Perception v. Reality

Contending with the past, the present, and a transgender sex worker?/busker?/panhandler?/hero?/villain? at college drop-off.

The inspiration behind this week’s ‘Stack:

Have you ever noticed something your whole life and thought it was one thing, only to find out, it wasn’t AT ALL what you had thought? While researching a painting for my memoir this week, I discovered that this “Rembrandt” I grew up looking at my entire childhood wasn’t a Rembrandt, and it never was a “boy holding a gun.” Turns out, it was painted by a student of Rembrandt and is actually titled, “Girl holding a broom.” I mean, it’s obvious now given the bucket sitting next to her. But my eyes saw what they saw when they saw it.

I am curious to learn about the things YOU have come across that aren’t what they seemed! Please share in the COMMENTS!

If you like this post, please do ❤️ it as it allows for further visibility on Substack, which allows me to continue doing my thang. xx

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On Nostalgia…
As we ran around Beantown, teeming with hundreds of thousands of other college students and their parents for move-in weekend, I found myself having to contend with some inner demons stirred by a city that I lived in when my dreams were alive but my soul was dead. The faint remnants of hope and promise when dodging the “T” trolleying down the middle of the street or looking to that landmark guide of a Citgo sign directing which way you needed to be flowing, filled me with a sense of sadness and also, acceptance. At 22, I perceived Boston as a stepping stone to New York City, when in reality, it was me just being afraid and biding my time in a BU program that wasn’t right for me or me for it: opera. In looking back, the only thing I “mastered” were high notes, and I wish I would have listened to the costume designer of an undergraduate production of A Little Night Music who said to me, “You should be on Broadway right now.” Instead, I finished my bachelor’s degree and then went to MORE school. Face palm. My perception was that I “needed” to take a certain path that others thought I should. Looking back, the reality of what was best for me, would have been to say, “Fuck it,” and just move to New York. I wish I had had an inner Citgo sign then to look to for direction. But alas, fear, and the lack of money and/or belief in myself that I would thrive in New York one way or another was just not there…yet.

So, I sat there. Idling in my car. Me idling. The car idling. Flashers on. Breathing in what Boston looks like now. The Huntington Theatre, where I was a stand by in a production of The Mikado, taunted me from across the street. The irony wasn’t lost on me that Joy Behar’s, My First Ex-Husband, was currently running. Nostalgia’s mixed emotions ran through my veins, and I was reminded of a clip from Mad Men. I’ve never watched Mad Men, (I ran across while reading the Substack post below about the importance of printing and saving photographs) and after seeing this minute and a half, I felt like I didn’t have to. It’s a nugget of perfection. Why ruin it with 7 full seasons of reliving a tv version of a narcissist, when I lived ten full years of it in real life.

Don Draper: “…in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.”

Coulds.
Shoulds.
Woulds.
Didn’ts.

On Perception…
But there I was, 28 years later, folding clothes and making Target runs for my stepson who was beginning his own Boston life-chapter. It felt right and whole and of course, everything in my life shook-out to be here in this moment with him and for him. I wondered what he saw and how he saw it. What Boston means for him and how it would look to him in five, ten, twenty years from now. At the end of the night, we said our goodbyes, and Tor and I headed to our AirBnB in Dorchester to crash. I vowed to put the past behind me and wake up to a new take on Boston in the morning.

As 50-somethings, we were up before the “breakfast” part of the “BnB” could happen so we decided to head to Dunkin’ in order to main line that coffee. It was a chilly Sunday morning, and we were drinking-in the sun as we tailgated at the back of the Mazda watching the action at Mass Ave and Columbia. This was the area that the Boston Police Department shoo’ed all the houseless people to from the campus streets so that the parents paying those high ticket tuitions could feel good about their kids living in a “safe” environment.

I noticed a person at the far corner of the busy intersection “dancing.” She, may have been a he and/or they, but at the time, I perceived them as a “she” due to the fact that she was wearing a skirt, a tube top, and hot pink boots. Her “dance”, though decidedly intended to be seductive, in reality, resembled a scene from Night of The Living Dead-meets-fentanyl. I thought this was a peculiar choice of “creativity” given the hour of 7:30 a.m. Twyla Tharp could have taken a few pages from her “act” as she sashayed up to cars that were stopped at their respective red lights, with a most impressive finale of climbing up onto the stoplight pole and gyrating in a new form of that 60’s move, “The Jerk”, this one being more like, “The Herky Jerk.” Tor and I were amused and wrote stories about her in our minds, recalling Eddie Murphy patronizing similar folx in the 90s. Suddenly, at 8 a.m. sharp, she stopped dancing and put on a jacket. Something shifted. But what?

Our not-so-tiny dancer left her bags at the corner and disappeared to an undisclosed location. After about five minutes we began to worry about her things, but we assuaged our fears by telling ourselves, “this was her territory,” and shrugged it off.

Just then, a houseless guy walked up to the dancer’s corner and began to sniff around her bags. As if by magic, another, houseless man tried to join our tailgate party of two and asked Tor and I if we would buy him a coffee. Tor said, “Sorry, but we can’t man. God bless.” The man responded in his thick Bahston accent, “Ahhhhh, I undahstand. Ecahnahmic times ah haahd right now.” And he’s right. I mean really, if we bought coffee for ALL the houseless people in Boston…then…we’d probably become one. Either that, or, all the houseless people in Boston would have coffee. While we marveled at the fact that an army of the downtrodden had descended upon the same intersection of Dorcester, the houseless guy who was eyeballing our dancer’s bags started going through them! Tor and I were pissed! How dare he?! We had developed an emotional attachment to her and felt the need to protect her. We couldn’t let this guy encroach on her corner, and even worse, steal from her!

As a concerned citizen, I did what any self-respecting human would do to take this would-be thief down: I took out my iPhone and started filming from a healthy distance.

As the presumed thief began picking through the dancer’s things, she resurfaced with a vengeance and a weapon. It’s tough living on the streets of Boston, where the only means of survival is to perform a circus act for a penny and pack a six-string for protection. She wielded that guitar like a viking his axe, thousands of years before her. This bitch meant business and we were there for it. Not physically mind you, but seated documentarily from afar. There was a heated exchange. We detected a hint of familiarity between them. Some yelling. Some resignation. And then…the would-be thief put down the bags and went on his way. Phew. We thought we were going to have to get up from our comfy spot sitting on the bumper of my mid-sized, all-wheel-drive vehicle and actually DO something.

This little micro-moment surprised us. Within an hour, our perception of this one individual went from judging this person as a drug-addicted, trick-turning, vagrant to being someone we cared enough to root for and protect, with certain boundaries such as not having to get up off of our actual asses. Our dancer, (maybe busker?), had changed our hearts and minds to a reality that this human being was a LOT of things, just like we were. Today we happened to be cowards, but there’s always tomorrow.

And then, I saw the discomfort wash over Tor’s face. “I’m going to go get that guy a cup of coffee,” he said with a conviction that would rival Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. My eyes teared-up with pride for the growlingly compassionate man I fell in love with. Those tears may have sprouted from pride or perimenopausal dry eye-ness, either way, I was crying. After a few minutes, my mighty man came bounding back to the car with the look of being unsatisfied. I asked, “Did you get him a coffee?” Tor replied, “No.” “Why?,” I asked wondering what could have possibly gone wrong with a cup of fucking coffee. “I went to the guy at the register and asked if he could just fill up my cup to give to the houseless guy out front and he said ‘no’. Then I pleaded with him and said, ‘Dude. Come on. We are all a heartbeat away from being there at any given moment,’ and then he said, ‘I already gave him coffee. And two donuts.’”

Hmmmm…we perceived this man’s situation as being in need of a first coffee of the day, when in reality he’d already had one + two donuts. Which got me wondering. What if our dancer actually STOLE the stuff she was protecting from the GUY who was looking through it, and HE was just trying to get HIS shit back?

We’ll never know.

On Reality…
My new take on Boston, and the only thing I know to be true in all of this, is that the houseless coffee guy was right about everything:

“Econahhmic times ahh haaahd.”

In Laughter,
LStL

p.s. THANK YOU to The Lacey List for unveiling the Mad Men clip! Iconic. One of the best moments in all of American television! Link to article below.

The Lost Art of the Physical Photograph