Image taken in the kitchen on Fallen Apple Lane in Forestville for use in a 2011 Solstice collage.
Welcome to my past.
I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays on Facebook.
Before long, readers started telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea, this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color, involved in over 200 (and counting) essays. Not to mention that many of the stories included links to appropriate Internet sites.
I next considered a website, but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing about 20-30 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size and/or eccentricities in spacing as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Welcome to my past.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. GETTING THE QUICKSILVER MESSAGE, Or, DECONSTRUCTING DINO VALENTE
2. THAT BLUE DRESS
3. NEW ENGLAND DEMOCRACY, Or,
A DOG’S GOTTA DO
4. THE CREATIVE PROCESS: A HOUSEHOLD HINT
5. A FLYING LESSON
6. BACK FROM THE PAST: A HORSE OF ANOTHER COLOR
7. ROSALIE SORRELS: TRAVELIN' LADY
(AND ONE HELL OF A LIFE STORY)
8. TOLTEC FRAGMENT: THE ART OF SYNCHRONICITY
9. RAINBOW MEMORY
10. A QUESTION OF MEMORY, Or,
ME AND GENERAL MacARTHUR?
11. CAMERA LOVE
12. DOWN ON THE COMMUNE, PART IV:
TUTU GARDENING WITH DOUGO
13. WHEN PUNS ALIGN
14. DORMOUSE ENCOUNTER, Or,
ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE SAN FRANCISCO
15. I GO ON AN UNEXPECTED ETYMOLOGICAL ADVENTURE
Or,
THE UNLIKELY TALE OF THE PHANTOM GOLFER; ADOLF HITLER’S JUNK; SCHOOLBOY SNOT; MUSIC-HALL HITS; AN OSCAR-WINNING FILM; MITCH MILLER; AND THE PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN
16. MOTHER AND THE TYRANNY OF THE NEEDLE,
Or
THE LITTLE STANDARD THAT COULD
17. MEDITATION 101
Or
GETTING CALIFORNIATED
18. NEW YEAR THREE HIGH
19. KENDRICK FREEMAN: A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
20. SPONTANEOUS DUCKERY: A COLLAGE TALE IN THREE ACTS
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sausalito, California; Early 1970s
GETTING THE QUICKSILVER MESSAGE, Or, DECONSTRUCTING DINO VALENTE
As I’ve written here before, in the early 1970s I had a weekend job in a gift shop in the tiny San Francisco Bay-side town of Sausalito, which at that point was somewhere in the middle of its long transition from fishing village to artists’ colony to beatnik hangout to hip enclave to tourist destination.
RenFaire pic of me about that time, still growing out my hair. (Sorry, no photos of Liz).
The chichi boutique where Liz was employed sold women’s designer clothing, with an accent on pseudo-Renaissance, pseudo-Victorian, lacy, frilly, frothy, peekaboo, and see-through garments, including a great line of naughty undies.
Liz was tall, willowy, naturally blonde, and could easily have been a model if she hadn’t had the good sense to avoid that strange and artificial milieu. She was a great asset to the store, as it was a no-brainer for the manager to dress her in its fashions—she pretty much looked wonderful in anything.
Needless to say, she was always getting hit on by men who came in with their ladies, and since she was naturally choosy, she had become an expert at tactful deflection.
One evening, as we were passing the time until her closing, the door was flung open, and a guy strode in, dressed in tight leather pants, embroidered vest, silk shirt open at the front to reveal a fall of silver-and-turquoise necklaces. A gaucho hat sat at a cocky angle on a full head of curls.
“I’m looking for—“ he began, and then caught sight of Liz and stopped cold. “Hey,” he said, “you’re beautiful! Come and have a drink with me!”
“No thank you,” she said politely.
“But I’m DINO VALENTE!” he sputtered.
“Sorry,” said Liz, suppressing an eye-roll, “I have a date.”
Without missing a beat, he turned to me:“How about you?”
“I’m her date,” I said.
His eyes lit up; girl on girl?: “OK,” he said, “Both of you come with me."
I’m working,” said Liz.“
Only until 5:30,” he replied, indicating the business-hours sign on the door. “I’ll be back then!” He swooped out.
I wasn’t a big fan of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the psychedelic-rock group that, along with the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, was considered to be a leading exponent of “The San Francisco Sound,” so I wasn’t that familiar with its personnel.
I realized, however, that our recent encounter had been with one of their lead singers and songwriters. I conveyed this to Liz, who said: “Really? I was sure he was just some flashy wannabe. Should we go have a drink with him?”
“Why not?” I said, “We outnumber him.”
Promptly at 5:30, Dino returned, carrying two perfect red roses, which he presented to each of with an elaborate bow and hand-kiss. (Elaborate exchange of eye-rolls behind his back.)
We went to the Trident, the hip waterside restaurant/bar founded by the Kingston Trio in 1966.. Our escort was greeted (mostly by women) with shouts of “Dino! Hey Dino!” He bowed and threw kisses. We sat down and ordered (I stuck to tonic water), and listened to Dino talk about:
The Trident
1. Himself
2. Quicksilver
3. Songs he’d written
4. Places he’d been on tour
5. Famous musicians he’d met
6. His theory of everything
7. Himself
Etc., etc.
This was punctuated by smiles and waves at people (mostly women) across the room. I felt my eyes starting to glaze over from a combination of boredom and annoyance.
Dino in Sausalito
Fortunately my friend Tommy, just off a bartending shift, came to the rescue. Ignoring Dino’s glare at being interrupted, he offered me (and Liz) a ride back to the city. I accepted; Liz said she’d stay awhile more. Had she fallen under the spell DV was attempting to weave?
The next time I saw her, I asked: “So how’d it go with Dino?
“Oh,” she said, "I ditched him not long after you left. He was just kind of…loud and empty. My friend Jorma (that would have been the Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen) gave me a ride home.”
Oh, Dino must have loved that.
Many years passed, and the Internet, Google, and Wikipedia were invented. Somehow Dino’s name came up in a conversation recently, so I looked for the Wikipedia page I was sure I’d find; instead I found a re-direct.
To “Chet Powers.”
Whaaaat?
From Wikipedia:
"Chester William Powers, Jr. (October 7, 1937 – November 16, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter, and under the stage names Dino Valenti or Dino Valente, one of the lead singers of the rock group Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Quicksilver: Dino at left, with David Freiberg, Nicky Hopkins, Gary Duncan, and John Cippolino
"As a songwriter, he was known as Jesse Oris Farrow or Jesse Otis Farrow. Early in his career, he used the name Jackie Powers. He is best known for having written the quintessential 1960s love-and-peace anthem 'Get Together', and for writing and singing on Quicksilver Messenger Service's two best-known songs, 'Fresh Air' and 'What About Me?'"
My friend Ben Fong-Torres wrote a brilliantly tongue–in-cheek Rolling Stone profile of Dino/Chet in February of 1969.
Here’s some of Ben’s elegant prose:
“[In] his formative years, [Powers had] worked in an East-coast carny as a pitchman, trapeze flyer, alligator runner, girl-show operator, sideshow operator, and all-around workman, until, at 17, he made his getaway.
“He cut loose from his parents' chosen rat race, the runways and tents of the carnival circuit, and told people that he was a composer, a guitar-picker, a folksinger.
Ben at work.
“By the time the kid made it into Greenwich Village, he was, at 17, no longer a kid. He'd shorn himself of his given name, Chester Powers, Jr., and told people to call him Dino Valente.”
The newly-minted Valente started taking low- or no-paying gigs in Boston coffeehouses. This was around 1959, when the Greenwich Village folk scene was just hotting up, so he soon headed to NYC.
Former Village club owner Joe Marra remembered Dino vividly:
From WIKIPEDIA:
"In the early 1960s, Valente performed in Greenwich Village and North Beach coffeehouses such as the Cock 'n' Bull and the Cafe Wha? at the height of the American folk-music revival, often with fellow singer-songwriter Fred Neil, and occasionally with Karen Dalton, Bob Dylan, Lou Gossett, Josh White, Len Chandler, Paul Stookey, David Crosby [who in 1965 would ask him to join the Byrds] and others. He influenced other performers, most notably Richie Havens, who continued to perform some of Powers' early ‘train songs.’”
Progressing from folk to folk-rock to blues, psychedelic rock and acid rock, scattering songs in his wake, Chet/Dino migrated to Los Angeles in 1963, and from there to San Francisco.
Somewhere in his early years, there was a brief stint in the Air Force, and some drug busts.
In San Francisco, shortly after making contact with some of his future Quicksilver band-mates, Dino was busted but good for marijuana possession, and sentenced to a one-to-ten stretch in Folsom Prison. He served about nine months, up to his first parole hearing. And then he pulled off the entirely unexpected:
Ben wrote:“With some legal maneuvering and miscellaneous jiving worthy of the best carny pitchman, Valente became, in his own words, 'the first cat in California to get bailed out of the state penitentiary, pending determination of a writ of habeas corpus.'
“He had pried a three-year parole from the Adult Parole Authority, then signed up with Epic Records, removing a final wedge to gain freedom. In essence, he'd kicked his parole on a signed promise to be a good boy and go make some records. It was, to say the least, unprecedented.”
As I read Ben’s interview, some sections began to seem strangely familiar.
“[Valente’s] rap [Ben wrote] is either an excited ego-tripping ramble ridden with contradictions and incongruities, or polished reflections on thought processes, order, energy, astrology, Dianetics, change, and societal downers. Visually oriented, he recounts dreams to do for theories what anecdotes would do for the biographical details he prefers to withhold.”
Dino/Chet
There’s even a mention of Liz’s boutique:“They [the girls fawning on Dino during an interview with Ben] are pretty; seen at an original-design dress shop moving from rack to rack in floor-length Renaissance-period gowns, they might be called ‘groovy.’ This night, they're running water for Dino's shower, offering tea and pie for Dino's pangs, and serving as a might-as-well-be-canned audience for Dino's utterances.”
This explained to me a lot about our close encounter with the guy. Somehow the carny kid Chester Powers had invented a rockstar alter ego that was a lot of work to maintain. Maybe he had to keep reminding himself (and the rest of us) whom he was supposed to be.
In Wikipedia, I read about his rise with Quicksilver, his attempts at a solo career, his prolific songwriting, and his comings and goings to and from the band, with whom he toured until 1979. He continued to perform after that, mostly in Bay Area clubs and coffeehouses.
In the late 1980s, according to Wikipedia, Powers/Valente underwent surgery for a cerebral arteriovenous malformation (CAVM), an abnormal connection between the arteries and veins in the brain. In spite of suffering from short-term memory loss and the effects of anti-convulsive medications, he continued to write songs and play with fellow Marin County musicians.
In later years
His last major performance was a benefit at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. He died, aged 59, at his home in Santa Rosa, California, in 1994.
Dino/Chet’s best-known song, the 1960s anthem “Get Together,” has been performed and/or recorded by a diverse array of groups, in particular The Youngbloods, whose 1967 rendition peaked at No. 5 and attained a RIAA gold certification in the United States.
In 1969, Richie Havens played "Get Together" live at the Woodstock Festival. In 1970, Gwen and Jerry Collins released a version of the song as a single that reached number 34 on the US country chart.
It's been used on The Simpsons and in Forrest Gump, recorded dozens of times by groups like The Kingston Trio, The Dave Clark Five, Jefferson Airplane, H.P. Lovecraft, The Staples Singers and the Carpenters (twice). You may have even heard it in a Walmart commercial a few years ago.
Ironically and somehow typically, Dino had sold the rights to the song years before in order to raise bail money for an early drug bust.
I sometimes wondered, on hearing “get Together,” how the buffoon-like character Liz and I had met could create such a sensitive and lasting piece of music.
So who wrote it? Chester/Jackie Powers the carny kid, escaping his childhood? Jesse Oris/Otis Farrow, the struggling young songwriter? Or Dino Valente/Valenti, the rock-star/ladies’ man constantly needing to re-invent and narrate his life story?
Doesn’t matter; it’s a classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdxUIZOzd5E (The Youngbloods/Get Together/4:53
GET TOGETHER
Love is but a song we sing,
Fear's the way we die,
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
Come on, people now
Smile on your brother,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Some may come and some may go,
It will surely pass,
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last,
We are but a moment's sunlight
Fading in the grass,
Come on, people now
Smile on your brother,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now
If you hear the song I sing
You will understand,
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand,
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command,
Come on, people, now
Smile on your brother,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now
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2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; 1959
THAT BLUE DRESS
Well, at the time I thought it was the epitome of glamor—yards of deep-cerulean chiffon, with a swoopy neckline, pouffy sleeves, a voluminous tea-length skirt, and a darling satin bow at the waist.
At the time, I was just trying to grow my hair out again (I’d cut off my long braids at 11). It had a lot of natural waves that flipped it in odd directions when I parted it on the side, and I could just about scrape it into an updo with a lot of bobby pins and hairspray.
I think my dad had a new camera; he asked me to pose in The Dress and took a number of test shots.
Not accustomed to putting cosmetics on my face, I believe I was wearing Tangee, a proto-lip gloss that was then considered the only makeup appropriate for young girls. I could never figure out why—when freshly applied, it looked dewy and pink, but soon dried out into an unflattering dried-blood red.
My date for the dance was Terry Siegel, who became a professional jazz saxophonist. We went steady for a while.
For the benefit of Dad's camera, I tried for expressions worthy of The Dress, but, as is apparent in the bottom two shots, I quickly got bored with posing.
So much for glamor.
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3. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, Windsor, New Hampshire; Mid-1980s
NEW ENGLAND DEMOCRACY, Or,
A DOG’S GOTTA DO
Canoeing on Black Pond in the 1980s
One fall evening in the 1980s, I reluctantly joined a delegation of Interlocken folks to a town meeting held in the historic Windsor Town Hall, a small, somewhat dilapidated structure of great antiquity and few amenities.
The Windsor Town Hall, version II. The old one, a former schoolhouse, was torn down in the eighties, to be recreated by Interlocken architect Peter Jackson Herman and students as a class project.
I’d been there once before, to vote, and was bemused and charmed by the process of inserting my filled-out paper ballot through a slot into a “voting machine” that had been in use since Colonial times.
To my delight, the venerable wooden box featured a cranked mechanism—probably the latest technology in Thomas Jefferson’s day—that drew the ballot inward and announced its arrival (and celebrated your vote) with a resounding “Ding!” from an internal bell.
I should mention that back then, as now, I valiantly attempted to avoid meetings whenever possible, but the agenda that evening contained a motion that directly affected Interlocken, and, obviously, the bigger show of hands, the better.
Said motion—number four of twelve such on the mimeographed handout—was duly proposed and passed. And since it would have been rude, and bad neighborhood PR, to leave right after that, I resigned myself to sitting through the whole process. It might, I thought, even be educational.
In spite of a certain factionalism—farmers; working stiffs; Yankees whose families had been in Windsor for generations; newcomers who had bought (cheaply) and “done up” old farmhouses; and odd bodies like us Interlockeners—proceedings moved along with commendable speed.
This was due to the skill of Eric Wilton, the de facto Mayor of Windsor, whose handsome Colonial house, owned by his family for generations, occupied “Wilton’s Corners,” where Windsor Road took a sharp left onto Black Pond Road, a dead-end lane mostly occupied by three winter-dormant summer camps.
Black Pond, looking down toward the end where Windsor once flourished. Featured as "Boulder Lake" on Interlocken PR materials, the Pond's distinctive hue was the result of tannins released by sunken logs dating from the time when they were cut and floated down the lake to be milled in Windsor.
“Hey,” the staff member at my left whispered to me as we breezed through Item Number Nine, ”Looks like we might even get out of here early.” I scanned the agenda, and on reaching the listing for Number Eleven, shook my head. “Not a chance,” I said.
Sure enough, when we got to the item headed “Management of Dogs,” a distinct ripple of aggression passed through the attendees. These were, after all, citizens of New Hampshire, whose motto “Live Free or Die” is not for sissies.
The issue at hand, it seemed, was not straying or barking or biting, but....pooping.
At that point, I should point out, Windsor was no longer a town in the usual sense, though it had it had once been a tidy little village at the foot of Black Pond, surrounded by thriving farms.
That was before a steady exodus had been triggered by the 19th-Century trifecta of: kindlier lands opening up in the West; the bottom falling out of the wool market; and the closing of the water-mill/clothespin factory that was the town’s raison d’etre.
Now it was mostly woodlands bisected by abandoned stone walls, and cellar-holes where houses had once stood. All that remained were farmhouses—often now just used as residences—19th-century cottages, and the occasional modern eyesore, strung out along Windsor Road.
One of the few features of Windsor left , other than a brick residence that once served as a church, and a small cemetery, was the Town Pound, a common New England feature in which straying animals were held until ransomed by their owners.
Some of these were occupied by people who actually cared about their lawns, Eric Wilton for one, who triumphantly produced a sheaf of Polaroid photos that showed certain neighbors’ dogs doing the dirty deed on his immaculately maintained premises.
Voices were raised, as were irate denials in the face of photographic evidence. We Interlockeners looked on amazed, until it occurred to some of us that we might actually have a dog in this fight.
Several pooches belonging to staff members were pretty well supervised in their comings and goings…but then there was Whitefield, a handsome brown hound/retriever mix who had showed up some months ago during the summer-camp session.
Whitefield was at once gentle, dignified, and playful, and the kids loved him on sight; His unusual name was attached to him when one of the students mistook a metal collar license from the town of Whitefield, NH (over 100 miles away) for a nametag.
Whitefield, a dog
Well-groomed and -fed, he was obviously not a stray. We searched out his owners, a recently relocated young couple living in a tiny place with a new baby and a toddler.
Perhaps intuiting that he was too much dog for the situation, Whitefield had simply upped and trotted down the road in search of sturdier playmates. We adopted him, which was fine with everybody, but he was pretty much a free-range pooch. Could he be one of the phantom poopers?
We then recalled, however, that Interlocken was at least a mile away from Wilton’s Corners, and that Whitefield, being a gentleman and homebody at heart, pretty much stuck around and invariably took his toileting activities into the woods away from paths and public areas. Thus I and the rest of the Interlocken contingent wisely kept silent as the battle raged.
That is, up to the point at which a fevered pro-lawn combatant seriously proposed a mandatory distribution of individually hued dye capsules to dog-owners, to be administered to their respective canines in order to render all scats easily identifiable by color.
That was when we all lost it, the proceedings having gone so steadily downhill that we felt justified in leaving.
I never found out if they ever got around to Item Number Twelve, but boy, we sure covered the heck out of Number Two.
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4. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1990s
THE CREATIVE PROCESS: A HOUSEHOLD HINT
When I first made this drawing in the early 1990s, there was no story behind it, just a vague image that slipped into my mind.
Some years later, a friend was going through my portfolio of drawings, and found this one. “This looks like an illustration for a fairytale or folktale” he observed, “but I can’t remember which one.”
I couldn’t resist. On the spot I invented “The Smirchcrow,” a clumsy bird who blunders between dimensions, using clean laundry as portals from one to the next.
“I never heard of that one,” he said, “Where does it come from?” Then he caught on: “You made it up!” he accused.
Of course I did.
A few years later, I came upon the drawing again. This time the story came out as a set of verses:
Ladies, in your launderings
Beware the SMIRCHCROW’s wanderings,
From outer space to linens fine
That hang upon your washing-line,
For sometimes, blundering through the dark
He’ll lose his way and leave his mark
Of stardust tangled in his wings
With shards of planetary rings
And other starry stuff that clings
Onto your sheets and underthings,
(My verse this timely warning brings:
Beware the Smirchcrow’s wanderings.)
Hint #2: To deter him, try a little bleach; he hates that.
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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: South Woodstock, Vermont; Early 1970s
A FLYING LESSON
Even before he started walking, it was evident that my younger brother David had inherited my dad’s amazing coordination and athletic ability.
Sure enough, the kid was a standout at Peewee football, a star Little League pitcher, could outrun just about anybody, and was the first picked for any team.
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| (L) Little boy, big football. (R) Carrying the ball |
After a stellar high-school football and track career, making the sports pages in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Connecticut in the late 1960s (we had two family relocations for my dad’s job), David switched to the less regimented rough and-tumble of rugby at Brown University.
I, on the other hand, (probably because I'd been press-ganged into neighborhood pickup games before I was old enough to develop decent hand-eye coordination), became That Kid Who Always Dropped the Ball, and that’s how I saw myself. Any high-school gym class requiring me to throw, catch, kick, bat or serve a spherical object was my own private Kryptonite.
In the early 1970s, David graduated from college, and moved with his then-partner Holly to Vermont, where he invented an unusual career in building reconstruction and architectural design. I always enjoyed visiting them in their old farmhouse in the hills above South Woodstock.
The old farmhouse
One perfect summer weekend day, after we’d slept late and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, David was full of energy, and really wanted to play Frisbee. Holly was otherwise occupied, so he turned to me.
Well, my previous experiences with the flying disc were, need I say, both short and frustrating for all concerned—I couldn’t throw the thing properly, much less catch it. I conveyed this to David, who nevertheless persisted.
With David in the 1970s
“We’ll just stay close together and do easy throws,” he assured me.
I love my brother, so out we went to the big well-mown space in front of the house, where David gave me a few non-condescending pointers on tossing and returning the damn thing. We started out at an embarrassingly short distance apart.
Then something amazing happened. I actually started to get the hang of it.
David slowly increased the distance between us, more and more, and suddenly—and totally unexpectedly—we entered that quasi-mystical state known in sports (and some other pursuits) as “The Zone.”
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| David at bat in Vermont |
All of a sudden we just couldn’t miss; I never dropped the frisbee once, and, if my throws were a little wild at first, David was spectacularly there to catch them. I became vividly aware of the number of things connecting us above and beyond our shared DNA.
For instance, I discovered first-hand, at long last, what a seriously accomplished athlete my brother was. I also realized, to my astonishment, that I also seemed to have inherited my share of Dad’s athletic grace and skill.
I’m not sure how long we played, both of us making great swooping throws and daredevil catches that had Holly, who had come out on the porch to watch us, spontaneously whooping and applauding.
Then, just as I felt myself beginning to tire, David began moving toward me. Our throws became shorter and shorter, turning into tosses from three feet, and then two feet, until we were standing, facing each other, gripping the disc on opposite sides.
My mind boggling, I looked up at my brother and asked, “So how come I didn’t know I could do that?”
“Because” he answered kindly and matter-of-factly, “This is what fathers do for sons.”
Oh.
Dads of daughters out there: you’re up.
David as a wise old guy.
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6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Somewhere in Sonoma County, California, 1980s; Sebastopol, California, 2023
BACK FROM THE PAST: A HORSE OF ANOTHER COLOR
Awhile back, I wrote about my long-time friend Laura's request that I refurbish a calligraphy/drawing piece that I'd given her years ago, and which had definitely seen better days.
BFFs
Well, she did it again.
Oh, that smile.
I can also date it by the fact that it was done after I'd become enraptured by a wonderful brand of pencils called Col-Erase™, which are not only erasable, but blend softly into rainbow hues at the touch of a finger. I also used them to good effect in a portrait of Laura, probably from the same era.
A little patchwork, a little glitter, a small collage element, and the horsie was set to trot colorfully into the next few decades.
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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Boise, Idaho, 1933; Grimes Creek, Idaho and Reno, Nevada, 2017; San Francisco, California, 1967-1970s; and Forever On the Road
ROSALIE SORRELS: TRAVELIN' LADY
(AND ONE HELL OF A LIFE STORY)
In 1967, on my very first morning as a resident of 885 Clayton St. in San Francisco, I woke up still jet-lagged from a cross-country flight, exhausted from a frantic day of looking for a place to live while at grad school, culture-shocked from a night spent at a friend’s Haight-Ashbury commune, hungry, disoriented and extremely apprehensive.
Innocent grad student at the University of Wisconsin in 1967, before heading west. (Photo by Ken Thorland)
Then I met Rosalie Sorrels.
As I approached 885’s communal kitchen that morning, I heard emerging from it a lovely, kind of jazzy humming in a rich contralto voice.
Peeking in, I saw a dark-haired, dark-eyed, and decidedly hip-looking woman in jeans, a flannel shirt and cowboy boots, riffling through the contents of one of a dozen or so grocery bags that covered the counter and floor, while simultaneously stirring batter in a mixing bowl.
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| Rosalie, from a 1961 album. |
When she spotted me, her face lit up with a lovely smile. “Hey,” she said, “You must be Amie; I hear you just moved in. Are you hungry? Move that bag off of the stool there and have a seat.”
She then proceeded to serve me a plateful of the best buttermilk pancakes I’ve ever tasted before or since, all the while recounting the improbable tale of how she’d once made these same pancakes for 200 hungover Mormons in Salt Lake City.
After I’d practically licked my plate clean, she grinned at my sigh of satisfaction. “Want a job?” she asked, tossing me an apron.
It turned out that I’d moved in on the eve of a party celebrating the birthday of Faith Craig Petric, my new landlady and the Indian Earth Mother of the venerable San Francisco Folk Music Club (which, I learned for the first time, met at the house on Friday nights).
Faith
For the rest of that day, I followed Rosalie around the kitchen, chopping, slicing, dicing, mixing, and washing cookware to be re-used, while my new friend, as her gift to Faith, prepared an unforgettable feast for the horde of folkies that began showing up to celebrate, sing, play music and eat their fill of that sensational food.
As she cooked, Rosalie punctuated her culinary efforts with scattered bits of song, rim-shot one-liners, spontaneous tales, and questions. I found myself telling her all about myself, feeling she was really interested. At some point during the day, I suddenly realized that I was truly happy to be exactly where I was.
At the end of the day, Rosalie sought me out and hugged me. “Thank you, Sweet Amie,” she said, and frequently addressed me that way for years afterwards.
Rosalie Sorrels (it’s pronounced Sor-ELs) was to wander in and out of 885 Clayton for the 12 years that I lived there, staying a night or two or a week or two, sometimes accompanied by one or more of her five children, sometime showing up with one or more of her many friends—musicians, poets, artists, rabble-rousers—to sing and play music and talk until the wee hours.
David Bromberg accompanies Rosalie at the Fox Hollow Folk Festival in the 1970s.
Some of these, like humorist/songwriter U. Utah Phillips, and Irish singer Lou Killen, became regular 885 overnight guests. Others were just passing through, like guitar wizard David Bromberg, who frequently accompanied Rosalie when she performed; Jerry Jeff Walker (aka “that big old boy with the two first names”); Kris Kristofferson, Dave Van Ronk (Rosalie: “I’ve never seen Van Ronk falling-down drunk; that S.O.B. does everything else when he’s drunk EXCEPT fall down”); Irish legend Joe Heaney, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, John Prine, and a lively host of others.
Rosalie frequently traveled and performed with U. Utah (Bruce) Phillips.
Although Rosalie got along very well with women, and collaborated with artist-friends like Faith, Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and beloved mentor Malvina Reynolds, she seemed to favor the guys as music- and drinking- buddies. She was, after all, not writing or singing what were then thought of as “girl songs.”
Griffith would later write "Ford Econoline," a fictional song about Rosalie, depicting her escape from an unhappy Mormon marriage in 1966, driving from Salt Lake City to San Diego with her five children to start a new life as a folk singer.
Here’s Griffith’s engaging performance:.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OBSo3G8LCg (Nanci Griffith/”Ford Econoline.”
Nanci Griffith
(The Lyrics:)
She drove west from Salt Lake City to the California coastline.
She hit the San Diego Freeway doing sixty miles an hour.
She had a husband on her bumper, she had five restless children.
And she was singing as sweet as a mockingbird in that Ford Econoline.
And she's the salt of the earth,
Straight from the bosom of the Mormon Church,
With a voice like wine,
Cruising along in that Ford Econoline.
Her husband was a gambler, he was a Salt Lake City rambler,
And he built a golden cage around his silver-throated wife.
So many nights he left her crying with his cheating and his lying,
But his big mistake was buying her that Ford Econoline.
Now she sings her songs around this country from Seattle to Montgomery,
Those kids are grown and that rounder knows you cannot cage your wife.
Along the back roads of our nation, she's become a living legend,
She drives a Coupe De Ville but her heart rides still in that Ford Econoline.
The true part of the story was that Rosalie certainly did drive her five children around the US in a Ford Econoline van as she toured and sang. The song was included on Griffith's 1987 album Lone Star State of Mind, which hit number 23 on the US Country charts. It was never released as a single, but was performed frequently by Griffith in concert, including, according to Wikipedia, a standout appearance backed by the Chieftains and Roger Daltrey in Belfast in the early 1990s.
Rosalie as a young mother with Shelley, Holly and baby Kevin.
One non-musical buddy was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a Mexican-American attorney, politician, novelist and activist known as “the Brown Buffalo.” Others were authors Studs Terkle, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and noted Gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
(I was once introduced to the notorious Hunter Thompson at a party, and responded not-so-innocently “Oh, I know who you are—you’re Rosalie’s friend!” This took him aback for a moment, but then he grinned: “Yeah. She’s something, isn’t she?”)
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Indeed she was. After her first album, recorded in 1961 for Folkways Records before she had ever performed for a live audience, she began to study singing and music theory in earnest. After doing time performing in penitentiaries, ski resorts and parlor socials, she graduated to the coffee-house/folk festival circuit. Wikipedia tells the rest of it:
Rosalie as a fledgeling singer.
“Rosalie Sorrels' first major gig was at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. She subsequently recorded more than 20 albums, including the Grammy-nominated My Last Go-'Round (2004) and Strangers in Another Country (2008), both up for Best Traditional Folk Album. She also authored/edited a folk history of Idaho and an anthology of songs and poetry of women's experience.
“In 1990 Sorrels was the recipient of the World Folk Music Association's Kate Wolf Award. In 1999 she received the National Storytelling Network Circle of Excellence Award for ‘exceptional commitment and exemplary contributions to the art of storytelling.’
“In 2000 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Idaho. In 2001 she was awarded the Boise Peace Quilt Award. She was featured a number of times on National Public Radio and profiled on Idaho Public Television.
“Throughout her career, she performed and recorded with other notable folk musicians, including David Bromberg, Utah Phillips, Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger and Pete Seeger. Authors Oscar Zeta Acosta, Hunter S. Thompson and Studs Terkel wrote introductory notes for her albums.
“Her career of social activism, storytelling, teaching, learning, songwriting, collecting folk songs, performing, and recording spanned six decades.”
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| Quintessential Rosalie |
Rosalie Ann Stringfellow was born in 1933 in a log cabin built by her father outside of Boise Idaho. “The Depression lasted a long time around our house,” she told me when I interviewed her for a Rolling Stone article in 1971. “It helped that we could live off the land—I learned to hunt and fish real early. Daddy really needed a boy; I think he would have named me Bill if my mother would have let him.”
That Rolling Stone article, December 1971.
In high school, she got into jazz, amassing a record collection that she claims her husband, telephone lineman Jim Sorrels, married her in 1952 to get his hands on.
Rosalie as a young woman and dancing with ex-husband Jim Sorrels.
They moved to Salt Lake City, where she began collecting folksongs. The Sorrels household, which expanded steadily with the birth of David, Leslie, Shelley, Holly, and Kevin, became the heart of the city’s folk scene.
Rosalie with son Kevin, from an album photo session.
Rosalie, pregnant most of the time, promoted the only folk concerts around, did a weekly TV show, hosted established names like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, and acted as den mother to “a lot of strange road-runners from the early pop-culture days.”
She divorced Jim Sorrels in 1966, and hit the road to become the stuff of legends. Her subsequent career was profiled by journalist William Grimes on June 13th, 2017, in her New York Times obituary:
“Ms. Sorrels came to widespread attention at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, where she performed traditional songs from Idaho, her native state, and Utah, where she lived with her family.
“She soon began writing her own material, about life on the road, her marital difficulties and the challenges of raising children. She then broadened her scope to include social issues like prison reform, suicide prevention and women’s rights.”
The Look
Of her storytelling, Grimes noted: “the effect could be incantatory” and quoted singer Christine Lavin from an NPR interview in 2003:
“It’s usually a big dark room, and there’s this woman onstage with this beautiful, rich, velvety voice who’s telling you this story or singing you a song, and then she stops and she tells another little story, and then the song continues. It’s like you’re sitting around a campfire and there’s this great wise shaman. And it completely transports you out of yourself.”
Rosalie (back to camera) sings "If I Could Be the Rain" at Woodstock, backed by Jerry Garcia and friends.
“Although she performed before multitudes at Woodstock in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1972 [Grimes continued], Ms. Sorrels didn’t break through to fame and fortune. She once estimated that she had never earned more than $20,000 in a single year. She spent most of her career in small clubs and often performed, gratis, at benefits for a variety of social causes."
With a fellow rebel in later years.
The music historian Elijah Wald, writing in the Boston Globe in 1985, called Ms. Sorrels “a legend in folk music circles,” adding: “She traveled around the country while raising five children. She drinks strong men under the table and is the first one up in the morning, bright and cheery and planning one of her famous dinners. And she can make the noisiest barroom crowd shut up and listen when she sings.”
In her Billboard obituary, producer Eric Pelloniemi summed up her performance style: “She didn’t just sing a song; she embodied it.”
After I moved to Sonoma County in 1978, Rosalie and I didn’t see much of each other, though we kind of kept track on Facebook. I was saddened to hear of her 2017 death in Reno, NV, where she was living with her daughter Holly.
Google “Rosalie Sorrels obituary” and you can read a veritable outpouring of tribute and love.
Thinking back, some of my favorite 885-Clayton memories of Rosalie involved being roped in as a captive audience when she had a new song or story to practice.
Going about your own business, you’d suddenly find yourself pinned down like a deer in the headlights by that compelling dark gaze, listening either to a story that would leave you helpless with laughter (who could forget the saga of the traveling salesman in Beirut and the six-bladed, gold-plated pearl-handled Boy Scout knife?), or a song that pierced you to the heart.
One of my favorites was this lovely Cole-Porter-ish fantasy, written in 1967, the year we met.
(Up is a Nice Place to Be/2:58)
(Rosalie sings “If I could be the Rain,” accompanied by Jerry Garcia at Woodstock/1969/1:03)
(Rosalie Sorrels delivered this performance at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, October 22/1:39:15)
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8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1980s
TOLTEC FRAGMENT: THE ART OF SYNCHRONICITY
Lately I’ve been reading Dawson Church’s brilliant (also award-winning and eye-opening) book, Mind to Matter: the Astounding Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality.
Synchronicities happen to us all the time. For instance: you’re thinking of Grandma, and Grandma phones you; looking through your high-school yearbook, you see a photo of a friend you haven’t seen in years, and run into him on the street later the same day; you're humming a song and turn on the radio, and that same song is playing.
One of the suggestions in Mind to Matter is to pause in your reading and think of one or more incidences of synchronicity in your life. When I did that, this image immediately flashed into my mind.
That year, I was sub-letting a lovely house at the end of a winding woodsy dirt road several miles from the village of Occidental. One of the amenities of the place was a great stereo/radio sound system.
I’d planned to go hiking that day, but woke up to pouring rain, and elected to stay inside, working on my latest collage and listening to music on National Public Radio.
The Classical Hour had at some point seguéd into a learned literary discussion on poetry in translation, but I was absorbed in my work and barely listening.
Suddenly, however, a Cultured Voice began reading what he identified as a “Toltec fragment.” Those first few lines yanked me out of my creative stupor; I found myself scrambling wildly, flinging collage elements in all directions in my search for pen and paper to write down the words as they emerged, hoping desperately that I’d remember the beginning and get the rest right.
At the end of the short reading, there was an uncharacteristic NPR moment of dead air, kind of a stunned silence. Then the Cultured Voice once more:
“Er, should I read that again?”
Oh-yes-please-yes-please-yes-please, I thought.
“Yes, please,” Responded the others in the discussion group, and I was able to check on my scribblings and make one small but absolutely vital correction.
After I had rendered the words in calligraphy, they seemed to call out for illustration, but I had no idea of what it should look like.
Then I happened on a 1930s National Geographic article on Mesoamerican culture, and was able to adapt the style of one of its accompanying images. (The colors were added on another rainy day about 20 years later.)
Whenever I look at this piece, I think of all the odd links in the chain of synchronicity that produced it.
For one, there was the fiercely ephemeral reality of life in the Toltec culture, which flourished (in what is now Mexico) from about 950 to 1150 CE.
The Toltecs were a warlike people; their advent marked the advent of militarism in Mesoamerica. They practiced human sacrifice intensively.
The Toltec culture disappeared as a result of a devastating famine, coupled with multiple invasions by nomadic warrior tribes.
And in the midst of all this fighting and killing and dying, there was one improbably poetic soul who got this message, and set it down in a place where it could be found and translated.
Then came that rainy day; that excellent sound system; that learned discussion; that Cultured Voice; that stunned silence that followed his reading, prompting a do-over; a magazine article picked randomly out of the house owners’ 40 years of saved National Geographics.
I mean, what are the odds?
Synchronicity.
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9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; Late 1950s
RAINBOW MEMORY
One of the joys of growing up near the end of a long lane out in the country was that of scampering around in whatever state of dress or undress suited one’s current make-believe scenario.
Thus, one day, following a refreshing summer shower, my Dad stepped out on our porch to photograph a rainbow sky, and caught three towel-clad sprites (me, my brother David, and friend Delana Kay Bish) frolicking happily in the lower left-hand corner of the frame.
Our neighbors the Myersons, who used that lovely farmhouse-plus-80-acres at the end of the lane as a weekend retreat from their hard-working lives in Philadelphia, called the place “Gan Aiden”—Hebrew for “Garden of Eden.”
And who, seeing this photo, could argue with that?
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania; September, 1951
A QUESTION OF MEMORY, Or,
ME AND GENERAL MacARTHUR?
In two of these half-hour segments, he explores the human mind’s ability to turn imagined scenarios into actual memories.Trying to think of a “memory” that I might have dreamed or imagined, I came up with this one:
I’m seven years old, it’s a fall morning, and I’m puzzled because it's a school day but my mother has, for some reason, taken me to her hairdresser’s appointment.
Like many women at that time, my mother treats herself to a weekly wash-and-set, but I’m usually in school, or at home with my dad or a sitter, when she does. Although the term hasn’t yet been invented, it’s her “Me-time.”
The salon is located several stories up in a building on Northampton Street, Easton’s main drag. It’s one big room with two or three occupied beauty chairs, but it seems, on that day, to be unusually full of women not getting their hair done. They pet me and make a little fuss over me (and treat me to my very first milkshake), but seem to be waiting for something really important to happen.
Northampton St. way back then.
After taking in the unusual smells—perfumes, permanent-wave lotion, slightly singed hair— and goggling at several women with their heads covered in metal curlers, I wander over to the window and look down at the street below, which is oddly free of cars. The sidewalks, however, are crowded full of people, milling around, trying to get as close as possible to the street.
Suddenly a woman near me calls out “Here they come!” Most of the others rush to the big heavy windows and join forces to open them. I start to lean out, but one of them stops me and puts a towel over the gritty sill so I won’t spoil my dress. I hang out so far that someone grabs my sash to make sure I don’t fall.
In our building and those all around us, people are likewise leaning out of the windows and craning their necks to see a line of cars that comes into view, driving slowly down the center of the street.
To my amazement, as the cars drive past, people leaning out of other windows begin cheering wildly and throwing handfuls of torn paper, party streamers, and confetti at them. I'm astounded to see grownups behaving this way.
Then I notice a man who seems to be at the center of it all; he’s wearing a uniform and is calmly sitting in an open car, smiling and waving at the crowd.
Seeing a set of windows full of attractive women (and one desperately excited little girl) waving at him, he smiles and gives a kind of salute involving a touch of his hat and a wave of his hand. The women squeal, and I yell: “He waved at us! He waved at us!”
“He sure did, honey,” says the woman who holds my sash. I watch the cars until they’re out of sight, then un-drape myself from the windowsill.
“Who was that man?” I ask.
“That’s General MacArthur!” somebody says, “He’s a great hero!”
For those too young to remember: General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) was a charismatic officer who commanded troops in WWII and Korea.
General Douglas MacArthur
He was celebrated by the American public as a kind of folk hero, and his maverick attitude toward authority seemed to demonstrate that avoiding rules could actually be a valuable quality for a leader.
Although he suffered several notable defeats, he was later officially honored “for his leadership in preparing the Philippine Islands to resist conquest, for gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action against invading Japanese forces, and for the heroic conduct of defensive and offensive operations on the Bataan Peninsula” (Wikipedia).
MacArthur’s intuitive decision-making and flexibility won him universal acclaim for his leadership, but he was relieved of his command by President Harry S Truman in April of 1951 for (Wikipedia again) “making several comments towards superiors questioning their actions.”
(One can only imagine that scene.)
There are a number of reasons that I think this might have been an invented memory: for one, I had an unusually active imagination, but my entire recollection of the event is oddly sepia-toned; I also don’t remember my mother talking about it or discussing it with other family members or friends. In fact, I don’t remember hearing anything more about it from anybody.
So did this really happen? I took to the Internet recently to see if such a parade had actually taken place in Easton, of all places.
Although there was much coverage and many photos from two gigantic ticker-tape parades held for MacArthur in New York City (still the largest on record) and Chicago in April of 1951, I could find nothing about a similar event in Easton at any time.
I persisted, however, Googling combinations of “General MacArthur,” “parade,” “Easton, PA,” etc., with no hits at all.
I was starting to lean in the direction of "imagined memory" when I suddenly came upon this snippet, posted in 2001, in the “50 Years Ago Today” feature of a website called Lehigh Valley Live:
“On Sept. 21, 1951, a bright fall morning, 25,000 persons turned out in Easton to pay homage to a great hero. The tumultuous welcome was accorded Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was the Pacific War hero's first visit to Pennsylvania since his return from Japan.
"John S. Fine, then governor, headed a delegation of high state officials who greeted MacArthur as he stepped from a convertible sedan at the center of the Northampton Street Bridge.
“Following a five-minute ceremony, Gen. MacArthur and his motorcade rode off the bridge into Easton and the cheering throngs that lined both sides of Northampton Street.
"Besides the spectators along the street, many watched from upper windows. Confetti was thrown from Hotel Easton and other buildings. Earlier, as the caravan moved west on Memorial Parkway, Gen. MacArthur heard the strains of 'Old Soldiers Never Die,' played by the Phillipsburg High School Band."
You know, I think I was there.
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11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California; Mid- 2000s
CAMERA LOVE
As I've written here before, from about 1995 to 2008 I worked part-time at a lovely little store called Natural Connections, located in the business district (all two blocks of it) of sweetly funky Occidental.
I don't recall now to whom this particular exhortation was addressed, but I remember with joy all those lovely people who helped me get the message across.
Lorraine, inside Natural Connections
Grant, inside of Altered Images
Jack, outside of Natural Connections
Terry Ann, outside of Vital Roots
Christopher, with the Bohemian Market in the background
Caleb, Ocean and Nicole, outside of the Bohemian Market
Me, outside of Vital Roots.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Farallones Institute Rural Center/Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, Occidental, California, 1983-Present
DOWN ON THE COMMUNE, PART IV:
TUTU GARDENING WITH DOUGO
The backstory: I was a resident of the Farallones Institute Rural Center in 1979-80, before becoming bi-coastal (between California and New Hampshire).
During the four spring months I regularly got to spend in Sonoma County, and after I returned to Occidental full-time in 1987, I continued to work, volunteer, socialize, and party at the RC for years.
Snapshot taken by Dougo in the North Garden with my old film camera
In the Rural Center communal kitchen. Doug is in front, holding one of his culinary creations. I'm at center back, with my head next to the refrigerator.
When I showed up in the spring of 1983, I quickly became aware of a new and magical presence in the extensive Rural Center organic gardens, a muscular and whimsical sprite with a sunny mop of blond curls, a penchant for over-the-top costuming, and a thumb greener than leprechaun poo.
Dougo salad
Starting out as a humble intern, Doug Gosling (“Dougo” to his friends) embraced the practice of horticulture with intense enthusiasm; a tireless work ethic; a brilliant sense of organization; a true gift for garden design; and an impish trickster’s sense of fun that enlivened life at the Rural Center and turned its beautifully flourishing gardens into a joyous playground.
Gardener in Paradise
And the gardens responded, so enthusiastically that even when the Rural Center lost its main source of funding, and was forced to close in 1990, Doug was allowed to stay on through two unfortunate property sales, albeit sometimes working all on his own and without pay.
In 1994, when the gorgeous 80-acre parcel was acquired by its present inhabitants, the (still-thriving) Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Doug, still busily at work and poised to become a key player in the OAEC organization, came right along with it, an unforeseen bonus for the new regime.
The OAEC's South Garden
The North Garden
There’s something both joyfully elemental and deeply paradoxical about Doug Gosling. On the one hand, he can organize, manage, and document the complexities of crop rotations, seed-saving programs, gardening workshops, greenhouse cycles and plant sales with crisp efficiency.
Heirloom beans photographed by Dougo
Lead photo for a Santa Rosa Press-Democrat article about Dougo
At the same time he enjoys an elfin sense of humor, scattering art objects about the gardens; importing wildly unusual crops (my favorite: a green and purple stringbean called "Dragon Lingerie"); and naming his beloved kitties after obscure horticultural terms (Tussie-mussie) or retro TV characters (Ward, June, Wally and The Beav).
Brindle buddies
He can walk into a pen of chickens, and they’ll run up to him to be held and cuddled. His love of extravagant costumes is legendary, as was the yearly “St. Lucy’s” party he held for years to celebrate his birthday.
With Laura Goldman and one of his famed desserts.
He adores African music, hosts his own radio show of same, and regularly travels to Namibia to oversee gardens that provide food for soup kitchens for children orphaned by AIDS.
Dougo with African gardeners
He’s both a gourmet-plus cook and a photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic. His relationship to all growing things borders on the shamanic.
Trees talk to him. Seriously.
And I eventually figured out why he’d seemed so familiar when I’d first met him. One day I suddenly remembered a book of mythology I’d loved as a child, with an illustration that was Dougo to the life.
And whom, you might ask, did that illustration depict?
Why the Great God Pan, of course.
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Here’s the official bio:
“Doug Gosling (He/Him) is a lifetime gardener, cook and educator, and has managed the Gardens at The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center for 30 years. He originated the Plant Sales at OAEC 18 years ago, and manages the new Greenhouses and Nursery.
“He is the Director of the Mother Garden Biodiversity Program; curates the plant and seed collection and directs OAEC’s seed-saving efforts and Seed Exchanges. Doug also manages the gardens at Food for Thought, the Sonoma County AIDS Food Bank, and is Chair of the FFT’s Project Africa, a program that supports AIDS relief work in Africa.
Gardens at Food for Thought
“He has traveled to Namibia numerous times to help start the gardens and orchards, and train staff and caregivers in Biointensive organic gardening at Hope Initiatives, a soup kitchen for AIDS orphans in Windhoek.
“Doug holds a BS in Botany from the University of Michigan, and in 2005 was awarded the national Stewards of Sustainable Agriculture award at the Ecological Conference. He has hosted an African music show, 'Crossing Borders', on KRCB, Sonoma County Public Radio for 15 years.”
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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, Windsor, New Hampshire; August 1987 and Possibly Throughout The Universe
WHEN PUNS ALIGN
I recently read that on this coming Saturday, June 17, 2023, five planets – Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus, and Mercury – will line up within a 93-degree sky sector. (One can watch this planetary alignment about an hour before sunrise.)
"Harmonic Convergence" was also the name given to the world's first synchronized global peace meditation, which occurred on August 16–17, 1987 to coincide with the exceptional planetary alignment, as well as with a prediction of the Mayan Calendar.
The principal organizers of the Harmonic Convergence event were, according to Wikipedia, spouses José Argüelles and Lloydine Burris Argüelles, via the Planet Art Network (PAN), a peace movement they founded in 1983.
According to the organizers:
“The Harmonic Convergence is a supernatural phenomenon that occurs once every ten thousand years. When the planets align, spiritual energy is greatly amplified, causing the spirit portals at the North and South Poles to merge, while an aura of spirit energy envelops the Earth.”
Read all about the astral intricacies of it at:
Well, it came and went, and a lot of people had a good time either celebrating it, mocking it, or predicting the end of the world.
I was at Interlocken at the time, and as I recall, we invented a pretty impressive celebration, as we were wont to do at the drop of a national or celestial holiday.
My particular observation of the day was the drawing below, inspired by a young friend who asked me if I knew anything about the “Harmonica Virgins?”
While I’d heard the play on words before, this innocent inquiry was enough to make me get out my colored pencils and calligraphy pen and concoct an answer.
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14. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California; Mid-1970s
DORMOUSE ENCOUNTER, Or,
ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE SAN FRANCISCO
Its theme was “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” from Alice in Wonderland, and although the original tea-party had only four attendees (the Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and Alice herself), we’d been instructed to come as any of the characters in the book.
Something about the odd little Dormouse appealed to me, and so I constructed a furry gray hood with silk-lined ears and chubby cheeks.
I wore this with a long blue jumper over a pale-pink blouse with a big floppy bow, and accessorized the whole with drawn-on nose and whiskers, gray paw-like mitts and my own copy of Alice.
[Digression]
While writing this, I realized that now, as then, I actually knew regrettably little about dormice, so I took to the Internet to remedy the situation.
My only previous acquaintance with the creature, besides the aforementioned Tea Party, was a delightful little set of verses by A.A. Milne of Winnie-thePooh fame, concerning a pompous doctor who, misdiagnosing the dormouse’s sleeping habit as depression, attempts (and fails) to cure it ( illustration below).
So, a very few dormouse facts:
1. It’s not a mouse, although it looks rather like one. It’s closer to the squirrel family, and has a fluffy tail, rather than a naked one.
2. Its name comes from the French “dormeuse,” meaning “sleeper,” as it hibernates for at least six months of the year and naps frequently at other times.
3. There are 29 varieties of dormice worldwide, ranging from thumb-sized to hamster-sized. In some countries, like Slovakia, Croatia, and parts of Italy, dormice constitute part of the local diet.
4. In ancient Rome, I learned, the tinier varieties were deep-fried and served as snacks drizzled with honey and sprinkled with poppy seeds.
5. Ew.
[End of digression]
Since San Francisco’s public transportation system is so very efficient, I never owned a car while living there, so, arrayed in full Dormouse drag, I set out by bus.
The first one I boarded was nearly empty, and, since most San Franciscans in that era were inured to the sight of oddly dressed persons, I received only a few smiles and raised eyebrows.
However, when I transferred to the 38-Geary bus that ran parallel to the park from downtown to the conservative Avenues district, I found it packed with senior citizens dressed to the nines as if returning from church, the men natty in suits, the women wearing hats and gloves with their tidy finery. A gentle frisson of alarm ran through the bus as I boarded.
The only empty seat I found was next to a tiny woman who appeared to be in her eighties. As I sat, I almost immediately became aware that my outfit was making her very, very nervous, and that I had effectively trapped her between the seat ahead of us and the window side of the bus.
I smiled at her. She stiffened in alarm, so I refrained from saying anything. As the bus trundled on, she kept glancing sideways at me, rigid with apprehension. I sat very still, and eventually she seemed to relax a bit, although the sideways glances continued.
Then she surprised me. Pulling the cord to signal for her stop, she stood up, bowed slightly, and spoke in a brave little voice:
“Excuse me, Miss Mouse,” she said.
Heart melting, I stood up to let her by. As she left the bus, I slid over to the window seat, where a movement from the sidewalk caught my eye.
My dear little lady was waving happily to me, a lovely smile on her face.
Oh, San Francisco in the 1970s—you just had to love it.
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15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Great Yarmouth, England, 1890; Germany 1929-1945; Hollywood, California, 1957; Graton, California, 2011
I GO ON AN UNEXPECTED ETYMOLOGICAL ADVENTURE
Or,
I’ve never been a great fan of golf, but, as my friends can attest, I can get downright enthusiastic about word origins. Thus when someone asked me several years ago if I knew where the golfing term “bogey” came from, I got right on it.
And what a tale.
OK, once upon a time (somewhere around 1914), there was a British Army bandmaster and composer, Lieutenant Frederick J. Ricketts, who, in addition to writing music, enjoyed golfing.
The talented Frederick J. Ricketts as a Major
One day on the greens, his creative process was inspired by a military man and fellow golfer who always whistled a two-note phrase (a descending minor third interval, to be exact) instead of shouting "Fore!".
It’s this two-note interval that begins each line of the melody Ricketts crafted into a march tune, which he called “Colonel Bogey.” For those unfamiliar with this classic, here’s the original version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuVYS4uw0as (Original Colonel Bogey March/F.J. Ricketts/1914/3:30)
“Colonel Bogey” was not, however, the name of the whistling golfer, but of a figure out of golfing folklore.
The fictitious colonel’s career began in the late 19th century as an imaginary "standard opponent" in what became known as the “Colonel Bogey Scoring System.’ "Going round in bogey" originally meant an overall par score.
(Yes, I had to look this up. A par in golf is the number of strokes the average golfer can be expected to take to get the ball into the hole. It’s a standardized score established for each golf hole, based primarily on the length of same.)
The “Bogey” nomenclature started at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in England in 1890, when a certain Major Wellman exclaimed, in the course of a particularly trying round, that he “might as well be playing against the Bogey Man.”
This referenced a popular British music-hall song of the time that featured the recurring lyric:
Hush, hush, hush,
Here comes the Bogey Man
Don’t let him come too close to you,
He’ll catch you if you can.
[Brief Etymological Digression]:The word “Bogey” has an ancient and honorable British history of association with ghosts and scarecrows, and is related to such useful words as bugaboo, bug, spook, Puck, pug and booger. (And, as any fan of Harry Potter knows, “bogies” is also English-schoolboy slang for snot.)
[End of Digression]
By Edwardian times, the fictitious golfing Bogeyman had acquired a military rank, and “the Colonel” had been adopted by the golfing world as the presiding spirit of any course.
Edwardians on both sides of the Atlantic now played matches against an imaginary par-holder, "Colonel Bogey." (As the level of golfing improved, “Bogey” came to mean "one over par," rather than par itself.)
The caption reads "The hypothetical golfing achievements of that (illegible) old bore, Colonel Bogey."
Lieutenant Ricketts’ march of that name was immensely popular in its time, and the sheet music for it sold copies by the million, just from music-hall performances, without benefit of TV, movies or TikTok.
Oddly enough, this was not the last time the English music hall was to figure in this tale. We now digress (again) to the autopsy of Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler’s possible monorchosm (the condition of only having one testicle) has for a half-century been a fringe subject among historians and experts on the German leader. There are verified eyewitness reports of the condition, later refuted by other propagandists as propaganda.
Adolf Hitler, with one ball
The deficiency or otherwise of Der Führer’s Privates is considered, depending on who’s assessing it, as either a plausible fact, an undeniable reality or an urban myth.
The fact remains that neither eyewitness testimony nor historical study has not been able to prove or disprove the true nature of Hitler's anatomy, but there are certain claims that this historical meme came about as the result of—yes, a music-hall song. Here, I pilfer unashamedly from Wikipedia (edited):
“…no author [of the song] has ever been identified. There is no known attempt by anyone to claim or enforce a copyright on the lyrics. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index, number 10493.
"The numerous versions of it available in print, some of them frankly obscene, reflect the enthusiasm with which the ditty was first plucked out of the British music hall and adopted as a British Army marching song. “
In WWII, in the other branches of the British armed forces, and amongst British civilians, from 1940 onwards, the "Colonel Bogey" tune took on a new life, fitted to a popular song of defiance against Adolf Hitler's Nazi-German regime.
Whatever the reason for Hitler's alleged testicular deficiency becoming a popular myth, there was considerable psychodynamic literature on it produced after World War II.
These scholarly screeds seriously sought to explain Hitler's personality and behavior as that of a charismatic, genocidal megalomaniac suffering from congenital "semi-castration."
Oh yes, the song:
The first verse, concerning Hitler and three of his top henchmen, is Noël-Coward elegant in its simplicity; try singing it to the tune of “Colonel Bogey.” Then try to get it out of your head.
Hitler
Has only got one ball,
Göring
Has two, but rather small,
Himmler’s
Are somewhat similar,
And poor old Goebbels
Has no balls
At all.
I’ll spare you the numerous variations and dozens of verses that follow, most of which celebrate, in gleefully naughty-to-obscene detail, where the body part in question wound up, how it got there, who did what with it, and its ultimate fate.
Now, a jump to 1957, and the release of what was to become an Oscar-winning film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, set during WWII.
It seems that the tune to “Colonel Bogey”/”Hitler Has Only etc.,” was common currency in WWII prison camps, whistled or hummed under the breath as a subtle act of defiance.
In the film, Alec Guinness and his fellow British prisoners whistle it in that capacity as they’re marched into the Japanese prison camp where they’ve been conscripted to build the eponymous bridge, and in the stirring final scene.
For the movie score, English composer Sir Malcolm Arnold added a counter-march, “The River Kwai March,” to set off the original theme.
The two were recorded together by Mitch Miller as "March from the River Kwai - Colonel Bogey," an earworm that dominated the US Billboard pop charts for 29 weeks in 1958, longer than any other record in that year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wATyrrGaaU (March from the River Kwai - Colonel Bogey/2:25)
And as a coda:
"Colonel Bogey" is also used by The King's Own Calgary Regiment (RCAC) of the Canadian Armed Forces, as their authorized march-past in quicktime for military parades.
Since the film portrayed prisoners of war held under inhumane conditions by the Japanese, there was quite a kerfuffle generated in May 1980, when a military band played "Colonel Bogey" during a Canadian visit by Japanese Prime Minister Masayoshi Ōhira.
Not amused: Masayoshi Ōhira
It was with great difficulty that the entire Japanese delegation was persuaded not to storm out in fury. A valuable diplomatic lesson was thus learned:
He'll catch you if he can.
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16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; Mid-1950s
MOTHER AND THE TYRANNY OF THE NEEDLE,
Or
THE LITTLE STANDARD THAT COULD
The photo below was taken by a representative of the Standard Sewing Machine Company.
It’s a shot of my mother, who hadn’t expected her picture to be taken, and was a little embarrassed—I was there—to be caught so informally dressed.
The occasion was the delivery to our house of a brand-new Standard electric sewing machine. This was after years of my mom turning out adorable school dresses, ambitious Easter outfits, and the occasional costume for my sister Susan and me on a clunky old treadle-driven contraption.
Susan (L) is wearing a dear little dress made by my mother. I'm wearing a big grin because we were going to the circus.
Giving my dad the I DON'T WANT MY PICTURE TAKEN stink-eye in girly-curls and a sweet blue gown made by my mother for my role as bridesmaid in a Tom Thumb wedding.
Another possible reason for this upgrade was that Susan had, to Mother’s delight, begun to take an enthusiastic interest in making her own school clothes, which she would do beautifully for years, even continuing, as a young married, to make her husband’s sport jackets and her children’s school- and play-wear.
Susan in a gown of her own making. She was, of course, Prom Queen that year.
I was, somewhat predictably, a bit slower to take to the machine. My high school “Home Ec.” sewing projects inevitably manifested some tragic flaw—a zipper inserted backwards, a sleeve put in upside down.
However, once I’d realized that I could: 1) stretch my clothes allowance, and 2) design and create proto-hippie outfits that drove my dad nuts, I began to spend my share of hours hunched over the machine.
The perky little vest I'm wearing in the high school chorus photo at right was made from the kitchen curtains with which I'm playing peek-a-boo on the left.
Dad got into the act, too, stitching pieces of canvas together for various reasons, turning out projects for an upholstery class, even thoughtfully repairing his own work clothes.
Kept well oiled and maintained, that valiant little Standard stitched its way into the next millennium, until it was finally sold or donated when my dad moved into a retirement village in 2000. For all I know, it’s still humming away out there somewhere, well over a half-century old, but as spry and productive as ever.
Meanwhile, it soon became fairly obvious that my mother had done all that early sewing primarily for love of us, and not at all for her own enjoyment. (Her last hurrah, bless her, was an extravagant 15-layer tutu for my dance recital in the late 1950s).
Clowning around with friend Delana Kay Bish in the infamous tutu. And, yes, I know I had no business wearing toe shoes. I never did go en pointe, as I was usually cast in male roles due to the scarcity of boy dancers.
Once Susan and I began taking charge of our own wardrobes and making our own clothing, I seem to recall that Mother pretty much stopped sewing, except for occasional necessary curtains, hemming, or repair work. And although she was always impeccably dressed, I don’t remember her ever making clothes for herself.
No wonder she looks so pleased in that photo; it seems, ironically, to have documented the beginning of her liberation from the tyranny of the needle.
With Sue's sons Scott (R) and Kip. I had by that time acquired my own sewing machine, and am wearing one of many homemade Indian-print bedspread tops.
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17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Joy Ridge, on the Outskirts of Occidental, California, c. 2001
MEDITATION 101
Or
GETTING CALIFORNIATED
Around the time of the most recent Millennium, while I was engaged in writing a book called Meditation 101, an old friend came to visit with me in my sweet little garden-surrounded cabin on Joy Ridge.
Phil had actually been my high-school prom date in Pennsylvania—no big romance; we just had a great time together.
Although he was now a white-collar engineer for a large company, Phil was also very much a word person, and we had enjoyed a cross-country pre-Internet exchange of lengthy epistles for years.
While Phil was smart and funny and cool, he was east-coast buttoned-down cool, and had never, ever been to California, much less Sonoma County. When he arrived, he was shorthaired, clean-shaven, and dressed in conservative outdoor clothes.
Cabin with redwood circle at right
Since my cabin was so small, and the weather warm, I had set him up in a comfy tent in the center of a redwood circle just outside of my front door. We immediately took up our old best-of-friends relationship, as if it had been four days, rather than four decades since we’d last seen each other.
I had compiled a mental list of possible Sonoma County adventures, and together we went on hikes to visit giant redwoods, drove to the beach to investigate the Pacific Ocean, and explored the nearby Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, where Phil was dazzled by the mix of art, technology and rustic living, the extraordinary beauty of the site, and, above all, by the impressive residents, who were then in full summer-workshop mode.
The OAEC North Garden
OAEC workshop
We also went to the über-picturesque little village of Occidental, with its 2.5 blocks of fine restaurants, craft stores, galleries and entertainingly eccentric local characters. I introduced him to many of my friends, who tended to be creative and colorful in personality, dress and manner.
Terry Ann Gillette outside of her store in downtown Occidental
One day, I took him to meet my artist neighbors Jack and Carol, who raised adorable little finches, which were often freed to flit about the house.
Carol and Jack in Occidental, with a big bird.
Phil had been enchanted by the sight of hummingbirds buzzing the garden around my cabin, so I watched in gleeful anticipation as Carol led him to the kitchen sink, turned the water on to a trickle, and instructed him to cup his hands underneath.
His expression as, one by one, half-a-dozen tiny birds came to light on and drink from his hands, was exactly like those I’d seen on the faces of people in the midst of magical acid trips.
This was all, by the way, without benefit of recreational drugs of any sort, but as the week passed, it became noticeable to me that Phil’s fine mind was being quietly and thoroughly blown.
The subject of meditation had come up naturally in the context of my book-in-progress, which was intended for complete beginners, with chapter titles like “What is Meditation, Anyway?” “What to Do With Your Hands,” “What to Do With Your Legs and Feet,” eventually progressing to subjects like “What to Do With Your Breath,” and “What to Do With Your Mind.”
A final section was filled with practical information on subjects such as: the various types of meditation practice; how to locate a teacher and/or sitting group; walking meditation; meditation accessories (cushions, mats, benches); how to tell real meditation teachers from phonies, etc.
Each day, I’d been taking time out from our visit for a short evening meditation session, and, after a few days in Californialand, Phil, ever curious, asked to join me.
Happy to have him do so, I got him seated comfortably, and gave him a quick version of the introductory techniques in the book. We sat quietly for about 10 minutes, then I heard a soft whisper:
"Amie?”
“Yes?”
“How do I know if I’m meditating?”
Talk about the sound of one hand clapping; I suddenly realized what was missing from my book.
When Phil left, somehow looking like an entirely different person from the guy who’d arrived, he said simply: “I can hardly believe this week was real.”
Whether he continued with meditation long-term, I never found out—he met Robin, the love of his life, soon afterwards, and our correspondence dwindled to occasional postcards and emails.
However, if the joyous wedding photo below (yes, they got married in kayaks) is any indication, his worldview now encompasses a few more elements of the sweetly unconventional.
Meditation 101 was duly published, and can still be found for sale on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Medita.../dp/0595250343/ref=sr_1_1...
Of course, I gave my friend a shout-out in the book for his unconsciously beginner’s-mind enlightened inquiry, which was pretty much as real as it gets.
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NEW YEAR THREE HIGH
It was the end of a beautiful day, probably in the late 1980s, and a collection of friends and neighbors from Occidental and environs had gathered at Pinnacles Gulch, a secluded Sonoma County beach, for our annual New Year’s Day celebratory picnic.
I’d brought my camera, and was focusing it artily on a group of rocks lit by the late sun, when I heard a little voice call out: “Amie! Look!”
I turned around to see the configuration below—tiny neighbor Mika Jang, perched atop her friend Faye Mulligan, both of them elevated on the burly shoulders of woodworker Fred Stasek, who appeared to be balancing 100+ lbs. of adorably wiggling/giggling girl-children with impressive ease.
Both the girls are grown-ups now, and Fred these days is an acclaimed artist in wood operating out of Bodega, CA.
For that brief moment, however, they were a sweet, happy, and memorable three-high, gilded by the setting sun.
I was SO glad I’d brought my camera.
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19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco and Sonoma County, California, 1974-Present.
KENDRICK FREEMAN: A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
We met initially as fellow students at the Inner Research Institute (IRI) School of T’ai Chi Chuan in San Francisco; then as co-volunteers for a wall-painting job at the school.
Photo by Roger Steffens: me in 1974
I had noticed Kendrick in class, and been impressed with his remarkable focus, and with what I can only describe as an intent, upright scholarly dignity and gravitas in his approach to the martial art.
As we wielded paintbrushes and became better acquainted, I was a bit gobsmacked to find out that he was a drummer.
This was, after all, San Francisco in the 1970s, and most of the species that I’d encountered conformed to a type—brash, a bit self-absorbed, often somewhat self-indulgent, and extroverted. I was intrigued that this guy was none of the above. This was the beginning of a thread of friendship that’s endured to this day.
Kendrick and I have never dated; I’ve never showed up at any of his gigs. Back then, we saw each other primarily at T’ai Chi classes, and at the office of redoubtable acupuncturist Dr. Wu Chie Mei-chuen, whose workplace doubled as an alternate social scene for a number of IRI students. (Dr. Wu invariably addressed my new friend as “Can-Drink!!”)
Kendrick soon began to make his reputation as a reliable Bay Area working drummer who showed up on time, and never got drunk or stupid; a musician’s musician who took care of business, and laid down a strong and appropriate beat for any occasion.
Kendrick with Haitian drum master Daniel Brévil
He played his share of weddings, bar mitzvahs and promotional events, at the same time working on a Bachelor of Arts degree at San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College.
He was soon taken under the wing of some of the Bay Area’s jazz greats, particularly George Marsh and Eddie Moore. “The work ethic and example of these mentors” he says, “led me to a life of passionate exploration of music.”
In the late 70s, a self-confessed “white boy with a drum kit,” he became drawn to the world of hand drumming, studying with American artists and musicians from Ghana, Congo, and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on the music of Haiti. (He became a vodou initiate in order to provide drumming for ceremonies, and was actually in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country.)
The following exposition of his extraordinary versatility was taken from his website and that of Sonoma State University:
“[Kendrick Freeman] encountered African drumming in 1976, studying with [Ghanaian drum master] Kwaku Dadey. In the 1980s, he studied with Bay Area Congolese artists Malonga Casquelourd, Titos Sompa and Mbemba Pangou.
“In 1987, he began an association with the premier Bay Area Haitian dance company PETIT LA CROIX, led by Blanche Brown (for which he eventually served as musical director) and RARA TOU LIMEN, directed by Portsha Jefferson and master drummer Daniel Brévil.
“This work lead to connections with the Haitian community in New York City that he maintains today. His Haitian teachers include John Scovel, Bonga Jean-Baptiste, Jean Raymond Giglio and Daniel Brévil.
“His drum-set and traditional drumming studies inform each other, and he has been flexible enough to work with a wide range of artists in a number of styles and settings, among them national dobro ace Rob Ickes [with whom he has recorded] and Americana singer/songwriters Sean Carscadden and Keith Greeninger.
"He has been a member of [Brazilian guitarist, composer, and arranger] Ricardo Peixoto’s quintet for the last five years.
“He toured for five years with New Acoustic banjoist Alison Brown. Since 1996 he has, with keyboard player John R. Burr, been a member of mandolin/fiddle/percussion wizard Joe Craven's trio,
"Like all working musicians, Kendrick does freelance work with a large pool of Bay Area players. (Or, as Kendrick says, 'Sometimes I still have to put on the tuxedo.')
“He teaches privately and at Sonoma State University, where he leads an ensemble in the Jazz Program. He’s received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alliance for California Traditional Arts.”
So, how good a drummer is Kendrick Freeman?
You could determine that for yourself by listening to the following piece of music, “Just Words” by GRAMMY® nominated Trumpet and Flugelhorn player Jeff Oster. It runs from 2:20 to 10:23 on the YouTube link below, combines jazz with Haitian “Juba,” and features Kendrick on both drumset and hand drums.
Or, you could read this story:
In the late 20-teens, I happened to wind up living next to a guy (I’ll call him “X”), who, for over a decade, had been principal percussionist for a household-name musical icon.
X
X, among other eccentricities, exhibited somewhat of a mean streak when discussing any other percussionists, criticizing everything from their skill, drumming style, and choice of equipment to their personalities and personal appearance. At his worst he was scathing, at his best dismissive.
When I came across the YouTube video below, of Kendrick playing with the great Joe Craven, I was curious as to how X would react to it.
Kendrick drumming with Joe Craven.
"I have a friend who’s a drummer,” I began.
“Yeah?” he said, warily.
I somehow convinced X to take a look at the link. After the first few bars, his eyes went wide.“I know this drummer,” he blurted. “I LOVE this drummer. I even sent him a fan letter!”
So, that good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73oyhKK97KI (Kendrick Freeman with Joe Craven Trio/11;49)
Kendrick and I still get together every few months for tea, conversation, and occasional T’ai Chi moves. He’s become a great storyteller, with an impish talent for mimicry, often with himself as the brunt of the joke. We enjoy and continue a conversation that began over cans of paint nearly 50 years ago. (But who’s counting?)
The first part of that interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE2jls0qcF8 (Embodied Memories of the Bay Area Interview/45"17)
20. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1989; Sebastopol, California, 2023
SPONTANEOUS DUCKERY: A COLLAGE TALE IN THREE ACTS
ACT I:
I’m occasionally asked why and how I began collaging. Well, it all started with a silly duck on a tricycle.
This was a mechanical metal toy that, when its key was wound, propelled itself hilariously across the floor, an oversized propeller spinning on the top of its pointed red-and-yellow hat. It never failed to make me smile.
In 1989, long after I’d passed the original toy on to a friend who’d fallen in love with it, I rediscovered the box it came in, with a glossy, brightly colored photo of Ducky on each side.
For some reason, I had the impulse to cut out one of the photos and set it into an equally eccentric landscape. But alas, colored pencils (my preferred medium at the time) faded into drab in comparison with the richly saturated hues of the box illustrations.
But wait, I thought, what about this brightly colored greeting card? And that wrapping paper? And the brilliant scene from a travel magazine in the day’s mail? And..and...
And thus was born a piece of artwork called DUCKY TAKES A RIDE, and a love affair with all of life’s brilliantly colorful flat-paper images—magazines, calendars, catalogs, wrapping paper, postcards, greeting cards—they’re EVERYWHERE.
Ducky Takes a Ride (1989)
ACT II:
Shortly thereafter, I attended a costume party at what was then the Farallones Institute Rural Center. There I encountered, for the first time, a gentleman named Michael Hathaway (at center in the photo below).
Michael with his mom and a friend
Michael and I had an absolutely delightful conversation, at the end of which he requested my address (snailmail in those days), in order that he could send me a clipping he thought would interest me.
Our conversation had been largely (though not exclusively) about art, so in return for his clipping, I sent him a photocopy of DUCKY TAKES A RIDE.
The missive/artpiece I received in return not only still occupies a treasured place in my collection of All-Time Favorite Correspondence, but also encouraged me to believe in the storytelling capabilities of the collage form.
And over thirty years later, thanks in part to the kindly wit of Michael Hathaway, the story continues.
ACT III:
After writing the above in 2023, I suddenly recalled that I’d seen one of the box panels with an image of Ducky in my trove of potential collage images. I went immediately to search for it, and found it, not under “Birds and Beasts,” nor yet under “Deco[rative] Bits,” but quite properly under “Beings.”
I was delighted to see that this image of the peripatetic fowl was facing the opposite direction from that of the “Ride” collage, so what else could I do but bring Ducky home?
TThen a misfiring camera flash caught him in the midst of his own portable energy field.
Spontaneous Duckery.
AMIE HILL: COLLAGES 1 —1989 through 2022
https://amiehillcollages1.blogspot.com/
AMIE HILL: COLLAGES 2 — 2022-Present
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