There was a phone call once one evening in December before the year of 2008 ended between the wonderfully talented director Tamar Halpern and myself. It went something like this...
Tamar: "I really would love to make a video for All The World but I would love to feature you in it... you would look great"
Me: "ah, um, erm, hmm, ha... I would love for you to make a video lady, but there's no fucking way I'm going to be in it.
Tamar: "Angela..."
Me: "Can't we have someone else be featured in it... like the Green Cotton Dress video you made. That girl is super hot. Or how about your gorgeous footage from Ezzy Fish? Let's just have the girls in it... I like videos with little kids instead of me running around."
Tamar: "Angela... I promise you'll be happy."
Flash forward to an unusually chilly Los Angeles evening in January- when I finally agreed to be filmed. I'm arriving to Tamar's house in the evening and about to have a freaking panic attack. She's very reassuring and sweet. Emily and her are totally wonderful to work with and patient as I stutter and stop in the cold under an extremely brilliant filming light wearing a black velvet shawl, an antique silver necklace that belonged to Tamar's Grandmother, and just about nothing else. I somehow make it through the night.
Flash forward again to a couple of weeks ago in a Highland Park apartment looking at the footage they shot, pieced into a beautifully dreamlike sequence cut with super 8 footage of young girls in a field... and I have to completely apologize to to Tamar for my stubborn insecurities because somehow- I'm not cringing at every shot of myself and instead am drawn into this lovely visual daydream with a song that I wrote as the music. I'm captivated.
The ballerina in the glass bell jar is perhaps one of the most lovely things I have ever seen, spinning and dancing along to the arpeggiating notes in the bridge. I wrote this song a few years ago on a day I felt so completely trapped in my life, not living out my dreams but simply marking time... I wrote this song and I had completely different scenarios in mind when I envisioned it. Other connections came into my head when I would play it live. And now, because of this poetic video my friends so generously created for me... I have the chance to envision someone else's interpretation of a song I wrote. I sing this song live now and sometimes these swirling shots of a ballerina, or young girls waiting in a field and dreaming, or even this face I don't recognize as my own singing the words back to me comes into mind. That's a gift.
Thank you Tamar and Emily.