November 9th. One day after the election. I live in Germany and, because of the time difference, have stayed awake all night watching the USA empty its bulging veins into a roiling river of fear and hatred. I’m scheduled to perform my one-woman concert program tomorrow night for a large group of American women in Berlin. I arrive at Tegel Airport, an out-dated structure with low ceilings and fluorescent lighting that illuminates every crack in my tired face. Laugh lines? Not exactly. I wait for my ride. Do I stand here in the greenish glow or go outside and freeze? I opt for fresh air.

At tomorrow’s benefit concert—sponsored by Steinway & Sons and the American Women’s Club of Berlin—we’re raising money to help educate impoverished girls. When I booked this gig I thought Hillary would win. I anticipated a celebratory event, complete with champagne, high-fives, and “you go, guurl” whooping. I would play joyful music and read uplifting, funny stories. Now I’m rethinking my program. I’ve played for a handful of memorial services over the years. Perhaps I should treat this like a family funeral. Music to soothe the trampled soul.

America has elected Donald Trump—the spray-tanned hero of white-hooded men—to be its leader. Surely there’s more to worry about than my stupid concert, but for now, I need to focus on the event. The concert is sold out.

There’s no business like show business.

My-Linh Kunst, President of the American Women’s Club of Berlin and organizer of tomorrow’s shindig, picks me up at Tegel. My-Linh, a Vietnamese-American, former boat person, mother of two, photographer, and multi-lingual Wharton graduate, has been up all night sweating the returns. She also made a brave, puffy-eyed, articulate morning-after appearance as a guest American on German national television. She fumbles with the navigation system in her car and off we go.

We cruise through Berlin chatting quietly about the disaster that has befallen the USA and what a setback it is for women. Here we go again: One step forward, two steps back—a dance performed by women since the beginning of time. Swing your partner round and round. Shake your booty. Dip and disco and do-si-do. Ladies choice? You’d think with all the fox-trotting, sashaying, and shuffling we’ve been doing for, say, the last thousand years, we would at least be making progress at a slightly faster tempo.

My-Linh parks the car across the street from my host’s home, a beautiful building in the Dahlem district. I open the car door and step confidently into the autumn night, thinking my foot is firmly planted on the sidewalk next to me. It is not. My boot wedges between the car and the curb and I fall. Hard. Splat. I feel my knees bleeding, but I know I’m not seriously injured. I start to laugh. My-Linh cannot see me—I have disappeared under her car. She rushes around to my side and tries to help, but I am truly stuck, twisted in a downward dog position that leaves me—butt up, head precariously close to a manhole—unable to move or think. So I laugh. And laugh. My-Linh laughs harder than I do. Here we are, two temporarily defeated American women on a Berlin street lined with villas, stuck between a curb and a hard place, laughing our asses off about nothing and everything. We could cry, but we’ve done enough of that over the past twelve hours.

Let’s call this the November Pratfall.

I am off balance. Out of sorts. Punch drunk and suffering from hysterical paralysis. Stuck! I take deep breaths—punctuated by giggles and sobs—and slowly remove my leg from under the Volkswagen.  I reach into my purse to use the flashlight feature on my phone. The phone is crushed. Toast. My bag cushioned my fall and protected my wrists—thank you, Longchamp—but my poor phone has taken my full weight. I must be heavier than I think. I feel like I’ve gained fifteen pounds in the last fifteen hours. And it’s all in my heart.

I go to my room, lie in bed and hold my phone, hoping for signs of life. I plug it in and poke it a few times, but it won’t respond. No light, no sound—just my own reflection surrounded by a web of thick, splintered glass. Before I drop into a fitful, achy sleep, I think: This is what women do. We dance, we fall, we pick ourselves up, we start over. It’s klutz-friendly choreography that serves us well when the odds are against us. No big deal, this Trump thing—just one more trip around ye olde dance floor, looking for the exit. We’re good at this. We know the steps to every dance. Electric slide, mambo, tango, funky chicken. Bump to the left; sway to the right.

This time around our choreography has failed us. Trump has given closet bigots permission to exercise their racist, misogynist tendencies. Regardless of education, economic status, or gender, a vote for Trump was a vote for white, male, heterosexual supremacy. If you vote for a racist, you condone racism; it’s that simple. You can claim you voted for “change” until you’re orange in the face, but we know what kind of change you mean.

In the ultimate Big Baby Diaper Pants move, complete with tantrums, shit-slinging, and bobble-headed bullying, Trump has coerced the great white unwashed—teeming with resentment and threatened by women and minorities—to get down, get dirty, get groping, get great again. Decades of slow progress towards gender and racial equality seem to screech to a halt, leaving ugly orange skid marks on the potholed highway to equality.

I spend the next day working on the text for my concert. I have two options: I can go ahead and do the happy-happy Piano Girl program I’ve planned and hope to distract these good women from the scourge of the last two days, or I can tackle the tangerine elephant in the room and remind my audience that we can, we will, we shall overcome. Really? Really. I think of Hillary Clinton and her life of service. “Speak up for what’s right,” she tells us.

I read “Pretty, Pretty: Piano Girl vs. Trump,” an essay I wrote in October. It’s angry and honest and sad and just a little bit funny. I conclude the reading with a quiet solo piano arrangement of “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen song. I feel better. Almost. We raise thousands of Euros for girls who need our help.

A broken hallelujah is still a hallelujah.

The next morning we hear that Leonard Cohen has died.

Call me naive; call me a bleeding heart liberal; call me an elitist. Maybe I’ve always lived in a bubble. A big, beautiful, bebopping bubble inhabited by open-minded men and women who believe in love and hope. I surround myself with artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals, strong-willed individuals of all sexual orientations and faiths who make tolerance and kindness part of their daily routines. Tonight, standing with this group of expat American women, I feel better about myself. Call me happy.

My friend Laurie Richardson, paraphrasing Walt Whitman (because Laurie is the kind of woman who does such things), takes me aside after the show and says: “We are large. We contain multitudes.”

My audience has rescued me. I have absorbed their positive energy. In spite of the Trump campaign’s shameful spew of hostility and its queasy aftershocks, these fearless women, buoyed by hope and Sauvignon Blanc, will keep working tirelessly to transform the lives of marginalized girls around the world. They will do all the good they can, as long as they can. They will do small things in a great way. They will speak up, push, and brawl with the big bad boys when necessary. They won’t give up and neither will I. We contain multitudes.

We dance, we fall, we pick ourselves up, we start over. We’re still dancing. Another Leonard Cohen song comes to mind: Dance me to the end of love.

*****

A nod of gratitude to Leonard Cohen for all the beautiful words. Rest in peace.  Special thanks to My-Linh Kunst, Ira Philip, AWC Berlin, FAWCO Region 5, Mary Adams, and Steinway & Sons Berlin. Photo of RMG and the Lalique Steinway Model B by Karen Axelrad.

Robin Meloy Goldsby is a Steinway Artist. She is the author of Piano Girl; Waltz of the Asparagus People: The Further Adventures of Piano Girl; and Rhythm: A Novel.  

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