What Lies Beneath

Vanity thy name is...okay I had to come up with something

What if you could get back something from your youth - not a dear friend or pet; an old favorite sweater — but a personal attribute you miss? Say good old Satan reached out of your Airpods in the form of a podcast and told you about some magic serum that would let you have just one thing back…

If I was allowed to zero in and choose a feature that was kind of nice, I’d get back my young legs. Slim, toned; unveined - I miss those legs. I miss wearing shorts and short skirts. I wish I’d appreciated what I had when I had it, instead of focusing on the things that were wrong with me. But life moves on and at least the legs still work well— they still carry me, are still reasonably strong. They’re not terrible, just not what they were. In the not too distant future I’ll probably reach a point where I just say fuck it who cares, and wear shorts again when it’s hot enough.. because when I look back from another twenty years I’ll think hell those 65 year old legs weren’t bad at all.

Best to work with what we still have. So not long ago I made a deal with the devil to regain…my eyebrows. It wasn’t really the devil but one of my fave podcasts, Everything Is Fine, the podcast for women over forty. That’s 40, not 60. Looking back to forty I see the bloom of, if not youth, then the plateau of fulsome womanhood. Yet I was convinced I was over the hill, wrote songs about it! Forty to fifty-something, baby you may not believe it but take it from me you’ve got it all happening.

Yet - I wouldn’t want to go back! I feel happier now in a lot of ways. But - when I heard the ladies on the podcast talking about NeuBrow, the serum that would help your brows come back, I thought wow that would save me so much time. I felt like precious minutes of my life were spent every morning trying to lightly sketch in what time had taken away.

I was never known for my brows. Who, that isn’t the Gallagher brothers or Brooke Shields, really is? Most people have never seen my brows! My hairstyle —bangs, always (see this song from my new record) —pretty much covers them up. But I knew they were there, and when they faded with time, from overplucking in the seventies, eighties and nineties , well I missed them. Brows give definition to your face. The more they faded the more I wished I could get them back, like my eyelashes that I destroyed with false lashes and glue. I’ve tried tinting, til there was not enough left to tint. I shyed away from microblading, but have heard some women swear by it. Too intense for me but NeuBrow - why not, I thought. I’ll give it a shot!

Spent the bucks, brushed on the clear gel and waited. Weeks went by and it didn’t seem to be working, but I’d shelled out the $ so kept at it. Then one morning I went to wash my face and that kid who played Eddie Munster was looking back at me from the mirror. Like Homer Simpson after Dimoxinil, “I have eyebrows! I have eyebrows!” I didn’t shout, just felt…stunned.

I didn’t exactly want to run down the street like Homer - I don’t even remember which street, or town; which mirror I was looking in (it’s been hard to keep track this summer) I didn’t want to be like Homer and greet the dawn with all the other NeuBrow users, but I was kind of amazed. The shit works.

BUT. These brows are just not in my control any more. They grew in black. How? Yes, my mom was Italian. She had fierce dark brows - when angry she looked like Leslie Caron crossed with Ernest Borgnine. But my dad was Irish and maybe cause he stuck around a few decades longer than my mother, I’ve seen myself taking way more after him. Paler for sure.

So these dark brows just feel weird. After years of brushing, stippling, pencilling, I was getting out tweezers, balancing glasses on my nose to try and pluck and diminish what I’d only just invited into my life. With brows this fierce, how could the rest of me possibly compete? It’s been a shock every morning to see so much punctuation on my face. Only by putting on loads of eye makeup did I feel like the rest of my face could compete. The brows have started running my life!

I backed off the serum a little and then stopped completely. They say you have to keep using the stuff or you’ll go back to how you were before. I welcome that idea! I can’t live up to these brows.

Yet I can’t help but feel amazed, heartened even. If the brows of somebody’s youth lurk below the surface, what else is still inside me? Inside all of us are vestiges of our past selves or even selves we never knew were there. Maybe it just takes the right magic wand to bring it back.

The darkness has been dialing back a bit, and thank god for bangs. Oh yes, that’s our new kitchen/front window.

In case you missed it, in case I haven’t done enough to spread the word: I have a new album out. I guess you could say there’ve been times I haven’t been sure I still have that in me - the gusto, the voice inside that says oh come on, go for it. You know you want to! You know you NEED to! Not to say I’ve felt like giving up but - the longer it takes to push that boulder up the hill, the taller the hill seems to grow. I’ve taken easier routes to gratification the past few years - Substack or Bandcamp, putting some writing out there or a rough track. The coordination of a full-on release begins to seem daunting but also like the very thing that’s been missing: sequencing tracks, taking photos, making videos and posters; booking gigs. Remembering to pick up the guitar and play and sing, to be ready for all these gigs; reminding myself that isn’t playing music the whole point?

That cycle: write songs, record an album, get out and tour then write more songs, record an album so I can get out and tour— has been my life for decades now. Maybe the world in general has moved on but for some of us, it’s ingrained as New Year’s follows Christmas that comes after Thanksgiving. There’s comfort in the cycle. You’ve got a job to do even if the shape the work will take isn’t exactly clear. God, do I sound like someone who keeps showing up at an office they let them keep cause it’s easier than telling them they’ve been made redundant? I still want to do my job.

I’m glad I have the Tapete label to work with this time, they’ve kept me on track, working to a schedule. Just like I’ve been lucky to have Eric in the studio, saying “look you need to show up. This record won’t make itself!” There’s no magic serum that you brush on to bring it all together. The record came out Friday, have I slacked off too much after a strong start and it’ll be forgotten by next week? Did I burn people out posting too often about this single, that video? The touring hasn’t even started yet. Hope I can keep the momentum going, and the energy up. I feel kind of exhausted today and under the weather.  Did I forget to answer this email or thank kind friends for sharing or writing a review, playing a track; doing an interview?

Thinking back to when my first album came out - did I thank anyone, or did I just take it all as my due? Forget NeuBrow, sometimes a time machine is in order! Let me go back and be grateful. Since I can’t do that, let me appreciate every moment along the way now. When I look in the mirror, when i’ve stopped being freaked out by these dark brows which are thankfully diminishing by the day, let me just see a person doing the best they can with what they have. Happy to have another shot at putting work out into the world.

And thankful for the bangs. They really do give me something to hide behind. Note to self, make a video for the Bangs song. It can’t hurt, right?