Mary Gauthier: I Drink
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Sorry to start the week off with a Debbie Downer song... but, hey... if the bottle fits - this one used to apply a little too close for comfort. But I digress...
1998 found me discovering, and then fully immersing myself in, our local folk community - seems I had just missed the South Florida Folk Festival... but was asked to be on board for the following year's event. We were known for our songwriter competition and my volunteer position was as preliminary judge - along with 3 others, we would rate the incoming songs (listen and lyrics, artists not revealed to us) and narrow (over 200 entries/400 songs) down to a Top Twenty, for the final judges to then choose a winner...
At that time, the songs were being dubbed onto cassettes and I would load one into my Walkman for my daily 45-minute walk around the neighborhood, making it through one side of a tape - when one particular song came on, I burst into tears and had to sit down on the curb to continue listening... and compose myself...
It was the first I'd heard of Mary Gauthier (pronounced go-shay... I of course later found out her name) and became an immediate fan - her songs were dark, taking us to those places we didn't want to go, but needed to in order to do things differently in our lives. Her website quotes such juxtapositions as "hope and anguish"... "faith as well as fear"... "accomplishment and devastation" - one of my favorite lines of hers (from Drag Queens in Limousines) is: "sometimes you got to do what you gotta do... and hope that the people you love will catch up with you"...
I Drink had me re-examining the history of alcoholism in my family - my father "inherited" it from his father and, for years, I worried it would trickle down to me. In January 2003 I made the conscious decision to quit drinking - I didn't set a time frame, but figured I'd just take it, to use the AA vernacular, one day at a time. I kept expecting it to be more of a sacrifice, but it wasn't - I found I was still fun to be around, and could continue to have a good time, without artificial stimulants. When a year had gone by, I realized I was in no danger of addiction and began drinking again - you can't imagine what a relief it was to know I had power and control over the substance...
"...and the wisdom to know the difference" - thanks, Mary...