Au Revoir, Miss Simone
With one Wikipedia edit, my era of clinging to questionable clout will finally end
By T. Bloom
It’s time to come clean about a lie I’ve been living for many years.
Well, a half-truth. A 37% truth.
You see, for the better part of a decade I have been referenced on Nina Simone’s Wikipedia page. I have no idea who added me to this paragraph about her film legacy, but there it is:
I certainly wouldn’t have sought to include myself. However, it would be a lie to say I haven’t experienced a glimmer of affirmation — especially at low points when it felt like I had little else to show for my work — from knowing that my name was still hanging on there like last night’s eye booger, like one of Jupiter’s lesser moons almost imperceptibly orbiting the mighty gas giant.
It was never even something I could brag about, because my presence on that page points to embarrassing factual inaccuracies which deserve to be corrected, and fixing them would involve omitting me from the page entirely. Which will likely happen as a result of writing this post! And I welcome that.
It’s true: under my old name, I did in fact host three different of screenings of Simone’s legendary Montreux Jazz Festival performance between 2009 and 2011. I really did! But never again afterward, so that part’s wrong: this is not an ongoing annual event.
The citation used to justify my presence on Simone’s page links to this old event listing in the New York Press, which was likely published in 2010 but then later automatically changed to 2014 as part of a site update, perpetuating the notion that I had continued to host events annually. Here it is:
This info is so wildly inaccurate that I still crack up thinking about it. Getting your event listed in a periodical is supposed to be a major coup, but usually they get everything so wrong you hope no one will read it. (In the instances where they do get it right, you discover that it doesn’t matter, because no one actually reads these listings except other show folks scanning for mentions of their own events.)
Our show was a screening of the 1976 concert film, not a re-enactment of it. My friend Roslyn Hart is indeed a superb cabaret artist — one I’ve collaborated with many times, an early champion of my work who is currently traveling the world with her show Never Sleep Alone — and she did help introduce one of my Nina Simone shows. But it’s significant to note that she’s a beautiful and brilliant white lady who would never in a million years headline a show impersonating the High Priestess of Soul.
But hey, you know who did impersonate Simone in a skit at one of our screenings? Season 8 RuPaul’s Drag Race winner and star of HBO’s We’re Here, Bob the Drag Queen. If a universe exists where our little flash-in-the-pan events actually do merit an honorable mention in Nina Simone’s official wiki, it would surely be Bob’s name that belongs there, not mine.
But there’s the rub: no proof of this exists anywhere online! Bob was performing under a different name in those days, and wasn’t mentioned in any listings. No photos of the appearance seem to have survived. I’ve scoured Gmail and Facebook looking for our initial correspondence about the event, and can’t find anything. But if you happen to ask Bob sometime, they will likely remember (and fondly, I hope).
Another name worthy of mention is Cassandra Freeman, the wonderful actress who is currently playing Aunt Viv on Bel-Air, the Fresh Prince reboot. At our third and final event, Freeman appeared onstage to read excerpts of Simone’s memoir I Put a Spell On You during during breaks in the concert. It was glorious! And blessedly, I do have pictures of that.
But still, all of this — while personally important to me — is just a flyspeck in the illustrious history of a legendary and complex artist, and hardly merits a front-page mention anywhere. It belongs in a scrapbook, or maybe just right here, on this page. When the wiki article is updated, it should not be to reflect my new name, or the proper inclusion of these other artists; the entire mention deserves to be cleansed away.
I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long to arrive at this conclusion. It was fun having this little erroneous little tether to a subject I admire so greatly. It’s always seemed, at worst, just a private joke at my own expense, highlighting my own irrelevance, the absurdity of trying to be known for anything at all in an era of persistent misinformation. I can’t imagine that I’ve benefited from it in any way that warrants real atonement. In all these years, no one has seemed to care at all.
While my handful of tiny shows were scarcely even a blip in NYC’s cultural timeline, they were always quite meaningful to me. Based on the success of those events, I went on to host a series of variety shows about other women: actresses, singers, authors, oddballs like Nina who drifted in and out of the spotlight during their own lifetimes, and afterward.
I didn’t consider myself an expert on any of them; if anything it was the phenomenon of oddness itself that I hoped would qualify me to hold forth on the careers of these illustrious ladies. My own wandering path through life — a rural Arizona kid who’d run off to become a big city queer and artistic somesuch — seemed to require these kinds of stories as a form of nourishment. Not every young misfit turns out to be a Nina Simone, or even a Brett Somers; qualities such as talent and fame tend to evolve at their own mysterious pace, occasionally coalescing in ways that leave a permanent mark on the timeline. Most of us hopeful weirdos are lucky to end up somewhere in the footnotes and margins.
Either way, the most interesting details about someone’s life often remain buried; the facts that prove most durable are usually just completely wrong. We can barely be trusted to tell our own stories, let alone someone else’s, and along the way these pursuits can get quite tangled up.
Want an example? By 2015, Nina Simone’s legacy seemed to be enjoying something of a renaissance, cemented by the Netflix release of the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? Ahead of that film’s release, I ended up being scouted by a major publisher who was looking for a writer to take on a last-minute book project: a biographical companion to the film, making use of additional research which had been gathered for the documentary. I had been recommended because of my series of shows — and in fact, I was informed that a producer of the film had attended one of my Nina Simone screenings, and had said they found it inspiring.
Reader, let’s momentarily set aside questions about whether an opportunity or responsibility like this belonged in my hands. At that time, it was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. It seemed like an natural continuation of work I’d been doing for years, and a sign that all of this was finally paying off, leading to bigger and better things. I felt ready to rise to this challenge.
I was invited to the studio’s private screening room to view What Happened, Miss Simone? ahead of its US launch, and was excited to note that the film opened very powerfully with footage from the same Montreux Jazz Festival performance that we’d been screening at our shows. It felt like an affirmation, of sorts: I had not wandered into the wrong room by accident. I belonged here. Was that delusional? I think so now, but at that particular time, I needed it to be true.
Objectively I was not a great choice for this opportunity, but I was an available choice, and that was important because the publisher wanted a manuscript delivered in less than two months (!) to keep apace with the film’s launch on Netflix. They needed someone now. It seemed like a good job for a young workhorse writer willing to undergo full ego-death in pursuit of something glorious, and I was convinced I could deliver.
Was that delusional? Perhaps, but we’ll never find out, because after several rounds of discussion the publisher basically ghosted me, and when I pinned them down for an answer they let me down hard, almost comically so.
I’ll never forget the brief, desperate period of time when it seemed like this book was about to become my life. In all fairness, rejection is simply part of the game; I already knew this. So is hunger, and I had lots of it. Hope is the third and perhaps largest part, although I don’t know if I’ll ever experience it quite the same way again, because in the aftermath of that loss — if any of it was truly mine to begin with — I began to rethink everything about what I was proud of about my past work, and what I felt entitled to as a result of it.
That included looking up the finished book long after the release date had come and gone, to face the reality of what was clearly never meant for me. The author they’d chosen was a Rolling Stone critic and editor-in-chief of SPIN Magazine, far more seasoned and more trustworthy with such a precious subject. And this is exactly as it should’ve been; I was probably only vetted as a last-resort backup in case all other options fell through.
And even then, I still would have been an inappropriate choice. I can say that with zero self-deprecation. It would’ve been a fortunate (for me) accident of fate, and I’ve learned from reading many star-lady memoirs to just accept those accidents, welcome them, grit your way through them in hopes that someone important will notice how hard you’re working despite being the wrong person for the job, recognize your talent, and give you a chance to be the right person for something else.
Having spent so much of my life surrendering to the awkwardness of being the wrong person, eking out minor successes along the way, I hadn’t seen the harm in making a whole career out of it. But in the wake of this Nina Simone book incident, I could finally understand how much more rewarding it would be to be right person, for something. Anything! Even if that meant never getting to write a book about anything at all.
Watching more established writers face this kind of reckoning has been… validating, I guess. Year by year layoffs have persisted at Gawker, Buzzfeed, VICE, and pretty much every outlet that used to pay for writing, and overall freelancer pay rates are in the toilet. My oddball friends who’ve published books have privately despaired to me for years over their prospects of staying in the game: the constant rejection and humiliation and sense of wrongness might seem worthwhile if the pay was good… but it isn’t. And just last week, everyone’s Twitter checkmarks — an important asset to any writer, whether they’d actually earned it or not — got rinsed away, setting off great ripples of status anxiety that may never quite stabilize.
I know these developments are being experienced as a disaster by many established writers and other oddball dream-chasers. After the dust settles, however, I want for them what I experienced myself: a reset. A chance to become stranger, more specific, hopefully a bit wiser.
That in itself can be a place for hope to live, for a while, in the absence of more convenient or financially rewarding outlets.
These days, I find myself at a loss in terms of what it’s fair to hope for. I haven’t been appearing onstage anywhere, and none of my writing projects have any real momentum behind them at the moment. My contribution to this upcoming Bride of Frankenstein book — another offshoot of my oddball variety shows — is a precious form of vindication, even if it hardly constitutes a major turning point. At least I was arguably the right person to write it! And because I’m the person I am, doing the work that I do, there’s even a set of themed fragrances commemorating its launch. I’m over here doing my own thing, and it is infinitely rewarding.
So it’s a relief knowing that by the time you’ve read these words, someone may have already diligently scrubbed my mention from Miss Simone’s page. And these past years, it has been wonderful feeling less connected to her as a subject to present to others — she certainly doesn’t need my help. Through all this, I’ve been slowly reattaching to her music and vibrant presence as just another devoted, lifelong fan, someone who feels lucky to have access to all the forms of expression she managed to bring forth through all of her suffering and instances of madness, in addition to her brilliance and technical prowess.
And who knows, maybe my star will rise yet. As Simone herself poignantly observed in the Montreux performance, borrowing lyrics written by Janis Ian:
Some make it when they're old
Perhaps they have a soul
They're not afraid to bare
Or perhaps there's nothing there…
Although Nina’s rendition also began with a sharp admonishment for unruly audience members who momentarily forget their place: “Hey girl, sit down. Sit down!”
These are also words to live by, and learn from.
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