I went to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings last night at the Beachland Ballroom and my head exploded. I’ve been listening to their CDs for years but hadn’t seen them live until now. They are a funk/soul revival band that have been around for about ten years but only got big a couple of years ago. Sharon Jones is 55, which is way past the age most people are comfortable getting up in front of a crowd of strangers in a short dress and doing the Mashed Potato or the Pony, but that’s exactly what Sharon Jones does every night. She didn’t hit it big until she was in her 50s. For years she worked as a wedding singer, as a corrections officer at Rikers Island (seriously, she’s like five foot nothing but can shrivel you with a glance), and being a back-up singer for other people. She hooked up with members of the Dap-Kings (who weren’t yet called the Dap-Kings) in the late 1990s and they released their first CD in 2002.

Sharon Jones gives me hope. As a writer, you deal with rejection All The Fucking Time. It’s really hard to keep sending things out and to keep writing and polishing new works because sometimes you wonder if anyone will ever read your stuff. So I think about her chugging along through her twenties and thirties and forties, knowing she had something awesome inside her, and not finding the right opportunity to let it out. And I look at myself chugging through my thirties and forties and think perhaps there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps it will be wearing a fringed dress and dancing the Bugaloo.