Come Fly Away: The Road Trip, By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

March 25, 2010 Whitney Farmer 9 Comments

I told you where I would be the third week of March, and I’m on the plane now.  In a couple more hours, I will arrive in NYC, a city where my beloved baby sister’s image now appears on buses and t-shirts and keychains:  She is one of the female leads in Twyla Tharp’s new show that is opening on Broadway, “Come Fly Away”, a collaboration with the Frank Sinatra estate. The opening night is Thursday, and I’ll probably see the performance three times before I fly back to my beloved land of palm trees on Sunday.

Over the last few weeks, Holley – who used to hang upside down on the bars at the playground doing what we called Cherry Drops and who used to play “Barbie Safari” with me in our dirt backyard before our pool was dug – has been featured everywhere in the press.  Articles and pictures in Vanity Fair, New York, New Yorker, New York Times, cover of Dance magazine…they all prove that I was right: She is a beautiful and astonishingly talented woman.  She even has groupies now, and she is worth it.

The show Holley is in follows the lives of four couples for one night in a night club.  When I first saw the preview in Atlanta, it was like watching a night at my regular job.  I’ll watch the floor during shows and will see everything that it means to be human condensed in a few hours. People walk in the door with bravado or excitement or shyness, sometimes threat. They will watch for the impact of Who They Are on the room – how they dress, walk, talk, laugh, dance, or move. The lights of the stage have the same effect that tribal campfires must have had: The crowd pulls closer and experiences something together.  At the end of the night, everyone has a new mark on their soul. Hopefully it is a tattoo from a rite of passage instead of a scar. It’s why people feel connected to bands: They have experienced something together, but they just have never met.

In “Come Fly Away”, couples arrive together, and they all leave in different conditions.  The four female leads all represent a part of what is the experience to be a woman.  One is innocent and full of hope and love, one has realized the power that is within her and has become almost ferocious, one has been stunned by loss and rejection, and one has gathered all of these truths and woven them into strength. This last one is the role that Holley plays in the performance.

I had a brief layover in Seattle during this trip. I used to have a life there because I used to have a love there.  I stayed long enough to get some salmon and a good beer to take the edge off a fatigue headache that I almost always have… I was thinking about how the lives of all of my sisters have changed in the ten years since I have moved to L.A.  All of us are in places that we didn’t expect with parts of both good and bad. Within all of us are contained the muses of the show that I am now flying to see.  As our plane pulled away from the ground, it banked to give me another glance at where I used to be.  It was beautiful here, but it’s not a part of me anymore. Except for the coffee.

Quote of the Blog from Ed, Dude of Light and Fog, “I used to be a manager of a bike shop. I hated it”.

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Whitney runs a rock music club in L.A. She has an MBA and no one cares.