I have learned approximately ten million things since becoming a parent, and an important one is this: tasks that used to take minutes now take hours. From cleaning the kitchen to sending a text, everything I do has the potential to feel like an odyssey these days. For this reason, while my sweet kiddo drifted off to sleep this weekend, I pulled a book from my shelf about two months earlier than I normally do. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared is a book written by Rabbi Alan Lew z’l, and it is read by many people during Elul to prepare for the head of the Jewish year and the Days of Awe which follow. Adjusting to the new pace of my life, I grabbed the book with the hope that perhaps I could finish it before my birthday arrives in October. I made it eight pages in before getting interrupted, this time by my own curiosity. I was suddenly fixated on a couple of lines I had never noticed before:
If the purpose of ritual is to render the invisible visible, then what is the profound, universal, unseen, and unspoken reality that all of this ritual reflects? What journey of the soul, what invisible journey of transformation, does [ritual] make visible?
Ritual is a big part of my life as a staff member at SVARA, and Lew’s suggestion that ritual is a tool to honor transformation resonated with me immediately. From Teffilat Trans to the Mishnah Collective learning guide; from the act of honoring our grief within the Communal Loss Adaptation Project to the marking of holidays and havdalah with the Disability Justice Torah Circle; from the spiritual practice of DIY Chevruta to our upcoming in-person Day Camps, SVARA is increasingly becoming a place where ritual lives harmoniously alongside Talmud study. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I wonder if it has to do with the fact that, for queer and trans folks, this “invisible” journey of transformation is actually rarely invisible. As queer and trans folks, we are deliberately and defiantly in flux, forever. We change our names, our pronouns, our stories, our partners, and our bodies. If our lives are spent traveling between who we’ve been and who we might become, rituals are the postcards we send to ourselves along the way. As I read these first few pages of Lew’s book, I thought about how lucky I am to witness this beautiful kind of journeying so regularly because I happen to work at SVARA. And then, for reasons I didn’t immediately understand, my very next thought was how much I love the song Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan (you can listen to and view a captioned video of the song here).
I’m a relative latecomer to Chappell Roan, a twenty-six year old pop singer who, as the kids say, is blowing up right now. She’s been making music for years but a quick Google search of her reveals a great deal about how mainstream American culture is narrating her induction into global pop stardom. In the last several weeks she has landed accolades in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR, and has even shared a headline or two with Kamala Harris. The internet is swirling with photos of her—images that consistently depict a young femme with a striking gaze, unshakably in her element, decked out in outrageously immoderate gold jewelry and the kind of campy stage makeup that screams Southern vaudeville drag show. She’s a Pisces Sun, Sagittarius Rising, with a moon in Libra, for anyone who cares (side note: a lot of people care). She’s also immeasurably talented: her vocal range is miles wide and she seems to have laser-focused control over the emotionality of every single syllable she sings. At the risk of offending the folks who identify as longtime Chappell fans, I think her 2020 single Pink Pony Club functions as a perfect entry point into what she has to offer pop music right now. The song is heartfelt, evocative, devastating, and dynamic. In less than a minute, it evolves from a stirring Judy Garland-esque serenade to a certified banger that can reliably close out the club, a song which depicts a small-town queer who dreams of leaving home for the bright lights of a big city. So why have I already spent 500 words unpacking this in Hot Off the Shtender? Because I am of the belief that Pink Pony Club chronicles the kind of “journey of the soul” Alan Lew examined with great curiosity, and the kind of journey that leads so many people to SVARA.
The internet is amassing countless videos of queer folks—depicted both alone and in large gatherings—singing Pink Pony Club with a passion that errs on belligerance. They’re practically levitating off the ground as they reach the chorus. Some are smiling, some are crying, some bombastically throw back their heads and stretch their arms towards the sky. Some turn to sing dramatically into the face of the person beside them. Some shut their eyes, ball up their fists, and pound against an invisible wall that surrounds them. Sure, there are plenty of songs that evoke similar emotions which fall under the umbrella of “queer anthems” (we’ll dig into that in a moment), but my speculation is that Pink Pony Club is different because it reflects that “profound, universal, unseen, and unspoken reality” Lew assigns to ritual: the reality that, for queer and trans folks, our lives are often spent searching for where we belong.
Okay, so, “queer anthems.” I would argue this genre necessarily includes a few broad sub-categories. First, there are popular love songs that were neither written by queer people nor about queer people, but their omission of specific genders or pronouns means the songs can be wielded in earnest by queer people everywhere (I’m thinking of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston z’l and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” by Celine Dion). Next up, there are songs that, for whatever reason, immediately got reclaimed and inverted by queer folks who wanted to play with the genders that were presented in the songs (I’m thinking of “It’s Raining Men” by the Weather Girls, “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, and “A Deeper Love” by Aretha Franklin—a pulsating house banger which is rumored to be the inspiration for the flamboyant synthesizer hook in “We Found Love” by Rihanna.) But to me, Pink Pony Club passes a unique kind of queer anthem litmus test, and, by Lew’s definition, is ritual, unequivocally. It’s a queer song written by a queer artist about a queer right-of-passage: the defiant departure from the place we’re from in search of the place we’re going. Sometimes this departure happens on our own terms, but more often it feels like expulsion. It’s painful, it’s terrifying, it’s emotional, it’s physical, and it’s spiritual. And as queer Jews, it’s hard not to hear echoes of Exodus. I’ve heard countless stories from SVARA-niks about how their experience of our bet midrash is so powerful because it lives in direct conversation with much less liberatory experiences they had somewhere else. These folks explain that the dissonance of being disempowered finally catalyzed action, and somehow, some way, they found themselves at SVARA (b’h!). In Pink Pony Club, Chappell Roan similarly finds herself at—you guessed it—the Pink Pony Club, a fictional, fantastical queer bar in West Hollywood that validates her wildest fantasies by existing in necessary contrast to her upbringing.
The song begins with a deliberate and elegant trill from the highest keys of a piano to the lowest. It’s undeniably theatrical and reminiscent of the beginning of “I Will Survive,” evoking a sense of anticipation, like the distant flash of lightning as a summer storm steadily approaches. Roan’s voice rolls in like a dark cloud, searching but also sure of itself:
I know you wanted me to stay,
But I can’t ignore the crazy visions of me in L.A.
And I heard that there’s a special place,
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day
To me, this introduction encapsulates what it’s like to wonder if where you are is where you’ll end up. It’s the terrifying and thrilling Oz-like realization that there is life beyond the farm. For sexual deviants of all genders, Roan’s mention of California (a cultural haven for freaks, misfits, and in her words “queens”) is an invitation for us queers to listen closely. With subtle coded language she lowers her mask and raises her flag in a homosexual rewriting of the proverbial directive, “go west, young man.”
The song continues. The piano both slows and intensifies, building and expanding into spaces that were previously empty. Roan’s voice peddles on, locating herself geographically and emotionally. This verse is littered with the guilt and anxiety of knowing that her dreams are going to leave a person she loves (in this case her mother) in despair (gays, sound familiar?):
I’m having wicked dreams of leaving Tennessee
Oh, Santa Monica, I swear it’s calling me
Won’t make my mama proud
It’s gonna cause a scene
She sees her baby girl
I know she’s gonna scream
The song immediately transforms, reinventing itself almost beyond recognition as it charges purposefully ahead. The piano disappears into a smoky sonic haze reminiscent of early 90’s electronica, ditching with it the naïveté and wistfulness of the song’s introduction. A more confident Roan moves into the actualization stage of her fantasy, and, out of nowhere, a throbbing synthesizer begins to pulse in the lowest of registers (does anyone else think it sounds like a technicolor shofar?). Roan’s voice reaches a fever pitch that borders on keening. She moves from anxiety to certainty, and the music follows suit:
God, what have you done?
You’re a pink pony girl
And you dance at the club, oh mama
Her self-deprecating suspicion that she’s “gonna cause a scene” hereby transcends the binary of “should” and “shouldn’t.” All of a sudden, we find a Roan who is unapologetic as she embraces a sense of spiritual sureness:
I’m just having fun
On the stage in my heels
It’s where I belong, down at the
Pink Pony Club
I’m gonna keep on dancing
at the Pink Pony Club
Many people spend their lives chasing the kind of certainty found in the chorus of Pink Pony Club, and it is here that I feel most certain that I am in the presence of ritual. This song deploys the painful memories of where we’ve been in order to illuminate the beauty of where we are. It maps a journey of transformation that is central to the experience of being queer: a journey that, whether we like it or not, makes us who we are. Maybe Pink Pony Club will rise and fall like all passing fads, and maybe I’m reading way too far into what the text is telling me. But if SVARA has taught me anything it’s that meaning is ours to make, and if my journey towards queer belonging posits Pink Pony Club as ritual, our tradition will be better because of it.
At SVARA, we welcome one another as the curious, determined, weary travelers that we all are. We understand each other as whole people who, regardless of age, have lived entire lives before reaching the bet midrash. At SVARA we aim to design learning spaces that honor all of your journeys, even the ones you haven’t started yet. In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing a thrilling update about what’s on deck for Fall Zman, a gorgeous season at SVARA that’s sure to spark and sustain transformative journeys for all of us. It’s my hope that our learning this fall will celebrate the courageous voyages we all take from the past to the present and—through the spiritual practice of Talmud study—back to the past. I hope that Fall Zman will hold space for time-traveling conversations between us and our queer ancestors; conversations between our past selves and our current selves; conversations, even, between Rabbi Alan Lew and Chappell Roan. Perhaps when Lew asks, “what journey of the soul does all of this make visible?” Roan answers, “I’m just having fun, on the stage in my heels—it’s where I belong.”
