Show Your Ink

"Show Your Love" was always my favorite Katie Reider song. It's Katie at her best - effusive and poppy, yet concealing a good deal of complexity in a lyric so simple. "Show your love." Is it a call to open pride, as I heard it the first time I saw her perform at a Pride event? Or is it a simple, romantic lyric, aimed at mainstream radio? Or is it an expression of Katie's strong Christian ethic? My guess is the answer to all three is a resounding yes. I've put it on many a mix CD.

Still, when I first heard it, nearly ten years ago, I never expected it to be the inspiration for my first tattoo.

But who saw any of the last decade coming?

I first saw Katie at the 2001 Rockin' in the Streets event, Friday night of Pride - my first Pride - opening for the singer songwriter I was most listening to at the time, Melissa Ferrick. Katie could aptly be described as the anti-Ferrick; Ferrick is the poet of generalized anxiety disorder, angsty, breaking guitar strings every set with the ferocity of her panic. I was enthralled by someone who so clearly spoke my language.

Katie, beaming from the parking lot stage, lighting up the crisp June night, made me want to learn a new one. I've never seen a performer so full of life. I don't expect to.

The version of "Show Your Love" that I have now is from her prophetically-titled live album, No Retakes. She starts off enjoining the crowd to clap along and shake their booties, then teases her brother, then a part of the band, about shaking his booty (which my unconscious just typed as his "beauty," something I suspect Katie would love), before launching the song. Near the end, she and Robbie playfully chant the title back and forth, almost scatting it as they go. Infectious joy. That's Katie Reider's legacy.

In 2004, Katie was giving a concert on my birthday, and Al & Liz conspired to take me. We'd gone to dinner first, and it had been sort of awkward, in the way that birthdays can be, when everyone wants to show you they love you in their own way and the collective can't quite get it together, when friends who don't know each other all that well are trying to negotiate splitting the bill. We were late, and the bar was so full, they wouldn't let us in for fear of violating the fire code. We lingered outside, Katie's music wafting out each time the door opened. Finally, after some smokers wandered out, the woman at the door said they could let in two. I didn't feel like making a choice - or, frankly, being shoved against the back wall of Summit Station by the crowd - and so we went home. Gave up on the good life, on making things work. Tragic foreshadowing.

It was the last time I heard Katie's voice live.

In 2007, my world came crashing down. And that was before Liz - who, I was slowly beginning to realize, could no longer the center of my world - was raped, before I butted up against the hard wall of what I could and couldn't do for her in her recovery. I'd never had more than a couple cocktails in my life, but the weekend after the rape - which happened to be Pride weekend, six years after the one where I'd first seen Katie - I drank until I couldn't feel anymore for the first time. Which was amazing. I still remember standing outside of East Village, about four a.m. Sunday, suddenly hearing myself ramble on about Columbus city council and realizing I wasn't thinking about the girl in pain on the other end of High Street...It was probably the first time I hadn't thought about her in five years.

For the next six months or so, I drank a lot. Not a lot by gay bar standards, not enough to truly endanger my health - though I have to confess that I stupidly drove home buzzed a time or two - but more than I ever had or ever will again. And I spent each night in gay bars, trying to feel community, pride, love, acceptance...I needed it so desperately. The gay bar scene, as much as it put me in the path of risky behavior as well, helped save my life in those months. And at some point in those months, I heard that Katie Reider was sick.

"Are you at least going to come out to see me perform at the Katie Reider benefit this weekend?" asked Deb, whose performance I somehow always manage to miss without meaning to.

"What's the benefit for?" I asked, assuming Katie was headlining a benefit for some worthy cause.

"Katie Reider."

"Wait, what?"

I was drunk, and as Deb recounted the bizarre turns of Katie's cancer, I couldn't believe it. Katie Reider was the picture of healthy in all senses to me. Beautiful face, voice, life, exuding brillance and love. I was incredulous. "You're honestly telling me Katie Reider's face is falling off?"

Just. Not. Possible.

And then, in July 2008, when my crashing had finally ended, and I was looking around at the rubble, thinking about rebuilding, the news - again from Deb, by text. I went to the gathering the night of her passing at Goodale Park, but I didn't know Katie personally. I didn't speak; I didn't stay the whole time. I wandered away, instead, to the parking lot where I'd first seen her, imagined her there again, beaming.

Show. Your. Love.

At the time, I had my first tattoo, the I-survived-losing-Liz (and also a couple jobs and a lot of self-respect) tattoo, all picked out in my head. It was a quote from Nietzsche, which now adorns my bedroom wall: "What is the seal of freedom? To be unashamed before oneself." I'd felt ashamed a lot during the Liz years, usually for reasons that long pre-dated her, but you know, these things tend to jumble. I wandered into a few tattoo shops, got quoted prices that I, with only a part-time job & no immediate prospects, couldn't, even in my haze, even in my highly impulsive state, stomach. By the time I had the cash, it no longer seemed like the thing I needed to remind myself to do. And it seemed long, clunky, a little self-righteous. Nietzsche. I grew up on Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is not where I am anymore. I want something simpler...and yet at the same time, more complex.



Meanwhile, Katie's widow, Karen, started blogging about her grief. (Read the posts from beginning to end. Seriously.) Karen proved to be just as much a beacon for me as Katie, as I struggled with grieving my own losses. (Read the blog, from earliest post to end. It is astounding. Then go watch the videos, at noretakes.com.) Karen's attempts to be real, transparent and vulnerable pushed me out of depression into action time and time again. Slowly, my life began to move.

Winter quarter this year was rough for me. I struggle with chronic depression. I don't usually say that out loud; I usually say something more like, "I suck," which, David Burns points out in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, is classic depressive cognitive distortion. Winter's melatonin scarcity exacerbated that; the fact of my amazement at landing my new job and my tendency to self-sabotage because I think I don't deserve it pushed me further away from who I should be. I fell down, a lot, as a teacher, as a person. I was angsty, panicked. Curled up in paralysis. I failed my students in some ways because of it, which again, fed the spiral of my crazy.

And then, a couple weeks ago, at about three o'clock in the morning, mid-panic attack, iTunes turned up my second favorite Katie Reider song, "What You Don't Know," a sweet, quiet love song about a love that you haven't yet told about your feelings. And it struck me, based on when the song was recorded, that the "you" is almost certainly Karen. And I said aloud, "Katie Reider would kick my ass if she saw me acting like this. 'You're alive, asshole.'"

I got up and got to work. Oh, it wasn't a total reversal, by any stretch. (Calling oneself "asshole," for instance, doesn't usually engender systemtic change.) But it was a wake up call.

Listening to Katie sing on the way to school the next day, I knew what the tattoo needed to be. And that I needed to do it now, to be reminded, always. Show your love, with whatever gifts you have, in whatever situation you find yourself, in whatever way you can.

It seems right, too, that the tattoo was done in my hometown, by (I'd forgotten) a classmate, (At a remarkable price; seriously, those of you in the area, it's more than worth the drive to CH.), while chatting with a friend about health care reform and Jesus' radical reformer ways. I think Katie would be proud. Who knew Court House would end up being the place where I am most called to show my love? Not me. And who knows where I'll be called to show it next? But at least I won't be able to say I forgot this time...