I recently spent a wonderful afternoon with the lovely, the beautiful, the brilliant Anna Ellermeier, president of the student body of Western Washington University, soon to graduate with a degree in Spanish, and Law, Diversity and Social Justice; and formerly a voice and piano student of mine.  She made an apple tart with Granny Smiths and honey and served it with English breakfast tea, just the way I like it.

I asked her if women on the Bellingham campus were upset about some of the birth control and abortion laws that are trying to get themselves passed in statehouses all over the country.  Her eyes widened, “Oh yes!” she said. “Because we’ve always had those rights, we haven’t understood that we had to work to keep them.”

Talking to Anna and other former students—who I have instructed to stop introducing me as “my old piano teacher”—is my best antidote when I despair of the human race or of the earth herself.  Another reason, besides college students to feel hopeful about the future of women in the U.S, is men.  In the 60s, the women’s movement knocked a lot of men and women off their balance.  But in the intervening years, many of us have discovered what’s in it for us.  In recognizing women as Persons, we have gained so much.

Women and men have had to grow up—or not.  We’ve discovered parts of ourselves that we had perhaps hoped would be taken care of by someone of the opposite sex.  We’ve appreciated that we all have the full menu of what it means to be human, in differing proportions to other persons.  It isn’t necessary to always delineate male and female especially in unedifying ways: “Isn’t that just like a man.”  “You know how women are.”

When I was a girl, an outburst of Personhood was often quelled by the accusation, “That’s not ladylike.”  I had no defense for this.  My mind whited out at the condemnation in the tone, leaving me unable to question what the hell “ladylike” had to do with anything.  This wasn’t an unusual response in my generation.

If people didn’t know what to make of the women’s movement of the 60s, today’s Facebook generation has put a less refined point on it.  Senators and Governors who are backing bills to make birth control —birth control— and abortion difficult and who have Facebook pages, are finding out that today’s Persons can fight on any level that’s necessary.  The comments are showing up by the thousands. Some poor government flunkey can’t scrub them fast enough.

Here’s one of the tamer responses to the bill requiring a vaginal ultra-sound before a Person could get an abortion:

“Hello Senator, My daughter is still young but will one day be a woman and before I know it, she’ll be having her curse, if ya know what I mean.  What should she expect from a government that wants to probe her vagina?  How do I explain the whole good touch, bad touch thing when politicians think it’s acceptable to explore vaginas with plastic instruments?  Also, is this part of a plan to create jobs somehow?”

Here’s another:

“You know Senator, I’ve wished all my life that a man would know more about my own vaginal issues than I do, and now you’re here!”

A spokeswoman for one of the politicians being inundated with Facebook comments has, in a version of “That’s not ladylike,” said “There is no place for such inappropriate comments.”

Oh, I don’t know.  I find them entertaining. This is Facebook. If you can’t stand the comments, you can always change your status.  Politicians are the last people on earth to be lecturing the rest of us about appropriate public language.  I think it’s appropriate that the topic of women’s bodies and women’s rights has become as messy as childbirth itself.  It’s about time for something new to be born.

I got into several lengthy conversations as a result of my post The Mud Hole of Religion(https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/03/the-mud-hole-of-religion/). While not actually throwing mud, we were pitching terms and labels (non-evangelical, anti-intellectual, liberal) apparently assuming that we knew what we meant and everyone understood the words in the same way. After it all fizzled away, I gave myself an exercise of creating some definitions without consulting Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia.  Here’s what I came up with:

Thoughts are words, images and ideas that flit continually through our minds.

Beliefs are the thoughts that re-occur often enough that we choose to believe they have taken up residence and can’t flit.

Spirituality has to do with our private, personal, idiosyncratic thoughts and senses about who we are, how we got here, and what happens to us when we die; and what we believe, if anything, about forces that seem larger than our own minds.

Religions are structures that attempt to codify behavior and beliefs for a group of people, using the culture’s or sub-culture’s ideas about spirituality.

Fundamentalism is a belief that certain ideals are  inviolate truths which apply to all people, all times and all places.

Evangelicalism is an attitude that attempts to persuade others to believe something on the basis that it’s better than what they currently believe.

Government is a structure that addresses the immediate physical concerns of people currently alive.

If this was one of those exams where they ask “which does not belong?” we could safely dispense with government. Government does not belong with religion. Full stop.

The most problematic concepts left on the list are, for me, fundamentalism and evangelicalism. We all have some of both.  We all get excited about things and make statements like “You’ll love this book,” the subtext being “because I did.” That’s a rather benign evangelicalism.  We all have our own fundamentals, our non-negotiables, our deal-breakers, the logic of our own integrity.  For some of us, these can change over the course of a life-time as we change and as our circumstances change.  This is a different paradigm than one which ascribes all authority to someone or something outside herself: a scripture, a deity, a pope, a party platform, parents, a tradition, a man. So far, so good because we all do that some of the time, too.

Fundamental thinking gets ugly when the logic of someone else’s integrity is smeared all over the rest of us. There’s an organization called “Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented” which says: “What you believe is not the problem. What you believe I should believe is the problem.” http://christianstiredofbeingmisrepresented.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html .

In music, a note is sometimes called the fundamental.  You sing the pitch or strike the note on the piano and when the sound is alive, you hear overtones, little shoots of other fundamentals. You hear/feel the sound resonating in different places other than right there in the vocal cords or on the piano keyboard.  If the sound is dead, you hear the clunk of the note, but no ringing, no whistling, and you feel no vibrations, nothing to suggest music of the heavenly spheres.

Singers experience a fundamental as a range, not a discrete point of sound.  Singers can push a note to its edges and enter a quarter-tone. In the western scale, we don’t have a special name for a pitch that’s a quarter-tone sharp.  We still call it the fundamental.

To me, the most fascinating part of the tone is its core.  Once I enter what seems like the core, it moves.  I move with it.  I follow the core of the tone all around what we are still calling the fundamental.  If I decide the center is a discrete place to concentrate my breath, the tone goes dead.  It’s the movement that keeps the sound alive.  But when the note is entered with grace and when its acoustics are arranged with care, it can resonate with life.

Life is like this.  There is no center. The core moves.  No one owns it, no one gets it all to herself. When I enter it, that’s grace.  When I lose track of it but I know it’s still somewhere, that’s faith.

My college roommate, Putzer, the attorney was with me for a few days this past weekend.  When I referred to the current political primaries as “March Madness,” she told me that phrase actually referred to basketball.  You could have fooled me. I’ve been following the political clown show via computer and inevitably I travel down the roads to religion.  The scent of sanctimony from the candidates, the bloggers and the commenters causes my computer to crash and I have to take time to re-boot and make a cup of tea.  While I’ve waited for the tea to brew, I’ve thought about religion, and specifically, Christianity because that is the religion I know the most about.

Spirituality is a rabbit warren of meaning with “ten thousand several doors” for us to make our entrances and exits.  When we’re young and fearful (or immature and terrified), there’s a waiting room where we can believe someone has all the answers.  Depending on where we are in life, we can curl up in one room or the other until we get curious about what else is there.  We can wander out of the Christian rooms and see what they’re doing in The Wiccan.  We can make macaroni necklaces with the Muslims, finger paint with the Buddhists, and star-gaze with the astrologers.

We can wander into hidden places that have no address.  We can find ley lines and vortexes.  We can be transported by mystery.  We can gather what has meaning for us, make our own rooms, and put in skylights.

Christianity, in this country, has become one big holding zone where the lowest common denominators are grubbing around in the muck, throwing sewage at each other, and imagining they are the warren.  The word Christian is now a political statement not a descriptor of one’s orientation to the mystery of life.  It’s a statement that one belongs to a fraternity with a really cool leader who makes him feel safe, important, and entitled to pretty much anything he wants, including the right to infiltrate the minds and bodies of other people.

When Jesus was alive there was no such thing as Christians.  Christians created their club after the really cool leader was gone and no longer had immediate jurisdiction.  Any future difficulties were neatly covered by the concept of the Holy Spirit who is endowed with qualities which conveniently give backup to whoever holds power.  Boy, was this ever a case of a parent who left a convoluted trust, secure in the belief his guileless heirs would sort it out fairly.  Two thousand years later, the heirs are still fighting over who is executor.

I cover vast territory when I say that one of the most condescending phrases to crop up in the past decade is “people of faith.”  I don’t know who coined it, but ironically, it’s been co-opted by the muddy folks in the holding zone. When a “person of faith” has conquered his way to the top of the pit, he needs all those muddy people below to hold him up.  Whatever once passed for faith is supplanted by fear that they won’t.  Meantime, everyone is still covered with mud.

When we stake our lives on the belief we are right, and that we have the Truth, and when we sit complacently in our own self-righteousness, we don’t need faith.   A more accurate descriptor in this case would be “people of doubt” because instead of our faith supporting us, we need everyone in the world to prop us up.

We are all people of faith.  We all have faith in something.  But there is something in life– a power, a mystery, the wind, a lump in the throat–that can’t be seen directly and which evades definition.   Everything else is language.  Language evolves.  When politicians get a hold of language, it dies.  But then it’s reborn at another address.

Meaning resides in those hidden places that have no address.  How we make meaning within ourselves makes all the difference in the world.

Doing a blog is like keeping a dream journal.  When you know you want to write, you tend to notice and remember images, anecdotes and embryonic ideas.  I have found that every week something rises to the surface and declares: “Write about me.”  Something funny happens, or a seed sprouts in a plot of ground I care about.   Both things happened this week as I wallowed in the Downfall of Rush Limbaugh. So many writers have parsed the actual story so well that I don’t have anything more articulate to add. And Comedy Central has done itself proud in the humor department.

So I have been reflecting on the concept of “sorry.”  In spite of the headlines that said differently, Limbaugh made no apology.  And no one expected one.  Saying sorry is not the same as crying uncle.  It’s not something you finally croak out when you realize your backers are deserting you.  It’s not something you scramble to say when you realize that in the attempt to save your face and cover your ass at the same time, you have done neither.

Genuine apologies are between two people. They are too intimate to be part of public conversation. When public figures engage in pseudo-remorse, and when contrition is an Olympic sport where anyone can hold up a rating, it’s degrading to everyone.  We’d do better to skip the pretense and stick to the equation of the First Amendment plus slander laws.  There was a time when X equaled shame, but we’re past that.

“Sorry” is an umbrella term, covering a wide circumference.  When we climb over all the subscribers in our row to get to the ladies’ room in the middle of Hamlet’s soliloquy, we say “sorry” a half dozen times.  When we can’t hear the salesclerk say, “That’s $29.57,” we say, “sorry?” When we say “sorry” for getting our face in front of Dick Cheney’s rifle then you know the word no longer has any discernible meaning.

I didn’t understand what an apology was until I was in my late forties because I was raised in a fundamentalist household where forgiveness was a bit of a racket. The winner had to be Right and the loser had to be Wrong.  Whoever lost the moral sweepstakes got to be disgraced and whoever won got to be smug and quote Bible verses.  What is non-ironically referred to as “our public discourse” is as familiar to me as childhood.

Here’s what a genuine apology looks like:

Part One: “I behaved badly and hurt you. I’m sorry. ”

Part Two: Shut your mouth. Stop talking.

The minute you add something like, “Against my better judgment I stooped to your level and fought with your tactics,” you have negated the apology.

Then you stand there in all your flawed humanity and tolerate whatever feelings made the apology so hard in the first place.  If you are fortunate, the person you’ve hurt, your fellow flawed human being, will say, “I appreciate that” or “Apology accepted.”

The relationship can start to repair itself.   If it wants to.  Forgiving does not mean forgetting. What martyr put those two words together anyway?  We all hurt in different ways and we recover –or not–on our own internal schedules according to our own desires.

I like the expression, “It’s all good.”   Sometimes it’s good like flowers blooming and sometimes it’s like rotting compost.

Years ago, on my first visit to Whole Foods, I nearly passed out from the sheer number of choices.   I had much the same response when I first set foot inside Larry’s Market, the now defunct supermarket that was one of the first, back in the 80s, to stay open for 24 hours.   Even factoring for inflation, Whole Foods is far more overwhelming than Larry’s Market ever was.

What links them is the samples.  At Larry’s Market, there were always little bread samples in the bakery and almost always some kind of sweet thing for afters.  At the check-out, there was often a domed lid with chip samples under it. If you were lucky, someone might press a bite sized granola bar into your hand on the way out.

My orientation to grocery store sampling is that of a pudgy kid in the sixties.  When I was growing up it wasn’t unusual for a stranger to approach an overweight kid eating a cookie at a picnic and say, “That’s the reason you’re fat.”   In the way these things work, I was the one who ended up feeling ashamed, not the adult who felt so entitled to insult a child who took her comfort in the few places she could find it.

Enough of these experiences turned me into a secret sampler.  I could smell a sample in the parking lot.  I could suss out a whole store and find where they were handing out Tiger’s Milk samples in a futile attempt to popularize it.  Though not technically a sample, I could finger the edge of wedding cake frosting left on the serving plate before the cake cutter turned back around to sink her knife in for another piece.

I think about how I got started on this life of sampling subterfuge sometimes when I am in a place like Whole Foods.  There’s a way of lowering ones eyelids to half-mast in a disinterested survey, looking for a dome.  Then circling the area like a predator, faking surprise when you come upon the prey, in this case, the do-nut holes.

I mention do-nut holes, because that’s how I set limits for myself.  In a bakery, I only take a sample when there are do-nut holes.  The truth is that most bakery goods look better than they taste. After you’ve been disappointed enough times, they don’t even look good anymore.  But I like do-nut holes and they always taste the same, give or take a day’s staleness.

Do-nut holes were the de-fault sample at the old QFC on 15^th NW.  I understand that a whole family can lunch off the samples at the big warehouse stores.  The West Seattle Thriftway for months put out samples of obscure little banana flavored sugar cookies that made the staff re-route themselves just to get another one. At the old Art’s Family Center which some of us still call Art’s, but which now is another QFC, you could always get salmon spread on either a Triscuit or a Wheat Thin.  Or both if you were fast enough.  The place to go for not just a sample, but a whole hunk of bread with butter is Great Harvest Bread Company.

Speaking as a veteran sampler, I can say that Whole Foods does better than any store I have ever scavenged. On a good day, you can sample orange slices and grapes in the produce section, something smoked in the meat or fish section, chips and dip in aisle seven and washed down with coffee or tea one aisle over.  Double back for the green liquid by the protein drinks or the artisanal granola in the cereal aisle, then due north to try some kefir, Yobaby or Greek yogurt.  Any continental repast finishes with cheese of which there can easily be four different kinds to sample, and then if you are lucky enough to get to the domed lid in time, some tiramisu or fudge cake in the bakery.  Whole Foods doesn’t do anything so down-market as do-nut holes.

But I have never seen anything like the sampler’s paradise that is Mackinac Island. The townies call the tourists “fudgies” with good reason.  Every other store front on the main street is a candy kitchen and you can eat a pound of fudge in a day just from going in and out of them.  Not that I ever did.

This last item is off topic by content, but not by free association.  Jessie, my little fairy god-child from years past, could make my mother laugh outright at comments I could never have gotten past her.  Jessie was with me one fourth of July when I went to see my parents in Olympia.  We were putting together a hamburger supper and my mother was shaking the mustard bottle while she explained to Jessie that the first thing to come out the spout was usually water.

“Oh, I know all about that,” Jessie assured her. “That’s why I always get a mid-stream sample.”

Last weekend I wrote about my students performing in a love-fest of a Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale.  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/02/terrified-adults-and-spotlight-whores/) I spent the week picking up pieces.  One of my students came to her lesson saying that she wished her best friend had been there because she would tell her The Truth about her singing.

I was almost apoplectic.  I wanted to say, “Give me her name.  I’ll take care of her.”

Contrary to what the prevailing trends suggest, singing is not done in a court of law.  But nowadays people listen to music with a clipboard and a smug attitude.  Audiences are pock-marked with critics and judges who wouldn’t dream of ridiculing a child who is learning to walk or undermining an adult preparing for a job interview, but who think nothing of ripping a singer to shreds and dispassionately examining the tatters while the performer bleeds out.

If I can borrow an expression from my painting buddy, Susan, this about sets my hair on fire.  Attempts to explain have me vomiting ashes that are trying to be words strung in a sentence. So I have been pondering this topic all week.  Yes, pondering.  Well, OK, fuming.  And dousing my head with the kitchen sink nozzle.  If this seems reactive, all I can say is that you aren’t the one having to resuscitate the victims.

So much of life is about passing exams, winning contests, and having letters after our names. It’s about how our accomplishments appear to other people.  The Experts and the Friends with The Truth have the advice we need to look and sound good.   I secretly wish that my students would not watch shows like American Idol.  They might think they are picking up useful information.  All I see is the damage it does.

I sing and I teach singing but I can’t describe how much I don’t want the pressure of being seen as The Expert.  I’m a human being.  If I attempted to play the Expert, I couldn’t sustain it.  I don’t fancy being as delusional as Popes and politicians.

A person doesn’t become a singer by having the so-called experts– or teachers– pick away at her voice until she despairs of herself and runs off the stage in tears. She would do better to embark on a course of something she already hates.  It’d be quicker.

I want to help my student build a house she actually wants to inhabit.  I view teaching as collaboration. A student wants to learn to sing, I want to learn how to help her learn to sing.  We need a dialogue.  I might have ten thoughts about a student’s technique.  I want to work with the one that is ripest.  I need a hint.  A student is sometimes reluctant to voice an opinion for fear being Wrong in front of The Expert.  There’s no Wrong.  Everything a student says gives me an idea of how we might proceed.

There are no blueprints for the house.  It’s a voice.  Maybe it’s your voice.  It’s you.  It’s your entire personality, every nook and cranny of it, in vocal sound.    I can tell you which rooms are filling up with sound.  And I can help you explore the rooms are still waiting for your breath to blow through them.  But you actually teach yourself to sing.

My biggest job, as I see it, is to foster a sense of curiosity, wonder, and pleasure at the sound of your voice filling your house. This pleasure is what will sustain you as you acquire technical skills.  It will make performance safe enough to give you a rush but also be a learning experience.  It’s what will help you mediate the ignorant pronouncements of the clipboard wienies.

The voice is a mysterious instrument. It’s like our unconscious mind: it does what it wants when it wants. The better your friendship with your voice and with all its sound colors, the less it matters what the critics say, and the more freely it will sing for you.

I’m not fuming quite so steadily. Even so, I am getting a longer hose for that kitchen sink nozzle.  When the experts and critics come around, I’ll be ready for them.

Two events from last week inspired this post:  Meryl Streep did a lovely interview on NPR where she said something that I want to put on my business card: “Voice lessons bring out the voice we already possess;” and The Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale opened its season.

The Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicale, known on my calendar merely as T.A. is what I call my adult student recitals.  My students can register as Spotlight Whores with as many songs as I will let them sing, they can be audience or they can come with Ambivalence Status.  Ambivalence Status means they decide once things are underway if they want to perform.

The T.A. Musicales are not your stereotypical music recitals. I do my best to provide as relaxed an environment as I can.  To this end, I provide props, costumes, and suggestions for ways to reduce the anxiety about singing or playing in front of an audience.  And everyone gets a chance for a do-over at the end.

On Sunday I asked the performers to explain what their objective was in singing that day. Was it to sing without throwing up? With the music memorized? Without saying “Damn it!” in the middle of the song?  Without apologizing or saying that it sounded better an hour ago?  (Always including one of my objectives: Please stay focused while I finish playing the accompaniment.  It’s part of the song, too.)

Our first performer, who will go by the name of Samantha because she has suffered enough exposure for one week, said she wanted to sing her song without crying.  She immediately started to cry, seemingly from the terror of what she was setting out to accomplish.  We started over a few times before she got underway and as she sang through the verses, her voice got steadier and stronger.  She went from looking terrified to beaming and sounding confident.

She demonstrated something that is missing from so much singing one hears these days, something that I think makes a performance compelling: vulnerability.  She had her heart out there with no interface except raw courage.   One by one, my students got up and sang better than I have heard them sing before.  Everyone had a different objective but everyone sang with a kind of vulnerability.

Every performance surprised and moved me, and if I can be frank, that is a tall order with me.  For one, I am at the piano accompanying the singers and wrestling with pages that won’t stay flat. Secondly, I hear a lot of voices in my studio and I listen to many attempts to sing things “perfectly,” which always backfires and is often accompanied by expressions of self-loathing.  Whatever the word perfect means to one person, it means something different to everyone else.  A song or a single note is different every single time you sing or play it because it’s alive.  If you once get it “perfect,” you’ve now not only killed it, but no one else thinks you’ve done anything notable so it’s an exercise in masochism.

Terrified Adult and Spotlight Whore are two sides of the same coin, but they have to be in balance in order for the coin to spin.  When you are too enamored of the spotlight, you are up there amusing and impressing yourself alone. The word masturbate comes to mind: there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s something one usually does alone.  If you are too terrified, you don’t share yourself at all.  In the balance, in the spin, you have room to experience the wonder of your own voice and to share it at the same time.

Performing is intimacy.  There’s an intimacy with your accompanist, you trust him or her. You can’t know ahead of time what clumsy goof you’ll make that you hope your accompanist can make look like is her fault.  Or better yet that the two of you can weave into the performance itself.  There’s an intimacy with the audience.  You can’t know what any particular audience is going to feel like.  You don’t know what they expect or how flexible and open they are.

You can’t be intimate in advance, and you can’t fake vulnerability.  You begin by falling in love with your own voice and inhabiting the music.  You present yourself and your song with as much openness and courage as you have in that moment.  And then you let go.  There’s nothing more to do and you can’t control the response.

Samantha went back for a do over.  Her face was incandescent and her voice was her own.  She didn’t cry until the very last note and that mattered to her.  But she had me from the beginning of the afternoon.  I was moved by her just standing up and singing with tears in her eyes.

Last Saturday Joan, my friend with the theological chops, and I went to Seattle University’s “Search for Meaning Book Festival.” We had our tickets and were eager to attend right up to the day before it took place. Joan called on Friday night.

“Who am I kidding?” she asked.  “I can’t spend the whole day there.  I don’t have that kind of energy.”

“Yeah, neither do I.”

Earlier that day I had shoved my feet into a new pair of walking shoes to walk around Green Lake with my friend Nancy.  By evening, it wasn’t only my feet that hurt.  All those places where joints hang out with other joints were like a bunch of cars that had spun out in traffic with every one facing the wrong way.  I would have happily stayed home and watched re-runs of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Joan said,  “I really only want to hear the Jesuit.”

The Jesuit.  Joan grew up Catholic and went to Loyola so Jesuit means something to her.  I grew up in the Church of the Miserable Masochists.  I don’t know Jesuit from Dominican from Franciscan other than if one of each walks into a bar, you’ve got a joke.

“Ok,” I said.  “I’ll go hear The Jesuit with you.”

The Jesuit was Father James Martin.  He’s the chaplain of “The Colbert Report.”  I bet you didn’t know the show had a chaplain.  I wonder if “Everybody Loves Raymond” had a chaplain because the Barone family was Catholic. In any case, Joan and I agreed that if nothing else, this particular lecture would be funny.

With my unsmiling, everything-is-a-sin religious background, I am always impressed with the Catholic’s ability to laugh.  I went to “Late Nite Catechism” nine times.  I can’t imagine a Protestant counterpart.  “Wednesday Night Altar Call! Hilarious and Cleansing!”  In my experience, professional Protestants don’t laugh at all, let alone at themselves.

Father James Martin was preceded by a series of self-congratulatory introductions on the part of the festival organizers that wound their way down to introducing the man who would introduce the person who would introduce the speaker.  I occupied my time trying to figure out how far I’d have to walk to get one of the cool red festival bags everyone was carrying.  Honestly what I love best about conferences are the promotional freebies.

The Jesuit’s talk was mostly a string of  funny stories.  My favorite: He was at a conference in Africa.  At the Q and A, all the priests left for a meeting, abandoning Father James Martin to a roomful of nuns.  When he expressed some self-consciousness about being the only man in the room, one of the nuns piped up in a loud voice, “Blessed are you among women!”

On Saturday someone asked a question about women in the Catholic Church.  Father James Martin launched into a canned speech about how women were the first at the tomb, women were important to Jesus etc.  I now understand the meaning of the expression “Jesuitical clap-trap.”  One courageous voice called out frankly, “Do you think women should be priests?”

The Jesuit answered with an eight minute long joke. That was disappointing, though not unexpected.

It is such a stupid situation: a power structure that excludes at least half its talent, intellect, courage, wisdom and imagination.  The Grande Fromages hoard their positions like dragons on their gold, deluding themselves that people actually believe it’s because of a couple of Bible verses.  But all institutionalized religions eventually lose their relevancy.  When their power starts to crumble, they fight to the death the persons they claim to serve.  It’s the nature of The Beast, so to speak.

Meanwhile the essence of spirituality quietly flows along as the subterranean stream that it is.  Here’s my idea of a conference:  You get there and there’s nothing planned and nothing to do.  This is my idea of a talk: the speaker gets up and says that everyone must find their own way.  Then he sits down.  I haven’t worked out how I would get any promotional freebies, but I rather think that if I found the meaning of life, I could forgo the totebag.

There’s a Sufi saying: There’s only one path and it’s yours.  I like that.

I love my Yoga for Over 50 class.  It’s slow and easy going and gives me time to think exactly how I am going get up from that forward bend.  Lately I’ve started having an experience with breathing which I never thought could happen outside of ingesting a Xanax.  I feel as though the breath is floating my body, moving it around so that except for that forward bend thing, I don’t have to think as much as I did in the beginning.  I only have to breathe and float.

So it was hugely irritating when a Problematic Person from my Past (P3) showed up in class.  She came in late, after the rest of us had settled into a flow.  Setting up right in the middle of the floor, it sounded like she was wearing rain pants because she swished every time she moved.  She had a special mat with her and every time she got off it, it sounded like she had fallen out of a bunk bed.

None of these impressions would be so extreme if I hadn’t seen who she was.  She was a woman who had sung with The OK Chorale for several quarters.  The last time she enrolled, she was looking ahead to hip surgery so she had some discomfort, ok, pain, going on.   We were singing at Folk Life that quarter and preceding it with a warm-up at the Queen Anne Thriftway and Bay View Retirement Center, working our way down the counter-balance, so to speak.

Before the first class P3 informed me that a new federal law required me to provide transportation for her, and what was I going to do about that?   This happened a long time ago, back when I didn’t question such assertions, when I believed that everyone in the room was a grown-up except me.  Or in the parlance of the day, I gave my power away.  I had only recently succeeded in finding a wheel-chair accessible place to offer the class per federal law and I was dismayed to learn that I also had to transport anyone who was physically challenged.

I said that I always arranged car-pools at the last rehearsal.  I made that point to her eight times.  Eight rehearsals.  Eight queries as to how I could compensate her for her pain in life. Eight re-assurances that I would arrange everything at the end of the last class.

At the seventh rehearsal, she asked me to find out if there were handicapped parking spaces at the retirement home, and she could maybe drive herself.  If this situation were to arise today, I might say something like this: “I understand your hip is a problem but is there something wrong with your dialing finger?”

At the last rehearsal P3 was the second person in the door.  She presented herself to me and asked if I had arranged her car-pool.  Today I might ask her what she did with that brain in her spare time.   But what I said was: “You know you could have taken more responsibility for this.”

P3 turned away, red in the face.  She was sitting with a friend, and chewing me to pieces when I found her and tried to repair things.  She took one look at me and erupted, spewing something along the lines of she hoped that someday I was in excruciating pain and no one, no one cared.  It was my turn to walk away.

As I tried to get the class started, she sobbed noisily in the back of the room. My friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) who is a mother and high school teacher, and has faced down priests, sat next to her, and used her teacher voice to say, “This is not the time or the place for this behavior.”

The sobs crescendoed to wails as she laid her head in the lap of her friend who was the only person on earth who cared.  She wailed all the way through the vocal warm-up.  She wailed for ten minutes.   Then she left.

The next morning, she cc’d me on the complaint she sent the Experimental College. And e-mailed me another curse, expressing her hope that I be in pain someday.  Ironically enough, one of the sopranos was chauffeuring me to and from rehearsals that quarter because I was recovering from a herniated disc.  But to mention that is almost too easy.

So this was the woman who walked into my yoga class.  After class she said to me, “You look familiar. I know you from somewhere.”

“Do you?” I concentrated on tying my shoe.

She gazed into the distance.  “It was a group of women, I think.”

“Oh. Well.”  I slipped out the door.

So there it is. I hope she doesn’t come back but she probably will.  Life does stuff like this.  I understand the equation of emotional and physical pain plus arrested development multiplied by drama queendom to the tenth power that leads one to feeling entitled to go off on other people.  And if one does it often enough, I suppose it gets difficult to keep track of the names of all the people one has abused.  There may be people who slide out the door when they see me coming.

But splat into my great yoga experience?  It would indeed be ironic if I needed a Xanax to get me to yoga.

When my brother and I played Scrabble as kids, it was a triumph to spell a word at all, never mind scoring.  Even the high scoring letters didn’t improve our games because our vocabulary wasn’t up to our aspirations.  The only words with an x that we knew were ax and ox and we’d argue about the plurals.  The only viable z word we knew was zoo.  It was too much to hope that we’d get a z and a b in the same hand, let alone the other accoutrements for spelling zebra, the only other z word we knew.  We didn’t know about qi.

But it was a start.  As an adult, I had Sylvia, a bi-monthly Scrabble partner who was worlds better than me.  I know of no better way to improve one’s game than to play with someone who is 1) more advanced, 2) doesn’t care whether she wins or not, just enjoys the company and the game, and 3) is patient.  I hit the trifecta with Sylvia and I learned a lot.

When my mother was in her dotage, Scrabble was something we could do without fighting.  She was a fierce cheater, but I didn’t care what she did as long as she didn’t talk religion or ask me if I went to church.  She played with nine tiles –Why waste the room on the tray?– and if she didn’t like her hand, she traded tiles during my turn.

“Mom, you can’t just change your tiles!”

“Well, I can’t use these letters.”

She could never just put tiles on the board.  She had to make an announcement.  If her word was dance, she arranged the tiles saying, “I’ll just do a little dance.”  If her word was dame, she said, “I guess I’ll be a little dame.”

Fast forward to the age of Computer Scrabble.  When I decided I was spending too much time playing Free Cell Solitaire, ( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/on-justifying-hours-of-free-cell-solitaire/) I moved to Scrabble.  I started on the Veteran level and moved quickly to Smart and Elite by virtue of using the Hints and Best Play menus i.e. by cheating.  In this I was my mother’s daughter.  I won 2500 games and lost 111, and picked up some skills, though as it has turned out, not as many as I thought.   I moved on to Facebook Scrabble with Chris, the Unclassifiable.  I won most of our games so Chris was an easy transition to playing in a system where I couldn’t cheat.

I discovered a seductive little feature on Facebook called “Stats.”  I started watching my rank rise.  I was second in line when I friended two people who play with greater skill and it knocked me all the way to No. 4.  Both of them invited me to play and it has been almost unbearably frustrating for me, the little cheater.   In two moves, they are already 150 points ahead of me and this with just commonplace letters.  They aren’t even working with x, z and q.  I told Chris about it.

“Welcome to my world,” she said.

“But do you just want to cry?” I asked her.  “So frustrated that you want to cry?”

“No,” she said. “I get mad.”  Then she laughed.  She didn’t sound mad.

Every morning I play my game with Chris, and she goes off to work.  The two Facebook Aces are in a position to play Scrabble all day long.  Unfortunately I am, too.  If I thought “Stats” was seductive, it’s nothing compared to the thought that if that so and so doesn’t block me, I can hang all my tiles off the word Rhamnus in my next turn.  And by the way, how does someone even know that word?

My friend Nancy introduced me to Lexulous which is like Scrabble only the scoring is inflated.  In addition, Nancy has bunches of degrees in English and has been teaching it for 30 years.  She can soar 250 points ahead of me before the board even downloads.  It’s so terrifying there almost isn’t time to cry.  The first time I won a Lexulous game with Nancy, I thought she was off her feed.

“I just did the best I could with the tiles I had,” she said graciously.  She says that even when she wins.

See, this is what cheating has done:  set me up with the illusion that I can always win.  I am finding it hard to play with such congenial company.  Chris laughs no matter who wins and Nancy says she finds the game relaxing.  Meanwhile I’m crunching hard candy and obsessing, with time-outs to meditate on the idea that cheaters never prosper.  My ignominy, in all its definitions, is complete.

Ignominy.  Eight letters.  I can hear my mother: “I’ll just have a little ignominy.”