Dancing with Joy Harjo to Beyoncé
“Yes, that was me whirling on the dance floor. We made such a racket
with all that joy. I loved the whole world in that silly music.”
— Joy Harjo, “No”
I do not think Joy Harjo has ever met Beyoncé, but I have met Joy Harjo.
Dancing back when those gatherings put on 10pm parties open to all,
dancing in DC or Baltimore, Tampa or Portland, who knows at this point?
Was it “Single Ladies” that drew this great-grandmother to the banquet floor?
Def — it had to be “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
I knew the dance thanks to YouTube and Chris and Naheed.
I knew to roll my hips and work those sexy thighs because for years,
friends had helped me see myself on the dance floor:
Natasha’s living room; Mike’s bedroom; Jessie and Ben; countless bars.
It was during what I can only describe as the choo-choo trot –
the hitched up tri-step where the arms cut fast and firm –
when Joy joined the group and met me with the open-eyed wonder
of a five-year-old thrilled for the ball pit at McDonald's.
We clapped. We laughed. We snapped our palms front and back.
And I didn’t have to tell her how her words changed me. The permission
to love herself, to love yourself. To hold yourself —
which means to hold everyone on this dance floor.
And yes, that is a metaphor, and yes,
you must forgive my middle school awkwardness, the flare-up twee.
I am just so excited to be living this life with you,
I am so excited to be beautiful and free.
“Lord Knows”
Originally published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone (2017)
In a way, my grandmother Victoria knew me better than myself. She recalls when I was around seven years old and wanted to be a pastor. A lifelong Pentecostal, my grandmother fully supported this career move. She even bought me a tiny blue suit so I could look good while reciting Bible verses in the living room. We called it my “pastor suit.”
I loved and honored my grandma. I couldn’t imagine disappointing her. When I came out at sixteen, the one person I knew I’d never tell was my grandmother. One, because she couldn’t handle it, and two, because I couldn’t handle losing her.
Victoria’s righteous passion was well-known throughout Palmer, a small town in Alaska. You never quite knew what would stir her rage. Someone once asked why she kept playing the tambourine during slow songs at church, and she refused to look at the person again. When friends angered her, she cut them off. It didn’t matter if the friendship had lasted ten or twenty years. I learned about these breakups through casual conversation, usually long after the rupture.
“Grandma,” I’d ask her, “how’s Philip doing these days?”
“Lord knows,” she’d state.
This was code that their relationship was over, and so was the conversation.
During my first year of college, I knew I had to tell my grandmother. We couldn’t have a real relationship unless she knew about me being gay and how instrumental it was in shaping me.
Spring was starting, and I was walking around the campus green, thinking of ways to tell her. I took a rest beneath a large oak tree. I thought of calling her landline on the mountain, but my heart started racing, and I felt like throwing up. If I couldn’t think of the phone conversation without feeling dizzy, how would I act when it was time for me to tell her in real-time?
It hit me all at once that I’d send her a letter. My grandma was a prolific letter writer. In my first semester of college, she had already sent me seven letters. She preferred bulky, wide-ruled legal paper. She’d only write on one side of the paper and always with a red pen. She would fold the pages at least three times, shove the thick wad into an envelope, and seal it all up with tape.
I enjoyed these letters although I didn’t finish all of them. Her cursive was wildly ornate. It took her a long time to write like this, and by page three she got impatient, and the words looped together in a blur I couldn’t read. It didn’t matter. I already knew her great themes: love of God, family, and being good to your teachers. She supported each theme with a new Bible verse.
I tore out three pages from a journal and started to write. On the first page, I told her about the motivated kids I was meeting and all the smart professors. On the second page, I said I loved her, and I was grateful for her help in raising me. And on the final page, I wrote, “It’s because I love you that I feel the need to tell you I am gay. I’ve known this for a long time, and I want to tell you because I want to be honest and have no lies between us. I hope this doesn’t change anything between us.”
I tried to make everything light again by mentioning the spring weather and upcoming tennis try-outs. Then I folded the three pages like she did, three times, and squashed the pages into the back of my journal and walked to my next class. I couldn’t think clearly the next two days. I imagined Victoria sending me to a conversion camp. She might write back with all the Bible verses that supposedly hated gay people. Or knowing my preference for science, she might send me magazine clippings saying homosexuality made no evolutionary sense. The most probable reaction was also the worst: She would refuse to speak with me. When people asked how I was doing, she’d state drily, “Lord knows.”
Eventually, I dropped the letter into a mailbox right outside my dorm. It was early in the morning, and with nothing else in the mailbox, I heard the letter hit the metal floor. For a brief moment, I wanted the letter back. But then I decided—I would rather have true rejection than false acceptance.
A few weeks later, I received a brown, flat envelope from Victoria. I weighed the package in my palms; it was light. The envelope had her familiar red script. It couldn’t be a bomb, I thought. And I’m pretty sure they still scan for anthrax. Right?
I walked around the campus green again and sat beneath the oak tree where I had written the letter. My heart was pounding.
I ripped off the top binding like a Band-Aid. I tilted out the contents. My heart sank.
It was filled with photos. There I was on my fifth birthday with a bunch of cake on my face, smiling like crazy. There I was hitting a forehand at sixteen. There I was playing the trombone at thirteen. There were two dozen pictures with no explanation.
She no longer wanted to remember me. This was the first of a series of “Lord knows” statements regarding me.
I stuck my hand in the envelope again. My fingertips brushed a scrap of paper. I pulled it out. It was the size of a fortune-cookie scroll. In red coiled letters, it read: “Yo te amo mucho,
mucho.” I love you very, very much.
I laughed.
Under the oak tree, I flipped through more pictures. She saw me in each moment: spelling bees, band concerts, tennis tournaments. I shuffled them and felt her say, I loved you in this moment, and this moment, and this moment, and I love you now.
Tears swelled in my eyes. I had expected her to choose politics or religion, to find any reason to justify her disgust. But of all the things she could have said, she had chosen love.
Author’s Note: I wrote this essay as my MFA program in creative writing was wrapping up in early 2017. My abuela died on May 11th, 2016. She had helped raise me and was continually on my mind. When I heard that Chicken Soup for the Soul was looking for stories for a “Step Outside Your Comfort Zone” edition, I immediately remembered the unusual way I came out to her and my immense fear leading up to it.
I’m grateful to have watched this essay take on a life of its own. It was the first story about coming out published in the massively popular Chicken Soup series, which has rarely published anything LGBTQ+ related. While I’ve received some irksome comments, most reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. People have told me they hear their own grandmother in Victoria, recall their own struggles with the church, or feel a new commitment to show up for those who need their love.
Chicken Soup has re-published “Lord Knows” in several anthologies, and I hear that it is regularly taught in high schools and undergraduate courses. This means the world to me. My abuela and I used to read Chicken Soup stories to each other. Now we’re part of the anthology. And so are you.
❤️
Why I Am Missing Catherine O'Hara
Credit: NPR
When I first moved to New York in the fall of 2012, I worked the table of a yet-to-be-constructed Blink Fitness on 40th Street and Third Avenue. After taxes and transportation costs, I was making $6.20 an hour.
My job was to lock eyes with any unfortunate passerby, smile with the mortal power of a hypnotizing snake, and lure them into our storefront, which looked like a FEMA shelter. I’d tell them all about the promotion we were running – my hands circling like the Greatest Showman – and exhort them to act fast, for this promotion would end soon as the gym opened. When people asked to see the gym in progress, I replied that they would have to wear a hard hat and sign several waivers (no one went for this). When people asked how I could be so sure the gym would be great, I promised them, with all the wattage of my 22-year-old smile, that it would be worth it.
My favorite person from this job was a chap I’ll call William. William was 53 and something of a gentleman Peter Pan, his waifish years still visible in his elegant WASP frame. Since most actual New Yorkers were not dumb enough to work for $6.20 an hour, this outlet was often short-staffed, and William, a regional manager, would occasionally join me in the uninsulated foyer. Every day, he arrived with a different newspaper or magazine: The New York Times, The Hartford Courant, GQ. I asked him if he subscribed to any of these, and he laughed.
“Lord no, that would ruin the day’s surprise.”
Today, inspired in part by William, I decided to leave my apartment in Astoria to buy a fresh paper from a newsstand somewhere in Manhattan. The deeper impulse was that Catherine O’Hara died yesterday, and I wanted to commemorate her in some small, hopelessly consumerist way.
It’s a curious thing to mourn the death of a famous person. I first learned about the news around 1:30pm while working at home. My husband texted me from the opposite side of the work wall we share: “Omg Catherine O’Hara died??” I was just surfacing from a deep writing session and had vowed not to check my phone until that afternoon. I was all peaceful and feeling like myself when I checked my phone. In 20 seconds, I was distorted by a cascade of terrible headlines: more innocents murdered, more criminals growing in power. And now the death of Catherine O’Hara?
I replied: “is this real?”
For several moments, I hoped against all reason that it was a hoax, not unlike Moira Rose’s fake death report in Schitt’s Creek. But there was the NYT headline, dead at 71. I wrote my husband back: “No no no no no.”
When we’re deeply impacted by news, it’s only human to wish to share it, so I reposted the headline announcing her death, with a caption conveying my exact sentiment: “I regret checking my phone.”
The first responses mirrored my own: “NOOOO” and “nooo!!!” and “Nooooooooo.”
By the second hour, variations of the crying emoji.
By the third hour, swapping stories of comedy’s favorite mother. And today, memes of her Beetlejuice dance, her speech to Macaulay Culkin, responding to a fan at the airport who asked what role she’d like be remembered for: “Mother of my children.”
What gets me is the initial, visceral response so many of us had to the news of Catherine O’Hara’s passing. Many of us said — No. What a testament to the impact she had on others. When an artist helps trace the full amplitude of our humanity, their presence and vision cannot be forgotten.
And that No — just what were we railing against?
Catherine once told Variety: “There’s no better survival instinct. You’re so lucky if you’re raised with it. It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light. You gotta look for the light.”
That’s what we are missing right now, that comic grin toward the light. Catherine understood that all we can do is make our tiny corner of the universe a little more beautiful. That’s how I’ll remember her. That’s why so many people (Seth Rogan, Pedro Pascal) reach for the word “lucky” when describing their relationship to her comic genius. That message of finding beauty and happiness in whatever small plot of land you find yourself on — what a gift.
***
The McNally Jackson at 47th Street did not carry The New York Times. The Barnes and Noble at 45th Street no longer sells newspapers. I asked a newsstand on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue if they sold newspapers. The newsstand on 42nd and Madison suggested Grand Central.
What a crazy time we’re living in. Newsstands no longer offer the news.
I found myself feeling sorry for William from Blink Fitness, who, if he still called New York home, would be in his mid-60s.
***
Another reason why O’Hara’s passing feels like such a gut punch is that it connects to all the goodness we’ve been shown and the ones who gave it: mothers, teachers, guardians, friends. The singer Michael Bublé wrote, “She made the world laugh, but she also made people feel seen.” Her passing is like a hit to the limbic system, that memory factory in the brain that stores the hippocampus and influences emotion. The limbic system is like a wind chime: a hit to one tube will inevitably produce vibrations through the neighboring chimes.
O’Hara embodied a stanza from “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
In all the roles I know her from – The Studio, Schitt’s Creek, Beetlejuice, Home Alone, Best in Show – she was the one who smiled back. And I cannot think of Catherine O’Hara without remembering eating popcorn with my abuela and watching Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, or cackling at Best in Show with my mother, and the DVD copy I failed to return to the library for nearly a year.
Each of them is gone now. Of course, their memory lives on through me. My mother and abuela remain as vivid to me as Catherine O’Hara screaming “KEVIN.”
***
It does feel like the end of an era. My friends in their 50s grew up with SCTV (Second City Television). Because of Catherine, they became actors, writers, directors. As a millennial, she was a comic force, yes, but also a stabilizing one; she was Kate McCallister walking through the Plaza back when a deranged narcissist was a passing joke and not hijacking the White House. When people reacted to O’Hara’s death with This can’t be real, they were also talking about America’s fall to autocracy, a new society where humans are expendable, judges and journalists are arrested for doing their jobs, citizens are murdered for protesting blatant abuse of force, and five-year-olds are used by masked vigilantes as “bait.” It can’t be real. Not in this moment. Not when we clearly need more joy.
Catherine O’Hara’s death is difficult to process because it coincides with the growth of a new society eager to deploy fascist politics. Words have been robbed of meaning. Lies are the norm. Newsstands no longer sell newspapers.
***
I did end up finding a copy of The New York Times in Grand Central Station. I imagine that I don’t have to tell you how depressing it was to discover that the only place I could buy an obituary of Catherine O’Hara was at Hudson News. Like these outlets, Hudson News was bright and depersonalized, a space interchangeable at any airport or train station around the world. It felt like a militarized zone, which was especially true at Grand Central, where military personnel routinely roam its tunnels. There was no bodega cat. Any fresh book or paper smell had been sterilized. It struck me then that I no longer had access to an old habit of life — the simple, spontaneous choice to buy a newspaper.
I have yet another twist for you: I did not buy a copy of The Times today. The front page was of an FBI raid in Atlanta, part of Trump’s attempt to claim the 2020 election was “stolen” — a front page I do not need to commemorate. O’Hara did make the front page, but the bottom centerfold, and that is simply not how we should remember a queen.
So, after all this walking, I didn’t find a cover memorializing Catherine O’Hara (or at least one I could stomach). I flipped through some Harvard Business Review books, was tempted by Bad Bunny on People, then thought I could purchase some collectible about her life from US Weekly whenever that comes out. Somewhat at peace with this brave new world, I left. But not before buying a $5 copy of Financial Times because I like the off-pink color and they had an essay by Marilynne Robinson.
Of course, you would be right to criticize me for patronizing FT. For not giving the $5 instead to an unhoused person I passed in the subway, to buying paper at all when the world is on fire, for not donating that money to any candidate who can resist fascism, for giving money to a chain bookstore rather than an independent, for using the self-checkout aisle instead of the clerk, for supporting a business-oriented magazine that is probably not much better than The Post. I criticize myself constantly, even as I continue to live in my own fucked up, assertively non-saint-like way.
Many of O’Hara’s characters were, by turns, wicked, hilarious, compassionate, self-aggrandizing, keen, mean, and surprising. I think we found relief in them because they saw our complexity; their examples allowed us to be our joyful, ribald, clueless, courageous selves. They seemed to hold that the world is messy, and we are no different.
I will miss knowing that a star like Catherine O’Hara is alive in this world. But like millions of others, I am grateful for the world she gave us. She made us laugh. She made us smile.