Liberace
Władziu Valentino Liberace (May 16, 1919 – February 4, 1987) was an American pianist, singer and actor.
A child prodigy born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin, Liberace enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television and motion pictures. He embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage, acquiring the nickname "Mr. Showmanship".
via Jeanne Love, February 24, 2021
"But if I could give you any message, it would be to dance! Even in your own living room. Dance! To move! To be in joy! Screw all the other stuff out there that says, '
You can't be that!'"
I'm not here just to be a pretty boy face. I want to remind you that that life is grand. And we've made it something other than grand. We've made it difficult and dark and weak and brutal. That's not the way it's intended. Life is not meant to be lived in suffering and sorrow and sadness and deceit.
Life is meant to be explored and overcome and reviewed in a way that is inspiring to the next time we choose to be here.
I'm not a prophet. With the larger part of my soul energy I've gone back to understand why I chose to be who I was in this time period. I had many lives of being pious, and being a priest, and being a nun, and being impoverished, and being brutalized, and being poor.
If you can believe it or not, pardon my French, I said "fuck that! I want to be something brilliant and uplifting, and fun. And I don't care what anybody says. Because I'm done with the old -- the old dark stories of my different lives."
That was my motivation — to come in and to be somebody totally different, and push the buttons and, you know, risk a lot of backtalk and tongue-wagging for how I lived, and what I believed and who I was, when I was out there, dancing on the stage.
I made up my mind that I wanted to contribute to life, not death and sorrow and dirges and darkness. So that's why I did what I did.
You [the Cosmic Voices team] have a lot of people standing beside you, guarding and protecting you, and making sure that each of you, in your own way, is inspired for your own work. Not only Cosmic Voices but for all of your own personal work. So it's taken me months to get in. I wasn't allowed until now.
But if I could give you any message, it would be to dance! Even in your own living room. Dance! To move! To be in joy! Screw all the other stuff out there that says, 'You can't be that!'
Who says you have to be miserable? Who says you have to be so worried? How do you change things if you're dark and dire? How do you change things when you're afraid of everything? And "What is this person going to say?" and "Oh we're doomed!" and "blah, blah, blah...."
The sadder and more berated we are, the more doomed our planet is. So the only thing that really is going to shape it is joy, because joy will go through all the other stuff. Love and peace and laughter and dancing -- that goes through!
Why do people have big parades like Mardi Gras? Why do we have these big celebrations and parties? And why do we dance like monkeys lots of the time? To shake off the tenets of the world's pressure of how we're supposed to behave and how we're supposed to act!
So when we dance, or we sing, or we get wild and crazy and we shake our booty, it's all in an effort to break off all of that stuff.
I was a little extreme, maybe, but that's what I had to do. So it's just my view, but I wanted to share it with you ... and I finally got my ticket in! *
[* The "ticket" refers to Jeanne Love's quip that so many souls are wanting to come through now that the guides and gatekeepers on the other side are "having to give out numbered tickets."]