Okay, so I realize that this happened forever ago, but I was looking thorugh stuff on my computer (saving important things to disc just in case my computer goes into early retirement unexpectedly) and I found this half-finished recap. You'd be surprised how many journal entries I start and save half-finished for a rainy day. Or maybe you wouldn't.

I'll give you what I got so far, and wing it from there:

Before this panel started, I was helping to set up for a concurrent panel happening in a room across the way. We were ushered into the Panelists' Green Room by SXSW volunteers about half an hour before the panels began, and I began to set up banners and things in the corner of the room. A few minutes later I heard a laugh, a beautiful, familiar laugh, and realized that I was standing in the same room as Ani DiFranco. Not just in the same room, but about 5 feet away.

She is so beautiful.

I am not the type of person who wants to get up in the face of a "celebrity" I have known and loved for over twelve years. I don't want to shake their hand, and say something moronic about how great it is to meet them, and can I take your picture before you continue the conversation I so rudely interrupted? I just don't like that kind of thing, and I've always sort of believed the foreboding warning "Never meet your mentors." Seeing Ryan Adams blitzed and stuck on himself at the Austin City Limits festival in 2002 is a good example - I've never had quite the same level of respect for him since, and I kind of miss that adulation. I do. You wouldn't want to know if Santa Claus had a nasty drug habit, right? I feel the same way about my idols. They are perfect creatures, and I want them to stay that way.

Needless to say, I did not approach her and ask for an autograph or picture. I just stayed in the same room, minding my business, trying not to be "that girl, the one staring at me in corner" while I eavesdropped on her conversation. Stalking, now, there's something I can support.

I had to leave the room to help set up for the Recording Academy panel, and I finally snuck into Ani's panel just a few minutes before it started. I was sitting about halfway back in the meeting room when she walked in with Lorraine Ali, the moderator, and took a seat in one of the two wicker chairs onstage.

By the way, I shall just refer to her as "Ani" from here on out, because I think she would be okay with that. She's down.

Now, I've read a lot of Lorraine Ali's work, and I like it. She's an Arab-American writer, very candid and well-respected for her work. I mean no disrespect by this, but it's my responsibility as an honest recapper to pose this question: perhaps Lorraine Ali was not the right choice for a moderator. Perhaps she should never be asked to speak in public again. It's okay, I'm not making fun of her, I promise. But the second she started in with her monotone reading of Ani's bullet pointed bio, I knew I would be cringing the entire time.

I think she had a hard time with wanting to seem hip and cool to Ani, and that need sort of overrode her responsibility to meet the audience's expectations by actually asking clear questions and steering the dialogue in a direct way.

Instead, the questions went something like this:

"SO, Ani, here we, uh, are, at this very, uh, you know, this Straaaange thing. Right?"

To which Ani would say.

"Humm, yes?"

Damn you, Lorraine Ali, for wasting precious moments of Ani's speaking times. Damn you for trying to be more a part of something than anyone wanted you to be. DAMN YOU.

Okay, time to refer to my notes.

After the terribly long monotone introduction, Ms. Ali started the panel by asking Ani what she has had to sacrifice to get to this place - being the success story, the indie artist who started her own label and has now sold over 4 million albums. Ani has obviously been asked these types of questions before, and was unsurprisingly elegant with all of her answers. She responded that for a long while she thought of her career and life in general in terms of sacrifice, i.e. if you want to get here, you must sacrifice this, and so on. She said that she now thinks in terms of giving up privileges instead. If she signed with a major label, she may have certain privileges that she doesn't have now. I thought that was nice. Thinking in terms of giving up privileges like record contracts, Cristal and caviar while maintaining self-respect certainly puts her career into perspective.

At this point a man with headphones, a tape machine and a microphone blocked my view, and I gasped with dismay. Damn taper.

(This is also the point where I quit writing the recap, and it's been over a month, so I will have to just rely on my recollection and overall impressions from this point on. Plus, now I can't find that notebook with my notes. My apologies.)

One of the more interesting questions that Ali posed regarded Ani's sexuality, or rather the reaction of her fans and the general public to Ani's marriage.

(For those of you that haven't followed Ani's career, back in the beginning - early 90s - she was sort of the adopted poster girl for lesbian rocker grrls, because she was perceived as a balls-out feminist lesbian. Some of her songs were about female relationships, or at least sexually-ambiguous. If you've ever been to one of her shows, you probably stood in one of the biggest gathering of lesbians ever amassed. The shows are hella fun, but Ani got pigeonholed into a stereotype quickly. Then later, late 90s, she married a man, and pigs flew out of arses across the country.)

Ani responded that she didn't experience a huge rejection after her marriage, that in retrospect, she thinks the media created the controversy in many ways. "I realized later that I read about the drama more than I experienced it," she said, which surprised me. I always pictured a mass exodus of betrayed lesbians from her fan club, but on the whole I think most of her fans stayed supportive. This is of course because Ani's magnetism, to her fans, has more to do with her uncanny ability to tell a story with her songs so well that the song becomes your story, in way. It's never been about her sexuality. It's about her kick ass-ness, to tell the truth.

Let me draw a parallel for those of you in the X or Y generations. Remember when Alanis Morrisette first debuted, with the "shocking" go-down-on-you-in-a-theater lyrics? I met many girls, mostly two or three years younger than I, who clung to Jagged Little Pill like L'il Kim to her cleavage on the red carpet. I could never understand it, because I thought of Alanis as a watered down shock-rock version of Ani, until I realized that Alanis did for them what Ani did for me: sometimes she said what you were thinking but told not to think, and she always said it better.

Anyhow. The panel went on, Lorraine Ali posed several long-winded monotone questions, and Ani tried to answer them and direct the flow of conversation as best she could. They didn't cover too much about her success in the independent world, or how exactly she built her own successful record label from the ground up (which I thought was the topic of the day), or how she is committed to bringing culture and life and business to her hometown of Buffalo. I was disappointed, but I guess I know all that stuff already.

What Ani said during the panel was not so different from anything she's said during her multiple interviews with indie magazines. It was her aura, and the way she carried herself, and her kindness to the adoring fans in the front row. You could feel that you were in the presence of a compassionate, thoughtful person, but also the kind of person who doesn't hold herself higher than anyone else. She was very "I'm just glad to be here" about it all, and that was refreshing during the sucking-up-ness of SXSW in general.

I sat in wonderment at the authenticity that is Ani DiFranco. Like her music or not, she's still an awe-inspiring person.

At the end, she took questions from the crowd. I steeled myself, because I'm sensitive, and I get embarrassed for people easily when they make a fool out of themselves on microphones (as people often do - myself included). The last question came from a singer/songwriter here in Austin, whose name may or may not rhyme with "Matrice Mike". Let's just say it does, for funsies.

"Matrice" got up to microphone and asked Ani if she liked working with kids. WTF? Random, right? NO. PLANNED.

Ani gave a sort of guarded "um, sure" answer, not sure what she was getting herself into.

Matrice immediately launched into a long story about how she was a singer/songwriter (then she took the liberty of introducing herself, as though that wasn't her intention in the first place, which in turn drew applause from the crowd, and also irritated me to no end) and how she had suffered all these recent traumas including touring, and her van catching on fire, and the time she got chosen last for the softball game in recess in third grade, and the time Johnny stood her up for the Sadie Hawkins dance.

It went forever, y'all. Kind of like this recap. My face hurt, that's how hard I was trying not to roll my eyes. She finally wrapped up this completely unsolicited exposition by saying that she works with kids (low income kids, actually, kids that she can totally identify with because she grew up as an at-risk child, the product of an abusive upbringing, and isn't that terrible?) (I'm not kidding that she worked all of that information into this one damn question.)

So, BACK TO THE ORIGINAL QUESTION, would Ani like to come meet the kids she works with?

GAH. (I stole that from Weetabix.)

It totally put a bad taste in my mouth. If I had rotten tomatoes, I would have thrown them. If I had a teeny tiny stringed instrument, I would have thrown it at her, along with the violin bow and the Muzak arrangement for "Cry Me a River."

Again, how dare you waste my precious hour with Ani DiFranco with your selfish thinly-veiled plea for attention? (Yes, I know I'm still bitter.)

Ani was very sweet and said, "Why don't you talk with me after this panel." Which is exactly what "Matrice" wanted. (The most exasperating thing about people like that is that they almost always get what they want. Damn them.)

So there you have it, after all these many days. My experience hearing Ani speak. If she had read her grocery list aloud, I would have loved it just as much.

Lucy loves you |