Try to disappear

My mother’s standard answer when complimented on her cooking was, ‘I just use good recipes.’ As though, with the right recipe, tasty food just makes itself.

I though it was her English reserve talking, the ‘don’t blow your own horn’ approach I tried to overcome as performing songwriter, where self-promotion is part of the game.

But from here, staring down a new year, I’m rethinking my mama’s humble pie.  Where would any of us be if we didn’t have good recipes?

Georgia O’Keeffe, moving west to paint, spent her days exploring the desert terrain.  Her recipe involved observation, thought and constant application of paint to canvas.  After all, those vistas, vivid to be sure, don’t exactly paint themselves.

‘The cliffs over there - you look at it and it's almost painted for you, you think. Until you try.'

Georgia O’Keeffe

Walter Murch, film editor on movies like The English Patient and The Godfather, Part III, describes his recipe for achieving invisibility in his work.

‘I will keep on working until I can no longer ‘see myself’ in the material. When I review my first assembly of a scene, more often than not I can still vividly (too vividly!) recall making the decisions that led to each of the cuts. But as the scene is reworked and refined, it reaches a point, hopefully, where the shots themselves seem to create each other: This shot ‘makes’ the next shot, which ‘makes’ the next shot, etc. In this way, the Walter Murch who decided things initially gradually recedes until, finally, there comes a point where he has become invisible and the characters take over, the shots, the emotion, the story seems to take over. Sometimes - the best times - this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that - it just created itself.”’

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

I gather, from these artists, that none of them think good recipes are substitutes for hard work and creative flow. My mother’s comment about cooking nicely joined O’Keeffe’s ode to ‘try’ with Murch’s acknowledgement that excellence lets you disappear.

Recipes are road maps and measuring tools.  Between setting out and calling it a day, there’s work, play, patience, judgement - every painstaking facet of art. The recipe gives an artist a familiar structure within which to dare.

Here's a very good recipe for relationship to anything and anyone you love:

‘Always wave goodbye until they can't see you.’
Regina Brett

Because your loved ones, human and created, need your fond attention, until you disappear.

Happy New Year!

Photo credit Alfred Stieglitz, Georgie O'Keeffe

Botox lullaby

Tis the day after Christmas
and all through this place
not a feature is stirring.
I’ve botoxed my face.

I’ve Stepford perfected
my vacuous stare.
I’m grimacing blandly
my inner despair.

My wrinkles are smuggled
all suave in my head.
They carved out a living
but now they’re quite dead.

Come anger, come jealousy,
plunder, conniption.
Come playfulness, happiness,
wonder, conviction.

Come shed your suggestion
that Botox is rape.
Oh ravaged emotions
dream not of escape!

Your passion is pointless,
your impotence funny.
My flesh has suppressed you
by medicine’s cunning.

I silence your sirens
with Stonehenge’s call.
Pass away.  Pass away.
Pass away. All.

Photo montage Susan Weber

Chron us

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

Losing track of time while cramming it with pleasure is what artists do.  The problem being, of course, that unless there’s somebody minding the store, monetizing all this pleasurable time, artists starve for lack of food - or recognition.

Venues stocked with savvy patrons did not seem to be a problem for early jazz musicians.  Nor did time.  Charles Hersch explores the role of time in the emergence of New Orleans jazz.

‘A defining feature of slavery was its near total control of the slave’s time... Emancipation held out the promise of, so to speak, time recaptured, but sharecropping and routinized industrial labor monopolized time in a particularly dehumanizing way.  Improvising musicians controlled time and how it felt - for what is music but sound unfolded in time? - and created a variety of experiences (rushed, languid, tense, or relaxed) with the rhythmic figures they played.
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Musicians who tinkered with time in rhythms that challenged long established norms found a willing audience in the beleaguered workers of New Orleans.  Jazz was escape from and revolt against oppression.

‘In this liminal state, individuals exist both ‘in and out of time,’ as if the clock were stopped as timepieces become useless or a hindrance to the flow of activities.  As a contemporary jazz musician once said about the trancelike ‘groove’ created by good jazz, “it’s about feeling like time itself is pleasurable.”’
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Time is not so pleasurable when monopolized by the boss, unless that boss is muse or spirit.

‘I came upon a photograph in a book; it was a small statue of a woman... But she had no face.  She was crowned with waves of water, covering her head, overshadowing the face.  It was her entire body which spoke, her breast-belly body, a thick bulb rooted, pushing up a halo of water, the water which moved within me.  I’ve been looking for her face ever since.  I had then, and still have one essential prayer: “Show me your face.”’
Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother

Yesterday my phone rang as I hunted down gifts at the mall.  My family wanted to know if I’d join them for lunch any time soon.  Jaded by the numbing assault of ten thousand consumer items blinking and winking their wild desire for my cash, I wanted to interrupt the time warp of shopping.  But I still needed smart socks from Dick’s and a book from Border’s.  What to do?  Drive home in my busboat of crazy contradiction?  Tinker with a day’s rhythm, shrug off the new (old) oppressor: stuff?  Prove I’m an artist, not a drone?

A funny thing happened on the way to Dick’s.  I lost the impression I had to be there for any other boss save the muse.  Art had its way with me.  To this end, time and I eloped, by busboat, to the Aegean archipelago.

Photo credit razielthomas

Word is

Words can be toys. Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

Words can be tools. Educators serve the tool-like qualities of words. They give us lawyer, doctor, scientist enthusiasts of orderly abstraction. Or artist grunts who lay down guns and pick up pens of battle.

‘When Oliver Stone returned from Vietnam, he enrolled at New York University, studying on the GI Bill. He's been wrestling with those experiences for years, expressing his feelings through a trilogy of motion pictures about Vietnam.’
Bill Moyers Journal

Celebrities crouch behind impotent words, betraying and braying impossible breaches of honor and love.

'I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.’
Tiger Woods

Words can be travesty.

Sometimes words are like music is to a child with Asbergers.

"The music somehow evoked a world in which I felt at home, as opposed to the real world, which I did not feel at home in."
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic

Words can be salve. Friends in foreign times. Anchors in storm. We keep words around on shelves and blogs and owners manuals just in case the world dissolves and leaves us frail and speechless as the wind.

Word is not all, it is some. It isn’t enough; it’s often rough approximation. Sometimes poets get it right by accidentally bothering to try.

Photo credit Victorgrigas

Imagination dust up

‘You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.' 
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

A painter friend asks, ‘why paint?’  I answer, ‘because you must - and it brings you comfort.’ Now, Freud and I slipped ‘why pain?’ into the equation first time around. Why indeed.

Peter the Great, my poet friend of large heart, sent me an article about Springsteen, Brubeck and company - the peak parade - receiving honors at the White House. At a reception, Clintons H. and B. toasted their greatness. Bill included a story about hanging a signed song chart for Blue Rondo a la Turk Brubeck had sent him on his music room wall. Peter liked this especially because he’d basked in a Brubeck concert as a younger man. I like it too; imagine the rich and famous pinning the rich and famous’ masterpiece to the wall. Intoxicating stuff.

I asked Colleen what her dream job would be. She combines dance and yoga in her drug-prevention work with at-risk kids. ‘Pretty much what I’m doing right now,’ she said. ‘I love dancing with kids. You never know what they’ll come up with.’

At the aforementioned East Room reception, Springsteen said this about his honor:

‘It's an acknowledgment that you've kind of threaded your way into the culture in a certain way. It's satisfying."

And then there are the people in the middle, like my painter and poet and dancer friends and me, who thread our way into the culture less publicly.

Colleen and I’ve been touring together in Lorain, Ohio, doing residencies with first graders who are learning to read.  I’ve heard John McCutcheon credit his work in schools with preparing him for the concert stage (he figured seventh graders were as good as a bar’s best patrons for honing his act).  Since I’ve put that stage on hold for now, diving into schools full tilt, I’ve discovered a wild truth quite the opposite of McCutcheon’s.  The craft I honed in front of adult audiences prepared me for this, the real story.

You never know what kids will do, but in one way, they don’t surprise you.  They do themselves, really well.  This is a life enhancing drug like no other, with side effects you may be unprepared for.
Imagination dust, seeping into every pore.

Photo credit Hans Lachmann

A few grains

A younger man approved my then long hair, telling me he wished women wouldn’t cut their hair the minute they reached a certain age. 

Approving his approval, I kept it long awhile, perishing the thought of looking middle-aged.  I decided to cut and run from the vanities one fine August day among the gnarled stumps of an abandoned cherry orchard.  Thrusting shears into the hands of nymphs who cut their own and each others’ hair at the merest provocation, I was reborn.

Since then I’ve shorn my coif ever shorter, sometimes feeling more artsy than elderly, other times not so much. The crone goddess stalked me still, until a couple of nights ago when my dear old mother visited me in her June Cleaver garb, a dream I told my sister...

'I dreamed I was sitting at the dining room table with you and Dad and Mariah and Mom. We were smiling and talking, Mom had flesh on her bones and her hair was brown. Mariah was young, in blond pigtails. I went over to Mom's end of the table, gave her a big hug, told her I missed her and we all missed her and loved her and I'd thought she'd died, but here she was with us. She just kept smiling her beautiful smile. She was wearing a beige cardigan and plaid Scottish skirt, maybe pearls. Hugging her sideways as I looked across the table at you guys, I felt Mom smooching my cheek continuously, like a happy child. I said to you sisters, 'this isn't real is it?' and Mariah, grinning back, said, 'nothing's real, Susie!' We all seemed to think that made sense. I woke up, thinking of love.'

 If nothing is real, then everything might just as well be real.  My sister’s take on the dream gives an artist pause.  She said:

'I'm listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about reality - how we can't really take it in - we take a few grains of sand of it and that's our reality. There's so much - so much.'

I guess that’s what art does.  Excavate, death defy, populate the world with seers.  There are muses, in pearls, waiting to smooch us unabashed into the light.

Painting by Paul Gauguin, La Baignade

Swiss minarets notwithstanding

Here’s the church.  Here’s the steeple.  Open the doors and see all the people.  Child’s play back in the day, with not a minaret to be seen.

Nearly 58 percent of Swiss voters put the nix on minaret building and the kibosh on religious tolerance.  Of course, it’s never that simple.

My heritage is Swiss.  I grew up high on its famed neutrality, sobered in time by the knowledge of Swiss banks looting Holocaust victims.

The Switzerland I’ve loved is pure.  I’ve hiked its alps, wandered its valleys and worked its farmland.  I’ve hugged its wondrous terrain by cable car, hiking boot and utterly punctual train.  Tilted a bowl of warm milk to my lips in a mountain cabin rocked by June blizzards.  Sung with Tante Anna.  Laughed with Hans.  Had a crush on Peter. Skied with Otti and Ernst.  Church bells and cow bells everywhere.  Not a minaret to be seen.

Wouldn’t it be comforting to knit the inconsistencies into an emblematic wool scarf just now.  Self-preservation so deeply moves us all, preceding love, consuming trust. Religion holds scant sway and no amount of logic makes us holy.

What shall become of a world were mercies languish at the feet of terror, our only lonesome vote: our art?

Photo credit Roland Zumbüh, Sankt Martin im Calfeisental

Command the poises

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events. 

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political events. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Photo of Warren G. Harding and Carrie F. Phillips

Be the air

Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti. The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.

These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library. As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.” Who decides what’s worthy? Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.

Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices. Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?

Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious. We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.

My mother would have loved this story. Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space. Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother. She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum. Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder. There, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting. Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence. She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.

Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:

Watercolor on my shoulder. Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water. Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air

Public Domain painting, Paul Gauguin, In the Waves 1898

Dylan agape

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Public domain photo, Bob Dylan 1963

Ripeness is all

I once stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. Now, Scott may not have been as overjoyed as Susan who, to her surprise, began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to her journal.

The dreams were more vivid and complex than usual, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Sendak took comfort in art as he ventured into public television.

Like coming here today, I was anxious about this. Would I be all right? And I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

So what did the 75 year old writer want to be when he grew up?

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. And also, I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax. Where we just had fun... I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

Sendak’s invocation of ripeness reminds me of the vivid dreams that lined up with my acting class back when. And my vivid dreams now.

By day, I’ve left my comfort zone to make a video about a sensuous song, It Falls Away. At night, dreams sway luscious in the branches, or squish beneath my midnight ramblings.  I’m not so sure about the comings and goings of dreams.   

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes?

Except that maybe it’s the other way around. Art comes first. Dreams, and vivid intrigue, follow. As Sendak mused, ‘when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain.’

This berry bears our artist mission: get our souls away from the languidly familiar, out onto the fertile plain where dreams chase us down to captivate our longing. Each act of art, whether absorbing or making it, is birth and death and depth perception in between.  It's where the wild things are. It’s where the master placed his benediction:

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Artist candor

‘We have an anti-semitic president.’

Not the kind of thing my sister and I expect to hear the cardiologist say as he listens to our dad’s heart.

My sister’s Israeli, occasioning the doc’s statements of certitude on Arab religion (violent), universities (substandard) and government (violent and substandard).  Oddly, my Jewish sister is left to defend Islamic beliefs subverted by unscrupulous leaders.  The Gentile physician ignores her completely.  The middle east is defibrillating; Koranic teaching is the culprit.  Case closed.

Somehow I’d expect a more nuanced approach to political science from an educated man.  Which only shows my unsubstantiated bias toward the belief set of academia.  As though more intellectual tools and exposure equals broadmindedness and curiosity.  Surely medical science refines itself by embracing more, not less, rational evidence.

A friend of mine circulates ernest emails pitting wise conservatives against pompous liberals in couplets of rectitude:

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

I shake my head as I hit delete, thinking that as long as there are voters who practice black and white thinking, we’ll have politicians who pander to them.  This, the unctuous underbelly of democracy, encourages gladhanders to exploit the us-them battleground.

It sometimes feels like hopelessness incarnate.

Enter, artist.  Ply your nuance.  Encourage doubt.  Eschew the easy answers and web-ready glib gloss besmirching your and my and everybody's lips.  As one artist philosopher of the day warns,

The end of the world came and went while you were on Facebook.
Dan Piraro, Bizarro

While you were on Limbaugh, Colbert, CNN, Fox, Hannity and Dowd, clouds of intelligent uncertainty passed you by.  Art is where we explore certitude with a double edged sward.  Slice question marks into the self-righteousness belly of the beast.  Generate beauty, lots of beauty, to remind us all of our capacity for love.

Hear the remonstrations of the muse:  ‘Paint me.  Make me real.’

Photo John T. Bledsoe, Library of Congress

Fellowship of the rope

‘In each of them, we find the amalgam of the child carrying old wounds and the adult who has learned to cope with a world oblivious to his or her individual dream.’
Jennifer Weil, Old Town Playhouse

These are words flung out to a waiting audience by the director of Gene Abravaya’s new play, The Book of Matthew Liebowitz.  Words to secure our ascent up a fictional mountain of contiguous words, astutely drawn characters and a well conditioned ensemble.

And why do we, audience or artist, entertain metaphors of mountaineering, with our own lives already rife with challenge?  Why explore, discern, respond to created worlds?  Charlie Houston, veteran climber, put it this way:

You're surrounded by beauty. No matter whether it's a storm, or a sunny day, or clouds, or not, the mountains are simply beautiful. I've never been a great climber. I'm just a competent climber and I know my limits. But I love getting out and doing it.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

Just ‘getting out and doing it’ for the beauty is impetus behind many a climb, fuel for exhaustive preparation and try.

But there’s more than solo gratification on the line.  Actors, musicians, writers and their audiences - even in the heady free fall of oxygen-lite extroversion - pull themselves together and upwards by means of what Houston, no stranger to death defiance, called a ‘fellowship of the rope.’

You knew that your life was in the hands of somebody else, and his was in your hands. And it made you climb perhaps more carefully. You didn't push the envelope quite so hard. But it also gave you a feeling of... there was an emotional or a psychological bond between us... at least as important as the physical bond. And that's why climbing with rope is... To some extent, it's more dangerous, because if one man pulls, slips and pulls you off, you're both gone. But on the other hand, as happened in our case, the fact that we were roped together saved all our lives.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

I’ve experienced this invisible tensile strength with musical companions, on stage, in studio, at rehearsal; a bond like no other.  Why climb creativity's sheer slopes?  Summoned by beauty, lured by dream, secured by interdependence, we do it in search of home.

I’m reminded of lyrics I wrote once, not yet calling love the rope, but knowing it full well.

Set out to climb impossible mountain.
Could not be done.  I did not care.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I thought I’d find my dreams up there.

Top of the world, you are alluring. 
I can’t deny your mystic slope.
I hear you scream your warning. 
Echo of madness, echo of hope.

Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I changed my mind, I turned in my tracks.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
Love took me home and home took me back.

Susan Weber, Everest

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Photo Felicity and Phillip, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

The people's largesse

A little girl, maybe seven, ploughs into me on her way out of the girl’s locker room.  ‘Daddy!’ she calls into the empty foyer of our local pool.  ‘My dad’s got my bag,’ she tells me.

‘Maybe he’s in the boy’s locker room,’ I offer.  ‘We can call him from the doorway.’  We both try.

‘Daddy!’

‘Anybody in there have a little girl?’  No answer.

So we head back to our locker room with me listening to the girl’s steady stream.  ‘I already have my suit on but I need my bag to put my clothes in,' she points out.

By the time we’ve got on goggles and caps and I’m saying her dad’s probably waiting for her on the pool deck, I notice the girl is studiously ignoring me.  She’s gotten a grip on worry and gotten in touch with something her parents taught her.  Rules.

Ah yes, ‘don’t speak to strangers’ and ‘don’t speak to kids who aren’t supposed to speak to strangers.’  In our rush to fix a problem, we’d both forgotten rules and roles and business as usual.  Strange woman.  Dutiful child.  Zero trust; all hallowed rules.

There are times when our great need, or loss, or even greater love temporarily interrupts the who’s who of trustworthy others.  After 9/11, it’s often noted, a national, even global suspension of distrust between strangers took effect.  Safe distance gave in to compassion and kindness.  It reminds me of cherished reunions with my family, whose Weltanschauung could not be further from my own.  I’m not the only one who loves her kin far more than she misjudges them.

I admire the girl swimmer’s resolve to ignore the stranger lady, as her parents told her to.  I told my little boys the same back when, to keep them safe.

But for grown ups, I’d welcome a person of stature to challenge us all - we the rule followers who curl up in our cozy sense of who belongs and who is never to be trusted.  Lead us not into self-preservation and other-ignoring but toward a role model our seven year olds may one day embrace.  A future where pundits and pols and the overlords who own them are shamed by the peoples’ relentless courage to include.

When such a leader emerges, I pray the stones we throw will miss their mark.  Long enough for us to awaken and think, as adults, for ourselves.

And with each other.

Hold Your Hand | Revolution Pie & Friends

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks...

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