Episode Details

“Always be on time—especially in New York.”

The words rang around in my head like a lesson— a lesson I had learned in high school, coming from theatre.

“If you're not 15 minutes early, you're late.” I regurgitated--something I honestly had stood by in all my years with it— my high school theatre teacher, Andy, probably my favorite teacher ever, if not a close second to my middle school English teacher, Mrs. Davis, or even a tie for first, since they came from different eras in my school years. Of course, my next favorite, Mr. Tucker, my middle school music teacher—a multi- instrumentalist and expert—some of the only happy blue eyes I had ever known— who had seen something musically gifted in me, and would at random pull me aside and stuck a new instrument in my hands, instructing me to play. I had enamored him with drums, playing out a copycat pattern by ear after watching it once, and seemed to continue to amaze him as I quickly repeated tunes or improvised on the guitar, bass, and clarinet—and though I had wanted to play in the drum line—with the cool kids who often bullied me, hoping desperate somehow to mix—he insisted that I take band, first playing saxophone, and then switching to trumpet, for my adaptability and ear for harmonies—I wanted of course to play first trumpet, but was assigned to the contrasting harmonies of second trumpet— also eventually joining the drum line, where of course I was still bullied and competed for the best-fitting harness, which would keep my Quads at waist level instead of around my hips—my body, then, now looking back, that of a stout young woman—I was maybe 5'2, with double -G breasts and no bavksidevworth mentioning-I was more wide than round at the rear with thugs, but no hips to accentuate—and though my body was strange for that of a middle school girl, leaving me miserable and disproportionate, compared to the white, frail and thin Mormon girls—and the long haired, pretty faced latinas— the only blac at school besides a couple of Mormon kids—who has a white mother, who had been abandoned by their obviously very black father at or near birth, as they were a couple grades apart—and besides actually knowing it, you wouldn't have known they were white at all. The girl, who was in my grade, might have been about 6ft tall by middle school, and her hair always disheveled and unkempt— which didn't seem to bother her white, Mormon friends—the popular girls who made my life miserable enough, and though she herself was for the most part neutral, her high status in the pecking order had been long established. The town was split into two by both class, which equated to race and religion—a Mormon establishment, the deeply rooted white and wealthy, conservative Mormons had huge houses on one side of the freeway—the lower-class, casino working Mexican immigrants and their l first generation children on the other side of the freeway; this was the place I had learned to hate myself the most, a foundation first implemented at home, and then fortified at school— where my skin was too dark, my hair was strange, though always well done— and my ill-fitting clothes, mostly boys clothes, as my mother had become impatient with attempting to find “cute” or pretty clothes, and the American obesity epidemic had not yet grown to the norm; plus sized clothes were expensive and hard to find—and so without being said, middle school was harder than it had to be for several reasons—but it was also the first place I had been called or considered a “genius”, at least musically. I had always excelled in academics, at least until middle school, where my life became dark and I first realized that my body was strange and unwanted.

Fast forward to now, a 30-year-old loser sitting in the Manhattan glass office of a Sales professional and her counterpart, whose distaste in my apparel I could feel just sitting there— I quivered and became nervous, trying to hide my unmanicured