“Storyteller”: Yet Another Tribute to My Aunts & an Account For My Hope

Rod Stewart is one sexy man. This is, at least, what my aunts have conveyed to me over years of concert going, stage crashing, and radio blasting rides. Apparently, the only thing that compares to that dirty blonde rock and roll mane and those skin tight leopard pants, is a voice so raspy and soulful it “will steal your heart away.”

And while I wanted nothing more than to tag along with my mom and aunts, each of them icons of that oh-so-distantly-enchanted womanhood, the concerts were always waaay past my bedtime. So I perched on the edge of the bed as late as I could, watching them gussy up in a cloud of Hairnet and polka dot ensembles, as they convinced me that a dab of confidence was all one needed to storm the stage like a rock star. And dance with Rod, of course. Were You Tube around in the 80s, they would have video footage testifying to their stage-robbing fame and you would have no trouble imagining how enormously cool they really were. Whether boosting one another up from speakers to stage or demonstrating the art of applying liner before lipstick, they were, for me, always the main attraction.

And because Rod occupied a demi-god status in their musical world, he quickly became prophet in my own. Like the Book of Ecclesiastes, Rod Stewart’s Storyteller Collection supplied all the classic human drama and lyrical pith to choreograph a life around. From Rod, I learned to cast dangerously smooth lines like: “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on sugar, let me know,” a pick up fourth grade boys were entirely too young to handle, and I, far too innocent to actually mean.

But when I wasn’t on the playground, spreading lyrics I didn’t understand, I was meditating upon them in the secret of my upstairs dance studio (also known as the hallway.) Waves of afternoon sun refracted through our old fish tank, casting pools of emerald and gold across the carpet, where I waited, barefoot. Maggie Mae, an obvious choice for my opening number, had five full bars, twenty-six seconds, of mandolin solo—a perfect prelude for the delicate array of plies, pas de bourrees, and releves, I was then practicing. I wanted my toes to grace the floor as lightly as each note plucked, not yet knowing what this mirroring of form and content would be called. It was simply pre-verbal, and in that sense, the purest art I have ever performed.

I cannot tell you what happened during those afternoon improvisations, when I felt alive and nimble and utterly free. But even as I recollect them now, a warm presence washes over me, and I am left wondering what or who exactly I was dancing for. Did I lyrically inhabit the wide world of “downtown trains” and “motown records” as a child clunking around in her mom’s heels? Or was I claiming my own voice in a space of free interpretation? Could it have been all of these things, all kinds of imitation and originality, sliding back and forth, down the hall?

Such was the grip of the Storyteller record on my impressionable, young mind. And yet, it is a possession I have never cared to shake, because beyond girlish revelry, those songs also occasioned a brush with transcendence. In that light-soaked room, with the trill of the mandolin all around, I encountered what Kahlil Gibran calls “Life longing for itself,” an old presence quickening within me. And into this effortless communion I sunk, for unaccounted hours on end. It was the kind of purposeless engagement with the Other that mystics revel in. It was Rod Stewart hinting, or winking rather, at the elusive hem of a life I could barely touch. It was a self-forgetting prayer I would dance any day.