You Don't Know Me

You've heard me rail about Hana Ripp, the woman who was acting as my agent (sort of) for the gig at Raz. Ask anyone who accompanied me to Raz or came to see and hear me perform there. The woman is a total cuckoo bird. (With no disrespect intended to cuckoos!)

When I got to the point that I hated to see Tuesdays dawn because I knew I had to deal with her that evening, and pay her 25% of the money I was paid, I said "enough."

The final night I played there, Hana was sitting at a table with several colleagues from Arizona Theatre Company. I was minding my own business, cranking out lovely tunes. I would look at the keyboard, glance around the room, look out the window. Anytime I caught someone's eye, I would smile and nod. But I am not Jo Ann Castle. Remember how she would play her honky-tonk piano numbers on the Lawrence Welk Show and keep looking up at the camera with an enormous grin plastered on her face? I will smile if I catch someone's eye, but I don't sit there with an artificial smile on my face. I'm too busy pulling together interesting arrangements and trying to keep from getting bored.

So at one point while I was playing, I caught, in my peripheral vision, some movement. I glanced in the direction of the motion, and there was Hana, waving her hand in the air to get my attention. When I looked at her (thinking she was waving to someone in the kitchen and wondering what on earth made her behave in such a cretinesque manner), she poked her fingers into her cheeks in that time-honored (and by me - detested) gesture that means "Smile."

I do not like people telling me what to do. And I especially do not like people telling me to smile. You don't have a clue what's going on in my life. Who do you think you are, really, to tell me to smile. Fly Over!

As I was leaving Raz that evening, giving her my final check (why do I feel I had been pimped out?), she started handing me publicity stuff about her for me to read. Umm, not interested! She said, "Well, I know all about you and I thought you might like to know about me."

Excuse me? You know all about me? You know nothing about me, short of what you've heard people say. You've heard my friend Lindianne say I'm a fabulous fiber artist, but you've never seen any of my work. You know I have a law degree, but you don't know anything about that portion of my life. You don't know the happiness and the trauma that has mixed together to make me who I am today.

You. Know. Nothing.

So I walked out of Raz, burning no bridges but hoping I'd never have to lay eyes on this woman again.

A week or so later, after returning from a trip to Youngstown and feeling very sad about drifting through my life in Tucson, I updated my Facebook status message to say something like "Jan is tired of life as it is in Tucson."

A few hours later I received a message from Hana saying, "sorry to hear that ~ ure opportunity to change it ! YOu have the power to create whatever you wish even in Tucson!" [Her spelling and typos, not mine.]

Rest assured. It took me approximately five minutes after receipt of that message to remove her as a friend in Facebook.

(Hmmm, why does this sound like high school again? I'm 57 years old. I'm done with high school.)

You know nothing about me. Go stalk somebody else.