Reading · The Lady Party with Margot Potter

Hello, Friend,

I was born in 1963, just as the Mod subculture was expanding. Mod for modernists. Modernists named for Modern Jazz, the post Beatnik crowd, Daddy-O. Carnaby Street, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, mini skirts, Mary Quant, Beatle boots, Vespas, slim fitted suits…The Kids Are Alright. Camelot, Jack and Jackie…a dream deferred. The March on Washington and the tireless fight for Civil Rights. Women rising up for equality. The bridge between the buttoned up 1950s and the psychedelic social explosion of the late 1960s that devolved into the seedy underbelly of the 1970s disco scene.

I graduated High School in 1981 at the start of the ‘me decade.’ Not content to embrace the preppy-verse, I wandered off into the wilds of the post-punk scene. Volatile, chaotic, thrifted, studded, teased, and mohawked. AquaNet Extra Super Hold in hand, I spent the first half of my 20s in the Bay Area singing with cow-punk and rockabilly bands and getting caught up in a series of unfortunate relationships. Lots of disappointments and promises broken by people who should have been true to their word, but there was wild, unfettered, Technicolor fun to be had and I surely had my share.

Lifetime upon lifetime, each decade and reinvention surprising even me. Tangents, side roads, unexpected twists and turns. Best laid plans derailed again and again, yet I kept evolving, defying, transforming.

And now I’m staring at the last third of my story (if I’m lucky), wondering where the days went. Time is elastic, stretching out until you feel as if one moment might go on forever then compressing so tight it all becomes a blur. I miss my friends from distant shores, slowly fading into the mists of my memories. I miss my daughter who caught her parent’s wanderlust. I miss the me I was before my lungs betrayed me and the cough battered my vocal chords, but I’m learning to embrace the me who makes the most of the spaces in between.

Performer, poet, painter…mother, maker, muse…wordsmith, wanderer, woman of many facets, moods, opinions, and shades of pink lipstick.

I feel unfinished.

I feel restless.

I have marks to make, stories to tell, pathways to forge.

The world may want me to fade away, but I’ve not yet begun to shine.

Ever stretching towards the future with a hopeful heart.

Grateful for another day, another chance, another chapter.

Bring it on.

New home, who diss?

Another Funky Vermont Home

By the River