. Glover-Kind at 41:41

“Deep Dual Love” by Jared C. Balogh at 44:32

Here’s the transcript:

As a kid, I remember my earliest memory, my earliest really vivid memory is being in a basket under my mother’s grand piano in our living room. And she was like the president of the chamber music society, and she was always having chamber music rehearsals and everything. So I was in this basket, and I looked over to my right, and there were my mom’s bare feet working the pedals, and I could hear the dampers on the strings above me thunking on the strings, and I looked out, and there were the string musicians, like a cellist and a violist, in their folding chairs swaying with the music, and I could smell the resin from the bows.

So music was, it was just always there. It wasn’t, “Do you want to play an instrument?” It was, “Which instrument do you want to play?” So I picked up the flute. It looked like an easy thing to carry. And I liked the way it sounded. Because I saw these other kids lugging tubas and euphoniums and stuff around.

I was pretty resolved that I was going to be in the music business. I didn’t know how, but I was just so drawn to it. And at 13, I started working in this college radio station. They were in the midst of an inventory, and I asked how I could help, and they gave me a broom and put me to work doing things that no one wanted to do, just helping them with inventory and emptying the waste baskets and stuff. But that changed really quickly. If someone didn’t show up for their show, I was on the air, and before I knew it, I was doing radio shows and teaching the new college students coming in how to run the equipment.

And then when I got older, I got into junior high and high school, and I was not working at the radio station anymore, but I still wanted to meet all these people that were coming through town. First, I would cold call all the hotels in town and ask for their rooms. One of the people I wanted to get was Chick Corea when he was in town doing a concert, and so I called around and just asked for his room at the Hyatt or whatever hotel it was, and his manager picked up, and he figured out what this was. I was just a kid who wanted to meet Chick. He gave the phone to Chick, and so we talked for a minute, and he said, “So are you coming to the concert tonight?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well just, why don’t you just come backstage?” I said, “Ok.” 

It’s almost like these footprints were laid out in front of me, and I was just as nervous and scared and ill-prepared as I was, I just put one foot in front of the other.

And so I went to this concert, and when it was over, I went backstage, and there was just this crowd of people there, and they were all getting autographs and taking pictures, and people bringing him flowers and all kinds of things. I’m pressed against the back wall, and the people started to part, and he points at me and says, “Steve?” I say, “Yeah.” And he calls me in, so I go in the dressing room, and we sit on the backs of these folding chairs next to a fruit bowl, and we just, I started… He was so open with me, so giving. He just says, “So, what’s going on? I heard that you wanted to go to New York. What do you want to… Is there anything that you wanted to ask me about?” And we just had this probably half an hour conversation. Me and Chick Corea, in his dressing room, sitting on the backs of the folding chairs, and it was expanding my world to know that this person who I had been listening to and studying and admiring was just a guy, and he was accessible.

And you know, when it didn’t work, when I couldn’t reach them at a hotel, I’d call around, call everyone, and no one would have them staying, they’re probably under a different name or under someone else’s name, so what I would do in those cases is I would go to, the afternoon of the concert, I would go to the venue to the stage door, knowing that they would be off-loading equipment onto the stage from the trucks. And I walked up to the stage door, and there’s a stage manager there and everything, and just walked over and grabbed a mic stand off the back of the truck and walked it in and went back out, grabbed a little box of mic cords or something, and did that like 3 or 4 times, and then I was in. And it worked. It worked so many times. It worked time after time after time.

So that was my bridge from this small town in Michigan to getting up the nerve to say, “OK, yeah. I’m going to go and immerse myself in this world.” And so that’s what I did. L.A., when I was 20.

I was so ill-prepared. I had been there for maybe a week, and I decided, “OK, I have to go down to the Hollywood Musicians Union and see what this is all about, see if I can make some connections and stuff.” I remember, I went downstairs into the basement, and there was a big band rehearsal going on. They have the door open because it’s blazing hot down there, and they’re just doing this rehearsal, and there’s this guy with this tenor sax on a stand, and he’s just slumping in a chair smoking a pipe while this rehearsal is going on. And I’m listening. The band is kicking. And he takes his pipe and puts it on the music stand at one point and reaches over and picks up the sax and straps it on, and still laying back slumped in his chair just blew the most blazing sax solo I had ever heard, effortlessly. And I remember being just awestruck and defeated at the same time realizing that no, these were world class players. I had stepped into something that I was absolutely not prepared for.

But I was picking up whatever I could, and there just wasn’t any work. And it got to a point where I just had to make a living, just to be able to stay there and not move back to Michigan and lose face. You know? Because I was the one who got out.

Talk about transformational moments. Sometimes they’re nice and perfectly laid out, as if planned. And sometimes they’re trainwrecks. And this was my trainwreck, this was my bottom. I was driving a delivery vehicle in Skid Row and the Jewelry District and the Garment District, and just all over L.A., and I was doing a lot of drinking, and so I would drink to put myself to sleep at night, and I’d get up in the morning and take little white pills and stuff to get me going, sometimes like a handful. And drinking coffee and taking these pills. And I remember, I was in this frenetic state, and so I would rush through everything, and I was driving very recklessly and everything. I came around a corner and realized as I swung around the corner that there was like a shadow of a person in front of me, and I just brushed past them, and I looked over as they fell away from my truck. I could see this horror on their face, this terror. And I still see that face today. I will always see that face. And as I continued to drive, I looked in the rearview mirror, and he’s cursing me. He’s OK, and he was just one of the guys on Skid Row. You know? But in a way, he’s the guy who saved my life because almost running this guy over, almost killing this guy, was the thing that made me say, “I can’t. I can’t keep going like this.”

And so, I drove the truck to my therapist’s office and just sat in the waiting room until she would see me. And she came to see me, and I gave her the keys to the truck and said, “I’m done.” And that afternoon, I was checked into a hospital, and I was there for about 10 months. I was having suicidal feelings. I was having even homicidal feelings at times. I just had all this rage inside that was unresolved, and so I had to take that time. And fortunately, I had insurance that allowed me that time. I just stopped my life and said, “No, I have to fix this.” And I had this sense that, if I didn’t fix it, I wouldn’t be able to live out my purpose or even find what that purpose was.

And I had a boss who kept my job for all that time and in fact welcomed me back when I left. I was so blessed with just wonderful people. There were these angels that just kept appearing that were just wonderful. That’s a theme for me, is these angels who pop up. And sometimes it’s a very mystical thing, and other times it’s like that guy I almost killed. To me, in my memory, this is the guy who helped me turn that metaphorical corner in my life as I almost killed him turning the corner with the truck. And I imagine, in my musings I imagine, maybe I had the same effect on him. I don’t know.

I got back on my feet. And I was at this for a long time. I mean, I was getting my act together for the good part of a decade, and I got to a point where I was feeling really grounded and assessing my life and saying, you know, there were problems. Some of that stuff I did with music, I did for the wrong reasons and all that, but I still loved music, and there was still a big part of me that wanted to be there because those are my people. That is my tribe, you know?

So I decided I’m going to go for it again. And at that point in time, I was pretty clear that, yeah, it wasn’t going to be as a musician. I just wasn’t that good. So I decided that I still liked putting music together. I liked the studio aspect of it, putting the pieces of a song together and working with musicians. So I thought, yeah, OK, I could be like an engineer or producer or something. So I took a bunch of classes at Cal State L.A. and UCLA. And I met this guy, he was one of my teachers, he was a Record Production teacher, and he was a serious working musician. This guy was a monster player. And we hit it off, and he helped me put together my production demo so I could show my skills as a producer, and I decided, OK, now I need to find somewhere where I can work my way into the business and do this record producing thing. And again, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just went for it anyway. And I remembered that there was this guy who I had met a couple times in passing back in Kalamazoo.

So I figured, if I could get this tape to him, since he had become a producer, a really hot pop producer, then maybe there could be some work there. But I didn’t know how to reach him. But I knew he had a studio in San Francisco, and I knew he was from Kalamazoo. And I figured he’s gotta still have some family there. So I went back to my old childhood ways, my tricks, and started cold calling. 

So I called and called and called, and then I got his mother, and I said, “I’m going to be in San Francisco on business, and I was really hoping to connect while I was up there, but I don’t have any of his current contact information or anything.” And so she just assumed I was an old friend. She said, “Oh, baby, just a minute, let me get it.” So she gave me the address to his studio and the telephone number to the studio. So I drove up. I rented a car, booked a hotel room, spending all kinds of money I didn’t have. I was going to take this tape, I was going to get in that door somehow.

So I drove up there, found the studio, it was just around the corner from San Quentin, found a phone booth, and called the number. Now this guy, he was huge at the time, and he was just in this incredible zone as a producer. So I called him, and he had like 10 people working for him in the studio, but for some reason when I called, he picked up the phone. So I just went to work. I just started to talk my behind off. He said, “So where are you now? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I’m just up the street in a phone booth.” He’s like, “Here? In San Rafael?” So he reluctantly asked me if I wanted to come down. I said, “Yeah, be there in a minute!”

So I drove down to the studio, and he met me at the door, and the first words out of his mouth as I was walking through the door, he said, “So what do you have for me?” So I reached in my pocket, and I hand him this cassette tape of my 3 little musical pieces, and he put it immediately into a boombox there in the lobby and listened to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 seconds of it, turned it off, and handed it back to me. Oh man. OK. So is this how it’s all going to end? All this stuff, all the classes, all the studio time, all this stuff, he was my best bet to get in with a production team. And he was clearly not interested. He knew that I wasn’t up to their level.

But he was nice, and he said, “Hey, look, you want to come back and see what we’re doing?” So I followed him down this dark hallway to the control room, and there was this little guy hunched over a piano in one of the booths, and he walked over to that room. He slid the door open, and he stuck his head in and said to the guy inside, he says, “I want you to meet Steve. He’s from Kalamazoo. He’s a writer. You guys talk.” And then he turned to me, and he said, “This guy is the songwriter of the ‘90s. You guys need to work it out.” And then he left.

So we talk, these 2 socially awkward musical geeks trying to carry on a conversation, and it’s going nowhere. And so, in my head, I’m tallying up all the money I’ve spent and saying, well, I’m just going to have to write this whole thing off as an experience. And so I’m starting to say my goodbyes, and I get one foot out the door, literally, and he says, “So do you write lyrics?” I say, “Yeah.” I had never written a lyric in my life. So he reaches over to his desk and picks up this cassette tape, and he’s going, “I have these 3 songs. I need lyrics. I need these things done. I was like, “Cool.” So yeah, I took the cassette, I said, “So when do you need them?” And he said, “Tape rolls tomorrow at noon.”

So here I am, with the opportunity to write the first 3 songs of my life, and I have about 18 hours to do it. So I drove up and parked under a streetlight in front of an all-night diner so I could keep the coffee flowing, stay awake while I hammer out these songs. Now, I had no idea how to write a song. I never paid attention to lyrics because I was so into the music, but here I am being asked to write the lyrics to these songs. And they were completed songs. They were studio-quality with a la-la melody over the top and a song title. So I had to create these stories around a song title to match the melody. I didn’t know what to do, so I just went by the seat of my pants and said, “What would a writer do? How logically would they go about it?”

So I just wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, until I fell asleep. Woke up the next morning. The lyrics are crumpled at my feet, and I pick them up, flatten them out. The sun is high in the sky, and I still have 2 verses to write. So I crank them out really quick and hit the road. I get there about 20 after 12. They’ve been there, they’re just waiting for me. The music is up on the monitors. The vocalist is all warmed up waiting in the vocal booth, and this writer is across the room nervously, I’m sure, imagining the extra money he’s going to have to pay for the studio time because he doesn’t have lyrics for these songs.

And he sees me walk through the door. “So you have it? Do you have it?” And I just raised up this legal pad, this crumpled legal pad with the lyrics, just cooler than I had any business being. And he rushed over and took it from me and read through the first one, then flipped the page real quick and started reading through the second song and started to slow down, and slowly turned the page and read the third and just sat there for a second and then turned to me and said, “Cool.” Walked out into the studio, put this pad on the music stand and taught this singer the melody to show her how the words would go with the song. So those 3 songs ended up being the first 3 of over 200 songs we wrote together. And that was what launched me into this career that consumed the next 10 or 15 years of my life. Never had I set my sights on being a lyricist. I’d never imagined that. But I found that it was the perfect thing for what I had been prepared for in life.

I set the intention, but when you set the intention, one of the tricks to that is that you can’t be rigid about it. You set your intention, and you release it to the universe to whatever is going to happen, whatever door swings open for you. I was on this journey to reawaken this childhood dream of being in the music business, and I thought I knew where I was going, but I didn’t. And that’s happened to me so many times in life that I’ve come to really trust it. That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open. 

I have to go back a little bit. My immediate family, my father and us kids, we were like black sheep in the family. We were really different. But it always bothered me that I didn’t know why we were so different. And then we had a grandfather who I did not connect with at all. He was this beloved doctor. He delivered me, and I never connected with him. 

When I was probably 16 years old, my dad pulled me aside and explained to me that my grandpa was not his birth father, that he was his stepfather and that my father had been adopted when his stepfather married my grandmother. It was apparently very serious for my dad. And “Don’t bring it up because it really upsets your grandmother” and all this subterfuge, all this stuff. It was apparently a chapter in her life that she just wanted to bury.  I knew that my dad was really, he was really wounded when his father left him. He was 9 years old. His dad left, and he was never heard from again.

But I wanted to help my dad find what happened to this guy, and I imagine from the way my grandmother tightened up and got angry whenever the subject would come up, I just assumed that this guy probably just died homeless under a bridge somewhere. But I continued to help my dad look. And his name was Joe Miller. We didn’t know what state he was in. But years into this, after helping my dad search every 5 years or so, I’m grown. And I’m on the phone with my brother, we’re having this conversation, and we’re finishing up the conversation, he said, “Oh yeah,” he said, “Did you hear about the circus picture?” It’s like, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, there’s… Larry found a circus picture.” And Larry was a guy who was my parents’ best friend. He introduced them to each other and everything.

So what happened was, he was down in Florida, and he was going through a local yard sale. He came across a stack of New Yorker magazines for a nickel apiece, so he bought the whole stack to have something to read while he was down there. And he opens up one of these New Yorker magazines to see this picture, a class picture of the sideshow from the Barnum & Bailey Ringling Brothers Combined Circus. And there’s a guy down in the corner who my dad’s best friend said looked just like my dad looked when he met him in college. And he was doing a contortion that my dad used to do when he was in college. It’s like when they met, when these 2 guys met, my dad and his roommate, they’re getting to know each other, and my dad says, “Yeah, they tell me that my grandfather was a contortionist in the circus, and look, I can do some tricks too!” And he disjointed his shoulders and crossed his arms behind his head, with his arms sticking out straight the wrong way. And there’s this picture of this guy looking like my dad doing that same contortion in this picture from Madison Square Garden in 1929. It’s entitled “The Congress of Freaks.”

And I’m doing Google searches to try and find something. Boom, there’s a posting from a circus genealogy bulletin board where people are looking for their relatives from the circus. There are no responses to this posting that was posted like 6 years prior to my seeing it. It’s just sitting out there. And this woman is looking for, I think her great uncle Lan, or her uncle Lan, or something, who was double-jointed.

So I write to her, and it’s after midnight, and the house was totally asleep. And there’s this email from a woman who says, “I can’t believe it. Seems like every year at Christmas, another relative finds me.” She was in her early 70s. She had been a lifelong genealogist who had done the whole family tree, but it had run cold at her uncle Lan, my great grandfather, that leg of the tree.

So she writes this letter back to me, tells me what she knows, and I’m starting to close this thing down, and I notice that there’s an attachment to the email. So I open it back up, click on the attachment. It opens up, and there’s this picture, this sepia tone picture of a little boy, probably 4 years old, who looks exactly like I looked at that age. And written in calligraphy underneath the image, it says Master Joseph Dustin Miller. This was the first picture I ever saw of my grandfather, and I’m at this point, I’m well into my 40s when I see this for the first time.

It was one of these moments where everything became very surreal. It was very unreal feeling as I’m sitting there looking into the eyes of this child from generations before me. And I get a sense that my wife is coming down the stairs, and I call her name, and she doesn’t answer, and so I look up from the picture, and that’s when I saw the ancestors gathering, gathering like they would around a street performer, with little kids trying to see between legs and between people to see what’s going on as I’m reconnecting with this lost generation in my life. I mean, and it was filmy, and it was just light, but it was clearly people. And they were there for the moment.

So the next morning, I write to the woman. She writes right back, and she introduces me to a couple of people, and they introduce me to a couple people. And I’m doing more and more searches now that I know where he was.

He’d left in Prohibition Chicago. My grandfather, turns out, was an emcee in Vaudeville and burlesque, and he would tell corny jokes. It was like, he would take a piece of bread out, and he’d say, “Now I’m going to sing, ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody’,” and he’d put it in his pocket. He’d come to the end of the song, he’d pull out a piece of toast. It was just really bad, corny Vaudeville stuff. This man who was a Vaudeville burlesque entertainer had had a knock down, drag out fight with my grandmother because he caught her with the grandfather I knew growing up. They had this fight, he disappeared, was never heard from again. Nearly 70 years, never heard from. And she would never help along the way, help us put it together.

So I break the code. The code is broken with this circus picture, you know? That’s the thing that lit me up to search again, and to search with passion. Things started falling into place like... you know, they talk about moving in the direction of your passion, and the universe will conspire to support you. I felt like I was riding a wave and like I was having all these, at the time I would refer to them as rolling epiphanies because it was like everyone I talked to, every turn, every email I received, there were all these people welcoming me to my connection to my family. People who knew my grandfather, people who loved my grandfather.

So there’s all this stuff is emerging, and it’s all emerging, I’m telling you, from the moment I opened the picture in the email, to see that picture of my grandfather, that little 4-year-old boy, to 5 weeks later, I’ve met all these people. And all these people come together to celebrate what would’ve been his hundredth birthday, and I was the guest of honor. All these mystical experiences started coming at me. It was this season of awakening for me that changed everything.

But I learned through this experience and connecting with these aunts and uncles that had no idea that I existed or my dad existed. I was able to bring them all together and find a place for healing those wounds, for reconciliation, for reconnection. And ultimately, I believe, to heal those wounds for those who had long past. There was so much damage through the generations, so much disconnection, so much pain that it needed to be healed. It needed to be healed for all those who are living today who struggled with their strained relationships with their father, you know, this man who abandoned my father, and for all the generations to come.

And that happened very miraculously. It just… It just happened. It fell in my lap, the one person who was best equipped, because it meant so much to me to solve the mysteries for my dad. And also because I was the one who was, who had become now a wordsmith, through my lyric writing and all of that. So I didn’t know how to write a book, but I knew enough to get a start and imagine what a writer would do, just like I did with the lyrics. And so I started doing it, and more things started coming, and I started getting visited by Spirit and by earthly angels who had a piece of the puzzle to bring to me.

And so I’m taking pieces of that, stringing all those experiences together, those things I didn’t feel like I was worthy enough to tackle. Who am I to say I’m a writer, or to suggest that I had anything worthwhile to hear? But I’m at the point now where I’ve had so many experiences and learned so much in life and feel like I’ve been gifted so much that now I’m compelled to get to that place where I can share it, share it out.

But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. None of this is sacred. I like to have fun with it all. I don’t take myself that seriously. I’ll tell you, when I hit 50, that’s when I decided that I was going to be honest and speak my mind, and when I hit 60, that’s when I decided I was, if I’m going to share myself, I’m going to share my heart. And I’m not going to do it halfway. I’m going to do the damn thing. You know? My wife says that. Whenever she sees me backing away from something or being cautious, she says, “Just do the damn thing.”