A guitar. A ukulele. A strap on harmonica. And a piano with sticky note reminders.
Sunday night couldn’t have been planned better with 50 people sitting around a stage, a stage all to ourselves to laugh and cry and joke and sing and make mistakes.
Humans are crazy. I critique and analyze them and their thoughts for my job. But the music let me step back and listen to someone for an hour and half with no judgment.
Antje Duvekot was the happiest person to be around. In jeans she made herself and a guitar she “exploded†her wallet over I was impressed with how much she loved what she does. Sure she has the company of a GPS and knows only crowds of strangers, but sometimes that’s all you need to make a moment special. Her voice was sweet and intentioned, every note seemed emotional and every broken note reminded me of how human she was. I forget that music is meant to be imperfection.
Imperfect because the world is terrible.
What better way to cope than to make beautiful, folky music? She whispered and belted about Kerouac, hippies, commies, peyote, and her friend–a.k.a. the dreams I have of my future as I find myself (because we all have to do it) out on the road. She sang about scenes she drove by, feelings she had about war, and her unwanted agnosticism.
I’ll be honest, at first I thought about writing this column about social identities and privilege and how they project on our view of the world. That would have been a crime. For all she did was to bear her soul and her memories for me. 15 dollars is worth learning about a human in a way that I doubt I know some of my friends.
And the crazy part was that it wasn’t just me learning about her. The old man, two rows beside, me was there too. There was even a child across the stage from me! Students. Adults. Teachers. Friends. Spouses. Couples. Friends. Granted I think we all hailed from very similar situations and our whiteness could’ve been compared to the Crayola crayon labeled “milk,†but it was so refreshing to be surrounded not just by 20-somethings.
The show ended and the encore came and went. I packed up my belongings and my friend and I headed the wrong way out the door. SHE WALKED BY US. Smiled and thanked us for being there, she walked to greet the rest of the crowd and waved goodbye as we left her life to return to our own.
The Ark is a great place to get some perspective. When I fret about an impossible midterm about boring English empiricist philosophy and over a paper on gender and distance and work and waking up early and going to bed late and running out of coffee and money and food and friends and breath and forgetting pesky commas and pondering on Toni Morrison I will know that last Sunday I got to feel again. “Oh, that’s what it’s like to be a human.â€
And even if I’m pushed back on the Merry Go Round, I’ll have more balance now.
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