This blog is not for the squeamish:

Recently Freud, the cat, got into some kind of altercation with his analysand across the alley.  It may be time to terminate their professional relationship as it seems to have taken a new direction. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/09/the-post-freudian-cat/)

In any case, Freud came in with a bump the size of a filbert on his left cheek.  By evening, the bump had become so enlarged it looked like he was growing a second head.  I traced a streak of blood to its source: a pinhole of a puncture wound.   I wrestled him down and treated the area with alcohol and Neosporin.

Freud leaped out of my hold, raced twice around the house, and ended up at his dish, demanding food.  In other words, he wasn’t about to let two heads slow him or his appetite down.

I have been through so many puncture wound scares that even a two-headed cat makes me only slightly uneasy.   How many times have I said: “OK, if it’s not any better by Friday (Saturday, Monday), I’ll take him to the vet”?  How many times has the vet said, “It doesn’t look infected.  Just keep it dry.  That’ll be $60 ($80, $95)”?

By the next day, there was a bump the size of a chestnut but just the one head.  For the next week the fur on the left side of Freud’s face was wet and matted and Winston was continually licking it.  Finally the fur looked dry and normal, the bump was the size of a sunflower seed and Winston had to find some other interesting discharge to lick.

Freud’s prodigious drainage reminded me of a time Winston got an abscess on his forehead –also from a puncture wound.  It appeared like the beginnings of a unicorn horn.  When I pushed on it, something alive appeared to move inside the bump.  I put a warm, damp towel on it for as long as Winston would let me.  A great gush of foul-smelling pus poured out like an underground spring come unblocked.  “Winston of the Spring.”  It came in rolling waves.  While I’d have liked to pass out from the stench, Artemis went for it like a gourmand.  She licked it for days and kept it clean and dry.

Here’s another odor anecdote:   I came home to find a storm of bird feathers settled all over the entrance to the front room.  Now this is far more unpleasant than popping cat zits.  I especially don’t like finding little bird feet and other spare parts among the feathers.  But it’s even worse when I don’t find them at all which was the case on this occasion.  All I found were feathers.  A day passed.  I looked everywhere.  I vacuumed everywhere.

Just when I stopped thinking about it, I began to smell something funky.  Tracing the odor to its source, I found under the wood stove, a festive pile of cat puke, festooned with bits of fur and grass.  Perched on top, at a jaunty angle like a bizarro Martha Stewart project, sat a whole and complete bird head.

I decided this was Freud’s doing, judging by the pitiful look that had been on his face for the previous 24 hours.  Otherwise I would have bet on Winston who will eat anything.  When he was still a small kitten, Winston threw up an entire shoelace, complete with the aglets on the tips. (I won’t tell you how I discovered he loves the taste of human ear wax.)

I picked up the puke cupcake with gloves and two thicknesses of plastic bag without actually looking at it. This is also how I deal with dead rats if my neighbor isn’t home. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/rodent-incident-report-1/) (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/rodent-incident-report-2/)

I would rather explode pockets of putrid cat pus any day than cope with rodents of any size, dead or alive.  Now that’s love.

Snow Day, watercolor by Elena Louise Richmond. Clockwise from back: Winston, Artemis, Freud

There was a regular rodeo at the OK Chorale last week when a TV crew filmed a rehearsal.  Joe Fryer from King-TV and I had been in negotiations for a week about a story on the Chorale.  A week ago Tuesday he asked if they could film us the next day. Up until then I hadn’t given any dates to the Chorale; I didn’t want them to waste their makeovers.  Now I had to act fast so they would at least wash their hair that morning.

I sent an email: “If you are in the witness protection program or are calling in sick, you’d best wear a wig because you may be on TV tonight.”  That was my little joke and I was proud of it.  No one responded.  Usually I get some wisecrack response especially when I have gone to the trouble to be funny.

“Damn,” I thought.  “A wasted piece of clever-ness.”

I sent the e-mail again.  Still no response.   After the third time I got a few laconic replies informing me they now had 3 e-mails from me sitting in their in-box.

“Oh great,” I thought. “Now they’ll think I’m excited about this.”  I wanted to be cool.

I was anything but cool.  None of us were.  That’s part of our charm.  I asked Nina (rhymes with Dinah) if she wanted to come early to chauffeur me to the rehearsal because Joe wanted to do interviews.

“You bet!” she said. “I want to be a TV star!”

The TV piece begins with Mari Huff, a ten year old piano student of mine.   If you watch the video at the end of this blog, her piano playing opens the piece and she was thrilled about that.   I wish we had seen more of her face in the final edit, however her graceful fingers are lovely to watch.  There’s value in those old Edna Mae Burnham Dozen a Day books still.

The OK Chorale rehearsal happened to be one of our quarterly potluck-rehearsals. We were at the home of Gail (alto) of the Boar’s Head fame: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/12/a-boars-head-in-the-hand/.   I think the potlucks help people feel more comfortable with each other and thus they sing better.  Also, I get a chance to do more than ask the sopranos to stop talking, ignore the altos because they rarely make a fuss, suck up to the basses because we could use more of them, and try to hide my terror of the tenors.

The Chorale really puts out for the potlucks, even mid-week.  Gail had roasted a turkey and we all brought side dishes.  It was like Thanksgiving only without the annoying relatives.  Eileen (tenor) of Juramento fame (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/03/makin-time-with-the-ok-chorale/ brought a corn pudding to die for and Don (bass) made two strawberry pies.

Jeff Christian, the cameraman, had a huge contraption—like a Sony on steroids with a goiter –hoisted on one shoulder.  He leapt around the room like a kangaroo, shooting from all angles, even from outside the house; shooting the food, the rehearsal, the music, my fingers on the keys.  The camera came right into our faces for interviews with Jim (bass), Nina (soprano), Gail (alto), Maxine (alto) and me (Squadron Leader).

A week later, last Tuesday night, the story aired.  All evening long, I got bulletins from friends that The OK Chorale was the teaser for the early news and for Oprah.  Mari, my piano student, stayed up until 10:00 to see it live.  I didn’t see it until the following morning on the web.  It was lovely, a beautiful job of editing and of capturing the character of The OK Chorale.  And they pronounced my name correctly!

The Chorale met last night for a regular rehearsal.  I thought we would all be flying high but we were a little subdued.   Hal (tenor) wasn’t there so that explains some of it.   It sounded like Nina and Gail practically got assemblies called at their schools to show the TV clip so they were exhausted from their turn as celebrities.

I didn’t need to inform anyone that a blog was in process but I wanted them to do something memorable to help me finish it.  There were some funny moments last night but you had to be there to get them.  Mostly we just worked hard at the music.

We cleared up the mystery of where to go for the repeat and the 2^nd ending of “The Theme from Peter Gunn,” and the tenors discovered that there was a page six that they did not remember singing in the previous rehearsals.  That’s the sort of thing a choir director loves to hear mid-quarter.

This is what it’s like being TV stars.  There are the rushes of excitement and then it’s back to work.  You can see us right here; after you click play, you have to wait just a bit:

Every few months, my adult students get together for the Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicales.  These could easily last all day what with my more confident students wanting to pull out another and another piece.  “And now for my fourteenth song.  .  . .

I schedule the recitals for my young students around holidays so we have an anxiety-reducing theme.  The Sunday before Halloween, anyone can come in a costume.  For years, I ran a Spook House in conjunction with the Halloween recital.  It was so much work that sometimes I couldn’t face taking it down until April.  It turned out that everyone was just as happy with a chocolate fountain, although the clean-up from that sometimes lasts until April when I am still finding streaks of chocolate on the walls.

The April Fools recital with its attendant jokes and tricks is always fun. But I still had to stop and think what she was referring to when I asked Michiko if she wanted to play in the May Day recital and she asked,

“Is this the one where we roast the Peeps?”

Now there’s a question for a deconstructionist.

After one Aprils Fool’s recital, I had a little campfire going in my yard.  I had cut sticks for roasting but instead of Kraft’s white marshmallows, we impaled marshmallow Peeps and watched their little faces crumple and melt.

We did not roast Peeps at this past May Day recital.  I lobbied for a May Day theme— Green Men and Queens of the May– but no one got excited about it.  I was counting on something wacky happening so I could write a blog about it, but it was a quiet, intimate affair.  Something quirky usually happens, like the time Bar-Chord Judy acquired her nickname.

Judy had a knack for playing camp songs on her guitar and getting people to sing along.  She had launched into a song when a bar chord came up.  Standing at an uncomfortable angle rather than sitting, she lunged for the bar chord, but her fingers didn’t get there in time.  She stopped and announced, “There’s a bar chord there,” and carried on.  Or tried to.  The room exploded with laughter.

“A bar chord is really just a big fuck-you,” she said.

Then there was the time “Tim’s” girlfriend wasn’t able to attend the recital but sent flowers with instructions for them to be delivered when her man sang.  At first appearance Tim seemed a gruff old guy, but after years of working with him, I found him to be softhearted and sweet on the inside.

When he stood up to sing “Misty,” he said, “I was going to dedicate this song to my girlfriend, but we aren’t together anymore.”

Enter the flowers and an awkward silence.

Tim was struck dumb, standing there with the flowers and his music.   He read the “care instructions” out loud.  That got a laugh, and bought us all time, but did none of us any good.  My mind had gone into lockdown.

“Tim, are you sure you aren’t still together?”  I asked him in a low voice.  I got weekly bulletins about his girlfriend at Tim’s lesson.  They had been together five days previously.

“I broke up with her last week,” he finally announced to the audience.  Because something more seemed to be called for, and because the feelings were apparently still raw, he added, “She shouldn’t have hacked at my rhododendrons!”

Tim said he’d rather sing later, after he recovered himself.  As he sat down, a new student, visiting for the first time, leaned over to her neighbor and whispered– except that we all heard– “Does this sort of thing happen every time?”

Something happens, but not usually something so bursting with human interest.

I said nothing wacky happened on May Day but something important happened. Nina –rhymes with Dinah (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/01/dining-with-nina/) had made it her project to memorize the songs she sings for recitals.

As she put it, “You can’t really sing it until it’s memorized.”

She’s right.  You interact differently with the words and the tones when you are free of the written music.

Nina didn’t bring her music or cheat sheet for “Weep, You No More, Sad Fountains” and “Blue Bayou.”  She came vocally naked, as it were.  I played the introduction; she forgot the first word of the piece.  I fed her the line and we started over.  Every so often, she stopped and thought for an extra beat.  A few times, she looked at me and I prompted her.

She wasn’t nervous.  She was comfortable in her own skin, going about her life.  She sang from memory.  Problems presented themselves which she solved without signaling that she thought she had “messed up.”

Performing is like Life: we go along, things come up and we make decisions. We do what we do when we’re alone–except that people are watching.  The performer’s comfort with whatever happens is what makes for a compelling performance.  We start with being comfortable with forgetting the words or with missing the bar chord.  We start where we are.   We can’t wait until we’re perfect to start being at home with ourselves.

Here’s a cheap trick: I’ve learned that traffic on my blog shoots up when I have a titillating title.   Now you’re here, you might as well hear what I have to say about Sigmund Freud because his birthday was May 6, 1856.  He no longer has that much to do with the way analysis is practiced today.  It’s just that he started it.  He was a courageous and original thinker.  He named and characterized the unconscious.  He was the first person to analyze anyone and he, himself, was the first person he analyzed.  This is how psycho-therapy, as we know it today, started.

Psycho-analysis is a vexed subject.  The image of a stern Freud smoking his cigar behind a patient who is lying on a couch with dream balloons over her head is an out-dated joke, like Aunt Maud singing “O Promise Me” at a wedding.  If you read Freud’s letters or the stories of people who were analyzed by him, he comes across as a kind, warm man and a loving, attentive father.

But analysis has come a long way since Freud, just like the theory of evolution has traveled since Darwin.

Here’s W.H. Auden: “In Memory of Sigmund Freud:

“.  .  . if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

to us he is no more a person

now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help .  .  .”

Freud’s ideas have so permeated Western thinking that no one is free of them.   Not even those who think a joke like the following both sums him up and dismisses him completely: “A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean your mother.”

Psycho-analysis and psycho-analytic therapy have been declared dead over and over. Studies come out periodically that say it “doesn’t work.”  Within the field itself, there are schools of thought, factions, and in-fighting just like in religion –Freud would love that comparison.  People can get quite fierce about their patches.

An exchange from a Law and Order Criminal Intent episode goes like this:

“You know why battles in academia are so vicious?”

“Because the stakes are so low.”

The analysis that I went through was called “relational.”  There are schools which say that if you use the word relational at all, it’s not analysis.  Winning that debate is a low stake.

The word psycho-analysis makes it sound as though the process is sterile and scientific but it’s quite the opposite.  It’s one of the most intuitive modalities out there.  There is a mysterious exchange of unconscious thought and energies that goes on.  When I was going four times a week, those four days were like inhabiting a long poem; they were a stream I floated in with four conversations at 24 hour intervals.

After years in that stream of images and associations, en-livened by a good fight or two, came the punch-line of the joke, the last lines of a sonnet, the sigh at the end of an aria.  My life had a form like a song that could be sung over and over but was different every time.  That’s what it feels like to be me. That’s what it feels like to be alive.

You know who psycho-analysis “works” for?  The people for whom it works.  And those are the people who get to decide what it means that it “works.”

My style as a teacher was psycho-analytic before I understood what the word meant.  And my teaching has always been about the relationship.  I think our most cherished learning takes place in the context of close relationships with other people.   I think of my students’ minds as maps showing places I haven’t been, with tentative new roads we will attempt to travel together.  I know enough about the general terrain to get us started, but the student unfolds his own map.

So there’s vulnerability on both our parts.  My student is nervous because maybe he’s a little kid and this is a new experience.  Or maybe she’s an adult who wants to sing but is terrified of the feeling of exposure that comes with singing.  Or maybe he is a busy man who hasn’t practiced and suddenly feels ashamed like a kid who hasn’t done his homework.

I feel vulnerable because for all my expertise, I don’t know this particular person beside me who wants me to teach him what he wants to learn.  I am not in his mind.  I don’t know what circuitous route he needs to take to learn piano or to find his voice.   I need him to trust me enough to give me hints so I can help him find his way.

I am often told that as a teacher, I am “too easy.”  I used to be called “wishy-washy” which sounds even worse.  I laugh about it sometimes, mostly with like-minded teachers.  Initially it would be a whole lot easier for my students if I just told them what to do.  But I have too much respect for them.  It’s their life, not mine.

It’s the hardest thing in the world to sift through all the shoulds and oughts, all the cultural messages, and all the thoughtless advice, to find what it is we most want for ourselves.  And then there’s the courage it takes to face the sadness of realizing that it’s too late for some things;  and to assess what is realizable now, given our arthritic joints, our menopausal status, our dead parents, our CRS (Can’t Remember Shit) .

I believe that as long as we are taking in air, we have the capacity to experience our own lives.  We’ve never had less than that and we’ll never have more.

Mai La was 18 years old when she got off the plane at SeaTac wearing her little Chinese pajamas.  I was 27 and waiting with Nghiep, a Chinese friend, and a photograph of Mai, courtesy of World Relief Refugee Services.

It was 1981.  The “boat people” from Viet Nam were flooding the U.S. west coast. Resettlement was a huge problem that wasn’t handled well.  Large families were dumped into small apartments and left to figure out the city, language, buses, schools, medical services, and DSHS with very little help.  I was living in a house in the U District with three other women.  I had the largest room; there was plenty of room for another bed and chest of drawers.

I told World Relief that I wanted to sponsor a single woman or a single woman with a baby.  They told me that single refugee women never happened.  Whole families came over together.  I filled out the form requesting a single woman anyway.

“It won’t happen,” they said.

“Ok,” I said.

Three months later, there was Mai.  During the ages that American girls are going to proms and applying to colleges, Mai escaped from Saigon and spent a year and a half in a resettlement camp in Malaysia.

Nghiep spoke Mandarin and Mai spoke Cantonese, but they managed to communicate in Vietnamese.  Nghiep made us dinner at his house.  I listened to them talk.  I hoped he was allaying some of her fears because she had a little worry- pucker between her eyebrows.

It was dark when Mai and I drove along Lake Washington Blvd and through the arboretum on the way to her new home.  She finally spoke to me.

She said in slow, careful English, “What is your name?”

Mai and I shared a room for a year.  Then I moved into the small bedroom in the back of the house and she had the big room all to herself for another year.  She finished high school at Roosevelt High and found a job removing pimples and wrinkles from face portraits at Yuen Lui photography studio.  She got married and had a baby, Tara.

One by one Mai sponsored two brothers and a sister to Seattle; they got married, and had children.   We all get together for Dim Sum at Chinese New Year, for some kind of outing in the summer, and for Christmas.  I showed them how to do a bloated American Christmas and regretted it.  We all just about smothered ourselves in the wrapping paper.  When she grew up, it was Tara who put a stop to the gifts and we were all relieved to just get together for dinner.  I still slip a gift to Mai.

The Chinese aren’t so big on individual birthdays but every March 31^st, I send flowers to Mai for her “second birthday.”  Her first birthday is February 22nd.  I can’t remember if this discrepancy came about because there were some mistakes on her immigration papers or if Feb 22 on the western calendar is March 31 on a Chinese calendar.  In any case, I routinely forget Mai’s birthday on Feb 22, and am always relieved when mid-March I remember I have another chance.  I order flowers with a card that says “Happy Second Birthday.”

When Ballard Blossoms picked up on my routine they began sending me reminder notices.  The next time I ordered flowers for Mai, the florist said, “You said Happy Second Birthday” last year.  Don’t you want it to say “Happy Third Birthday” this year?”

One of my all-time favorite stories about my Chinese family stars the daughter of Mai’s brother, Tom.  Tom went to China for a traditional wedding with Fei Fei but they gave their two daughters staunch American names: Donna and Leslie.   Donna was five the summer we all went to the King County Fair in Enumclaw.

We spent half an hour in the petting zoo.  We fed goats, sheep, chickens, and geese.   There was even a baby wallaby.

We advanced next door to a facsimile of a longhouse.  A huge native American man was carving away at a canoe.  Various native crafts were on display.  On the walls hung pelts and skins from foxes, deer, and beavers.

Donna looked soberly at the skins on the walls.  She stalked up to the big native American and nailed him with her eyes,

“Did you get those skins from the petting zoo?” she demanded.

He stared at her, shocked.  Then his shoulders started to shake.  He put down his tools and laughed.  By the time we left the longhouse, he was wiping his eyes.

Fast forward to last weekend.  There are fourteen of us now.  Donna and Leslie are in high school.  Tara is finishing college.  Mai still works at Yuen Lui studio.  I went to a baby shower for one of the brothers and his wife who are expecting their second baby.  Their first, Christina, is 14 months and she was the star.  A baby in the room makes a party come alive.

I guess I am the matriarch.  For someone who never had much of a family to begin with and who doesn’t have a traditional family at all anymore, I treasure this one.  Even though I was the one who started it, I feel like they took me in. Yesterday I watched the faces, laughed at the jokes and ate the wonderful food.  I thought of Mai coming over  here all by herself, me with my deficiency of family, and the words to a song from Miss Saigon:

“A song
played on a solo saxophone
A crazy sound, a lonely sound
A cry that tells us love goes on and on.”

It does, indeed. Pretty much anywhere you look for it.

I’ve been waiting for the traffic on my last blog to slow down before I posted another.  I don’t know if it delivered all that it promised, but “Sex and Betrayal at the OK Chorale” sure got a lot of hits. (www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/851/)

If that’s what it takes—a racy title—I was toying with the idea of calling this blog “Easter Debauchery” but that would be cynically misleading.  It’s just that I feel debauched.  Holidays are exhausting for musicians and florists.  By Christmas Day I don’t want to have brunch or dinner or see anyone or ever get out of bed.  If you polled members of both professions, you would probably find a shocking lack of reverence around Easter. And this year with Easter coming so late, working with the church choir has felt like one of the U.S.’s endless election seasons.

But it had its fun moments. Last February I introduced the choir to a couple of pieces that I thought would be good for Easter morning.  One called “Resucitό,” is a dramatic Spanish language piece in a Flamenco style.  We struggled with it for months. Finally I took out the most awkward verse.  Literally.  I whited it out and made copies of the redacted music so as to eliminate confusion. We worked on the elisions which the Spanish speakers in our little group had more trouble with than those of us with grade school Spanish whose pronunciation was never pristine to start with.  Just thinking about the effort makes me want to sleep until August.

The other piece was called “Oh, What Beauty, Lord, Appears.”  Or as Chris, the unclassifiable except that she owns three Chinooks and is a great tenor, called it: “Oh-comma-what-beauty-comma-lord-comma-appears.”  The attraction of this piece is that the text is set to music of Mozart and arranged in a Mozartean style, evocative of powdered wigs and candelabras.  I referred to it as “The Mozart.”  It was difficult but I knew it would be satisfying to learn.

The two pieces were just coming together when two rehearsals before Easter, Marvin showed up.   Marvin is a Min Pin—a miniature Pinscher—and the comfort dog of a woman in the church named Karen.  Karen is another good tenor but we hadn’t seen her all year.  I don’t know why she up and decided to come to choir rehearsal two weeks before Easter, but she chose an evening when Starfire, the Chinook, fresh from Shy Dog Class was already there with Chris to practice her social skills.  Starfire was practicing her social skills, not Chris.  Chris has been in the army.

Little Marvin was swathed in a fur cape with an orange hood to protect him from the cold.  Karen had added beaded tassels to the hood and flaps of leather festooned with pirate heads to the cape.  Marvin almost disappears inside this regalia except for his little legs that scurry him around.

I was already feeding dog biscuits to Starry who was blissed out under the piano bench.  Marvin joined the picnic.  The doggie activity that night was more to my tastes than the mounting frenzy around preparations for the Easter morning service which had begun to feel like the atmosphere around my mother on Thanksgiving morning. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/thanksgiving-day-circa-1965/)

As far as Marvin was concerned, Easter morning church was no different than Tuesday evening rehearsal.  There I was, the cookie lady, and he expected treats.  Everyone else in the church got an Easter egg, compliments of the kids so why not Marvin?  I had dog biscuits lined up on the music rack and at the end of every verse of “Resucitό,” I swept another onto the floor for him.

The last chorus of the dramatic Spanish anthem was sung a capella.  I hit the first chord, then maneuvered my way from the piano, through the   sopranos and our lone alto so I could direct the ending.  I looked up at this tiny choir that I have worked with for four years. There they stood, looking like a street gang, the Sharks in formation, thundering “Re-su-ci-tό” with little Marvin dancing around everyone’s legs, a little ballerina in a tutu.  The very image makes me smile.

The Mozart came off just as beautifully.  The operative concept for Mozart is “grace.”  There were a couple of rests in the music adequate for gracefully flicking dog biscuits onto the floor.   It was very satisfying.

I think Marvin is probably a soprano but we are fully stocked with those.  We need more altos.  I may audition Starfire.

Marvin the Magnificent

I’ve got this lovely piece of music in front of me and I am musing about loss of innocence in a post Thomas/Hill world.  It’s called “Matona, Lovely Maiden,” and I first heard it on a long playing LP of the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir.  I was probably eight years old.  On the album cover was a photograph of the children.  I listened to the record over and over, and stared at the faces, trying to imagine whose voice it was that stood out in this line, on that note, and who was the soprano whose partials floated to the top on that last note.

“Matona, Lovely Maiden” is an old war-horse of an Italian madrigal.  It has a recurring refrain of the “derry derry, dong dong.” variety.  The German kids sang “diri diri, don don”  in the original Italian.   The harmonies and rhythms are easy-ish and it seemed like a good choice after all the challenges of last quarter’s music. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/03/makin-time-with-the-ok-chorale/)

The OK Chorale has sung it once or twice in the past with no repercussions.  Maybe the last time, there were some snickers.  Last night we couldn’t get through it even once.

Matonna, lovely maiden, Oh, listen to the song;

We sing beneath thy window while night clouds roll along

Dong dong dong, derry derry, dong dong, dong dong

Sweet, no?  So far, so good.  The dongs still referred to bells in a majority of minds.

“I pray you hear my ditty, tis sweet and not too long.”

(The edges of the group began to crack.)

“Tis pointed, if not witty and sharpened as a prong.”

(Safe to say the dongs are no longer about bells.)

“The words of choicest tissue, to shoot .  .  .”

(This line was interrupted by an an implosion.)

I exchanged my piano glasses for ones that can distinguish faces.  The first face I saw was that of Maxine, a mother and grandmother, formerly a pastor’s wife and owner of a business called “Altars Everywhere,” a name which in this climate could no doubt acquire unintended associations.  Her face was crumpled in laughter and tears were running down her checks. (http://www.maxinemanning.com/)

“OK,” I thought.  “If Maxine can’t get through this for laughing, we’d better pack it in.”

We moved on to “All Around My Hat,” also one we have done before.  It’s an old Steeleye Span hit that I have arranged somewhat staidly because we all don’t have Maddy Prior’s instincts for rhythmic flourish.  When I am the arranger, the music is always a work in progress; I am continually finding typos and notes out of alignment.  When I get enough of a mess on any one page, I re-write it.

We found a couple of typos in last night’s rehearsal.  A minor skirmish broke out over the line-up of words to notes.   In verse one, we had a “false deluding woman”—six syllables—to parcel out to eight notes.  In verse two, we had a “false deluding young man” –-also six syllables to eight notes.   It wasn’t flowing.

I get no end of advice in these situations.  Pages rattled, basses leaned over to tap things out on their neighbor’s music, altos called out instructions to me.  The tenors tried to tie in the ding dongs so they could continue snickering.  (Do you know, the tenors, who sit farthest from the piano, all brought binoculars to a rehearsal once?  They are an unruly bunch.)

“You have the deluding young woman on the first beat but the deluding young man is on the second beat, that’s the problem,” someone said.

We had the only silence in the entire evening while everyone considered this.  It was broken by Sandi, author of Humor in the Workplace, who announced, “The deluding woman is not young.”

The Chorale exploded.  I looked at the clock.  Five more minutes.  No, really, I was enjoying myself.  It was a great beginning to the quarter.  Not too late to sign up.

Sadly, I will retire Matona and her dongs for good.  I wonder what those Obernkirchen kids are doing these days.

I sent some marshmallow Peeps to my cousins in England.  It was partially to reciprocate the chocolate Tiddly Reindeers they sent at Christmas, partly to contribute to good relations across the pond and partly because Peeps don’t weigh very much so the postage isn’t twice the cost of the item.  Well, actually it is but the item doesn’t cost much in the first place.

And partially because I am grateful to England for the Cadbury creme egg.  So this was a return gesture not unlike the kindergartner who gives a glue-encrusted macaroni sculpture to the mother who gave him life.

I love the cultural exchange between the two countries.  I keep a file of words that my friend Sue has interpreted for me.  Like “moreish.”  Chocolate Tiddly reindeer are moreish.  They make me want more.   I was made over with them (i.e. pleased.)

It’s fun to learn the expressions here and then encounter them over there.  I was flipping though some brochures in St Mary’s church in Rye when I found some with a picture of the church on the cover but with the inside copy missing.  I gathered up the blanks.  When I showed them to the volunteer at the till, he –to my utter delight—said, “Oh well spotted!”

I had another church experience in Bath.  I was there with my cousins, Pamela and Mervyn.  We usually split up when we get to a town because I have my peculiar interests and Pamela mostly likes to find the Marks and Spencers, especially on a hot day because they have such lovely air conditioning.

It was hot.  I had a Sally Lund at the Sally Lund house while it was still morning, and then decided to do a tour of Bath Abbey tower.  Three hundred steps up and I thought, “Aw geez, you haven’t recovered from the hill climb the other day at Cheddar which was also a bad idea and this involves an even greater height.”  I get queasy at high altitudes.

I went straight to the center of the tower and breathed deeply. Then I crept to the side and peered far down into the market place where people were milling around like so many ambulatory dolls.  The first things my eyes focused on were Pamela’s familiar plaid skirt, her bright handbag and Mervyn’s distinctive gait.

I just about toppled over the edge of the tower. “Look!”  I grabbed the person closest to me who happened to be the tour guide.  “There are my cousins down there, going into Edinburgh Woolen Mills!

“Oh well spotted!” she said.

The street, or dual carriageway, if you will, runs in both directions.  A taxi driver at Paddington, who would have been a young boy during World War II, told me, “I will always love the Americans for what they did for us.”  I gave him a whacking great tip.  He grinned and saluted.

I spent an afternoon at spooky, old Highgate Cemetery on that same trip.  The guide opened the wrought iron gate with a whacking great skeleton key and then locked us all inside for the tour.  As she was unlocking the gate to let us out, we were halted by a thunder and lightning storm.  Very exciting, but the point is that I got to chatting with a group who were old school chums, Julie, Jill, and June, while we waited for the rain to abate.  They invited me to join them for lunch.

At the café, I ordered a chicken Caesar with dressing on the side.  A whoop went up from all three women simultaneously.

“What?” I asked, astonished.

“Oh!” said Julie.  “I have always wanted to hear an American say ‘dressing on the side!’  They always say it in the movies and now I have heard it for real!”

“An English person would never ask for that, or for anything, really,” Jill explained.  “But the Americans will do.”

Oh, I don’t know about that.  They asked us to come over and help with that war a while back.  I’m really glad we did.

Highgate Cemetery, London, watercolor by Elena Louise Richmond

Most of us of a certain age have heard that “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”  It was de rigueur for learning music notes on the lines of the treble staff.  I must rant about the inherent sexism but before I do, I want to launch the news that piano isn’t taught that way anymore.

When I was a child in music lessons, names of the notes were drilled into me.  When I played, I translated note to letter name to piano key until, as with any language, I began thinking in music.

I taught note names exclusively for years until intervals began showing up in the method books.  With interval reading you learned to judge the distance from one note to the next or in the case of chords, you read shapes rather than individual notes. Eventually, of course, you learn the names of the notes as well.  Sight reading skills grow quickly when one uses both techniques.

Over the years I have encountered parents who are suspicious of interval reading because like me, they had note names drilled into them.  The suspicion seems to be that interval reading is designed to teach students to understand music without actually teaching them to play.

“She doesn’t know the names of her notes!” a mother threw the accusation at me as though she was exposing a fraud.

“Not all of them,” I said.  “Not yet.”

“What is she doing at her lessons?”

“Well, she’s having the experience she’s having,” I said.  “Would you like to sit in on a lesson?”

I didn’t want her there—talk about having an unbeliever at the séance–but she was signing my checks.  Turns out she didn’t want to be there anyway and her daughter wanted her there the least of all.

Some students need to know where every note is, what it’s called, and what it’s doing.  These are our future accountants.  Other personalities would sooner bang their heads on the music rack –and some do—than do note drills. Still others don’t care about anything except sound;  they can get into quite difficult music before it’s clear they don’t know how to read a note.  I have students whose hands are constantly caressing the keys: they rely to a great extent on feeling the relation of the black keys to the white keys.

So it’s good there is more than one way to go about learning something.

I overheard a couple of old school music teachers cluck their tongues at a young teacher who let a student play a piece in the key of D, leaving out the sharps on the first pass through.  The second time through, the student sharped all the F’s and C’s; the third time through, she counted and finally worked out the fingering.  The older teachers had the same look my mother would get whenever she suspected that somewhere in the world some child might be learning to read without using phonics.

Teachers cannot control what or how a student learns.  I liked the young teacher’s idea because it allowed her student to make choices about her learning.  When you learn a new piece of music, everything comes at you at once: notes, counts, fingering, tempo.  It interests me to watch a student choose the most manageable way to begin.

I really want to get to my rant about sexism in piano lessons.  Why was it only the boys who did fine?  I mean, it’s not true, for one thing.  Even worse than “Every Good Boy Does Fine” was the variation that filtered into my piano lessons when I was ten: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.”   How is that fair?

When I started teaching I changed the mnemonic to “Every Girl and Boy Deserve Fudge.”  But one year I ran a contest to see if my students could come up with something better although there isn’t much that’s better than fudge.  The winner was Jeremy Caci who came up with “Elvis Goes Boogieing Down Fremont.”

Adult students are dismayed when they learn that the bass clef has a completely different mnemonic.  The line notes — G-B-D-F-A –are traditionally taught with some uninspired saying like “Great Big Dogs Fight Animals” (or Ants.)   This is what I call aclever.

But my friend Chris, the unclassifiable except that she is a good cook, recently came up with a splendid mnemonic for the bass clef line notes:  “Good Bikes Don’t Fall Apart.”

So far we have only been talking about line notes.  The space notes in the bass clef still insist that “All Cows Eat Grass.”  The space notes in the treble clef still just spell F-A-C-E, which every boy and girl deserves to stuff fudge into.

Winston and the late Edwina and were five year old cats when Freud and Artemis joined the household.  Just six weeks old, they were stray pieces of fluff, one orange and white, one jet black; with flat baby noses, pink tongues and soft paws.  They pounced on anything that moved and stalked single grains of rice that had fallen to the floor.

It had been several years since Edwina was that playful and Winston, born a big ol’ doofus, had never been much inclined to anything except eating.  Neither of them was pleased with the attention the interlopers received from my students.  And they begrudged me every minute I spent in the kitchen which was barricaded to function as a playpen.

Abby was eight when her twin brother and sister were born and she began lessons with me.  Abby knew something about being the eldest.

We were sitting at the piano when Winston grouched into the room, well into his season of discontent over the imposition of the kittens.  Abby assessed him expertly and nailed me with her eyes.

“Are you spending extra time with him?” she demanded.

I needed extra time to keep up with this next little guy, aged around ten:

Jacob told me he was making a duplicating machine in his bedroom.  I heard about it every week for several weeks.  One day he came in and announced,

“I’m not Jacob.  I’m his duplication.”

“Is that so?  He must have got that thing to work.”

Next week the boy who came for his lessons was a duplication of the duplication.  I had images of multiple Jacobs flying out of a machine that was out of control.  I wondered if I was going to be getting multiple checks, but the machine broke down and only the original Jacob came after that.

He was an original. And here are two more originals:

“Here we are, two little ghouls come to ruin your life!”

Enter Anna and Julia.

Even the cat looked forward to the girls’ lessons on Monday nights.  I might not have seen (the late) Edith all day, but at 6:30 on Monday night, she was waiting at the door for Anna and Julia who kept to a policy of being businesslike.  This endeared them to Edith all the more.

As distracting as cats are (to me), the subject of this vignette is “ghoul.”  I don’t remember how it started but Anna and Julia created an imaginary world they called Ghouldom.   It had nothing to do with the undead or anything dark.  I think they just liked the sound of the word.  They had ghoul identification cards. They made maps of Ghouldom and established an academy at which one could learn to be a ghoul.  Week after week they brought in travel brochures and literature until I expressed an interest in becoming a ghoul.

I feel the need to reiterate that the weekly visits were for piano lessons–a minor point that may get lost– and yes, we did piano.  Both girls practiced more or less regularly and learned how to play.  See: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/12/tales-of-the-high-teas/

The next week the first of my study guides were handed to me, I signed a contract and was issued a temporary identification card.  The following week brought in a flood of welcome notes.

The one from Mayor Henry Ghoul said, “I am honored to welcome you to the land of ghouls.  I hope you try your hardest to ruin people’s lives.  Good luck!”

Dude Ghoul wrote, “Waz up, Man! Dude, have fun bein’ like a ghoul! Later.”

Five year old Patrick Ghoul wrote: “Congragulsion Ms Eleanea. Goood luke at ghoul.  Luov.”

The next week I got an exam schedule.  Every few weeks, a new exam was left for me to complete which I usually did five minutes before the cat stationed herself by the front door and the girls showed up for their lessons.  The whole business had been going on for over a year when Anna who had begun adolescing, dropped out of the game entirely.  Julia and I managed to hold on until I finished the final exam and got my ghoul license.

I saved my final essay because I was quite proud of it (you’ll want to imagine this in Chiller font):

What it means to be a Ghoul

The first thing it means is that there once were two utterly delightful girls who took piano lessons from me, a reasonably sane woman.  One day the girls came to their lesson and they were no longer just Girls, they were Ghouls, come to ruin my life.  While maybe my life wasn’t definitively ruined, it certainly has not been the same since.

One of the hardest things about being a ghoul is learning the list of all the ghoul presidents. Only about 8 are women.  That’s not good news.

The best part of being a ghoul is getting the certificate/license and all the congratulation notes from Very Important Ghouls.  But then my Sponsor took them all away so I couldn’t use them for my exam.  She had better not lose them.

The ghoul diet is kind of restrictive but it’s better than Weight Watchers or The Zone or even Eating For Your Blood Type.

The Very Best Part about being a Ghoul is seeing my Ghoul Students/Sponsor every Monday night.

Respectively Submitted (and this better be good enough to make senior ghoul),

Elena Louise Richmond (Ghoul nickname, Itch)

Mayor Henry Ghoul is proud to see Julia at M.I.T. and Anna about to become president of the student body of Western Washington University.