When Jackie Huntington first reached out to us, over a year
ago, to ask if we would consider being in and hosting on our farm Ollie and
Nesta, to make a music video, we listened to the music and immediately fell in
love with Ollie. We didn’t know who the
artist was, when Jackie first approached.
We guessed Taylor Swift or Halsey.
We debated about it for weeks, as we listened and thought about it.
More than one good, strong, Sister came to us as a result of
watching Jackie’
Refinery 29, her short documentary on us.
There isn’t much Jackie could ask of us, that we would deny her.
We often accept requests from odd places (the Charlo
Green show), and sometimes regret those decisions, but in this case, I
convinced reluctant and saintly Sister Sierra that the song isn’t really about having
sex and smoking weed and getting couch-locked.
I convinced her that the song is about what happens when one doesn’t
have a purpose-driven life. She accepted
that and we agreed to hosting and playing our part in Jackie’s production. (Merced county should thank us for the people
we bring into the valley. People who
rent camera equipment, trucks, and stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, and fuel
their cars, locally. Just saying.)
Our next interaction with Ollie, and her manager, Evan, was
in the release party for the Sex, Weed, TV music video in December. We got to know Ollie a bit better on that
trip. And our next interaction was just
this past weekend, as we came to Hollywood to rehearse and perform as the
Supremes to her Diana Ross. Ollie is a
sweetheart and it was touching to form a circle before our performance and pray
together, for blessings from Mother Goddess, for her success, and so the
Sisters didn’t trip and fall on our asses with all the cords and equipment on
the small stage.
It just so happened that on our way down to Los Angeles, we stopped
in Santa Barbara to attend the film festival and answer questions after the two
showings. I was so thankful to have
Sister Alice and Sister Sierra by my side, happy to sing with me for the
audience, a Randy Rainbow song, ‘All
About His Base’.
Our first showing was sold out and our second showing was
very well attended for 8:20 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Breaking Habits (the movie) was
well-received. The audience had great questions
and it was fun to answer them with Rob Ryan standing next to me, the
award-winning producer of our documentary film.
“The film shows a picture of you with two boys, where is
your other son?” Easy. He’s an engineer on the coast and has kept
his social media distance since his university days, when I was Sister Occupy. He has a career to protect, is all.
“Can you speak numbers? Numbers of Sisters? Numbers of sales units?” Easy peasy, as well. I did.
I gave her the best numbers I had readily available in the filing
cabinet in my head, annual history of gross sales, salary ranges, and explained
how I now have to guess at the number of sisters because other orders are
growing and other sisters have been given the authority to bring in others, in
other countries, like Canada and the U.K. and New Zealand.
“Is there anything about the making of the film that either
of you would like to share?” (Don’t go
there, Brother Rob, I whisper, and he smiles, relieved that we don’t have to
pick at the still-tender sores of the difficulties we traversed to get to this
point of standing on that stage, taking questions from a kind, considerate, and
educated audience.)
Good Deeds Entertainment informed us that the highway 101
was closed in the early afternoon of the day of our red-carpet walk, and that
the red-carpet walk has been postponed. Their representative also asked if we could stay another night. I was so relieved. I feel like I personally prayed away the red-carpet
walk. “Glen Close had to turn around go back
to Los Angeles, but she’ll be here tomorrow night and the red carpet is on for
tomorrow night if you can stay . . .” I
was so relieved we had to be in Hollywood for a rehearsal
and couldn’t stay. I wanted to confess
that I prayed away our red-carpet walk (as much as I would have liked to meet
Glen Close), because it’s unhumble and, frankly, stupid, in my opinion. I get that Hollywood does it, and I get why
they do it, and it’s not stupid at all for Glen Close, it’s logical, but it’s
illogical for sister servants to be doing that kind of stuff. I would rather smoke five joints on tv and
pass out on a red carpet, then walk one.
Maybe my other sisters don’t feel the same, but I made it go away, anyway. Or Mother Goddess did. Same result.
When we finally arrived at the Bardot Theater in Los Angeles
Monday night at nine p.m. for our performance, we had all had sick stomachs all
day, and alternated trying to get our attention off of the upcoming
performance, and gathering to practice.
Our job was to sing Nesta’s lines in the “Sex
Weed TV” number and the chorus for “Please
Don’t F*** Up the Whole World, Mr. President”.
We had to rap these lines:
All I ever do is trying hearing
you out when you have a problem you know you can bring it to me.
That’s the first line.
No punctuation. No pause, one
breath, one long sentence with three little ones in it.
Tired of 9 to 5, too much time
this regular life is taking from me.
I gotta slide, when I’m low, I
know you’re coming like medication for me.
High, take a ride, I am so over
this week.
A nice man named Mark, whisked us out of the crowd and gave
us a personal tour of the theater. We
saw the den where the rat-pack once hung out, the stage where the Jerry Lewis
show was filmed, where the Hollywood Palace was filmed, and where Judy Garland
performed.
We had time to kill and after practicing on that same stage
for a half hour, we went into the room that was a private lounge for those very
stars, not more than forty years ago.
After all the excitement of practicing on a world-famous
stage, touring the behind the scenes bungalow of the stars, we sat quietly in Jerry
Lewis’ dressing room and wondered how we got here.
“They say, look at what you were doing when
you were seven years old, and that’s your destiny or calling.”
“What were you doing, then?” I asked Sierra in response to
her profundity.
“Oh, I was wanting to learn guitar, but my mother was
troubled and she used it as a weapon against me so I wasn’t much
encouraged. But I liked music.” Sierra
answered.
“I was gathering up the neighborhood children, with a white
pillowcase on my head to mimic Sister Cecilia and organizing musical talent
shows.” I confessed.
“Funny thing,” said Sister Alice wistfully. “I was organizing my dolls and teddy bears to
be my audience and stage-props as I performed musical commercials.”
We laughed. And then
it was quiet again. The brothers were
somewhere out of earshot.
“But now we have gone from singing about sex, weed, and tv,
to saying the ‘f’ word and shouting ‘asshole’,” Sister Sierra mused aloud, ever
protecting our image – ever-protecting our name.
“Do you think people are really bothered by that, when our
president is putting children in cages?” Sister Alice countered. "We aren’t supposed to swear even when
swearing is called for?”
“It feels like a slippery slope,” I said.
“What, you think if someone lays out a line of cocaine here,
we’re going to lean forward with rolled up dollar bills?” Alice asked, making the two of us laugh at
the image. “You girls worry too much,”
Alice lectured. “We are taking on the
tough issues, and the Goddess has our backs.”
She was right. “And anyway,” she
added, “This is Ollie’s show. We are
simply back-up to her music. When we do
our own music, we don’t use any of those words.”
We spent the next ten minutes walking up and down staircases
that seemed to go somewhere, but it was an optical illusion. It seemed every route led to locked
doors. We started to get frightened that
we would miss the performance and made our way back near the main stage where
we started, to get help getting out.
We formed a prayer circle for a second time, Ollie, Sierra, Alice,
me, and said a final quick prayer that gave us the courage to bounce onto a
stage that had hundreds of people cheering us.
Maybe not hundreds. It just felt
like that many.
When we sang, we put our hearts into it, for Ollie, for
Evan, for the musicians and musical appreciators gathered. It was a magical experience for all of us,
and this time, we are very happy we swallowed the fear and walked right into
it. Ollie and Jackie have promised to
join us on the farm sometime in the next two moons, for a quiet retreat, as the
anti-dote to the glamour and glitz.
