Anyone remember my Boar’s Head? The short version is that two years ago The OK Chorale sang “The Boar’s Head Carol” and the kindergarten class of Gail, alto, made a Boar’s Head of paper maché and fabric to use in a processional.  We processed our Boar’s Head laden with cookies instead of “bedecked with bay and rosemary” like they do at Christ Church, Oxford.  Here’s the full story: A Boar’s Head in the Hand.

The week before Christmas, two years ago, I made a pilgrimage with the Boar’s Head to the place of its birth: Gail’s classroom.  She and I paraded it around the room, singing the carol, letting the children each take a fortune-teller fish of which I had 50 or so from Archee McPhees.  I use them for prizes in my music studio.  Except my students have all gotten so many of them they don’t have much currency any more.

Then I packed the head as carefully as the most fragile Christmas ornament.  For the past two Christmases, the Official OK Chorale Boar’s Head has sat in my holiday window and joined The Chorale for cookies after our concerts.

This year I arranged with Gail to make another pilgrimage.  Again I wanted an offering for each child. Otherwise I think it would be quite strange to parade a paper maché pig’s head around a kindergarten classroom and ask them if they had ever heard of England.

I also wanted to avoid going into a store.  Ideally I stay out of stores from Thanksgiving until New Years except to buy food and Valium. I had a bunch of little yellow ducky candles that I bought at a yard sale a few years ago and have been doling out for various occasions ever since.  It was the only thing in my house besides the fortune teller fish that I had in bulk.  I counted them quickly. Twenty.

“Gail, how many kids in your class?”

“Twenty Four”

“Damn.”

I remembered that I had given a handful of the candles to my painting buddy Susan.

“Susan, do you have any of those candles left?”

She rummaged in a drawer. “I have three.”

“Damn.”

I took Susan’s remaining ducks.  Surely there would be children absent from Gail’s class on the last afternoon before winter break.

The last day before winter break arrived.  Gail and I e-mailed that morning.

“What’s your head count today?”

“All twenty-four are present.”

Oh great.  Twenty three little duckys, and twenty-four kindergarteners.  If you think I could have gone to the Dollar Store and bought 24 trashy Christmas tchotchkes, you are right, but you are not fully appreciating the drama of my internal world by the weekend before Christmas.  I was bordering the State of Frenzy due to my inability to say No to anything the season had thus far asked of me.  I had become heartily sick of Christmas by umm, about Dec 16 but I was wound up and couldn’t stop.  Couldn’t stop baking, couldn’t stop wrapping, couldn’t stop writing cards, couldn’t stop combing my files for people I have never sent a Christmas card to in my life, couldn’t stop being cheerful to students and choirs, or having holiday teas with my friends who I see every week year round, could stop doing what I set out to do with a focus as narrow as a toilet paper tube.

I feverishly counted my 20 duckys again—this is something we do at Frenzy State: the same thing over and over.  But lo, there were actually 21 duckies.  I must have originally counted them like I sometimes “balance” my checkbook.  There were sort of 20ish duckys the first time I counted. Or it might have been a Christmas miracle.

The Duckies

Getting the Boar’s Head and the duckys ready I remembered that I had a tin of tootsie rolls, the remnant of an earlier party.  The hostess had begged me to take them off her hands and I figured I could unload them on my students or the neighbors or some holiday function where I know there’s going to be too much of everything but still hate to go empty-handed.  God knows I didn’t want them.  I grabbed the tin and was out the door. At the North Beach Elementary School office where I was outfitted with a visitor’s badge, I dumped out the duckies and the tootsie rolls to the delight of the two children being timed out in the office. Gail came into the office looking frayed and ready for her vacation to start.

“I don’t know what we’re going to sing,” she said. “And I forgot my music.”

I wanted to suggest we pelt the duckies and tootsie rolls at the class and not sing anything.  “O Christmas Tree” was the least complicated song The Chorale had sung that quarter.

Full on Boar’s Head with dreaded tootsie rolls

“Here, take my music. I can la la the parts I don’t remember.”

Off we went. Gail’s class was admirably restrained. Each child took one tootsie roll and one ducky candle, except for one tiny girl who looked at me in terror.

“I don’t want to have to take one of those,” she whispered, pointing to a tootsie roll.  “I don’t like them.”

“Nobody does,” I thought. “That’s what they’re doing here.”

Admirable Restraint

If you would like to rent my Boar’s Head for your Christmas party, the contact information is below.  This year it comes with a free tootsie roll.

Let’s review all the reasons “Good King Wenceslas” is a great carol. From a piano teacher’s point of view, it’s an easy one for beginners, especially small children who have just started learning piano in September.  By December, “Good King Wenceslas” is a good teaching piece.  That’s about it.  Or that’s what I thought two months ago when I asked The OK Chorale which traditional carols they wanted to sing this quarter and Hal The Baritone suggested “Good King Wenceslas.”

I couldn’t imagine anything more boring.  Melodically two of the lines in each of the five verses are exactly the same.  Rhythmically the song is 75% quarter notes which means it yaps along like an annoying small dog.

“It’s boring,” I said

“It’s a dialogue,” he said

I looked at it again.  This time I read the verses.  “It’s a little play,” I thought, “Hmmm.”

I passed out copies of the song with a little note attached: “I am only agreeing to do this on the condition that we come up with a way to break the musical monotony.  So start designing those costumes and figuring out a way to make snow.”  Who was I kidding?  I was the one who’d have to make snow.  The Snowmaker, that’s me.  I made a list of all the nouns in the song and put out a request for props.  I asked Hal if his granddaughters who have yearly enjoyed the OK Chorale Christmas concerts would want to participate.

He reported back the next week. “They’re in,” he said. “We’re arguing over who gets to be king.”

Hal was crowned king.  I brought him my crown from The Great Dalmuti.

“That’s a little girlie for me,” he said

He replaced it with one of those “Flavor so good it makes you feel like a king” crowns and a yellow T-shirt that said KING on it.

Wenceslas was not actually a king. He was just a duke.  And really, Hal is just a baritone.  Wenceslas was a tenth century Czech nobleman who was assassinated by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel.  Such a binary family.  St Stephen’s Day is Dec 26 or 27 depending on which side you take in the War on Christmas.

The carol says that the Good King looks out his window at the moonlit snow on St Stephen’s Day.  He sees a Poor Man gathering wood for a fire. He gets the neighborhood scuttlebutt on the Poor Man from his Page.  The two of them set out with bread, wine, and meat, plodding through the wind and snow to the Poor Man’s dwelling.  By verse four the Rude Wind has kicked up and the Page says he can’t continue. The Good King tells him to walk in his footsteps and so they continue.  The song ends with the mild suggestion that when we bless the poor, we ourselves are blessed.

By mid-quarter we had assembled our props and the Dramatis Personae had been decided.  Hal was the King, Kelsey would play The Poor Man, and Brianna would be The Page.

“How much rehearsal time is this going to eat up?” Nina (rhymes with Dinah) asked gloomily as we drove to the church.  Nina is a high school teacher.  She knows about trying to get anything done with large exuberant groups of people who don’t listen.

“Probably the whole evening,” I said thinking about all the music we still had to learn: the Latin song, the Ladino song and the Ethiopian song with words that that no one understood.

It was worth the time. Good King Wenceslas turned out to be my favorite part of the OK Chorale show this quarter:

Good King Wenceslas, a Treatment:

Five white sheets cover an area in front of the stage, not deep and crisp, just white.  Strewn about are sticks and small logs from this year’s supply of wood for my wood stove.  Anne (alto) holds a fan with crepe paper streaming from it in the direction of the audience so they can appreciate the ambiance.  Nina (soprano) cuts most of the hall lights.

the rude wind

Verse One: At first mention of the moon, a powerful flashlight from Hal’s glove compartment is turned upon the side wall by Kathleen in the soprano section.  The Good King sees The Poor Man gathering up sticks.

The page and Good King Wenceslas

Verse Two: The Page appears dressed in a Robin Hood hat supplied by Chris (tenor) and wearing an outfit made of magazine pages designed by the girls’ mother, Monika.

Verse Three: The Page and the Good King get together a wine bottle supplied by Anne, and the rubber chicken supplied by Sandi (alto) that doubles as one of the French hens for “The Twelve Days After Christmas.” At first mention of the wind, Jody (soprano) Eileen and Chris ( tenors) and Kristin ( alto) fan the air (mostly in the direction of the director at the piano.)

Verse Four: The Wind becomes Rude. Jody, Eileen, Chris and Kristin fan more furiously.

Verse Five: The Page clomps across the snow in a pair of Hal’s shoes, trodding in The Master’s footsteps.

King, page, poor man

Jody, Chris, Eileen, and Kristin, having transubstantiated the fans into instruments of blessing, pronounce one.

I told Hal that Kelsey and Brianna were welcome to do something with us every Christmas until they start adolescing. I love this group.  Something wonderful always happens and I always feel blessed with them.  The transubstantiated fans just put the crown on it.

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The fussy, self-important and over-committed woman is not one of the more attractive stock characters in our society but she likes to infiltrate her archetype throughout our ranks during the holidays.  This year, she got a toe-hold in me and was meddling with my nervous and digestive systems in no time at all.  It started last fall when I got on the fundraising committee at the church where I run the choir.  In my position as a self-employed artistic type, I never go to meetings or get on committees of any kind so it was a novel experience.  I said yes to every idea that was floated, an alarming number of them having to do with Christmas.

Once when I was a young piano teacher, a mother marched into her daughter’s 30 minute piano lesson with several boxes the size of small filing cabinets panting that 500 of her Christmas cards had to go out that night.  I looked at her hair hanging down the front of her face right between her eyes that were rotating in an ellipse and said, “No, they don’t,” trying to be wise and above it all.

“Yes, they do!” She shouted.

I told myself I would never be like that.  Surprise!

This year I did one too many holiday bazaars where I sold my book, my watercolor cards, my raspberry liqueur, and various other handcrafted items that I thought it was a good idea to start making in the middle of November.   Still on the calendar is the shepherding of the church choir through their rehearsals and performances and the cattle ranching of The OK Choralethrough theirs.  Then I had agreed to lead a caroling party, which in my frame of mind would probably turn into a horse whipping.  After my second bout of schedule-hysteria, I canceled the caroling party.

Getting all wound up is not predicated upon the number of activities cluttering up the month.  People survive being busy.  Some people like it.  I don’t, which makes it all the more puzzling why I ever say Yes to anything.  I need spacious, do nothing, day-dream time.  Those times are actually quite full and productive times for me. When I’m too busy I contract a fussy self-importance that sucks the joy out of everything.

The day after the last bazaar I packed gifts to mail to cousins in England and Wisconsin.  Waiting in line at the Post Office does not count as Do Nothing time.  When I have to do something soul-destroying like getting stuck behind someone with three small children who is sending ten large packages to Mumbai but doesn’t understand what a customs declaration is, well, OK, sometimes I try to help.  I’ve been terrorized in foreign post offices myself.  But when there’s nothing to do but wait, I read a book.  I know: Hahahahahahaha.  A book!  Everyone else is posting on Facebook and playing with their apps.

The book I had with me the day after the bazaars was a relic from the 60s, The Book by Alan Watts. Full title: The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are.  I hadn’t read it since college.  In line at the post office, my stack of packages beside me, I lost track of where I was when I read:

 “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

I no longer cared how long the woman from Mumbai spent with the only postal worker at our branch.  When I got home I pulled out another relic from the 60s, another book, yes: Carl Sandburg’s Honey and Salt  because the line from Alan Watts reminded me of this:

 .  .  .forget everything you ever heard about love.  .  .

it comes as weather comes and you can’t change it:

It comes like your face came to you, like your legs came

And the way you walk, talk, hold your head and hands—

And nothing can be done about it.  .  .

There it was!  “Nothing can be done about it. . .” These few lines pulled me into Do Nothing space and reminded me why that space is so rich and why I need it.  It’s the space of nothingness and everything.  I’m alone yet I’m with everyone.  I feel safe letting go of classifications and boundaries because I feel intact.  The fussy self-important archtype has left the building.

What do you know, someone else appeared to pick up the reins of the caroling party.  As I go off tonight to The OK Chorale’s dress rehearsal, I’m leaving the horse whip at home.  If you are in the Seattle area, you can hear the Chorale this weekend at:

Friday, Dec 7, 7:30 Broadview UCC (325 N 125th St)

Saturday, Dec 8– 4:30 University House, Wallingford –4400 Stone Way N

Saturday, Dec 8 — 6:10 Green Lake Pathway of Lights, aqua theatre

Ballard is a Seattle neighborhood.  A former student of mine has a riff where she describes the two faces of Ballard:  There’s the old Scandinavian community, the fishing boats, brick houses, and the Nordic Heritage Museum.  And the new Ballard that sits at Cupcake Royale with their Macs, looking important and saying, “I am so much better dressed than you.”

In a hidden dimension of Ballard live the writers.  A year ago, as far as I knew, there was a Yahoo group of Ballard writers who occasionally got together at the public library. Then along came literary provocateur, Peggy Sturdivant, who has so much energy, I feel tired just typing her name.  Simultaneous with the publication of my memoir, 99 Girdles on the Wall, was the birth of the Ballard Writer’s Collective–time coincident but not causal, as my physicist friends would say.  The Collective  had an immediate presence, thanks to the Secret Garden Book Shop, Ballard’s local independent book store, and Peggy.  She immediately organized a Writer’s Jam at Sunset Hills Community Center.  A week after my book came out, I was on a stage reading to a packed house.  It was a delirious moment for a brand new author.

A year later, the Ballard Writer’s Collective has a website http://ballardwriters.org/ and a Facebook page.  We read each others’ books, help publicize each others’ individual events and participate in our own, that is to say, Peggy’s Big Ideas.  There are a lot of writers in Ballard.  I think it must breed.  Here are some I have gotten to know:

Rita Bresnahan.  She read my book, lavished praise on it and invited me out for coffee.  She herself has written a book about her mother’s final years of Alzheimer’s with the touching title, Walking One Another Home.

Jay Craig describes himself as “more fun than the Dalai Lama and not nearly as creepy as the pope.” He wrote The Scottish Buddhist Cookbook.  I loved it.  It told him it was borderline obscene and he wanted to know what he could do to make it full blown obscene.

Joshua McNichols is a “freelance journalist obsessed with finding food outside the grocery store system.” Besides co-authoring The Urban Farm Handbook with Annette Cottrell, Joshua is a presence on KUOW, Seattle’s  NPR station.  Joshua did the story about me that made me a radio star.

I had the pleasure of interviewing and writing an article about Nancy Schatz Alton whose lovely blog is http://www.withinthewords.com/.   She is the author of The Healthy Back Book and The Healthy Knee Book.

I think of Jennifer D. Monroe (The Erotica Writer’s Husband and other stories), Alison Krupnick (Ruminations From a Mini-Van) and Christina Meyer Wilsdon (articles about science for kids) as three funny ladies.  I get on a Facebook thread with one of them and my day is shot.  Alison also writes a blog http://sliceofmidlife.com/ and Christina writes http://www.piccalillipie.com/, a blog about a little of this and a little of that.  If you ever get a chance to hear Jennifer read, she is double funny in person.

This past weekend, the Ballard Writer’s Collective had The Big Event on the anniversary of last year’s Writer’s Jam.  It was an all-day book and gift fair with raffle baskets, tasting events, and demonstrations.  In the evening a bunch of us read 3-minutes pieces we had written.  We had been given the task of using the words slump, jingle and interlude in some way in our pieces.  Because creating all these live links is really tedious, you can read what everyone else wrote on the group’s website.  You can read what I wrote right here.  The words in bold print were to help me when I read the piece aloud.  They are in no way meant to insult your knowledge of current events or to expose your (or my) preoccupation with titillating details of the past election campaign.  If you are of a different political bent than I am, please don’t write me off.  I’m a good person.

Post-Election Re-set

I spent the night before the 2012 election fretting about the Florida voting machines but by Wednesday morning, I was over the moon about the election results.  In the interlude between the election and the following weekend, I stopped gloating and my sleep stabilized.  By Sunday morning, I was finally focusing on other concerns, such as my little church choir, which was singing “On Eagles’ Wings” in a few hours. The election was forgotten, a thing of the past.

So—that Sunday morning I got a call from our lone but capable alto that two of the three sopranos were sick.  The third, healthy, soprano warbles an indeterminate part–she takes a breath but the notes don’t come out of her mouth the right way.  The lone alto wondered if I wanted to cancel the anthem since we would have not just one, but two empty chairs.  “No, “I told her. “I’ll sing soprano. We have binders full of tenors, and one of them can sing the melody an octave lower. We’ll have 47% of the choir there.”

“We can win this thing,” I thought as I walked up the church steps. “Arithmetic.”

I enjoy walking into a quiet church on the Sundays that the choir sings. Thanks to the church ladies, it’s warm and smells of flowers. But on this Sunday when I pulled open the door, I was greeted with a blare of nasty piped-in, electronic, illegitimate music. Gahh! 

The sound originated in the back of the church and from an imposing black box with knobs and carbuncles on it.  When I turned its largest knob, that musicky thing stopped. But apparently I had just hit the re-set button because as I hung up my coat, the poopy, jingling started again as though God intended it to happen. I took off my glasses to squint at all the buttons and levers before I finally found the way to shut that whole thing down. They say women have a way to do things like that.

The choir showed up for a short rehearsal. In the middle of the first run-through I stopped playing the piano in order to check the balance of voices.  The tempo fell into a bit of a slump, but the harmonies were lovely. And though I had not asked for a stimulus, a church member who knew the song offered to sing soprano with me.  With good heartedness and generosity from others, “On Eagles Wings” soared.

Hey–Choirs are people, my friend.

It’s so good to have my mind cleared of the presidential campaign, and to be thinking of other things.  If they get those damn voting machines in Florida fixed before the next election, it’ll only be 16 years late.

It’s been a dispiriting November, but the sun managed to bogart the sky for a few days last week.  Long enough for me to remember another November, five years ago, when the sun shone in a cloudless sky for the entire month.  I remember it because I spent much of that month driving the I-5 corridor from Seattle to Olympia where my mother was in hospice.  Except for the brief dip into the Nisqually Valley, the stretch of road is like a long day after a sleepless night; but that November all my trips were enlivened by warm sun and the voice of Jane Monheit.

My mother died the day before Thanksgiving five years ago.  I’ve written at length about her craziness and its effect on me in 99 Girdles on the Wall (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/99-girdles/) which was published a year ago this month.  When I was in the process of editing the book, I visited my mother’s grave.  I had picked out roses for her head stone, by-passing the crosses and praying hands that she would surely have preferred.  She was Bulgarian, Bulgaria is famous for its attar of roses, and she left the choice of headstone up to me.

“I’ve written a tell-all about growing up with you,” I said to the grave.

Her voice floated into me, “You aren’t saying anything about menstruation, are you?”

By now my mother feels like one of those vacations that at the time was horrible but as the years go by, one starts remembering the beauty and the fun.  It’s safe to have the good memories now.

She was a remarkably talented woman.  Though she disparaged each ability as it came along, I know she found her accomplishments satisfying.  She had been an occupational therapist during World War II.  In those days OTs knew how to do things like ceramics, leather work, and weaving.  For the first eight years of my life, a bedroom in our house was set aside for my mother’s full size loom.  She once showed me how to put eyelets in leather and when I cleaned out the basement of her house I found stacks of ceramic molds.

On the domestic front she was a good cook, a gardener, a seamstress and needle worker.  She did it all: knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, crewel, quilting, dress-making.  If it could be bought, my mother tried to make it more economically: candles, Halloween costumes, underwear, greeting cards, ice cream.  Near the end of her life, she learned to paint in watercolors, showed some talent for it, and then decided she had more important things to do.  I think she enjoyed it too much.

Women in my mother’s generation tended to pursue domestic arts with the same determination they pursued dirt in their wall to wall carpeting. It was what you did if you were to be a respected middle class wife and mother.  The child of immigrants, my mother felt she had to work twice as hard to stay ahead of what she perceived as her own deficit.  So she did everything.

I shook off my own sense of inferiority at around my 18^th year in therapy.  These days I thoroughly enjoy my particular cache of interests and I sometimes feel myself infused with the best of my mother’s energy.  It’s this legacy I am most grateful for.

My mother had moments that made me proud of her.  She was feisty and had a kind of instinctual common sense.  Always battling a sense of social inferiority, she once took on the Music Specialist in the Olympia school district.  My mother’s first grade class was learning a song that was clearly too high for them and the M.A. in Music wanted to ditch the piece altogether because transposing it down a few steps was too much trouble.   She tried to explain in pitying tones how complicated a process transposition was.

“But don’t you just move everything down the same degree for each note?”  My mother didn’t know much about music but she had, as I said, a stubborn sort of common sense.

“Well, Mary,” Mrs. Agnew looked down from her height of two music degrees and three instruments.  “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I don’t see why.” My mother said.

She asked me later, “Is it more complicated than that?”

“Not really,” I smiled. “You got it right.”

My mother did the transposition herself.  It was a Christmas song called “Gifts for the Child,” and I found a few copies of it in one of her piles of Billy Graham magazines and 8 x 10 glossies of the Nixon family.  It’s become part of my holiday ritual to sing it to myself, and to my mother, wherever she is.

My previous blog, For the Love of Music Teachers was a paean to the neighborhood piano teacher.   Today’s rhapsody is on that most exotic specimen, the voice teacher.  Since I am a member of both pedigrees, I can say with great generosity of heart that we voice teachers are a wobbly, eccentric bunch.  We think nothing of people coming in off the street to coo, whine, make retching noises, stick out tongues and gabble in nonsense syllables. Unless you’ve actually studied voice, you have no idea what a cult it is.  You may imagine you are going to get accompaniment services because you like to sing.  It may work that way in the beginning but if your teacher is of one of the bel canto traditions, you may find yourself wading slowly into an alternate reality.  One, I might add, that is full of magic, time travel, altered states and a profound sense of mind-body alignment.

I got my first sense of how much the body allies with the voice from a teacher at Whitman College. I had been assigned to study with a bombastic bass whose idea of teaching was to thunder along with me during scales.  He had no idea what to do with me and could not understand why I wasn’t amassing vocal skills.  When he went on sabbatical I worked with a husband and wife team who came in for two semesters.  I chose to study with the woman as soon as I realized her husband had the annoying habit of non-ironically saying “by the by” every five minutes.  She introduced me to the concept of paying attention to my body by having me sing bent over so I could feel the resonance falling into my head.

Voice training is a long process that can intersect with identity crises.  The complaint I hear most often after students have managed to start singing with more of their being is, “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“Who else could it be?” I ask.

I often hear the worry that “I’m going to start sounding like an opera singer.”

Like that is a bad thing.

I try to soothe, “Oh don’t worry about that.  You would need to come twice a week for ten years and actually practice at home before you’ll ever approach sounding like an opera singer.”  This mollifies them, again non- ironically.

Another hard concept for students is the difference between actually singing with one’s own voice and imitating a favorite singer,  complete with fantasies of being on stage, looking glamorous, and feeling adored. My high school voice teacher once said to me, “Can you try it again? And maybe this time, don’t pretend you’re Julie Andrews.”  I’ve thought about that comment over the years as a parade of Christine Aguilera and Taylor Swift wannabees have whined and glottal-fried through their lessons with me.

My high school voice teacher was Pat Jacobs.  I adored her.  She was elegant.  She wore subtle silver nail varnish at a time when everyone else wore blood red.  The only remotely eccentric thing I ever saw her do was eat a single fried egg at the start of my lesson. No toast to sop it up, just a runny fried egg.  The house of another teacher was such a pig sty it wasn’t unusual to find week old pieces of runny fried egg encrusted on plates next to the toilet.

I studied for a few years at what was then the Cornish Institute of Fine Arts in Seattle with Pamela who was marking time as a teacher.  She wanted to sing in New York.  She was a beautiful singer, a beautiful woman, and always on a diet.   She assuaged her constant hunger during lessons by sucking Jolly Ranchers.  There was always a little pile of candy wrappers on the eighth octave of the piano by the end of a lesson.  Pamela was a soloist and a performer in her soul, so it was doubly sweet when she wanted everything to go well before my recital at Cornish.

There are those teachers who are in their souls only concerned about their reputation like He Who Shall Not Be Named but who figures in my memoir 99 Girdles on the Wall.  Marge Sackett rescued me from the aforementioned He and took my entire voice apart.  “I hate to have to tell you this,” she said. “But that palate is going to have to come down.”  Let’s pause in respectful silence while fans of William Vennard recover their composure.

Identity crises? My singing voice has been taken apart and put back together three times.   I’ve surfaced as a coloratura, a lyric soprano and a mezzo-soprano.  As I approach 60, and as I continue to work with my beloved Tommie Eckert, I am finally seeing all those parts integrate.  My voice is still a grand field of discovery.  My wobbly trajectory is to offer my students a share of the terrain.

Here in Seattle we implode a couple of sport’s stadiums every few years, and then ask property owners to finance a few new ones.  We vote no.  The stadiums get built and we all pay for them.  I’m a wee bit bitter.  To further delineate myself, let me disclose that I have attended exactly two basketball games in my life (one of them was women’s basketball at a time when that didn’t count as basketball), one football game, one track and field event, and no baseball or soccer games.  Coming home once from Daniel Smith (art supply store), I was caught in game traffic from an indeterminate generation of sports stadiums.  I looked at the lines of happy and excited people wearing caps and holding blankets and cushions.  I don’t know that world of tickets, fast food, noise, crowds, loyalties, and excitement.

I feel like an anomaly, although there’s no way of knowing.  For 53 years I have gone to one, often two music lessons a week.  Since the 70s I have been a proud member of that endangered species, the neighborhood music teacher.  I teach piano and singing.  I still study singing.

The private home studio.  Bookcases and cabinets full of music line the walls.  Collections of pencils are never sharp enough.  Music stands pose this way and that.  Modest recording equipment has crept on stage in the last few decades.  Stickers are more prevalent than when I was a child and even adult students like stickers.  Metronomes are sleeker and less obvious, and in my studio, a little dusty.  At least one piano is enthroned in the best lighting.

Sometimes when I walk in the door of my music teacher’s house, it occurs to me that many people have never experienced this alternative reality:  The privilege of opening the door to a private home and walking into a quiet space, quiet except for the end of the lesson before you.  When my time begins, the quiet room turns into a sacred space and for an hour, I intersect with the magic of music.  I like the womby-ness of the home music studio.  It signifies that something precious is being nurtured.

The neighborhood piano studio of my childhood, however, has, I think, sounded its final cadence.  Here’s an excerpt from my memoir, 99 Girdles on the Wall:

I learned to play the piano the same way I had learned to read: I watched my brother.  Alex practiced “C-D-E, make a boat, round and round and round it floats” in his Leila Fletcher Piano Course Book One, the orange book.  I looked at the written music and saw what Alex’s fingers were doing.  I tried it and never looked back.  I started formal lessons when I was four.

We practiced on a 1903 upright Haddorf piano which had belonged to my grandmother Louise Knott, and had been used for a time in the Whitman College conservatory in Walla Walla.  The piano’s beautiful soul lived in a plain, sturdy cabinet.  It is with me still.

We took piano lessons at the Lavinia Jennings Music Studio which was located in the front room of Lavinia Jennings house. I always rang the bell to enter Lavinia Jennings Music Studio; every other music teacher who taught music in her home has told me to walk in.  I rang the bell and heard the thump, thump, thump of her brown pumps as she came to open the door, dressed to the nines in one of two different teaching outfits.

One was a double-breasted green jumper worn with a frilly white blouse buttoned up to her chin, the other was a straight brown skirt and plain white blouse opened to her supra-sternal notch with a tiny cross supervising its eroticism.  It was her hair, however, that fascinated.  I had not yet seen the movie Gone With the Wind, but Mrs. Jennings’ hair gave me a reference point for Miss Pittypat.  Hers was a birthday cake of curls piled a foot high with masses of bobby pins sticking out like candles.  Every week I checked to see if any bobby pins were about to spring loose.

I sat in her dining room and looked at the one book available for waiting students, a cartoon book called Misery Loves Company.   When I used the bathroom, I sneaked a look at other parts of the house.  The kitchen gleamed with clean.  There was a guest bedroom and an enticing staircase to the upstairs.  I longed to see what was upstairs.

Once when I was in the bathroom, I noticed the medicine cabinet was open a crack.   I pulled it a few inches further to get a better look at the riot inside.  The door made a loud cranky sound.

“Elena.” Thump thump thump.  Mrs. Jennings rounded the corner and bumped into me shooting out of the bathroom.  “What are you doing in the medicine cabinet?”

“Nothing,” I looked straight at her and said honestly, “It was already open.”

She closed the medicine cabinet firmly and followed me out to the front room.

When it was time for my lesson, Mrs. Jennings handed me the fountain pen she kept in a pen holder on the edge of the piano.  I signed and dated my page in her ledger.  By the end of each year, I had written my name 40 times, line after line.

When it came round to my first recital with Mrs. Jennings, she told me it would be held in the studio.

“Where is the studio?”  I looked around.  I thought it was in her back yard or maybe in town somewhere.

Mrs. Jennings looked at me as though I had suddenly become half-witted.  “Right here.” she said.  “This is the studio.”

“But it’s your front room.”

“It’s. The. Studio.”

In early spring, a stack of sheet music two inches thick sat on her piano.  Mrs. Jennings selected two pieces for me to play in the spring recital.  I never had a choice about what I played and I hated the recital music.

About a month before the recital, Mrs. Jennings asked the girls for the color of their dresses and she meticulously made note.  The day of the recital, we went into the guest bedroom to find a big box of white boutonnières for the boys and colorful corsages to match the girl’s dresses.  In the world of small town children’s piano recitals, the corsages were a classy note.

On the day of the recital, the performers sat in the order listed on the program, twenty of us lined up as though to be shot.  We sat in Mrs. Jennings’ impeccable kitchen –as far as I could tell, she and her husband, Sumner, never ate actual food –and sweated out the wait for our performance.  I desperately wanted something in my mouth but I had never so much as smelled dinner cooking or seen the remains of breakfast in this house.  Only once was there a bowl of shining green apples, but they turned out to be wax.

The parents sat on rows of folding chairs in the front room.  While the house heaved with sweat and nerves, my father occupied himself by writing comments in the margins of the programs, critiquing the performances.  My mother kept her knees together and monitored who was and wasn’t doing the same.

*                  *                  *

I don’t run my studio like Lavinia Jennings.  My students choose their own music.  They don’t sweat out recitals.  I teach barefoot half the year.  I feel especially fortunate that many of my students are high school age boys.  They apparently feel that while sports may take up most of their week, it’s not going to take up their whole lives.  And they are very patient when I don’t know a goalie from a basket.

Every year on November 2, I create an altar of pictures and memorabilia of family and friends who have died, many of whom I wrote about in my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall:My parents, my Aunt Frances,  Meghan, Dennis, Hazel, John.  I sit at the piano and sing two songs during this week of Dias de los Muertos: Schubert’s “Litanei” and Richard Strauss’ “Allerseelen.”  The songs usually start me crying, but more importantly, they involve me in remembering.

This year I am adding to the ritual.  Into this dark quarter of the year have come Shakespeare and Sonnet 18, which begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” My former student, Jocelyn, who recently had a part in an episode of The Middle (http://abc.go.com/watch/the-middle/SH5539541/VD55240148/the-hose), chose to read it at her grandmother’s funeral.  Her mother Nina (rhymes with Dinah) asked me–now that I am a Shakespeare devotee–what I thought about this sonnet as a funeral piece:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I might begin by saying that people write books and papers and get into vicious arguments about who Shakespeare addressed his sonnets to but I don’t particularly care.  What matters to me is to find something compelling or something that will make me laugh.  This sonnet begins like a comic bit.  Too, too Oscar Wilde, don’t you know? Shall I compare thee to, oh, I don’t know, a piece of toast, a glass of wine?  How about a summer’s day?  So it starts out lightly.

Shakespeare immediately begins to list all the ways his loved one cannot be compared to a summer’s day: more lovely, more temperate, and besides there are storms in summer.  Then after all that, summer is short, sometimes it’s too hot, and sometimes the sun doesn’t shine at all. So far I don’t see where he’s going with this, especially when he says, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.”

Here’s why Death won’t be bragging about having Shakespeare’s loved one wandering around his premises:

 When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 English major alert, others can skip this paragraph: There’s a technical problem to be solved in the sonnet: how does this person line up with a summer’s day.  Shakespeare solves the puzzle of the sonnet with words, and at the same time he acknowledges the power of words with a nod to his own ability with language.

What I take from the last two lines has to do with memory and language.  Sonnet 18 is just a bunch of words on a page.  It only has meaning when a human being takes it up and reads it and is moved by it.  The meaning we take from the sonnet keeps it alive.  Remembering those people in my life who have died keeps them alive.  What I remember of them is what remains alive.  As long as I breathe, as long as I can see, the people on my All Souls altar remain with me.

Let me say up front that a sonnet is nothing to be afraid of.  Sonnets were the Sudoku and the crossword puzzles of their day, that is to say, of the late 16^th century.  People enjoyed writing them and figuring them out at whatever level they were capable. If sonnets were featured in the New York Times, I wouldn’t get far with the Sunday version but in the spirit of a dilettante, I do the ones I can.

Billy Collins (U.S. poet laureate 2001-2003) in a poem called “Sonnet” reduces the intimidation factor as only a good professor can:

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

OK, he does throw in an added complication in that there are Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets and Elizabethans ones and they differ somewhat.  But like the man implies, an Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with 3 quatrains, a couplet, and a strict rhyme scheme.  The Italian sonnet makes a turn (a kind of plot twist) after line eight. The Elizabethan final couplet often, but not always, serves as a punch-line or plot twist or in some way presents the whole point of the exercise.

There’s usually something interesting to find when I separate the parts of a sonnet.  This is part of the appeal for me: a sonnet is a game or a puzzle to figure out.  Embedded in a sonnet are puns and elaborate metaphors, similes, and hyperbole that build the meaning.  It isn’t just what the poet says, it’s how he says it and how many hidden objects, so to speak, I can find.  Like the Elizabethans I enjoy mining a sonnet for the clues left by the poet. This much I learned in college.  I decided to see what my education was worth 35 years later by picking a sonnet at random seeing what I could make of it.  My finger landed on #129.  I read it and could make nothing of it:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

I mean nothing.

I had started listening to a wonderful CD called When Love Speaks which features actors and musicians performing the sonnets and songs from Shakespeare.  I played it over and over in the car as I drove, at first identifying the voices: John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Gemma Jones, Judi Dench, and letting the words wash over me.

I started paying attention when I heard Ralph Fiennes read Sonnet #129.  When he gets to the third line he starts talking faster and faster, piling the words up on top of each other in a frenzy.  I thought, “Lust in action. Oh.”  I looked at the first two lines again (not while I was driving, mind you, that wasn’t me you honked at) and read them this way: “Lust in action is a shameful expense of spirit.”  Then the poem began to open up.

The way Fiennes recites the sonnet is an expression of how lust behaves: madly, wildly, past reason.  The iambic pentameter is interrupted as words tumble over each other, falling out of meter.  The line “Had, having, and in quest to have” came out like the one-track feeling of–-ok, this is what I thought of—a binge.  People can lust after different things.

The first quatrain of #129 is written in present tense, the second is in past tense, and the third encompasses past, present and future.  The couplet at first reminded of that line in Romans: “For I do not that good thing which I would: but that evil I do, which I would not.” (Tyndale trans.) But Shakespeare isn’t moralizing.  He isn’t saying that lust is evil and to be avoided.  He lays out the panoply of hellish and heavenly feelings that accompany lust: savage, rude, cruel, joy, bliss, a dream; and he connects them with the repetition of the word extreme.  All this he holds in balance as essentially human.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about it for me, for now, for this sonnet.  I’ll think about it off and on and come back to it.  I’ll have conversations about it if I can find someone who’s interested.  If you are one of those people, please talk to me!

I need to call Regence Blue Shield to ask a question about my health insurance coverage but I am putting it off.  I have just barely recovered from asking them a question last week.  While I didn’t exactly ask, it was a question– Why the fuck didn’t I get notice that my premium was going up?—but I was screaming at the time.  I have these episodes over insurance every now and again but it had been years since I was hysterical at a customer service cretin at Regence because I have an insurance broker who is supposed to be running interference for me.

I am self-employed. Sometimes there is a thin line between hysteria and exhilaration.

It’s exhilarating having ideas I’m excited about.  It’s satisfying to be free to make plans and to see things happen.   It’s harder having my boss, custodian, bookkeeper, and human resource person always there in my own face, so to speak.  I have to be the big idea person and the detail oriented one.  These two parts of me continually vie for attention.

I came out of my leisurely, soul-nurturing summer of reading and writing about Shakespeare (My Revels Now Are Ended ) and sprung into a fall, so to speak. My church choir was to start the first week in October, The OK Chorale the second week, and my first watercolor class –Fall Colors in Skies and Trees—the third week.

I had already done the preliminary thinking, fussing, and freaking out about the music for both choirs. Church choir: plan schedule, choose music, call the people who don’t look at e-mail, and take copies to the alto that only comes to the rehearsal before we sing at a service.  The OK Chorale: choose music, balance sacred with secular, lively with expressive, traditional carols with chimneys, trees and sleigh bells. Chanukah.  God help me, a decent Chanukah song is hard to find.  I have about four that I like so I rotate them until a new one shows up.  I had a new one this year–Ocho Candelikas– and I was thrilled to arrange it for my group.

This would ordinarily be all I would do in a fall quarter and it would be enough.  But in addition to choirs and watercolor class, I had agreed to be on the Fund Raising Committee at church.  I have a vested interest in them being able to pay me. In any case when we mapped out the year, this is what I agreed to: Two watercolor afternoons, a Christmas caroling party, a vocal solo recital in the spring, organizing a festival of music, helping with a trunk sale and a Christmas gift wrapping service, singing in the Harp and Bells concert which was moved from December to January which meant I couldn’t repeat Christmas music that I already know.  It all sounded like so much fun.  I had forgotten about four Christmas craft bazaars I had signed on to do in November and December.

Wiser people than me learn not to over-commit themselves.  I am already nostalgic for days past when I was bored and depressed.  Or at the very least, the pace of the 17^th century sounds lovely.  Everything at the speed of feet, hooves or boat.

The choirs started.  I spent the next weekend going over my plans for the watercolor class, checking supplies and painting more examples of Fall Colors in Skies and Trees. The class, which was to start on a Wednesday, had filled up.  If the sun shone in the morning it would be warm enough to paint in my sun-room.  If not, I would fit everyone in my front room/music studio. I couldn’t set up tables until the sun had declared itself on Wednesday morning.

Tuesday I had time to worry about the evening’s presidential pissing contest and to feel dismay about the commitments I had made for the next three months.  I can do this, I thought.  I’ve been around for a long time. There’s nothing here I haven’t done before.  I only talk this way when I’m on the edge.  Then I opened the letter from Regence.

In smarmy language they told me they had not gotten my premium yet—the one that is on auto-pay—and they are sure it was just an oversight on my part but they do need to get my premium or they will cut me off at the knees.

I have a long, horrible history with health insurance companies and I get hot along the hairline and short of breath whenever I get a letter from them.  I was already saying “What the fuck?” to myself when I dialed Regence’s number so that when I started shrieking, I’m not surprised that that’s what came out.

Customer service people -I refuse to say customer care because they don’t care-are better trained than the last time I yelled at them.  The woman on the other end of the line was admirably polite and even re-assuring except that I was not in the market to be reassured. Snapping and snarking –I spent 25 years in therapy to learn to not behave this way—I found out what I needed to do so they wouldn’t screw me out of my annual physical and I hung up.

Then I called my (ex) insurance broker.  Why had I not been notified about a rate increase?  Well, he didn’t have my file to hand.  Oh, why was that?  He had moved to California.  So you just left the state and didn’t inform any of your clients?  Well he wasn’t in the individual insurance market any longer.  And you didn’t tell your clients?  He starts to explain why there is a rate increase in individual insurance.  I cut him off.  I know why.  It’s so the executives can wring another few drops of blood out of us in exchange for their fucking worthless insurance.

By now I was screaming again.  He hung up on me.

I went on a six hour crying jag.  It was one of those eruptions that was so extreme it seemed unfair to dump myself on a mere friend. I stood sobbing and hiccuping at my phone list, going over the names of my friends, trying to gauge at what point in my hysteria one of them might be able to handle hearing from me.

When things were finally under control, I thought, Oh my god, what happened? I can’t do this.  I need to go back on anti-depressants.  But no, it wasn’t that at all.  It was just over-stimulation at a time of year when I tend to be energetic anyway.

Local Dilettante Studio (classes and lesson in art, music, and words for people who have fallen through the cracks: www. elenalouiserichmond.com) is running smoothly and I haven’t yelled at a single student or friend.  I don’t need to when I’ve got Regence.