My Three Aunts

Whenever people rant in my earshot about Roman Catholicism, I am more apt than not to pipe up: "I have three aunts who are nuns."

Technically they are Great Aunts -- sisters of my father's father -- and two of them are now passed on into Beloved Memory. But growing up with them, being the recipient of their showers of love and affection, and watching them move in and out of cloisters, teaching positions, nursing jobs, and the changing dress-codes for their habits certainly gave me a different perspective on being Religious.

Of the three, I felt closest to Sister Ann Constance, SSJ, former principal of Bethlehem Catholic High School, also known in the family as "Aunt Iz."

(It was a novice at her convent that swept me from my mother's arms at the tender age of six weeks, placing me on the altar for a blessing that Mom always reminded me of whenever the story of Isaac's willingness to sacrifice Jacob came up in a reading or discussion.)

Sister survived breast cancer only to fall prey to a brain disease that left her increasingly immobile and in dementia for almost ten years. At her funeral, my father humbly (or perhaps fearfully?) passed his assignment of reading the Intercessions to me, and I trembled on the altar in front of hundreds of devout Catholics, many of them in religious orders, to dare to invoke "Let us Pray to the Lord."

Devotion to G-D and the Blessed Mother I have. Dogmatic adherence to the precepts of Roman Catholicism or weekly attendance at Mass I do not, probably logging a total of 50 Masses in the last FIVE years (rather than one), ash on my forehead at Lent and friendliness with the campus Newman Association(s) notwithstanding.

Her sister in the Order, Elizabeth Immaculate, passed on less than six months later. She was one of the sweetest, most innocent women I have ever known. Childlike in her way of seeing the world, and beautifully modest about expressing her faith and her opinions. But I also heard she was a tough math teacher. And at her funeral, listening to the work of her teaching career, I realized that my vocation in education was not an anomaly in the family.

Aunt Nancy joined the convent first, at eighteen, directly out of high school. But Aunt Clare held out through her twenties, carried on a vibrant social calendar, and exercised her spending power with a career in nursing. She became a Sister of Mercy. And they were among the first order, from what I recall, to discard the medieval habits for modern costume.

I used to love summers at the Jersey shore. Or more precisely, the two weeks of every year, usually August, that the clan would gather in Sea Isle City. And the nuns would doff their headdresses, and run their fingers through their graying close cropped curls, and laugh at themselves. The older women wore bright tanks with skirts; their brother, my Poppop, always had an underwear shirt covering his chest. It was before most people used sunblock. And we would fly kites, jump the waves, and build castles made of sand and seaweed and clamshells.

Rocktober

Why is it that the first time I have some solo writing time in months every single one of my favorite jambands has to come to the New York City area???

String Cheese Incident played at a community college not too far from Asbury Park on Saturday night. It was a cute, fun, round room. Unfortunately their long-time sound engineer had just quit / been fired over longstanding gripes with the managers, and so the same quaint factors made for an atrociously muddy mix.

Danced up front during second set, and got down a little with a bunch of freaks I love the STRING CHEESE INCIDENT, but was too in my head over the departure of Jon O'Leary to really enjoy.

We zoomed up the Garden State Parkway, thru the Holland Tunnel, and walked in to the Knitting Factory just as New Monsoon started up, sometime after 1 a.m. After the debacle in Lincroft, we were happy to be in a happy-vibed crowd, albeit a small one. And much dancing and festivity took place. Guitarist Jeff Miller was the most relaxed I've seen him over the last several years we've been following them, and so the music was brilliant.

Sunday NM played again at Mexicali Blues in Teaneck, joined by Hot Buttered Rum String Band. One of the storm's players, Bo, who's instruments are acoustic guitar and banjo, lost a close family member and was home visiting. It was the band's first appearance without him, and they were wistful at times, but still very high powered. Aaron Redner, the fiddler from Butter, filled in an alternate part for him on Calypso. And then Erik Yates joined in for a couple a few songs late on banjo.

Butter had opened with a gorgeous set of their usual hot and spunky stuff. Another meltdown!

I arrived a tad late, missing the exit for the George Washington Bridge in a bit of musical mayhem, and having had to turn around in Fordham. I don't know the river crossings or the northern parts of the metro area nearly as well as Brooklyn, so it was a tad of a hairy ride. I always think of my Dad and my Pop-pop when we ride by Yankees Stadium, 'though, and also muse about where my Bronx relatives on the Barrett side lived. So it's definitely a different nostalgia trip for me than for darling hubby.

A good crew of GoudaFriends were in the house, for we all do love the sound at Mexicali Blues, and it was pretty nice sized crowd for a Sunday night! Next up: Yonder Mountain String Band.

La Dolly Mama

We were among the crowd thronged into Lindley Meadow of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Sunday to hear Miss Dolly Parton sing at the “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass” free music festival.

There were, of course, quite a few Dollies in the audience, dressed to impress in the masquerade of diva queens one might expect in such a queer-friendly urbana as Baghdad by Bay. But my favorite was the woman we all came to see perform on the Star Stage, spangled out in turquoise and silver, rouged and dashingly blonde, and wielding at times a matching teal electric guitar.

There was little sign of “the hippie-styled” / vintage show she had put on at Radio City Music Hall six weeks earlier, although the setlist relied similarly on the Sixties-standards recorded on her upcoming release, Those Were The Days (Sugar Hill Records, October 2005).

She sang “Me and Bobbie McGee” with a nod to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin. She cooed “Crimson and Clover” with a stand-up-like commentary on the pungent aroma of that incense-like herbal intoxicant, known colloquially as “grass,” which seemingly permeated the audience. And among her half a dozen or so other songs, including several peacenik ballads (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and John Lennon’s “Imagine”), she regaled us with a poignant version of “Coat of Many Colors,” dedicated to her Mama, who sewed it for her during a childhood where rich and poor were relative categories reflected against such mirrors as pride, identity, and dignity.

You might remember some of the lyrics about a pieced-together, recycled rag jacket that the enterprising and economic seamstress compared favorably with the bibical story of Joseph’s “technicolor dream coat:”

Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors”
Title song of 1971 RCA Victor album

Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us
And how my momma put the rags to use
There were rags of many colors
Every piece was small
And I didn't have a coat
And it was way down in the fall
Momma sewed the rags together
Sewin' every piece with love
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of

As she sewed, she told a story
From the bible, she had read
About a coat of many colors
Joseph wore and then she said
Perhaps this coat will bring you
Good luck and happiness
And I just couldn't wait to wear it
And momma blessed it with a kiss

Chorus:

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money
I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

So with patches on my britches
Holes in both my shoes
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

And oh I couldn't understand it
For I felt I was rich
And I told them of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch
And I told 'em all the story
Momma told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes

But they didn't understand it
And I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
Only if they choose to be
Now I know we had no money
But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me
Made just for me

My mother was also born in 1946, but to far wealthier circumstances. She and her two older sisters (Dolly was one of 12 children in Appalachia) wore matching wool coats with fancy buttons and coordinated berets from New York's finest mercantile. And my grandparents bought similar sets for my sister and I in the early 1970s, before we grew too wild to bother with such decorous styling. The "class" politics of coats and clothes and rags and stitching... All I can say about it right now is let's hear it for the needleworkers... UNITE!

Live from Cali

Nothing like a one-way aeroplane ticket to California!

I'm hanging out in Santa Cruz, recovering from the most amazing wedding EVER in Yosemite. I mean, I loved my weddings -- both to the same man, a year apart, one guru-blessed, one rabbi-legalized. But this affair was quite special.

Hostessed by the Martha Stewart of hippie/deadhead world and the taper extraordinaire of our whole scene, it was a dragonfly extravaganza of love, respect, bliss, happiness, and joy. What a bash! With the best waterfalls Yosemite has had in years. And plenty of crazy hippies mixing it up with Yonder Mountain String Band and Hot Buttered Rum String Band playing music for the aforementioned bride and groom. You can't complain about a gig like that!

Come to think of it, maybe I'll stop complaining. About everything. Why not? With so much love in the world, what's the point in being cranky?

Glad to be outta NYC and hanging in the redwoods - can'tcha tell?

Don't pet the animals: they bite

Note to self: stopping by the tail end of the Motorcycle Club's evening meeting, after they've adjourned to Fillmore's (the Local 3 watering hole) is a set up for chaos. And I have an Outlaw Biker's toothmark on my middle finger to prove it!

Thought the gentleman wanted to kiss my hand, and then he started gnawing on me!! With my husband and our best man standing right next to us!!! Oh the company I keep, and the boundaries I lack. Another lipstick notch for Agnes the Airhead, my new persona for dealing with that "smart girl who doesn't think" side of things.

Apparently the peace offering is a tattoo, according to the men's subsequent negotiations as I raised a rugby-player's balls-out protest about the welt on my knuckle. But we'll be away during "the convention" this weekend at the Roseland Ballroom, so I'll have to wait until June to get inked.

It's funnier than it probably sounds.

Yom HaShoah - Remembrance of the Holocaust

We live in a part of Queens where the observance of Jewish holy days are noticeable, even if you are goyim and/or don't have an eye on the calendar. I hadn't been too deep into the public fray when I posted yesterday morning. And after running errands and noticing some religiously minded men out and about, I came home to check out the many web-sites helpful to intellectually curious people, like me - someone who "married in" to The Tribe, but whose spouse is decidedly assimilationist and unplugged from the shul long ago.

5/5/5 was also the Day of Remembrance this year -- it shifts according to the lunar-based Jewish calendar -- and follows so close between the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Dachau death camp (April 29, 1945) and the surrender of the Germans to Allied Forces and VE Day (May 8, 1945) as to make this historian notice the synchronicity in her mental file. (See also the provocation of a new Deutsche papa to my new bloggishness!)

Dachau, the first of the death camps established, initially for political prisoners, is a place I have visited. It is not far outside Munich, and in 1988, after a semester abroad at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, a small group of us travelling on the continent sojourned out to pay our respects. It was December, cold and gray, and quite possibly the day after Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie Scotland with 50+ study-abroad juniors like ourselves travelling home for Christmas; a friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Saunders, perished in that bombing.

Modern traumas notwithstanding, the historical weight of visiting one of the Kamps is not to be underestimated. The psychic shock of being in such a place was overwhelming. After just a few minutes of walking the grounds, I began to hear my name echoing. Not quite in my head, but in the sound of pebbles underfoot, and in the wind, and from a far away place. Rachel, mother of the tribe, Jacob's beloved. Rachel of Ramah, crying for her children, unconsolable. Rachel, my daughter. Rachel, my sister. Rachel! Ruchel! Ruchelah!!!

At age 20.5, walking the grounds of Dachau, unkowingly untethered from familiar reality, the membrane between conscious awareness and the collective Unconscious had grown thin.

I sought out sacred ground to quell the spirits. To a temple with an eternal flame, but the gates were closed. To an ecumenical, United Nations-ish memorial, but it was cold and forbidding, not much solace. And then, blessedly, to a Carmelite convent church, on the edge of the grounds, which I stumbled into half-mad with grief and the uncontrolled channelling of psychic pain that was mine and not mine and everyone's at the same "time." You walk through an old guard tower into the monastic grounds, and the transition, for me, was perceptible. As if angels had folded their wings around me and I could breathe again, surrounded by air made purer with prayer and sacrifices of a different order.

As the great soul Elie Wiesel points out in an interview about the controversial religious sites at Auschwitz, in fact Dachau was a KZ for all sorts of dissenters, and many Jewish prisoners were sent further East to their deaths. But I did not grasp that distinction at the time. And still, the unevolved human capacity for genocide remains a terror for us all regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity, or political belief.

What, of all this, might our new German pope, whose faith took its formation in the cauldron of such a war, bring from it to bear on the future of this world?

Why I didn't go see Dylan at the Beacon

It was a rainy night.
We took a taxi to your mother's home
She went to Florida and left you
With your father's gun alone
Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see, who in the world I might be
-- Joni Mitchell, "Rainy Night House," from Ladies of the Canyon (April 1970)

Up until 3 a.m the night before, being all buttery in Joyzee, my morning plans to trek up to the Amherst-Williams Women's Rugby Footbal Club showdown fizzled. I wrote much of the day, and then fell asleep before Jeff got home from a hard day's work at the airport. He never even checked the bedroom to see if I was home, and set about relaxing with a Hoegaarden's & limon, found himself watching The Last Waltz and realized, hey, why am I watching Bob Dylan on tv when he's live, in town, up at the Beacon Theater?

The Beacon, as diehard NYC music fans know, is one of the last places in town where you can almost always find a way in the door. They often sell standing room only tickets at the door, and since it was a rainy night, my man figured the ticket would be an easy one.

It was at this point, as the music from the room next door began to louden in anticipation of his evening plans, that I roused myself from a nap, stumbling into the hall rubbing the snoozies out of my eyes. Although he was happy to see me, the surprised but gruff tone "What the fuck are you doing home?" made us both laugh.

So, now he had a date. Or so he thought. He pled, he wheedled, he tried out the "you're a sixties historian and he's the Bard of the Era" line on me. But there was no budging. I'd been in Minneapolis too long, and heard too many bad reports of mumbled shows and mediocre music to deal with the scene at the Beacon. I preferred my joyous memories of the Government Mule show there on 12/30/04 to the anticipation of a somewhat stressful jockeying for position night. Solo, Jeff, or I for that matter, can ease our way around and through the crowds at a music show, making friends, finding soulmates, dancing with the spirit. As a pair, however, we are a little slower, a little harder to fit into the crevices between people, and more than preoccupied with how happy the other person is at any given moment. Codependent indeed.

Moreover, all my usual joy-joining suspects were either at Jazzfest, down in Philly at a strangely venued Ratdog at the Electric Factory gig, or on their way to Bryn Mawr for a Hot Buttered Rum meltdown. And the thought of jostling my way into the Dylan crowd was just too much after the beautiful energy of the night before at Mexicali Blues.

So we had a very mature, married-couple conversation, off he went to the Forest Hills train station, and home I stayed to read and write and write and read and organize and journal and enjoy my Joni Mitchell fix.

I will always love Lisa Law's photographs of a young Bob when they were all living down in L.A. But I save my sponteneity for musical energy that vitalizes me, not enervates.

And besides, I still haven't figured out who I might be. It was a good night for that journey.

Buttery Bliss in the Northeast

Hot Buttered Rum String Band is finishing up their east coast tour. Tonight in Bryn Mawr, tomorrow for Bard College's spring fling, and then back to California for some SoCal churning before a special wedding day and then more tour in their newly retrofitted ecodiesel bus. Details at www.hotbutteredrum.net.

Not counting a sideshow at Hornings Hideout a few years back that failed to lodge in my memory bank -- I may have been off blissing on the peacocks -- I've seen HBRSB five times now. The first was last April (Holy Thursday) at The Independent, a San Francisco venue I spaced out in a few times in the early 90s when it was more of a rave disco. Butter was the supporting act for New Jersey's jamband, Railroad Earth, and after only an hour of their string-picking and flute-tooting I wanted MORE MORE MORE. Not Earth! Butter!!!

NYC got some of its own churn with an exciting show at the Lion's Den in August (a terrible sound system in that little brick room!), another brief opening set at B.B.King's November 2, which we arrived at late (although since they were followed by Peter Rowan/Tony Rice one can't complain), and a few weekends ago at Tribeca Rock Club (which hubby made but I had to miss). Passover got in the way of our aspirations to a three-setter in New Hope PA, so on Wednesday night I put on my driving gloves and took Lunabella up to Bridgeport, CT. Although the Acoustic Cafe was a nice, comfortable vibe, I go to live music to dance and this was very much a seated show. Their encore at the next gig (Ironhorse Pub, Northampton MA, hipstorian not in attendance flask alas!) was a cover of "You Make me Feel like Dancin" and last night's throwdown in Teaneck, NJ fulfilled that prophecy.

Mexicali Blues is a sweet little venue hiding in a quiet town off Route 4 - well-designed for sound and optically pleasing with its choices in lighting & Grateful Dead artwork. But the band, if a tad tardy getting onstage while waiting for city stragglers to get in the door, made my 20 mile drive with double-bridge tolls well worth the effort. Soaring fiddles and ecstatic flute vibratos put an end to my preliminary plan of leaving after first set. Thumping bass and sweet pickin' and strummin' on the mandolin and guitar made me revel in the beauty of this music genre. And it was a large enough crowd to give the room some energy, but still enough space for the dancers to get into a serious symbiosis with the musicians. None of us could get our cellphones to work for uplinks to friends and loved ones in other geographies, but we tried! Plenty of Irish heart strings being pulled and angelic energies floating around the dancefloor. And even a little Cajun nod to all the jamband fans doing their collective thing in New Orleans this weekend.

Jennga showed off her new Rye-esque spinning footwork, Sunshine Bob did his thang, and the Ronquillos & compadres plied the band with several rounds of topshelf tequila. I also got my freak on but good. (Lishy danced her ass off? No.... I know you can't believe it). Anyway, among my favorite songs, although I don't have the complete setlist, were The Crest, Idaho Pines, Homeless Man, Irish Medley 2, and Evolution.

If you like Yonder Mountain String Band, I dare say you will LOVE Hot Buttered Rum. Too bad they aren't part of The Big Classic with SCI and friends!

Despite that fun looking ensemble, our summer tour plans remain contingent: I have a dissertation screaming to be finished, the triannual Berks conference on the History of Women is going down at Scripps in early June, and our spiritual teacher is visiting from India for two months. Then there's this little matter of my stepson's college tuition. But that Wakarusa festival in Lawrence Kansas (June 17-19) is looking more and more enticing after the last few Buttered nights. Or maybe we'll even have to get ourselves to High Sierra Music Festival, now in Quincy CA, after all these years.