Jenny’s Gold Dress and the Persistence of Art

Very blurry Jenny Lewis at The Met Philly, October 26, 2019

The world seems to be ending in a million ways. The Getty, which seemed as eternal as any place I’ve ever been, might burn down. I spend time worrying about the denizens of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, many of whom are probably long dead. In the grand scheme of things, there’s not THAT MUCH I can do for Kamala Harris or Greta Thunberg. And Yet.

We see the dress before the lights come up, a movement more than a color, a reflection of every kind of light, but unerringly, unceasingly gold. So many different kinds of gold. Gold in every light, heating up to pink or cooling to silver-edged shimmer, but always, always ALWAYS, gold, gold, gold.

This whole situation, this band, this stage, these multicolored neon landlines, this fancy new-fashioned chandelier, this rosemary-flavored hard seltzer, it all seems like a miracle to me. Like, how does anyone do anything? How does any driver ever make it where they’re going, never mind the logistics of this whole show?

And yet, this perfect gift, the actual prettiest person with her benediction of a voice. Somehow, out of all the world’s chaos, art. Solid, still, shimmering. It’s why I visit the Hope Diamond after the scariest protests, why I need to document nearly every flower. It’s important to take it all in, to honor it, to metabolize it into something new. This beauty, these perfect notes, this gold dress, this lifetime I’m in the middle of living.

I sat in the balcony with my cool cousin-in-law and her very ladylike friends, thinking yep, this is femme, and also thinking of the nearly 20 years since Rilo Kiley became my favorite band, my favorite almost-anything.

Though married then, I lived on a shifting sand of crushes, heartbreaks, and meltdowns. I played songs from beloveds’ MySpace pages to be close to them a little, watching a little blinking star near the cursor—I’m here, I’m someone, I’m someone else, I’m here in the world with you.

Though it seems like hometown, family, and true love would have stabilized me, would have made me feel safe, I was in a constant fight with the world to see if I belonged here, convinced that everything from closet-mold to weather was a personalized indication that the world was trying to push me out, that I would never be welcome anywhere.

I cried in the spring because I worried that I wasn’t looking at the lilacs enough. I cried in the summer if it wasn’t warm enough to go to the lake. I ate big salads with Amy on Sundays, read the paper, did the crossword, went over to our best friend Marc’s apartment to watch the Simpsons. I was in love with him too, and eventually that made us not friends, which could be the title of my memoir.

Since then, I’ve lost so much, but, miracle and meds, I’ve learned attachment. I’ve learned to (in my own extremely guarded way) belong in the world. My friendship with Amy is a stronger foundation than marriage ever could’ve been, a pedestal as important to me as the Statue of Liberty’s base. I feel, in some sense, permanent, though still glimmering, ridiculous, unsure.

Jenny’s voice and her gold dress plugged me back into something unbalancing though, and utterly vital. The way a cute guy or a good flower or a beautiful/sad documentary can grab me by the chin and face my attention in the right direction, toward my most central truth: art persists. There never wasn’t this ballroom, this flower, this gold dress.

And with that reminder, yearning comes back. Yearning to be solid and quiet and loved but also to be knocked off balance by the sheer force of gorgeousness, yearning for every destabilizing and grounding reminder that I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.