During the first week that I moved to New York, I saw The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, I interviewed for a job at CremaLita (which I didn't take, because just in the nick of time I got a prep cook position instead), and I saw Cassandra Wilson perform. I'd been obsessed with Cassandra Wilson for a few years prior to this—it was the thing that, until I realized my romantic inclinations, set me apart from my Dave Matthews Band-loving friends at college.
I moved on a Friday, I think, and the show was the following Sunday afternoon. It was a free one put on by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I arrived early enough that I had no problems securing a seat that was exactly in the center and as close to the ledge of the stage as I could be without being tempted to touch her shoe. As the lawn at Battery Park filled up, a man squeezed in between me and an annoying couple who was drinking wine and had spread out a picnic. This guy turned out to be a friend of Lonnie Plaxico, her bassist at this show and a jazz luminary by his own right. The proximity—the narrowing degrees of separation between C-Dub and myself—was intoxicating. She performed with her "muse" Brandon Ross (who, incidentally, I think lives in my neighborhood!), opening with her cover of "The Weight", and sang covers of "For the Roses," and "Only a Dream in Rio" (she does write original songs, but I usually prefer the covers). My face hurt afterward because it had been frozen in a state of barely containable glee. I squealed and teared up. I'd never thought I'd have the opportunity to see Cassandra Wilson live, and look! I'd only been living in New York for three days and I was sitting ten feet away from her!
Over the next seven or eight years, I saw Cassandra Wilson eight or nine times more. I saw her for my twenty-first birthday when she performed at the Jazz Standard. I went alone and ordered a bottle of wine and shook her hand afterward. I brought my friends Meghan and David to see her with me at the Blue Note (a terrible venue); when she sang "Broken Drum," I told them that I wanted the song to be played at my funeral. One or two summers after that, Lesley came with me to see Wilson's Summerstage show. This one was my favorite of all time. There were several thousand people there sprawled out in front of us (we were in the back on the bleachers), and when she sang "Time After Time," the park went eerie quiet and the expanse between us and the stage lit up like a slo-mo disco ball with everyone's lighters held in the air, waving around in little circles. She covered "Brown Sugar" and "Redemption Song" and it seemed that in terms of what was happening in New York during those ninety minutes, there was nowhere else to be. Then one time my ex came with me, also at the Blue Note, to the worst show I ever saw. This mound of a man from New Jersey shared a table with us, and throughout the show he wanted to assert his superior jazz appreciation skillz via his expansive CD collection; even though he did that thing that jazz aficionados like to do, the very deliberate off-beat head-bop thing, he talked over most of the music. But mostly there was no sense of collective appreciation. It's like the music was secondary to the table service, and when Wilson came back out for an obligatory encore, her path was blocked by the onslaught of patrons exiting. Awful.
In high school I drove an old, cherry-red Volkswagon Cabriolet convertible and on summer nights when I wanted to be alone (or, more likely, on nights when I had no one to hang out with) I would drive up into the foothills to a little overlook point from which Boise looked a lot bigger and more interesting than it actually was. There I would play Wilson's cover of "Harvest Moon" on full blast, lay on the hood of the car, and in nonspecific terms fantasize about my adulthood. I'm not a person who is motivated by his convictions, so while at that point I might have told people that I was going to move to New York, I didn't believe I had the inner resources to make it happen, nor could I even fathom what such a move would entail. Honestly, it seemed like a terrifying prospect: What if moving someplace else changed nothing, and I just found myself lying on the proverbial hood of another proverbial car, aching for something still unidentifiable but "better"? "Harvest Moon" is a poor expression of this kind of teenage angst, though conveniently enough it is about yearning, and perhaps as a final appeal, it fast-forwarded from my point in time so that what was yearned for was compassionately figured in retrospect.
After that first concert, I waited at the "stage-door" (in this case, a street barricade) for maybe an hour with three or four others. I finally asked someone from backstage if Wilson would be coming out. "It's not looking likely," she said. I scribbled something on a scrap piece of paper and asked that she pass it along:
Dear Cassandra Wilson,I included my email address, but—duh—she didn't respond. It was probably illegible anyway.
In Boise, Idaho, I would listen to your version of "Harvest Moon" at night up in the foothills under a blanket of stars and a real harvest moon every once in a while, and sometimes the clouds opened up for me.
Sincerely,
Lukas
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