Nothing gold can stay.

Most of you know by now that my schedule is not the norm. I busy myself with workshops and training, to then stroll into work at the whopping hour of 11p.m. (when most of you are just getting your weekend started or ending your weeknights and heading to bed), and I take calls till about 7:30a.m. - rinse and repeat. I'm okay with the life I signed up for - sacrifices are made for dreams to develop, but this blog is not about my "survival" job nor is it about my dreams. Nope. I'm taking you all back just a bit to my childhood.

Mariah Carey. Michael Jackson. Paula Abdul. Whitney Houston. Gloria Estefan.

I think you may now know where I'm going with this. Well tonight, at about 11:15p.m. I was walking from one side of my building at work to the other to get ready to take my usual calls. As I'm crossing the breakroom area, I see Whitney on tv and think they must be running some kind of special on her - maybe on VH1 or MTV. No. CNN. Why is Whitney Houston playing on CNN? Odd. I walk into my breakroom area only to read the headline that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Now, when I had first heard about Michael Jackson, it was from a close friend of mine and we had cried for about 10 minutes on the phone together. Hearing about Whitney at work just felt like the most inappropriate setting, and how I found out felt so impersonal; I just stood there frozen, not breathing for what felt like an eternity. I'm slowly coming to - I realize this is nothing of a surprise, but things like this never cease to shock me. Not because of the individual and their lifestyle choices, but because of the image and how I see them in my mind. I grew up listening, dancing, imitating, and dreaming to be like these idols of mine, and that ideal perfection I believed them to all possess is how I still associate them to be till this day. So it is not just a loss in the world of music or public/influential figures, but it is a loss of my childhood. My innocence. I feel as though the sparkly bubble of my youth is slowly being burst, only to find that it was just a sticky, soapy mess flying everywhere. The one good thing about all this is their contribution to this crazy world we live in. Regardless of how they lived their personal lives or the choices they made that so many will sit back and judge them for, no one can deny the "get on your feet and dance" feeling you get when you hear a classic MJ song play or the awe and sheer amazement you feel when you hear Whitney belting out some insane note you know you couldn't hit if someone kicked you in your nalgas. They provided me with something that only those with the gift of a true artist could provide - Hope - a message that transcends all races, religions, ages, and ethnicities. It's the same in every language, and in every place of the world.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-Robert Frost (1923)

What I'm really reflecting on here are the most influencial artists that helped shape my life and my choices, perhaps not in the day to day ritual type stuff, but most definitely in the artistic sense of who I feel I am as an actress/artist/entertainer. It would be a shame to not pay tribute to them and the special gifts they have left me with.

So, hug your loved ones tighter, love your family and friends harder, and live your life each day as if it's the only day that could ever matter.

That is all. Love & Light.