When I was a janitor in upstate New York, I had this co-worker named Jay. We would never really say much to each other. My shift was 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; his was 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Our paths would occasionally cross for the purpose of exchanging info, like, “Stall No. 3 in the women’s room has a sanitary box that needs to be refastened, but in the meantime, just set it against the wall. I will get it in the morning.”

That was the height of our general interaction. So in my head, Jay was a man I worked with. There was no reason for me to know anything about him beyond that. This relationship changed when Jay asked me to watch him perform slam poetry at Happy Endings café. He was good. It was obvious that he practiced, and had this other world. After having witnessed that performance, I saw him as a man who had the ability to dismiss the mundane mechanics of paying rent while on stage, and conversely, hang that persona on the coat rack at work. Two separate ways of being existed in Jay. This fascinates me because I am not good at keeping such things compartmentalized to that degree. It’s the same reason I admire Bruce Wayne and Shade the Changing Man (an early Vertigo title, for the uninitiated).

Saturday at Floristree, this transformative phenomenon revealed itself in the form of one Jana Hunter (Texas transplant/singer-songwriter). Now, I will make no bones about it: I have known Jana for about a year. If you added up all the words exchanged between the two of us over that time, it would equate to something under 100, with me of course doing the lion’s share of the talking. I know she is a musician, yet the Jana I primarily interact with is a light punch-in-the-arm, hi-and-bye kind of friend, someone who lets you have one of her beers when you forget to bring one. What I see on stage, much like my experience with Jay, the slam poet/co-worker, is Jana as in she is the bones and flesh that make up Jana’s earthly form — yet that form embodies an alternate entity when Jana plays. It is a form that commands attention of even the most hardened eye. She intertwines the solidity of well-thought hooks with the unabashed serenity of a pretty man’s celebratory cigar. With a full backup band she lays down the tracks and rolls through you on a breezy train, like a soft admiral who crystallizes exuberance into a fine grin, miniature crooning, showing you quasars with a mumble. If only all of us had such fabulous costumes.

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