At OMCA’s Friday night music, the crowd usually echoes the tradition or community of the act. It's not remotely surprising, of course, that proud Black acts tend to play for proud Black crowds, KULARTS drew a heavily Filipino audience, or when Dos Four brought people onto stage to dance with him, they knew the steps. But I mention it because the acts so often mention it, foregrounding and emphasizing that their performances express and represent community solidarity and pride. Also because of the sparseness of the crowd that Gabriela Sepúlveda was singing to and invoking, on Friday, and because it broke my heart a little bit, as she called out for her people, of Mexican heritage, from Michoacán specifically or Latinidad in general. The response she got was always thin, and she kept pushing for more.
I may be overstating, I don’t know. I might be projecting. She didn’t get much of a response when she tried to find her San Jose people either, and there’s never just one reason why a crowd is thin, if there's a reason at all. Nights are getting colder, and not everyone is LaRussell; I’m actually not sure, now that I think about it, that Ouida’s crowd the previous week was all that much larger than Sepúlveda’s. But the reason I didn’t think about it, last week, was because I hadn’t been reading articles about how Fruitvale “was empty” and because the presence of an intensifying fascist purge in Oakland hadn’t been quite so front of mind. On a different night, I might have simply said, yeah, it was a little bit awkward how hard she was trying to get the crowd to respond. I might have speculated that while she’s a lovely performer, perhaps she’s more famous for being the child and teenaged singer she no longer is than anything else? Perhaps she just doesn’t have a lot of draw? But really, I wouldn't have said anything at all, because it was a great performance, to a happy crowd. My kids were enthralled. Singers always do the thing where they say “I can't hear you” and then you cheer again, slightly louder, and they say “Ah, THERE you are, Oakland!”
But because it all happened last Friday night, I was on the edge of tears the whole time, a cracked egg after an exhausted day, in an exhausted week, and there I was sitting with my kids in my lap, in a moment in time that may never repeat itself, as they stared with the fresh awe of three-year-olds suddenly aware of how incredible music is, how beautiful human beings can be, after a summer of taking them to these OMCA concerts, and especially early in the summer, they barely focused on the music, and just wanted to go back down into the kids’ play area in the natural history floor, or walk up and down the stairs, or jungle-gym on the bars near the entrance, and about 6:15 or so, just when the music was starting, I'd have to take them home to bed. And then suddenly, last week, with Ouida, it hit them, and they wanted to stay until it ended, and drink in every drop, and then all week they’d been demanding to listen to “the señora from yesterday” (which stayed yesterday, all week) and each new song I played them in the car, they’d ask “is it the señora from yesterday?” So of course we came to OMCA’s Friday Night again, and they were just staring up at Gabriela Sepúlveda in awe and excitedly discussing how beautiful her dress was, and all the colors were their favorite, and she didn’t have shoes, and are the other señoras singing to her? counting the instruments, and noting that in this song “she is a little bit sad,” and so it was all one of those beautiful out-of-time moments that makes the rest of the hardships of parenting and life fade away for a moment, even though one of the twins in my lap had pissed themselves, he still does that now and again, and there I was, thinking about how next week’s Friday night event is the last of the season, and I wonder if they’ll want to sit in my lap and be absorbed in the music the same way when these concerts start up again next April, and all sorts of thoughts like that were all jumbling together in my mind—because there’s never just one reason—when Gabriela Sepúlveda called out to the beautiful diversity of the crowd, and declared that this too was “resistance,” and someone shouted “Fuck ICE” from the back, and then she started another one of those corny-ass wailing songs about heartbreak and feelings and love that might feel self-indulgent or even a little silly in another context, and then a great singer like her does it so un-self-consciously, so truly and with such purity of spirit, that suddenly all of the good and beautiful things in the world stand in front of you and all you can do is do is exactly what the song and the singer and the tradition is asking of you, and you feel full.