Today I went out to play a live fiddle set benefiting NoHo School Teachers & Other Jaycee Charities at the UCNH Jaycees Rockin’ Community Garage Sale. Most of the activism/fundraising work I do is within the GLBT community, so it’s always fun to step outside and work with non-GLBT groups, just for something different. Straight people are still enigmas to me on many basic levels… growing up so apart from “mainstream” society, with all sexuality discouraged, was not an auspicious start toward blending in. You can’t get much straighter than the military, which was my second stop after childhood, but somehow that experience was so formalized and isolated in its own way that it was like learning about chocolate by sipping its distilled essence from a beaker in a lab, rather than by sharing a Hershey bar with my cousin on a Halloween hayride.

Yes, yes, I am a woman who is attracted to men, so I am straight. But I’m straight like a Wisconsin-born person of Italian heritage who’s just moved to Rome is Italian. I don’t know the culture. I’m struggling to catch up. I blend in at first glance, but every day is a choice as to what parts of my old life vs. what parts of the new I want to claim.

My longtime Cal-pal Sarah was in charge of the event, and she asked me to do a 30 minute set along with several of her other musician friends. There were long tables set up with various donated goods for sale, and we plugged into a small sound system when our turn came. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough material to fill a 30 minute solo live set, since I mostly only play my fiddle for TV, film and stage roles nowadays and not as part of a band situation. But the time seemed to fly by, and before I knew it I was done.

Sarah is a beautiful and brilliant woman, and I stuck around for quite some time chatting with her, listening to the other musicians and browsing through the books on sale. I love going through donated books at swap meets and yard sales… there are always some weird ones in there. I ended up buying the sequel to “Wicked” for a dollar, since I had read the first one to great delight when it first came out. I’ve never seen the musical, by the way. I tend to not like musicals, except for “The Sound of Music” and maybe “Moulin Rouge”.

Then it was back home, back to work… as they say, a man’s work is from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done!

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