Shameless plug #1 — Everyone in the known  universe should contact Jared M. Reed, Audio Engineer of Tetrasound Productions, if he needs to record something.  This guy made me sound like singer, and believe me, I am not one!  — his e-mail is jreed299@gmail.com.

Secundo, No one should underestimate the talents of that profound genius and fabulous hottie, Su Lian Tan, a brilliant scholar and even more brilliant composer, who has deigned to descend from her own personal middle kingdom to write an opera with me.  Its title is Lotus Lives and should debut in NYC in late 2008 — we think we’re going to be on TV, too!  Stay tuned, buckaroos, for more details later.

This is a picture of Su — my collaborator in all musical things — isn’t she pretty?  She’s very, very smart, too, and incredibly talented, so utterly, unspeakably brilliant that she inspired the following homily:

“I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me.” — Philippians 4:13

Oh, yes — let the church say “amen!” Christians will tell you, if they are familiar with the Word, that they believe what this Pauline epistle says. Yes, Christ strengthens us, allowing us to do all things. Some will say, all things which we are called to do — I mean, perhaps Christ wouldn’t help us rob a bank.

It is easy, of course, to say that one believes this until it is time to do something really hard to do, something that one knows could not be accomplished in the natural.

This week, I had such an incident this week, brethren.

Ok — Here’s what happened: I’ve written the words to an opera, a very modern and hip one. In it, I wrote a small comic role, that of a bad 1980s pop star. I wrote words that go like “Orange Mousse! Everyone is a Flower! Everyone is a Fruit! Drink that Pineapple Flower!” Not exactly cogito ergo sum, not exactly the words of Dr. Faustus when he meets the devil — just think B-52s, think Go-Gos, think Lena Lovich lyrics, and because I expected my brilliant composer collaborator to write something melodically on the level of sophistication of “Lucky Star” or “Turning Japanese,” two admirably foolish 80s hits, I said to her that I would LOVE to play the part of the bad 80s pop star on the bad 80s recording and rock video that would accompany the production on international tours and appear no doubt in the best concert halls of New York. After all, I sing in church and can surely carry a tune as well as any bad 80s pop star, and I can imitate the attitude and make it funny.

I forgot one thing, brethren. My collaborator is a GENIUS. She can’t help herself. She wrote something very sophisticated. It’s in the bad 80s pop genre, but it has got a three-octave range and rhythms that could put a flamenco dancer out of business. I heard a music-only version of the piece and did not understand that she wanted me to sing more than five notes — I thought all that piano music was an instrumental solo, not where MY voice was supposed to go!

Okay, I’m clueless. I’m not a real singer. For a singer, I’m an excellent blogger.

When she called to practice with me — understand the girl has been in the company of the world’s greatest musicians since she was knee high to a Malaysian tree frog — she was horrified I did not have a better instant command of the music. I could hear her disappointment in her voice. This opera means the world to her — it establishes her, rightfully, at the summit of contemporary classical music. She can’t afford for this not to work.

When we hung up the phone, I started to pray and cry — life has been a little hard lately, and being a nineteen-eighties pop star in my own mind has felt like a renaissance of sorts to me, a rebirth of my high school fantasy cool self. I couldn’t afford to mess this up either, on an emotional level. I called the engineer who was supposed to record (see my plug of him above) and asked him to rehearse with me.

A nicer guy has never been born than this young engineer. I think he’s single, ladies, and if you’re about twenty-two years old, he’s I’m sure quite luscious, too. Again, look above for his contact information.

I prayed, standing on the above-mentioned scripture for my text, and I got other believers to agree with me, including but not limited to Pastor Mike Burns of Christian Joy Fellowship, the prayer ministers at Kenneth Copeland Ministries, my good artist friend Andrea Bonifacio, a believing painter who paints in tongues — a story for another blog entry — and an engineer pal of mine who loves the Lord. Jared the engineer rehearsed with me for hours and hours with my still not making the sophisticated piece of music either palatable to the ear or funny. I began to despair.

I cried on the way home from the recording studio, and I fretted in my apartment. My voice was hoarse, and I was no closer to being an 80s pop star, bad or otherwise, than I was in high school. I decided to reread the passage in Philippians, looking for God’s loophole out of helping me with answered prayer.

Truthfully, it would have been unrealistic for me to expect to prosper in this project without practice. There are some people who think that the anointing of some gift should hit them without their preparation in the natural at all. That’s just stupid. God expects us to do our very best, and then He adds His very best, which of course is beyond all we can ask or think.

So that’s my testimony. I went to bed weepy and exhausted, discouraged and still standing on the Word, and God gave me better than what I had asked for by the time I got up.

I woke up at 4 am — it was the day of the actual recording (the video will come later), and I heard a funny voice singing the song in my head. She was incredibly pretentious, more pretentious than what I had imagined. THAT would be how I would succeed! I would make my “pop star” so full of herself, even though her voice was mediocre, it would be a send up of both pop stars and opera divas alike, and the piece would take on the air of the intentionally, rather than the accidentally, ridiculous that it needed to succeed.

When I got to the studio for the first take, I was ready. Jared the engineer heard it and said, “You did that a lot differently yesterday! It’s good the way you’ve got it now.”

Ah, says the agnostic, you just had a moment of inspiration of a human kind that pulled you through, Anne. Wait! Not so!

Before I tell you what happened next, allow me to praise God, whose Word NEVER returns to Him void. A moment of silence, please.

My composer had written me a high F sharp — that’s high f sharp over high c, y’all, and I’m a frigging ALTO. I HIT that note!

Let us have a moment of selah.

Again, I hit that high f sharp. It was NOT in my capacity to do it the day before, and I had no natural reason to aspire to it, but I hit it like Whitney Houston telling me that she’d always love me.

The song is funny, just what the opera needs. I don’t sound bad so much as snooty, in the best possible way for the context, and by the way — the opera is being filmed for TV, and we expect it to air in 2009. Details when they are confirmed.

I can do all things, even ridiculous things, high-school fantasy things, in Christ who strengthens me.

So can you. Practice your way to Carnegie Hall, whatever that is for you, but know that having done all you can, you can stand in your full armor of God, believing His Word, and what you can’t do on your own, you can do with Him and through Him.

I am giving some readings with various groups over the Summer:

Global City Review, founded by that mother of all that is kick-butt, Linsey Abrams, published a short, humorous poem of mine, and they have included me in their “It’s All Relative” Launch reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, a totally awesome place to pose as a deep thinker. Here are the details:

June 5, 6:00 -7:30 pm, Bowery Poetry Club, Between Houston and Bleeker

www.bowerypoetry.com

Because I am in Women Studies Quarterly’s (WSQ) Witness Issue — I wrote a poem about women not being believed by authorities — I am reading with them at the venerable radical bookstore Bluestockings:

June 10, 7 pm , Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, Between Stanton and Rivington

www.bluestockings.com

Then, because Brooklyn is the new little black dress, I am giving another Global City Review reading at The Perch Cafe:

June 17, 7:30 pm, The Perch Café

www.theperchcafe.com

Finally, but totally the most important event of my Summer reading extravaganza, I was honored to be included with such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka in a British anthology of the most happening American poets — Seeds of Fire (2008, Smokestack Books) — and they have invited me to stand next to said luminaries and read at the Bowery Poetry Club in August:

August 7, 6:00 pm, Bowery Poetry Club,308 Bowery St, Between Houston and Bleeker

See link posted above.

If you’re reading this, then come — I promise to agree with a prayer if anyone mentions this blog to me at each of these events. Who knows? You and I might become co-conspirators against the forces of darkness!

It is the start of the season on Coney Island, Memorial Day Weekend, 2008. The candy apple stands and the flume rides are running. The vendors vend. The Wonder Wheel and its minion wheels are spinning. The air smells like burning popcorn and sugar, cigarettes and sand. Everything glows as if it had always been this way — always thriving, churning.

However, passing by here a week ago, the boardwalk was a ghost town. Only the heavy-set Russian Polar Bear Club members were on the beach in their swimsuits, several homeless drug addicts leaned against benches until cops shooed them away, and the owners stands were padlocked shut with corrugated metal grates. Coney Island looked like the press says it looks now — grim, seedy, about to get torn down to develop condos.

However — just look at it today — it is reinvigorated, as if nothing had ever happened.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anne Babson. I am a Christian writer, a girly girl, a new resident of this neighborhood half-condemned, half-celebrated. This blog will be my window to others into one Christian walk along the boardwalk, sidewalk, and stairwell climbs of the toughest borough in the toughest city in the country.

So what does the reinvigoration of Coney Island’s boardwalk have to do with Christianity?

A Presbyterian minister might give a homily on the notion of resurrection from the tomb. Indeed, that which looked so grim is now grinning. The abandoned is crowded. Christians are supposed to think that even our Lazarus things — those which have started to stink for being so very dead — can return to fullness of life. We are to pray for resurrection in all its forms.

For me personally, this revival of The Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, is a sign that my own prayers for resurrection in my own life are being answered. Christian writers are not supposed to get divorced, but I have just fled a marriage that spit me out, and I floated up here on the beach with a bunch of seaweed and trash that was pecked on by the seagulls — discarded waste. But that’s not how God sees me. He sees me fully resurrected, able to thrive again, living and loving with total abandon, more and more the way He loves and He lives despite being rejected by so many people.

I buy a corn dog and sit at a table. The three men at the table next to me are speaking Arabic. They watch with great interest as a woman, obviously drunk, on a dare from her friends a few yards from us, runs into the ocean fully clothed, and runs back to receive a beer from each of them.

This place needs prayer.

Fortunately for all of us, a local church, Fellowship Baptist at 2929 West 20th Street, off of Surf Avenue, right around here, has a prayer station. They wear the red and white vests that YWAM manufactures and sells to ministries, hand out Bible tracts in Spanish, Russian, and English — but wish while I stand there that they also hand them in Bengali and Arabic, among other languages. They feed the poor and minister significantly to the addicted, and they have no head pastor — only three elders, amateur Christians, amateur meaning that they do what they do not for money but for love. While I stand there, a man admits in a heavy Russian accent that he is a heroin addict. One elder pulls him aside, makes an appointment to see him the next morning. A Muslim couple, the man with a full beard and skull cap, the woman with her head fully covered, comes over out of curiosity, then leaves. A police officer asks for prayers of protection — in this tough neighborhood, they need such prayers, the cops. A man from Bengladesh comes up to get a hug from a big, burly elder, barely speaks English, probably doesn’t understand half of what is said to him, but he does understand the message, “Welcome,” which has not heretofore been uttered to him since he arrived in the US two months ago.

I ask for prayer, too. The kind sister who prays for me listens briefly to my war stories, then starts praying for my husband to reconcile with me, but she doesn’t know that he threatened my life, expressed repeated, scary wishes for my death. I don’t enlighten her. God knows the ghost town my life has become. God also knows that this is my season for revival, and soon I, through the resurrection power of our Savior, will look like the boardwalk, as if nothing had ever gone horribly wrong.