Tuesday Talk
 

November 29, 2011

Lisa Huang & Megan Cunnane

To listen to Lisa's Tuesday Talk - click the play button...

 

There’s a method to the madness.

We’ve been going through the college process and, among many others things, we’ve realized that we’ve never thought about ourselves so much. It’s pretty egotistical, but literally everything we touch, read, smell, taste and do is pressed up against the thought of college and yours truly.

We’ve never really had to do something like this before: think and write all about ourselves, our future, and what sets us apart from the other millions of students doing the exact same thing.

You can understand, now, when we say we needed to get away from ourselves.

This Thanksgiving Break when we found ourselves sitting in Palace Theater, at 1564 Broadway, watching the famous musical Priscilla (which is, by the way, about a trio of Australian drag queens) we thought of something. We remembered Mr. Williams’ advice from the end of last year—he told us to quote, “get lost.” And we decided, right there, that New York would be the place where we lost ourselves.

To do this, we would have to adopt some new characteristics, or personas. First things first, we spent a few hours walking through the crowded streets of Times Square, researching.

Lisa decided she would embody her inner New York hipster. She bought a worn out rucksack and a brown leather bound journal, which she carried in her hand so that, at any moment, she could sit down and paint something. She also drew, on her arms, very subtle tattoos. To make her hipster more New York, she bought a shirt that said, “I can’t afford to heart New York” and cursed at banks whenever we passed them.

Megan decided to be Blaire Waldorf, or, rather, the typical private school New York teenager, immersed in high fashion and a trust fund--(she was the 1%.) She dressed herself in a red Prada coat, heels from Milan and stockings from Saks Fifth Avenue. She also held a Chanel bag, which brought out the color of her lipstick, and doused herself in a bottle of Chanel No.8. None this, of course, was real. (Thank god for Chinatown) She also made it very obvious she was extremely disapproving of my style. Rude.

Now that we looked the part, we had to actually do something radical. This something, we decided, would first be to find a roof. We thought that the beautiful New York landscape would inspire something in us that was completely different from anything we had felt while up here, on the Mesa. Plus the search itself would most definitely lead us through small, side adventures.

But we had a problem. Megan had spent most of her money on her new apparel and Lisa had forgotten to call Montecito and Trust to tell them she would be in NY, so they shut down her debit card. We were too broke to do anything we wanted to, like buy our way onto a roof.

But New York is the city of opportunity, especially for the musically talented. I mean, have you ever been on a subway station and heard the gentle (and sometimes cacophony) melodies of bearded drunk men? We have. And New York, we decided, was about to hear some of our personal sound.

Unfortunately, we didn’t come prepared. Though majestic, our voices could not stand-alone. Feeling slightly defeated, we walked and walked until we stumbled upon an old ethnic homeless guy with a grocery store shopping cart. It was pretty chilly out and the man wrapped himself in red plastic bags for insulation. He also had shades on. Pink sparkly ones. He stopped us in our tracks. Yet it wasn’t his peculiar appearance that intrigued us, we stopped because he was playing the cello. Now we don’t play the cello, but we remembered our empty pockets and useless debit cards, and figured maybe we could learn.

So we stole it.

Thank God he was blind. Cause boy did we make a quick get-a-way. We made our way to the 86th Street metro station. Lisa began full-frontally plucking the cello while I sang. We played for five hours and ended up with a burrito, five sweetango apples, a mini Thomas the Engine train set, an Archaic Kouros, wet socks, a strawberry blond wig, and three dollars and a 157 cents. We were ready to rock and roll.

First stop, the Bowery Ballroom, a venue for the hippest indie-rock bands. It was a five hour walk (because four dollars wasn’t enough for the subway) but no big. If we conquered the Kern, we could definitely carry everything across Manhattan. Unfortunately, the 1.84 meter marble Kouros proved to be slightly cumbersome, so we decided to give it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on our way down.

Anyways, at the Bowery Ballroom, we saw this band called the Flaming Red Lips of Alien Intelligence. They were amazing.

To say that their sound lifted us off the ground would be misleading—it rather carved the floor beneath us out of the earth and let it drift past layers and layers of dimensions. The space now growing between the cheap carpet beneath us and the earth we left behind was a surging and twirling knot of realities. With every beat, every nod of the singer’s head, every fluid movement of the audience, and in every reality that we swelled past, we experienced different versions of ourselves. Our skin would loosen, tighten, snap, our eyes would run wildly over the faces around us—our thoughts would flicker through languages and our minds would reel through memories that we could never remember remembering. And when the band introduced their last song, we turned to the back of the room as if every version of ourselves was waiting on the wall and we could walk right up and choose which one we wanted to live with for the rest of our lives.

When they finished playing their set, The Flaming Red Lips of Alien Intelligence approached us.

We told them about our plan to see the city skyline on a roof. Turns out, they were planning on doing the same thing. They told us the best way to get to a good roof would be to skydive into one. After all, most roofs in New York are inaccessible from the streets to keep the suicidal rate low.

Because the Empire State Building would just be cliché, we decided to skydive off the Rockefeller viewing platform. However, the band only had enough skydiving kits for their own members, so we had to come up with our own. We knew from experience that homeless men are in possession of countless plastic bags, and plastic bags make good parachutes. So, in exchange for Megan’s fake Prada coat, we found a man to give us a cart-full of red plastic bags. We tied them together and scaled the side of the Rockafellar building, which is only a little bit harder than teacups.

As we stood on the platform, the excruciating cold wind blew our hair into braids. We had to jump quickly.

So with our feet perched on the edge of the building and our tightly braided hair drifting to the vigorous sway of the wind, we took a deep breath and jumped. And in what felt like terminal velocity, we cascaded into the fairy light city. The open sky seemed to cradle us between the stars and the lights, merging us with the clouds. A flock of pigeons flew by and we spread our plastic bags wings, shrilling the coo-coo with the majestic birds. For a moment our souls began to warp and merge with those of the pigeons. We could hear the mélange of our souls, those of two creatures, generations apart. And when the birds flew away, an electrified zing sparkled along our spine as our connection was severed. We re-directed ourselves towards the best looking roof in Manhattan.

So we land on the roof.

This is when things really get weird, and you might not believe what we are about to tell you. But it’s all true.

The band was waiting for us in the center of the roof. They had surrounded themselves with the skeletons of bull heads on sticks. They each held a lit candle, but the weird thing was there weren’t any candles for us.

Instead, there was a strange, metal box--big enough for two people--sitting directly underneath a fast approaching saucer. The band’s eyes started to shine with a hint of green.

We started running.

For a few minutes, the band chased us in circles, a cat-and-mouse chase, if you will.

When the band started slowing down, Lisa and I still in full throttle, a flock of whiteness started to fly towards us.

At this point, we were unsure of what was reality and our own imaginations. It was a freeing feeling, though, because we were as far away from ourselves as possible. As high school seniors, we hardly get the opportunity to imagine. Everything we do now is an effort to shape our future or our understanding of the real world. But this moment, running from crazed musicians towards a blur of what looked like pigeons, helped us remember the times we allowed our imagination to run wild.

It goes without saying that the best memories of my childhood were the moments I played pretend with my sister. Our bedroom used to be like a Hollywood movie set--we often transformed it into a variety of random scenes like mansions, islands, or pet stores. One time, with the help of our cousins, we turned our bedroom into a carnival. We set up games, drew raffle tickets, and made popcorn, inviting our parents to come play in our world of disbelief. As we grew older, my sister started saying no to my pleas of reviving the game. I found myself playing, alone, with Barbie and her plastic kitchen, until one day, I, too, walked away from the world of pretend, something I regret throwing away.

When I lived in Uganda, I loved my house. It was kind of beaten up—water stains, cracked windows, the like—but the front yard was amazing. The yard was a huge, deep green, rolling hill that stretched from the street to our front door, dotted with rocks and ferns and occasional dips in the earth. A dark tar driveway curled through it and most of the time a flock of black open billed storks would scramble by its side. The whole scene was just begging for exploration, and that’s exactly what I did for three years. The driveway was a river and the corner farthest from the gate was my “village.” But I don’t care so much about these memories because of the stories I imagined—I care for them because I miss being able to shrug off who I am for as long as a day and do something completely disconnected from any type of consequence. I care for them because they represent the liveliest time of my imagination, and I don’t remember really ever being upset.

We’re not going to tell you the rest of the story--and we mean the one on the roof with the pigeons. But by now you could probably use your own imagination.