Well. Where to start…again. It has been a loooong January and dark night. But I am not finished here. I am she who shall not be defeated. Any one who has known me for any time has heard or read me say again and again: “Remember, it will be the artists who save us.” My soul knows it is true.

And so I shall return to my youth for inspiration. I was raised in a musical family, beginning with my grandparents and aunts and uncles. My father and sister played piano, my mother the guitar. My southern Mimi could shake the tambourine so fast you only saw a blur at her hip. They all sang and danced. I was the least talented musically, but I could draw and paint anything before I could write. I won a dictionary for my copy of Rembrandt’s Young Woman at an Open Half-Door in the Detroit News Scholastic Art Awards when I was in the fifth grade. This is not to brag, but to inform you that art and music run in my blood. And so when I am struggling in any way, it is art and music that inevitably pulls me out of the abyss. I believe that is a universal truth for us all.

I entered high school in 1968. By this time I was already sick with ulcers, depressed and fed up with the dysfunction of my family. I had no idea. No idea what I was dealing with; that would take a lifetime of undoing. It was the height of the British invasion in the music scene and Detroit was the center of it. Hollowed out historic old theaters soon became the Grande Ballroom and the Eastown, offering stage side seats for $5. every Friday and Saturday night. It was my salvation.

Unbeknownst to me I was so old so young. Retrospect being what it is, I now understand that I assumed the role of parent in my family somewhere around the age of 10. I was already functioning as caretaker of my four younger siblings. I was tucking my parents in when they got home from the bar in the early morning hours and making breakfast and doing the laundry and getting the kids off to school. I had no choice. Were you to look at any of my yearly school pictures from junior high on, they would scare you shitless. You would think you were looking at a woman in her 30’s. Perhaps like Benjamin Button I have aged backwards.

The Vietnam war was being televised nightly. I watched my beloved Detroit burn in the riots of 1967, school having been cancelled because of it. College students were being shot down by police. I remember well the day Kennedy was shot (I was in the 3rd grade). And then his brother. And Martin Luther King. My father kept loaded guns at the doors and we all had a bug out bag on the boat, ready to flee to Canada if the war outside came to our front door. The world was on fire.

There was no peace, no solace, no safety – at home, or in the world. I remember being eleven or twelve and thinking, “what is wrong with this planet?! Are these people insane?!” I am a product of chaos. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was made for a time such as this. Day of judgement, God is calling…