Instead of slowing down when she hit the half-century mark, Missy started singing the aging blues to other women feeling her pain. Now her 5-woman, 3-man cabaret band, The Bats, is giving women in their Golden Years something to laugh about.
Missy's Story
"Having a band was this little dream I had and it came true."
My husband has been in bands all his life. I have watched him have so much fun playing out, and occasionally I would sing back up stuff with him, but he didn't really need me. I thought, "Why can't I do this too?" I knew some really great singers that I wanted to be in and I already had a name for it - The Bats. I thought it would be so fun to have this name that implied some sort of punk, tough group and then for these middle-aged women to come out.
"What people really come to hear is our comic material."
When we started the band you had to be at least 40, but now you have to be at least 50. We tried to be a straight rock and roll band for awhile, but then we threw in a few comic songs that we liked and those became our most popular. We sing about eating or food, men, shopping, and aging -- everything from menopause to hair loss. We have written a song called "Aging Lament" that is about menopausal symptoms like forgetting words, not being able to find your car in the parking lot, sagging body parts and all those terrible things that happen to you as you age.
"It just releases all that anger and uptightness and depression and all the horrible things that go along with menopause."
Instead of making you think so much about menopause, singing about it helps you forget about it. Even though you are singing the terrible things that happen to your body and to your mind and attitude, it lets you laugh at it and it lets the audience laugh with you at it because they're all going through the same thing. Being able to laugh at it and have the audience laugh with you and understand it is very freeing actually. I come out of those gigs feeling just so great, feeling that everyone understands what we are talking about, that we are all in this together, we're all going through this together, so maybe it isn't so terrible to at least laugh about it with other people who understand it. To see people out there having a bawl like that you can't help but be affected by it and just want to give them a really great show and make sure that they have fun.
"Maybe there's a song in that."
Going through menopause, you feel like you just don't have a grip on anything. Your body is letting you down for one thing. The hot flashes are just part of everything else that happens. I went through a really depressed period and then I discovered the power of the antidepressant. I had the night sweat thing, a few hot flashes that would kind of start in my nose -- it was the just the weirdest, most bizarre thing. I had nausea, my libido was in the toilet, I had weight gain -- that is the major one that is just hellishly depressing. I read somewhere they called it the thickening of the waist and the widening of the hips and that is was even happening to Tina Turner. If she is going to have it, everyone is going to. Everyone in the Bats complains about that. We call each other to see what we are going to wear because "the thing I was going to wear doesn't fit me this week. Do you have something black I can borrow?" A lot of the time this stuff ends up in a song.
"I realize how fortunate I am to have this outlet. There is no mistake about that."
If I wouldn't have started the Bats I would be spending most weekend nights watching television while my husband was playing in a band somewhere else. Now I get to have much more fun. Next year I am going to be 55, and maybe that is when you should stop, but my band mate Marilyn said, "I don't want to quit when I am 55; that is only a year away." I think as long as we can hold up we are going to do it. Look at Mick Jagger, he is still going! I mean, I doubt we'll be singing at 75, but we might be in the nursing home entertaining each other with a whole new set of songs.
No comments:
Post a Comment