A Dancing Demon with Roxanne in the Melodrama

Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor, or, how the music world knows her, Lorde, is touring the world right now, promoting her already hugely successful second album Melodrama. Do you know it? Of course you do! And that’s good, because she was there when I spoke to Roxanne last. Remember Roxanne? The punk goddess writer, with whom I spent a leisurely afternoon in our town a little while ago? Okay good. Here we go!

Conversations on Popular Culture

I was a little late from meeting Roxanne because I had needed to rinse those gourmet whips and wipe them tables, and, on my way to meet her at Deli 1909, I fell into an argument with Lorde that just would not wait.

Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk? No, Lorde, I think talking is great! To some extent, that is. I mean, I have never been one to yap in the bedroom, I’m like Miranda on Sex and the City who just wants her partner to shut the hell up during sex: in my verbally suffused life I – Making smart with their words again, well I’m bored – Don’t be rude, darling, talking can be a powerful aphrodisiac, especially when talking to someone smart and inspiring and a good conversationalist – Because I’m doing this for the thrill of it, killing it – You think I am not doing this for the thrill of it, killing it? Never not chasing the million things I want - But you also have to be able to listen, that’s part of being a good friend and, well, you know how I love to hear myself speak… And I am only as young as the minute is, full of it, getting pumped up from the little bright things… Sometimes I need to pinch myself to not monopolize the conversation. Now hush, let’s go in!

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Roxanne was already there, enjoying a platter of pear-and-walnut-and-blue cheese crostini at a romantic, candle-lit corner table. I made my own order at the bar and settled opposite her. After greetings, we dove right in.

ROXANNE: I like it here. It’s homey. I remember how I used to come here with friends all the time, back when the place had a different owner. It was always either here, or Telakka.

ME: This used to be a standing hangout for me and my workmates, too, back in the day. We would order a bottle of wine and proceed to unburden ourselves from the varied ailments and complaints of our long weekend shifts. Oh, look, there you are, ten years ago! And there I am! It’s us, with long hair! Just behind our singer friend, who is obviously sulking after my fight with her.

LORDE: Our rules, our dreams, we’re blind.

ROXANNE: I don’t see her. I spot my own long-haired self, having brunch, I can tell, and I think I can make out who you are… In the yellow beret? By the way, isn’t it crazy when ovulating makes you hungry and horny?

ME: “Well… sometimes I crave for a non-fat yogurt afterwards.”[1]

LORDE: Our friends, our drinks, we get inspired.

ME: If I’m wearing the yellow beret then it’s winter, and I am about to leave.

ROXANNE: And the sheer pain of it! Like ‘Listen you tiny little egg, it’s your turn, you need to leave now, get going! – But I don’t want to go!’ I can tell when it happens always, and it’s a whole jumble of mixed emotions. For instance, get the hell away from me, do not touch me, while at the same time yearning for lots of orgasms. It’s a conundrum.

ME: Kind of like in Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), where the sperm doesn’t want to go, and he debates with fellow sperm on why he must jump into the unknown, while they all wait for the command to go from the headquarters, mastered by Burt Reynolds.

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It was one of those beautiful, yet dusty, spring nights. The workplace smells and huffs and puffs still lingering in my aura, I hadn’t had time to change, so I was still in my superhero outfit that was in need of both washing and ironing. Roxanne had braided her green hair, and her pink and purple and yellow sequined top sparkled in the candlelight. In her hands, along with her customary silver rings, she wore elbow-length black-and-neon-colored striped fingerless gloves that reminded me of my own neon striped Sonia Rykiel sweater I wore to my mammogram last month. One might say we were color coordinated, you just had to jump to the left and take a step to the right to do the time warp in order to really see it.

LORDE: Let’s let things come out of the woodwork, I’ll give you my best side, tell you all my best lies. Awesome, right?

ROXANNE: Gin tonics, with a rosemary branch and some cranberries, no shakers, just pouring. Schweppes Russian is the best tonic. Napue is my favorite gin brand, its taste is so unique and distinctive.

ME: Gin tonics! I would be in an emergency room in a New York Minute!

ROXANNE: I have accustomed my friend into gin tonics now, too, and every time we meet, we have ourselves a gin tonic fest.

ME: Adding cranberries is always a good idea for us ladies. I used to have repeated urinal tract infections a few years back, and where were you when I needed you, with your perfect gin tonic recipe! I am a wine girl, myself, and am still wary of hard alcohol. It was the usual route, for me, starting up with years on red wine, detouring into the realms of white wine since I developed a mean case of heartburn. I had thought I hated white wine, but suddenly I couldn’t get enough of it. More recently I have started preferring sparkling wine. I don’t know. It just feels like a sparkling wine moment in my life right now.

ROXANNE: Every moment is a potential sparkling wine moment, for me!

ME: Is that so! Well, I’m glad. Waitress, two more of these, and make it sixteen centiliters, not twelve, please!

LORDE: Have another drink, get lost in us, this is how we get notorious, oh!

ME: Yes, Lorde, the difference being that we are not a coupla teenagers.

LORDE: Let’s let things come out of the woodwork, I’ll give you my best side, tell you all my best lines.

ME: “I saw that half-smile, you little slut!”[2]

SZA: I checked your girl at the door, I sent your friend to the store. It’s only me and you, finally us two, and I don’t regret drinkin’ this liquor, makin’ you listen, yeah, I know you don’t know me well. My girl’s at the door and I left my pretense at home, and it ain’t no going back.

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ME: I can’t help feeling a little envious of your lifestyle. It’s like oh, now she’s here, now she’s there, why am I not here and there? You move around so much. But I know I’d hate to actually have to leave the house.

ROXANNE: I hate it, too. But getting out of the house is beneficial, a lot more than one might think. More experiences, more friends, more sincere sensations, more life. But when I am about to leave, I always hate it. But I love to travel and see new places, meet new people. There is always an element of surprise present. Once I saw Björk at an airport.

ME: Really!? Oh, man!

ROXANNE: I know, right? There she was, sitting in the lounge with the rest of us mortals, just another passenger. Only she was wearing this enormous, billowing white evening gown.

ME: Practical.

ROXANNE: Well, it’s Björk. I didn’t bump into her when I was in Iceland, though, but a friend of mine did.

ME: Iceland! Was it utterly marvelous?

ROXANNE: It was. But also, they have really given their all to tourism there, and it kind of shows. I think my favorite destination so far has been Faroe Islands, hands down.

ME: Really? Why?

ROXANNE: It was just so gorgeous, the villages at the foot of the mountains, the landscapes, the nature, jingling brooks with beautiful covered bridges. Perfect for long kisses in the twilight. – Another curiosity about traveling is the watching TV in your hotel room. All of a sudden you are back in time, when there was a certain number of programs and you had to watch something from those predefined channels. It is surprisingly hard to handle after having conditioned ourselves to the easy living with streaming services.

ME: I believe you.

LORDE: *simultaneously* But what will we do when we’re sober?

ROXANNE: For instance, there was a Sex and the City marathon on a while back when I was staying at some hotel or another, and watching some episodes, I couldn’t help but wonder how we had once considered that show the epitome of the female experience. Watching it now, it was so filled with so many pre-conceived notions of women that have since then been disproved or disvalued. Or at least there is a more varied mindset now, as to how women act and behave and what arouses them and what sex is like for women. Of course, this doesn’t mean the show has altogether stopped being funny.

ME: Of course not, perhaps just a little dated, now. On the show, they are continuously orgasming, all of them, even the self-conscious Charlotte, not to mention the uptight, cerebral Miranda. It’s more like sorcery than a natural occurrence. Girls showed the world what sex is really like for most women. Lena Dunham did the rest of the world a huge favor. Orgasm is more often than not the big no-show for lots of women during sex with a partner, and preaching on how traditional penetrative sex will always get a girl off is pure fantasy. An exception to the rule, though: having Adam Driver on the show. A different kind of sorcery, there. I am orgasmic just looking at him.

ROXANNE: Really? So, Adam Driver, huh?

ME: I’m afraid so. Yes, Adam, Adam, Adam! “Does every conversation we have have to come around to that freak?

(*Adam Driver passes the table.*)

ME: Oh, hey man! How ya doin’?”[3] - You’d think his obvious shirtlessness started to get annoying after a while, like right now at this moment, but I’m telling you, I’m not the least bit annoyed. In fact, that’s when I miss smoking the most. After watching an episode of Girls. You know, the old post-coital cigarette. Smoking isn’t unlike alcoholism. It’s my go-to drug of choice, if something horrible happens in my life, you know, because I used to be a smoker. Quit when I turned thirty. After a coupla falls off the wagon, I have been, so far, smoke-free for some years, now. But the desire never goes away. It lays dormant inside.

LORDE: (*simultaneously*) Oh god, I’m closing my teeth around this liquor-wet lime.

ROXANNE: I never smoked, professionally, so to speak. I used to be one of those godawful Tipsy Smoke Bummers.

ME: (*laughing*) Why were you godawful?

ROXANNE: Because isn’t it annoying, when someone starts begging for at first puffs and then entire cigarettes, when you are out with friends? At first it feels like it’s nothing, but after a while I myself started thinking, what am I doing? If I was eating a chocolate bar and someone, no matter how dear a friend, continuously hovered around my chocolate, asking to bum a chunk or two, I would be peeved to the max and ask them to get their own damn chocolate bar!

ME: Ooh, chocolate… So we’re talking Fazerin Sininen here, or what?

ROXANNE: Any chocolate. It’s like Ad-Libs, choose your favorite kind and insert it here. So, the post-coital cigarette for Adam Driver now missing, what have you replaced it with?

ME: Chocolate, man.

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LORDE: Oh, how fast the evening passes, cleaning up the champagne glasses! And the terror, and the horror, when we wonder why we bother, whoa. All the glamour, and the trauma, and the fucking melodrama, whoa.

ROXANNE: I need to go soon, I promised a friend to go running with her first thing in the morning.

ME: Running?

LORDE: Yes, honey, I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go.

ME: That is so not the activity of choice for me. Give me dancing, any day, before the dreaded running! You a solitary or a social runner by choice?

ROXANNE: Either one, I think. Making a date to go running makes it that much harder, though, to cancel and stay in bed instead. And nobody loves to stay in bed more than me. Given the option, I would sleep fourteen hours a night and then lie in bed for the rest of the day. So making running dates comes in handy. But I do go by myself, too.

ME: I detest running.

LORDE: (*simultaneously*) I’m waiting for it, the green light, I want it.

ME: I’m an avid walker, though. And I dance. Give me dancing any day over running. Music blasting throughout the apartment: I have a large clear space in my study for crazy-ass dancing. I dance full throttle, always alone, to Rihanna and Drake and Queen Bey, and the like… Are you shocked?

ROXANNE: No no, you wouldn’t believe what I have stored on my training playlist. Besides, loving Bey is not exactly embarrassing anymore.

ME: I know, Beyoncé is the new – I don’t even know who. After her self-titled album, and especially Lemonade… Gone are the years of Baby Boy, and Halo, a song I, for some reason, have always hated. But in reference to the dancing playlist, or running playlist in your case, the beat and energy are important, and the more fun the playlist, the better and more enjoyable the exercise.

ROXANNE: I just wish I had more color choices in my selection of running shoes. It’s all salmon pink all over the place.

ME: Salmon pink, well, Pretty in Pink. Pink, the singer. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. Katja Tukiainen’s crazy pink girls. Ooh, and Janelle Monáe’s new single, Pynk, featuring Grimes!

ROXANNE: Yes ok, I get the point!

ME: My feet are so darn big I need to shop at the men’s sneaker department, so I guess there is more variety in colors. I am something of a shoe nut. I own maybe five pairs of running shoes.

ROXANNE: I own three. All salmon pink. Dammit!

ME: Now that we’ve outed each other as listeners of music with a dance beat that lacks street credibility for exercising, I think we need to apologize to my friend Lorde, here. She has been trying to get our attention the whole night, and we have heard you, dear. You know we adore you, right? Melodrama kicks fucking ass, and you are the queen of everything.

LORDE: But honey I’ll be seeing you wherever I go.

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LORDE: I bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark.

ME: I know, but did you see the studded, maroon biker jacket she was wearing? Besides, what did Chandler say on Friends? That he rued the day once and didn’t get much else done that day? I am still deep in these between-seasons wool coats. I need to yank out my own brown suede biker from naphthalene. Roxanne’s jacket sported a kind of Peter Fonda on Easy Rider -vibe. Mine is probably more like Rihanna holding a phone in the park.

Dedicated to the magnificent S.S. Thanks again for hanging with me.

Buffy Buffy Buffy! I could not have done it without you, Joss Whedon. As a rule, I can never do anything without you. Title reference from s.6 ep 7; Once More, with Feeling: A dancing demon, no, something isn’t right here.

The use of ellipsis was fiercely un-taught to me by every single teacher of the Finnish language, grammar, and writing, that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. The use of ellipsis was re-taught to me, as an adult, with equal fierceness but also with a sense of humor, by the French school of contemporary writers, particularly Anna Gavalda.

Lorde song lyrics in italics, from the following songs: Tennis Court, Homemade Dynamite Remix (with SZA, Post Malone & Khalid), Perfect Places, Sober, Sober ii (Melodrama), Green Light, Writer in the Dark. Everything, Tennis Court notwithstanding, from her 2017 album Melodrama. The brilliant record also works as a mean dance album!

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[1] Exchange between Buffy and Faith, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, modified, s. 3 ep 3; Faith, Hope & Trick

[2] Xander to Buffy, s. 3 ep 3, Faith, Hope & Trick

[3] Xander to the whole table, modified, s. 2 ep 5, Reptile Boy