Marching with Scissors

I thought she died at 50, that woman who was me, singing her heart out with abandon, dancing like a lunatic, awash in sequins, glitter, sweat, and the mad delirium that is performing for an audience. I thought life killed her: married, divorced, career, married again, kids, divorced again, married (third time's the charm). Not much room for music in all that. Got older. Not much room for sequins or activism. Afraid of failing, of looking old, of losing what was once as natural as the pulse you feel when you press your fingers against your wrist.

Five years ago, Yid Vicious, the klezmer band I’m in, was asked to play a children’s Easter Hat Parade for a local toy store. Not enough of us could make it, so we invited Forward! Marching Band, my town’s activist street band, to join us.

As we assembled in front of the store, we could see a flock of little kids inside, furiously snipping away at tissue paper to decorate their paper-plate hats for the march around Capitol Square. The children came streaming out, shepherded by their glue and tissue-papered speckled parents, grinning and proud of their hats. The stilt walkers teetered glamorously into place, and off we all went. The band leader bellowed “one, two, three, four,” and the band roared into “We Are Family.”

There was a shift in the universe. The glorious, disheveled clamor of unbridled music lifted the hair on the back of my neck, levitated my soul. At the top of my lungs, I shouted along with the song’s chorus, overcome with joy and a knowledge that wherever this band marched, I wanted more than anything else to be with them. Swinging into step, there wasn’t anywhere else I wanted to be.

Within a week, I’d joined F!MB. Those kids decorating Easter hats foreshadowed all the different ways scissors turned out to be essential to the craft of supporting social justice actions one deranged, wonderful, passionate, silly home-made costume, hat, and sign at a time.

Out. Fit.

An activist street band is an all-you-can imagine buffet of slap-dash costuming. You don't make money, but you do make what you wear, assembling it from scraps, thrift-store finds, Halloween get-ups, swanky scarves from crazy aunts, suspicious cast-offs, pipe-cleaners, battery-powered lights, and whatever other flotsam and jetsam you come upon, are given, or reallocate from the normal, non-band world. And, listen (but do not inhale), all our finery is quickly soaked in perspiration, and must constantly be re-constructed, lest the ape-house fug of old sweat kill parade attendees and protesters alike. Scissors are essential, as are staplers, duct tape, glue-guns, and the kindness of strangers.

In the olden days, a woman of my proportions would have been described as being formed upon queenly lines. Translation: tall, broad shouldered, big-busted, wide-hipped, and built to specifications wildly unfamiliar to those who mass-produce clothing. I edit my garb with scissors. I snip right what fits wrong. I clip crazy what was mundane.

Case in point: the Halloween circus ringmaster costume's coat sleeves were too long, and the dirndl blouse I was wearing beneath it made them look as if I had sprouted a wrestler's shoulders. Also, the ringmaster costume was hotter than hell, and our march ended at an enormous Oktoberfest celebration in Harvard Square. Dirndl visibility was essential. In the tailor's version of a Civil War battlefield amputation, I used borrowed scissors to hack off the sleeves, and off we went.

Hats. Off.

Eric died of brain cancer. He was with the band from the beginning, he was the man who shouted “one, two, three, four," at the Easter Hat parade. To lose him was like having half the best notes in all the scales go still.

Dia de los Muertos, getting ready to celebrate him at an event. Makeup won't stick to salt, so I decorate my hat with red and white flowers. Busy scissors trimming ribbons, helping me twist and bend the wires around the base of the plume on my hat. I didn't know sorrow made your hands shake. It does. But the scissors worked regardless, and the flowers are still there.

A Sign

Activists make signs to explain, to abjure, to coax, to unify. I learned very early on that, as is the case with almost every other thing, movies lie. "One does not simply" whip out a can of spray paint and some stencils and blithely produce a sign that is legible and doesn't look like a Rorschach blot.

Instead, you end up covered in paint, making up new curse words, and wasting ungodly amounts of foam core before you realize that even though the @#$!% stencil makers didn't provide you with a dot to go beneath the exclamation point for your sign that is supposed to read "Raise Your Voice Up!" on one side, and "Vote!" on the other, your trusty scissors will allow you to craft a star (which, by the way, is way cooler than a fusty old dot) to be the dot's stand in.

Snip right what fits wrong. Clip crazy what was mundane.

Joy

I thought she died at 50. Joy stopped fitting, and I thought she'd outgrown it. Like the movies, that was a lie.

In the picture, you can see me grinning like a fool, dirndl blouse in full view. In the video, you hear me yelling "Here we go! Here we go!," red and white roses on my hat.

She didn't die. She just needed some scissors to make things fit the way she is, and make room for what's true, and silly, and wonderful, and next.