CHAPTER II

My old pal the Amoeba is my take on the mad ego inside us all that places us at the center of galactical time and space.
I don’t know if there’s really any other message in it. I started writing it during Trump’s presidency, so certainly narcissism was on the top of many people’s minds, pretty much all through the day. 
It isn’t really much more than a spoof on the genre of the one person show. There’s something called the “I Want” song.  It’s the moment where the main character tells you their raison d’etre and I was trying to figure out what would that song be for me? 
We’d written quite a few songs and I’d come at the idea of the “I Want” song many times, but it just wasn’t sitting right with me until I started to write it as “The Amoeba.”
I just love that at the very beginning of all time there’s this cranky, strange, little odd creature, kind of Gollumesque, and they’re not happy with the situation. I like the idea that human nature is such that from the very beginning of everything we were miserable, as opposed to the mentality of “it’s a brand new day and the beginning of everything.” Instead you get this little obnoxious creature that’s not even interested in helping the rest of the galaxy come into existence. It’s going to stymie and thwart everything. I like that whole notion.

So there’s a couple of different things going through my mind at the time. Starting from the premise of the “I Want” song and then feeling I didn’t have it in me to write that song, so what could I write? I definitely feel ambivalent about the memoir genre. I feel ambivalent about the one-person show. I feel it’s all been done to death. Or at least, I have my doubts on my own take on it. People do it brilliantly every year, but it eludes me.

With the Amoeba it was fun to create this untalented little monster. But that being said, I think it lives within all of us, hopefully the smallest part of us.  When I’m creating, and particularly when I’m performing live, but really in any artistic endeavor, I find it very easy to become completely, beyond the pale, self-absorbed. “The Amoeba” for me is a constant reminder and also definitely a warning, most especially to myself, that at any time anyone you know can succumb to putting everything about the project in front of everything else. As a woman and a mother and a business person I’ve never really been able to do that to the extent some people have been able to, because of the obligations of daily life. But even within those social structures, I certainly can become that way on any given day. So it is definitely a way to rein myself in. 

But it’s also how I feel about things that I see out in the world. Whether it’s in show business or in politics, another kind of show business, or wherever it rears its ugly little head. It’s inside of all of us and every day we have to make a choice if we’re going to rein it in or if we’re going to let it out. I also think it’s really freaking funny. I mean if you live long enough, that kind of self-absorption is hilarious. You can see it in yourself immediately and, of course, you can see it in others even faster. I’m definitely playing with that. 

Writing this song is also alleviating the tension I feel between thinking that I need to tell my personal story in order to get to the larger story or by telling the larger story I’m going to be able to tell the personal. There’s a lot of tension with that, because I really wish I didn’t have to do it that way. I wish I could just do straight out history, but I can’t. It’s not possible, in this lifetime, for me to do that. I am not a professional scholar of history, so I can’t do it that way. So a piece of me is wrestling with that, and then, just kind of giving over to it, in the most obnoxious way.