Kate Bush

     Today seemed like a good day to start a blog.  It's something I've wanted to do for a while now and after receiving a rather exciting email this morning I thought "today is the day."  Yesterday was a crappy day both figuratively and literally.  I've had an upset stomach all week and I was having a real pity party about my whole life in general - often, I tend to get too inward when I'm not feeling well and I start judging myself harshly.
     After an entire day of feeling hopeless and unaccomplished I woke up to an email from Kate Bush! Well, not actually Kate Bush but an email from her fan site stating that she would be playing a series of shows this summer after a 35 year absence from the stage.  If you are asking yourself right now "who is Kate Bush?" please, I beg of you, PLEASE Google her, download her albums, look on the interweb - educate yourself to this mystical, musical master (http://www.katebush.com)!  After the shock of the news, and the fact that I'm a big enough nerd to be registered on her fan site, wore off I felt a strange feeling of elation and excitement and, well, hope.
     People always say that music saved their lives and I really, truly must concur.  As an awkward and strange, gay child growing up in upstate NY I didn't have much to identify with or look forward to.  Discovering music was like opening a magical Pandora's Box (not the drag queen) and riding on a magic carpet to amazing new places where there were like minded souls - and unicorns, of course!  When you "discover" a new band as a kid you feel like you have found the key to something special that no one else has.  Listening to an album for the 1st time makes you feel like you are the only person who has ever been lucky enough to hear these particular sounds.
     Kate Bush is a strange and magical creature.  She's the strangest kind of strange because she looks pretty normal but, in fact, is kookier that the kookiest.  She's kind of like the Marilyn Munster of music.  I use words like strange and kooky as a reverence because I LOVE the strange, the kooky, and the queer.  She found a way to express outwardly the swirl of kaleidoscopic emotions that I was feeling inside even though I was a far cry from an English, country girl with a seriously musical family.  That's the thing about music, it's universal.  Kate could play a heartbreaking melody on the piano and sing words that caused tears to spill and then switch to a braying donkey howling in possession.  Perfection!
     I even used to perform lip synch numbers of her songs when I was a young drag queen in NYC.  For a while I worked as a waitress at a place called Stingy Lulu's on St. Mark's Place in the East Village.  One time I was performing "Wuthering Heights" (a song Kate wrote at school when she was like 16 or something crazy like that) and I decided to run out the front door of the restaurant onto the icy, winter streets wearing a see-though, flow-y gown.  Right on queue I pressed myself up to the plate glass window from outside just in time to lip the words "Heathcliff, it's me -- Cathy. Come home.  I'm so cold.  Let me in-a-your window." The patrons of the restaurant went wild as I ran back inside, teetering on strappy-stilletos, onto the stage in time to finish the song!
    Some people don't "get" Kate Bush or they feel like she's too much of a girly, emotional singer.  She clearly didn't fit into the punk scene at all - I mean, she trained under Marcel Marceau and is probably the only person ever to make mime not detestable.  That being said her album "Hounds Of Love" is on every single list ever compiled of the best albums of all times.  I would have to say that "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" is the most perfect song ever written, or one of them at least.  Personally, her album "The Dreaming" is my favorite because it is, well, the weirdest one.
     The tickets for her upcoming 15 shows in London have not even gone on sale yet.  She does not travel and most likely will never play in the US.  I may not even be lucky enough to score any tickets for those gigs.  The idea that she's playing and the possibility that I may actually see the only living idol of mine left that I have not seen live yet fills me with hope.  Just receiving that email alone gave me the nudge I needed to realize that life is a grand and awesome journey.  Music really does save lives.  It sure saves mine.