Welcome to my past.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. CRANKY PANTS? Or, DO-IT-YOURSELF BLUES
2. THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THAT ANY MORE; THE LONG & COLORFUL LIFE OF GREAT-GREAT-UNCLE WHAT’S-HIS-NAME
3. INSIDE JIVE 95 Or,
MY UNDERGROUND LIFE IN RADIO
4. A MOST ACCOMPLISHED YOUNG LADY
5. HUG
6. FOUR COLLAGES AND A SONG, Or,
CHILLIN’ WITH THE EVERLY BROTHERS
7. FOX HOLLOW FANTASY Or,
THE ORPHIC RESONANCE OF GORDON BOK
8. INDUSTRIAL CALLIGRAPHY; SIGNS OF MY TIMES
9. DANCING COLORS WITH DON JOSE; A COLLAGE TRIBUTE
10. A SUMMER PORTRAIT
11. FROM ONE TO TEN THOUSAND, Or,
MRS. RAMBO LEARNS A LESSON
12. SLEEPING UNDER TOADSTOOLS; THE SWEEPING SAGA OF RANGER RICK
13. COCK & FEATHERS; THE GENTLE ART OF MERRY MAYHEM
14. MY LIFE AS A BOY
15. SELF-PORTRAIT WITH RAIN AND STRANGENESS
16. LINE BY LINE WITH THE SHRUBBER, Or,
THE EDIBLE AND HORTICULTURAL VIRTUOSITY OF ROBERT KOURIK
17. CALABASH! Or, OUT OF OUR GOURDS
18. THE CLYDE CROW MEMORIAL TRASHCAN: A POST-THANKSGIVING TALE
19. CHOKE: A CHORAL PROGRESSION
20. JULIE MEREDITH GETS THE BIRD, Or,
DON’T MESS WITH THE DIVA
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Graton, California; 2001-2006, and 2010-2014
CRANKY PANTS? Or,
DO-IT-YOURSELF BLUES
In the fall of 2001, I received the unwelcome news that my sweet little rental cottage in Occidental was being sold out from under me. Slightly panicked, I posted a house-or-room-wanted ad on a local online bulletin board.
It must have been a renters’ market, because the next day I received over a dozen calls from nice people with room to spare. I was not feeling great, and soon became rattled, taking notes and trying to sort them all out. Eventually I just started telling callers that I’d take down the particulars and would get back to them.
“The thing is,” she said, “my friends and family keep forwarding me your ad with messages that say ‘This is the housemate you’ve been looking for!!’ Won’t you just come and take a look at where I live?”
Well, I did, took one look at Judith, her fanciful house, and her beautiful garden, and wrote a check on the spot.
When I moved into the place, I had no idea that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, nor of how much fun it would be to live with Judith. After living alone for many years, I enjoyed the frequent comings and goings of her friends, circle sisters, extended family, workshop participants, and the clients for her busy holistic-health practice.
Although we had our own separate lives, Judith and I gardened together, danced together, practiced qigong together, celebrated together; even built a labyrinth together.
And, as we got to know each other, we soon discovered that we both enjoyed making up songs. Hers tended to be either ceremonial in nature or ditties to sing to her grandchildren. Mine were usually silly and topical. Sometimes we would collaborate spontaneously on a passing mood:
There once were two ladies from Graton
Who no longer found sex elatin’
They said “Men are all right
When the jar-lid’s too tight,
But they’re otherwise just aggravatin’.
And who could resist this spontaneous country-style lavatorial lament?
You can’t un-take a shower,
You can’t un-fart a fart,
You can’t un-flush a toilet,
And you can’t un-break my heart.
We did, however, have our grumpyish moods, and one especially rainy winter, I decided to make buttons featuring my scowling two-year-old visage (below) for us to wear as a warning when appropriate.
And, of course, there had to be a song.
These verses can be sung to many standard blues rhythms. (the opening of “Heartbreak Hotel,” with the chorus of “St. Louis Blues” for instance). Great for belting; have at it.
CRANKY PANTS BLUES
Oh, when you’re feeling cranky, you don’t want to sing or dance,
All you want to do is sit around in your mean old cranky pants.
I got those cranky pants blues, and I’m mean, mad, and moody,
Got a crimp in my style, and a cramp in my booty,
Oh, I wish I could lose
These old cranky pants blues.
And when your pants are cranky, it don’t matter which you choose;
Your khakis all feel tacky and your jeans all have the blues.
They got those cranky pants blues, double-wide, heavy-duty,
I got a big “kick me” sign right across my patootie,
I’m feelin’ dazed and confused,
By these old cranky pants blues.
And when your pants are cranky, don’t expect to spend the night
You get no hanky-panky when they’re spoilin’ for a fight.
I got those cranky pants blues, and I’m cross as a cootie,
Got a bug in my britches, with a bad attitude,
And he won’t turn me loose
From these cranky pants blues.
Well I woke up this morning, and everything went wrong,
So I sat down on my cranky pants and wrote myself a song.
Now I’m movin’ along, and life’s a thing of beauty,
Got a spring in my step, and a kiss for my cutie,
Got my fancy pants on,
And my cranky pants gone,
And it sure feels good to lose
Those mean and moody, heavy-duty
Spank-your-booty, cranky-pants blues.
2. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Dancing Creek, Beaver Brook, and Purdytown, Pennsylvania; 1801?-1914
THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THAT ANY MORE; THE LONG & COLORFUL LIFE OF GREAT-GREAT-UNCLE WHAT’S-HIS-NAME
Micajah (Mick-KAY-zha) Weiss (1800 or 1801-1914) was not your ordinary old-timer.
To begin with, there was that name, which his fellow native Pennsylvanians could simply not seem to wrap their brains, tongues, or orthography around. (It’s actually a Biblical Hebrew variation of the name “Michael”—Micajah and his sister, my maternal Great-Grandmother Jeannette Weiss, were of robust French Alsatian and Eastern European Jewish peasant stock).
Thus, on documents scattered throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Micajah appears as “Mecago,” “Cajay,” “Mairgah,” “Macajy,” “Cager,” “MacCajer,” “Mecayjay,” “Micaijah,” and as a final insult, on his gravestone, “Micager.” His surname was also frequently misspelled as “Wise.” Of course, none of this probably bothered him, as he was happily illiterate to the end of his days.
Micajah was the fifth of 11 children born to John and Susan LaBar Weiss in 1800 or 1801, at Dancing Creek, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware Water Gap. In an era (c.1764-1916) in which the region’s vast virgin conifer forests were being cut down for consumption by the fast-growing nation, he became a lumberman like his father.
From a 2014 article in The Tri-County Independent newspaper: “Winters would be spent lumbering trees and taking the great logs on horse-drawn sleighs to the riverbank. With the ice finally broken, great rafts of timber would be expertly floated down main tributaries including the Lackawaxen River, and down the Delaware. Easton, Trenton and Philadelphia were among the ready markets for the valuable trees.”
In his later years, one can imagine Micajah regaling his step-grandchildren with tales of his wild youth, when he was accounted one of the best steersmen on the river and the long trips downstream were beguiled by breakneck races between competing rafters.
He may have told them of the Great Freshet of 1857, with the river running so high and fast that all of the oars on his raft broke, and only exceptional skill saved him and his crew from disaster.
His obituary stated that just a few years before his death, “he wanted to make a trip down the river, just to show the boys that he had not forgotten how; but he was persuaded otherwise.”
Then there was the winter that he built a cabin for himself and a shed for his oxen in the middle of a stand of virgin timber, and found himself fighting off a pack of hungry wolves. After tangling with Micajah, the wolves decided to run off and seek easier prey. He was apparently bitten numerous times, but both he and the oxen survived.
He was also a legend as a hunter, as game was still plentiful in his younger days. In 1913, The Reading Eagle recorded, “He told with glee how he took the saddles of 106 deer to Philadelphia in one trip, 11 of them being of bucks which he himself had killed in one day.” (Of course, one might wonder how elaborate the statistics had become by the time he was over 100 and telling his stories to eager newspaper reporters.)
When he wasn’t lumbering in the winter and rafting in the spring, he operated his farm. He was recalled as “industrious at raising crops”
Then came the Civil War.
Until 1862, Micajah carried on with his thriving lumber business in Beaver Brook, but when the conflict seemed to be settling in, he lied about his age (he could pass for a young 50) and enlisted, aged 62, as a private in the 141st Pennsylvania Regiment.
Again from the The Reading Eagle “Asked how many battles he took part in, he replied, “Most all of ’em.” These included Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and Appomattox. He later described to a reporter about the conditions at Petersburg.
“We got there without any rations. A colored regiment—a lot of fine fellows too they were—shared their food with us and then we did the entrenching. I was on picket duty in the rain for days.”
“He said that is where he contracted rheumatism, which bothered him the rest of his decades.” (The Siege of Petersburg was a spectacularly nasty situation; my Great-Grandfather George Bush Arnts came down with malaria there.)
Micajah saw the war through to the end, apparently surviving by virtue of his duty assignment; although he was present at many of the conflict’s significant battles, including the bloody encounter at Gettysburg, it was seldom as an actual combatant, but primarily as a driver of wagons supplying the troops or ferrying them to battle sites.
His rugged constitution also seems to have played a part in his survival, since after the war, he returned to being a lumberman, and for another quarter-century took hundreds of rafts down the Delaware to Easton (64 miles downstream) Philadelphia (99 miles), and Trenton, New Jersey (113 miles) often walking the entire distance back to his home in Beaver Brook. He also continued to farm between river trips.
Micajah was married four times, each time to a widow. With his first wife, Elizabeth Ansley, his helpmeet of 43 years from 1828 until her death in 1871, he had two children who died in infancy.
His second widow, Lucy James, came to the 75-year-old Micajah with six children in 1875, and died in 1891; the third, Kate Adams, whom he married when he was a mere 94, only lived four months after the wedding.
His final wife, whom he wed in 1897, was 55-year-old Christina Cherisher Weber, who actually survived him by three years.
This took some doing, as Micajah lived on and on, becoming Pennsylvania’s oldest Civil War pensioner, and perhaps the oldest in the country. Even in his later years he apparently got around well, retained a sharp memory and never needed eyeglasses. According to one newspaper account, he “never used tobacco in any form, though he had a glass of whiskey when he felt like it.”
“His face was almost ruddy with health,” reported the New York Times, “and his eyes fairly danced as he talked and laughed. His memory was bright and the operations of his mind seemed lively. His locks were snowy white and hung down over his neck.”
The Times also told how, in his later years, Micajah became an inveterate raccoon hunter. “Many of the younger men would go out with him, expecting that the long tramp and the drowsy feeling would capture and overcome the old man, but he had been too long in the business to allow the lads to outdo him, and each occasion added to their admiration of his strength and skill,”
The Times-Dispatch of Richmond, VA, reported in July 1913 about a memorable visit by Micajah to the dentist: “The 110-year-old soldier marched into the hospital and asked the doctor to pull one of his remaining teeth,” the article states. ”‘The durn thing is bothering me considerable,’ he said.” The doctors warned that at his age it would be dangerous to try and pull it.
”‘All right, I’ll pull it myself,’” he replied. With his knotted hand he reached in and out came the infernal tooth.
”‘You folks is too squeamish these days,’” Weiss told the doctors, as he picked up his cane and tramped away.”
His demise was an exercise in exquisite irony. In 1913, he attended the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, driven there in an automobile, rather than a supply wagon (he himself drove a car until shortly before the reunion, and spoke of admiring “them new airships”).
As the oldest veteran, he was, according to a local newspaper, “the center of admiration of the vast throng present, and of everyone who came in touch with him. When here, Mr. Weiss was apparently in the best of health for a man of his remarkable age.”
His obituary states, however, that he was eventually “overcome by the August heat” and, presumably, the overexcitement of the Gettysburg reunion; he never really recovered from the experience, grew more and more infirm, and took to his bed.
Micajah Weiss died on September 22nd, 1914, aged 114. Slowly and inexorably, the battlefield at Gettysburg had claimed its last casualty.
3. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, 1969
INSIDE JIVE 95
Or,
MY UNDERGROUND LIFE IN RADIO
In the late spring of 1969, I found myself in a delightful situation. I was in my early 20s, living in San Francisco, had just scored a brand-new graduate degree, and hadn’t a clue as to what came next.
I’d lucked into a weekend job at a tony boutique whose owner believed in paying her employees well. This brought in enough cash to live on, since my rent was then $45 a month for a big sunny room (utilities included); bus or streetcar fare was 15¢ (with free transfers); groceries were affordable; movie matinees cost a dollar or two, and San Francisco itself, especially at that time, was an ongoing free feast for the eyes and the imagination.
One day, a friend of mine had some business at Radio Station KSAN, and asked if I wanted to tag along. Of course I did. “Kay-San” was then the wildly innovative psychedelic soundtrack for the city’s hip revolution, and spiritual home of the famed “San Francisco Sound.” It was essentially the first “underground” radio in the country (as opposed to “Top 40” with its three-minute song cuts and shouting DJs).
The new KSAN, (usurping the signal of a former classical station called KSFR) had emerged from a different-kind-of-longhair-music rebellion at yet another station, KMPX, where many of its jocks had first adopted their offbeat style and personae.
In the course of this shuffle-and-jive, the newly-minted KSAN took its place as part of a multi-station entity called Metromedia, whose executives, wisely not wanting to mess with their new runaway hit, maintained a mostly hands-off policy at first.
The re-assigned broadcast facilities were located in a downtown office building, where (sandwiched in between floors of insurance companies and travel agencies) mellow-voiced, low-key “personalities” with on-air names like Travis T. Hipp, Tony Pigg, Voco, Edward Bear, and Dusty Street began to hold forth.
Jocks of around my era: Station founder Tom Donahue is at lower left. Ben Fong-Torres is reclining in the middle. Scoop Nisker is third from right in the bottom row. Dusty Street is at lower right.
These canny hipsters played lengthy LP cuts of the latest and best music, interspersed it with laid-back and often humorous musical and political commentary, and conducted live interviews with musicians, activists, and other countercultural luminaries. For a delightful YouTube glimpse of the jocks and their times:
https://www.ksanjive95themovie.com/ (Movie trailer)
While waiting for my friend in KSAN’s music library that day, I got tired of sitting around. Since I have a great deal of patience for fiddly tasks, I started casually working on the unending job of re-filing vinyl LPs yanked from the shelves by the jocks, the news guy, and the fellow who produced the ads, and shelving new acquisitions (they rolled in every day in the hope that they’d actually get played).
I found that I enjoyed being a fly on the wall in the station’s atmosphere of anything-goes creativity, so when my friend was ready to leave, I said I thought I’d stick around for awhile. The next afternoon, I drifted in again and continued re-shelving and observing.
That day, the person responsible for producing the ads, a charmingly hip old-time radio guy named Paul Boucher (Boo-SHAY), suddenly emerged from the glassed-in production studio next to the library, and asked me to do a voice-over in a commercial he was making.
Paul, who had gracefully made the transition from classical radio to KSAN style, then remarked that he was stuck on a pitch for another commercial, so I helped him write a script. Before long (pre-digital days), he was teaching me how to splice and edit audiotapes.
I should mention here that writing and producing ad copy was not exactly a cut-and-dried process at KSAN at that time. In the station’s early days, the advertisers had primarily been local businesses that provided details or copy and trusted Paul to come up with an appropriately hip delivery. Now, with KSAN’s expanding popularity and high-spending demographic clout, bigger players wanted into the mix.
In a set of offices quite separate from the exotic anarchy of the studio section dwelt Station Manager Willis Duff (a man whose name entirely suited him), a suit-and-tie kind of fellow who always seemed slightly baffled by the job of riding herd on all his wild-haired, wild-eyed on-air personalities.
There were also a number of sales guys who seemed to occupy a whole different era and world-view. One of their unenviable tasks was to negotiate with corporate sponsors who, in those early days, hadn’t a clue as to how to relate to KSAN’s peculiar audience.
As a result, in the months that followed, Paul and I were frequently given free rein by companies like The Gap, Allstate, Nike, and even the makers of Campbell’s Soup, to produce appropriate commercials from details provided. This resulted in often hilarious, irreverent and occasionally surreal little playlets, small works of art compressed into 60, 30, or even 15 seconds.
For instance, our first (and, not surprisingly, only) 60-second Campbell’s Soup ad consisted of Paul’s matter-of-fact slightly-bored-sounding narration (with sound effects) of the cherubic “Campbell Kiddies” wandering through an increasingly bizarre psychedelic landscape of animated flavors, while on the horizon, the trademark red-and-white Campbell’s soup can slowly turned blue, and Paul’s voice could subsequently be heard directing someone “offstage” to “check the darn projector.”
The pre-psychedelia Campbell's kiddies.
(This craziness, incidentally, was probably the best practical education I could have gotten in how to compress words, ideas and necessary details into the smallest possible space.)
So I continued to come into the station on weekday afternoons, and was several times introduced to visitors as “Paul’s co-producer.” Soon I was part of the scenery, automatically included, without my ever asking to be, in invitations to record- or book-launch events and parties, distribution of spare tickets to concerts, and other perks. In August, I went to the Woodstock Festival with the KSAN contingent on its charter flight.
As time went on, I was occasionally drafted to provide a female on-air voice, sometimes in ads, sometimes for the brilliant and devastatingly topical sound-collage newscasts produced by Wes “Scoop” Nisker (think Edward R. Murrow crossed with Spike Jones), where I occasionally reported on women’s issues as “Big Sister.”
I was also asked to do an interview show with Eugene L. Schoenfeld, M.D., aka “Dr. Hip.” Gene’s newspaper column, Dear Dr. HIPpocreates: (Advice Your Family Doctor Never Gave You), which covered conventionally unmentionable topics involving sex, drugs and rock ’n roll, was written in a dry, witty, hugely knowledgeable and slightly edgy voice, and had just been syndicated nationally.
For various reasons, the show didn't last long, but Gene’s wildly popular columns were soon collected into a book, and it was at his book-launch party that I met a very new Rolling Stone editor named Ben Fong-Torres, who had just begun hosting a weekend show on KSAN. At some point, Ben suggested that I write for RS, which was then to journalism as KSAN was to the airwaves, and I jumped at the offer. Life was good.
Then, one fall day, Willis Duff called me into his office. I seem to recall that our conversation went something like this:
“We’ve been going through everyone’s hiring agreements and contracts,” he said, “and we can’t seem to find yours; do you remember when you were hired?”
“Well, actually,” I replied, “I wasn’t.”
His eyes popped. “Then how do you get paid?”
“I don’t.”
His face started to turn red. “You mean you’ve been working for us for free for all this time? Why?
“I enjoy it, and I’m learning a lot about writing ad copy and production. It’s like an unpaid internship.”
“And that’s OK with you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well,” he said, obviously at a loss, “Thank you."
Willis must have discussed the situation with others, with the result that I was called into his office again a week or so later.
This time, as I recall, he was not looking friendly, barely greeted me, and asked bluntly: “Are you a narc?” (This was hipspeak for “narcotics investigation agent”.)
I was, of course, taken aback: “No, Willis, I’m not a narc.”
“D. says you are.” D. was one of the only female jocks at the station. As she was on the nighttime shift, we’d barely ever met, let alone had a conversation. “She says somebody has to be paying you to work here, because nobody would just do it for free.”
“Didn’t we cover that before? I have a nice weekend job.”
“So you’re not a narc.”
“No.”
He looked relieved, but then his eyes narrowed again: “Then are you an undercover reporter writing an exposé on the station?”
“Whose idea was that?”, I asked. He named another nighttime jock, one I’d never even met. “So you’re not?”
“No, I’m not,” I said, “You mean there's something to expose?”
We left it at that, but even though my daytime co-workers thought it was pretty amusing, the unfounded accusations had taken the edge off of my enthusiasm.
So, over the next few weeks, I quietly phased myself out, telling Paul and other friends that I wanted to concentrate on my writing career (which was conveniently hotting up a bit at that point), and one day, I just stopped showing up.
I wrote many subsequent articles, but never anything resembling an exposé of the station.
Well, until now, that is.
(And several years later, the station learned what it was like to deal with actual Federal agents...)
• FROM Wikipedia: In the early 1970s, KSAN-FM rose to number one in the 18-34 demographic, developing a devoted cult following that lasted for many years. During its heyday, KSAN maintained a strong counterculture reputation. News reports often contained political commentary….When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, they used KSAN to communicate their message and demands, via cassette tapes. The station enlisted the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this ordeal, as they became an unwilling go-between in the Hearst kidnapping….
In the late 1970s, the station started to decline in popularity, with new station KMEL (July 2, 1977) rising in popularity. By 1978, the station adopted a tighter presentation, with a playlist replacing the longtime freeform ethic. They also added more new wave and punk music, such as the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Blondie.
KSAN's famed rock format ended on November 15, 1980, when the station switched to a country music format.
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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, c.1950
A MOST ACCOMPLISHED YOUNG LADY
I can too do a headstand while wearing a skirt without showing my underpants. (It helps to hang onto the grass.)
5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, Early 2000s
HUG
Back before the concept of online greeting cards really caught on, I used to manufacture my own, using my first digital camera.
This process involved: making placards or signs with relevant text; asking friends, fellow Occidental merchants, and the odd passer-by to hold them up; photographing the result; and attaching the photo(s) to an email.
In this manner, I conveyed numerous personalized Happy Birthdays, Get Well Soons, Valentines, and all manner of other holiday and celebratory greetings.
One day, I received an email from a friend who was obviously down in some major dumps, and decided to craft a photo-email to cheer her up.
This not only resulted in some great shots, but I was also fascinated by the fact that, hearing about sadness on the part of someone they didn’t know, and probably never would, all of my photographic subjects responded with such empathy, generosity and joy.
6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Graton, California, Early 2000s
FOUR COLLAGES AND A SONG, Or,
CHILLIN’ WITH THE EVERLY BROTHERS
I created these four very different meditating-figure images amidst a spate of collaging in the first years of the century. Two of them celebrate my discovery that, while many collages are composed of dozens of bits of paper, in some cases you only need two.
Around this same time, a friend who was trying to begin a meditation practice groused to me: “I can’t relate to all those Sanskrit mantras and sutras; why doesn’t somebody write a song about meditation?
Well, OK. I devised one to the tune of “(All I Have to Do is) Dream,” as so wonderfully sung by Don and Phil Everly. My friend loved it, and I have to confess that to this day, when I sit down to meditate and my mind won’t settle, it usually does the trick.
(ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS) BREATHE
When Life is fraught
And times are tough,
And all your thoughts
Are not enough
To make you feel better
All you have to do is
Bree-ee-ee-ee-eathe,
Breathe, Breathe, Breathe,
It’s such an easy
To ease your soul
And body too,
And bring them together
All you have to do is
Bree-ee-ee-ee-eathe,
Breathe.
Watch your breath go out,
Maybe count
Up to ten,
If you falter or forget,
No sweat,
Just start all over again.
It’s there for you
You have to do
It anyway,
It’s Nature’s little gift,
And life is better if
You bree-ee-ee-ee-eathe,
Breathe.
Watch your breath go out,
Watch your breath come in,
Rest your brain
For a while,
If it brightens up your mind,
That’s fine,
Just go right ahead and smile,
It’s handy, restful,
It doesn’t cost
A single dime,
You’ve got to admit,
It’s kind of nice to sit
And bree-ee-ee-ee-eathe,
Breathe, Breathe, Breathe,
Breathe.
(Repeat as needed.)
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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Fox Hollow Music Festival, Petersburg, New York; Early 1970s
FOX HOLLOW FANTASY
Or,
THE ORPHIC RESONANCE OF GORDON BOK
The Fox Hollow Festival, which took place in upstate New York from 1966-1980, was a unique musical event, to say the least. For starters, it was held on a woodsy 40-acre estate formerly owned by Prohibition gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, and, according to its owners, hosted several resident ghosts.
The annual festival, which evolved from homegrown music gatherings during the “folk boom” of the 1960s, was put on each August by Bob and Evelyne Beers, who frequently performed and recorded traditional music with their daughter Marty and son-in-law Eric Nagler.
The festival, called by the New York Times “a folk event for purists,” was adamantly all-acoustic, although stage microphones and amplification were allowed. Electric-style performers gladly gave up their wires and amps for the privilege of appearing at Fox Hollow, some driving all night after gigs in New York City to take part.
Photo by Bill Spence of Michael Cooney playing for a Fox Hollow audience. (All following Fox Hollow photos are also by Bill Spence.)As noted by the Times in a 1974 review: “…the festival spends no money on advertising and deliberately avoids any advance publicity except for a single announcement sent to a mailing list built up over the last eight years; all available tickets for this ninth Fox Hollow Festival—2,700 tickets for each day—were sold out more than four weeks ago.”
By 1970, the first year I attended the festival (in company with the California-based Portable Folk Festival), Fox Hollow had blossomed into a four-day weekend of just one wonderful performance after another. These ranged from the touchingly amateur, left over from the early years, to the jaw-droppingly professional, with workshops, demonstrations, meet-and-greets, dance sessions, and craft exhibitions/sales filling the daytimes before musically lavish evening concerts.
Fox Hollow was all folk and folklore, all music, all day and all night, whether it was the official concerts—which often featured spontaneous combinations of unlikely performers—or the hours-on-end of unparalleled musicianship emerging from protean clusters of performers camped out in a meadow up above the main-stage woodland amphitheater.
Few participants tenting it in the Fox Hollow campground got much sleep during these after-hours sessions; everyone was either caught up in making music or, if just listening, moving from group to group, hoping to be there for some new song, some legendary rendition, some unexpected combination of talent that people would be talking about for years thereafter.
Perhaps like this one.
I don’t remember the year (I attended the festival in various capacities from 1970 to 1975). It may have even been one of those crisp upstate August nights when the Northern Lights hazed the stars eerily with shades of green. The audience was cuddled cozily into the amphitheater; the evening’s lineup was particularly wonderful, and what with all the spontaneous moments and encores, this concert was running quite late.
Nobody, however, was leaving, because the last performer that night was Gordon Bok.
Gordon has never exactly been a household name outside of folk circles (although I did once find him as a clue-and-answer in a New York Times crossword puzzle, which he thought was hilarious), but in those same circles, he’s spoken of with a respect that borders on reverence.
Before I’d actually become acquainted with Gordon, I’d heard a recording of his haunting “Bay of Fundy,” and, like many others, fallen for that rich unadorned bass-baritone voice, its timbre echoed by precise accompaniment on one of the guitars crafted especially for him by his luthier friend Nick Apollonio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPlkjX5KdXw (Bay of Fundy)
Gordon is a sailor (he was first mate on the maiden voyage of Pete Seeger’s Hudson River sloop, the Clearwater—the only one in the folksinger crew that actually knew how to handle a boat); a boat-builder and woodworker; a virtuoso instrumentalist; a luthier, visual artist, singer, folklorist, composer, songwriter, recording artist and poet. He does all of this with down-to-earth practicality, simple authenticity, enthusiasm and generosity.
From Wikipedia: “Gordon Bok plays six-string guitar (both the steel-string acoustic guitar and the nylon-string classical guitar) and 12-string guitar. In his playing of the nylon-string guitar, he embraces the tradition of Latin American guitar music. He also plays a self-built instrument he calls the "cellamba," a six-string, fretted cello.
“As a songwriter, Bok draws on his experience in and around the working boat culture of the Gulf of Maine. His lyrics include stories of fishermen and other sea-folk, At times, he reaches into the wealth of sea myth of the North Atlantic.
“In addition to writing songs, he is also a folklorist and gatherer of songs. His repertoire also encompasses contemporary songs written by his friends from all over North America, Australia, and the British Isles.
“As well, Bok sings, in the original languages, folksongs from Italy, Portugal, Mongolia, French Canada, Latin America, and the Gaelic Hebrides, among other places, and draws from a huge body of old Anglophone folklore.
“Bok is also an artist mainly dealing with sea themes done in wood carvings.”
On that particular Fox Hollow night, I was seated high up in the amphitheater, with performer/MC Michael Cooney’s youngest daughter Kate snuggled fast asleep in my lap. I don’t remember what songs Gordon played as part of his set, but it was, as always, masterful.
When he came to the end of the song he’d announced as his last, however, for some reason he didn’t stop to receive his inevitable standing ovation, but continued on playing, improvising a continuous series of lovely and hypnotic instrumental phrases.
Then, from my high perspective, I noticed a really strange thing, even for Fox Hollow. In ones and twos, audience members began to stand up and slowly drift down towards the open area in front of the stage to join in a slow, almost solemn procession-like dance that circled and spiraled in time to Gordon's playing as if in some kind of blessed ceremonial mosh pit.
Time passed. The line of dancers grew longer and longer, and the moment drew out, becoming more and more impossibly mystical and Orphic.
Finally, tidy craftsman that he is, Gordon slowed the music out to a sweetly logical ending; in the ensuing silence, you could actually hear the last note fade into nothing. Everyone seemed to draw in a big breath, and then let it out in a shared pulse of happiness.
And then Fox Hollow woke up and everybody went off home, or to play or listen to more music.
So that’s what happened that night.
Although maybe I just imagined it.
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8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: 1970s-Present; All Over the Place (Things found in an old portfolio #s 7-21)
INDUSTRIAL CALLIGRAPHY; SIGNS OF MY TIMES
It’s a fact well known to most calligraphers that when people find out that you are one, they frequently start thinking of things for you to write down.
Unlike my teacher, the great Thomas Ingmire, whose works sell for big bucks as Art, I consider myself a decent journeyman (-woman? -person?) calligrapher, and have always been happy to practice the craft for hire.
In my time I’ve produced company logos, T-shirt designs, business cards, flyers, postcards, greeting cards, posters, wedding invitations, birth announcements, gift certificates, awards of merit, and, oh yes, signs.
I’ve scribed signs by the score, ranging from the basic (OPEN/CLOSED or WELCOME) to the instructional (PLEASE REMOVE SHOES BEFORE ENTERING), the profound (REMEMBER THE SILENCE), and the profane (LOCK THE DAMN DOOR WHEN YOU LEAVE!!).
Everywhere I’ve lived/worked over the years is littered with my work. Recently, I found an old portfolio full of drafts, paste-ups, photos and and final studies for calligraphy pieces, and picked out the following because of the stories or situations attached to them (readable in the captions).
9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Rainbow’s End Farm, Occidental, California; 1979
DANCING COLORS WITH DON JOSE; A COLLAGE TRIBUTE
One late-summer afternoon, when I was living at Rainbow’s End farm/commune/community near Occidental, California, an unusual workshop took place. It featured Don José Matsuwa, a 101-year-old, one-handed Huichol Shaman, and his Casteneda-like apprentice-translator, Brant Secunda.
Then Brant nodded to Don José, who had wedged a small drum under his truncated right arm, and held a little wooden mallet in his left hand. The tiny man began to play a repetitive rhythm that somehow made the steps make sense.
We all began tentatively dancing counter-clockwise in a big sloppy uncoordinated circle-mob. Although I was in pretty good shape, I was soon out of breath, but glancing at Don José, serenely drumming away in perfect time, I remember saying to myself: “Well, as long as this little 101-year-old man can keep playing, I can jolly well keep dancing.”
Fortunately, after about a half hour, I got my second wind, because Don José played on. And on. And on.
I and the rest of the dancers found ourselves entering a collective trance-like state, now moving in unison in an essentially timeless zone, as if members of a herd or flock.
By the time we stopped, the sun was beginning to take on its late-afternoon golden slant. There was no fancy ending, just a sudden strong beat on the drum that halted us in our tracks like startled deer, all of us sweaty and dusty and a bit confused as to what century we were in.
Afterwards, Brant brought out a selection of traditional Huichol “paintings,” created by pressing yarn in parallel rows onto soft wax to form images. He explained that they were selling them to obtain the funds to bring the Dance of the Deer to other communities and schools.
I’d seen colorful Huichol artworks before (they also create magnificent pieces with beads and wax), but these were some of the brightest I’d ever encountered, made with acrylic yarn in Day-Glo colors, producing the same effect on the vision as a very loud Hawaiian shirt.
I’d earlier noticed a fellow who’d arrived after the dancing had started, but didn’t join in. He was dressed in drab attire and had the aloof/withdrawn air that many zen students adopt in their early years of practice.
As he walked down the row of paintings, his face took on a look that seemed to flicker between puzzled, slightly troubled, and disapproving. Suddenly Don José called out to him, speaking for the first time, in lilting Huichol. Brant translated: “He says, ’Do you like the pictures? They’re holy pictures.’”
(I should mention that among the activities depicted were women giving birth to goats, angels emerging from flowers, and even a couple having sex in a field of grain and lilies.)
Mr. Zen, nonplussed, replied, with Brant translating: “But don’t you think they’re a little too (and you could almost see him selecting, then rejecting, the adjectives ‘loud,’ and ‘garish’)—brightly colored?’
Don José smiled sweetly and replied with another stream of Huichol.
“What did he say?”
“ He said ‘Oh yes. But don’t worry; the gods love color.’”
Don José passed away in 1988, at the age of 109. I picture him still smiling, happily drumming away for merry gods dancing amid marvelous fields of color.
Two collages for Don José:
10. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Joy Ridge, Occidental, California; Late 1980s
A SUMMER PORTRAIT
One lovely summer day I was out in my garden with a camera when two young neighbors, Faye Rhianna Mulligan and Mika Fong Jang, stopped by. They were on the way to a party, and asked if they could each pick a bouquet for their hostess.
Well, of course. When they’d collected their flowers, I asked them if I could take a photo; the result was this sweet and pensive summer portrait.
11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania; Early 1950s
FROM ONE TO TEN THOUSAND, Or,
MRS. RAMBO LEARNS A LESSON
The toilet facilities, such as they were, consisted of two malodorous and splintery outhouses that scorched our tender bottoms in summer, and froze them in winter. Our playgrounds were the surrounding woods and fields.
In school, I managed to hide most of these deficiencies under the mantle of being The Smartest Kid in Class, an unofficial designation that I shared with Bobby Unangst, who came from a poor family with inadequate plumbing.
Although Bobby usually arrived at school unwashed and wearing the same clothes for days on end, his intellect and graceful athleticism won him grudging respect, and he was quite willing to stand up to anyone unwise enough to insult him.
Insulting classmates was a tricky business altogether at Hopewell, since quite a few of them, due to two centuries of inbreeding (until the invention of the automobile, Mammy Morgan’s Hill had been all but isolated on its ridge-top) and/or poor home conditions, suffered from one affliction or another.
Margaret King had a cleft palate, and her older brother Clarence another kind of speech disorder. Both Harry and Franklin Walters were mildly what was then called “retarded.”
Dorothy Shruntz was not only “slow,” but slightly facially deformed (though exquisitely clean and well-dressed).
Carol Koose was cross-eyed. Roberta Trumbauer, like Bobby Unangst, stank, but unlike him, had no offsetting charisma.
(The Trumbauers—the name means “bad farmer”— were a prolific clan, and, as one of my classmates somewhat uncharitably expressed it, “No matter what grade you’re in, you’ve got a Trumbauer. And they all smell bad.”)
Mary Anne Christian was extravagantly bow-legged. Dougie Hendricks was pasty and obese. Eleanor Hagenbuch’s teeth were blackish and riddled with cavities. There were so many “different” kids (including me—that early-reading, non-shoe-tying-ball-dropping thing) that there had long been an unspoken truce called on picking on other people for their differences, and we just accepted all of these non-mainstreamities as a fact of school life.
The most special of these special-needs kids was a boy named Chester Frindt, who was brought to school each morning by his mother. Chester could talk, after a fashion, but only had two demonstable talents (besides his unfailing good nature): he could go to the blackboard and draw what we called “goose eggs,” and he could imitate the galloping of a horse, careering around the edges of the schoolroom in his hobnailed boots.
When it was Chester’s turn to recite, he would march up to the blackboard and happily produce goose eggs until persuaded to stop. (Only as a special treat was Chester’s Inner Horsie allowed free rein.)
Our teacher, Mrs. Louise Rambo (a perfectly good name of French origin before Sylvester Stallone co-opted it), was probably in her late forties, with a body that, encased in neutral-colored sweaters or blouses and skirts, evoked the words “stout” or “sturdy,” rather than “fat.” Her hair, a woolly ginger-brown, was cut short and worn in the kind of updo that I never saw on a woman again until punk rock came into being.
I remember being found (on Mrs. R.’s return from a trip to the outhouse) sitting on my desk as part of some kind of horseplay. I was made to sit on my desk for the rest of the class period. Another time a similar scenario found me sitting on the floor, pushed there by my two-seater desk-mate, so I sat on the floor for the period, while the pusher stood in the corner.
Someone whispering out of turn might well wind up with scotch tape criss-crossed over his/her offending lips. For a more serious offense, such as fighting or open rudeness, a trip to the cloakroom was in order: girls had their legs smacked with a ruler, boys got it on the backside with a leather strap.
This brand of corporal punishment was common throughout the school system, but was relatively rare in Mrs. Rambo’s classroom because of a diabolical solution she had devised for problems of chronic misbehavior: if a student was caught in true mischief of whatever nature, the miscreant would be sent to stand facing the blackboard while the normal class schedule went on. When five students had accumulated at the board, all were taken to the cloakroom and rulered or strapped in front of the others.
This full-scale punishment only had to happen once; after that, the event of one person’s being sent to the blackboard generally produced a uniform urge in his/her classmates to behave. The number of standees would rarely get higher than three before being reprieved by recess, the lunch period, or the end of school, at which times the slate was automatically cleared, so to speak.
I remember vividly the only time I was sent up, for talking out of turn; I was the third offender, and the agony of standing in suspense waiting for the arrival of two more bad ‘uns, or for the school day to end, made me vow never to let it happen again.
Another common punishment, which combined neatly with pedagogy, was being made to write in vertical columns from one to 100, 500, or 1000 (depending on ability) during recess, or to make a “table block”—a grid incorporating the multiplication tables from two to twelve both horizontally and vertically.
Only once did I see this tactic backfire. In an unusual moment of out-of-control annoyance one May morning, Mrs. Rambo snapped: “All right, everybody in this room will write from one to ten thousand during recess, and no recess for anyone until everyone is finished!”
Gulp. This decree was made five minutes before recess-time, and so, quivering, we got out pencils, lined paper and rulers for making columns.
Neither we nor Mrs. Rambo realized, however, just how long it would take an entire roomful of third- and fourth-graders, many with mild to severe learning disabilities, to write down numbers in correct sequence from one to ten thousand.
Day after lovely spring day passed without a single recess, “How far have YOU gotten?” was the most common question around, and one could see, over and over, Mrs. Rambo visibly regretting her hasty decree, but for authority’s sake unable to rescind it, as dozens of grimy little hands sweated over equally grimy sheets of paper through what should have been our playtime.
She therefore turned a blind eye when the more able students began doing double duty, surreptitiously sneaking slower students’ papers onto our desks and hurriedly scribbling down an extra column or two. Some of these papers made it entirely around the classroom numerous times this way.
On the day, a few weeks later, when the last grubby paper with the last desperate thousands made it into Mrs. Rambo’s hands, no one was more relieved than she, and recess the next day lasted an extra hour.
As we frolicked, Mrs. Rambo, unusually for her, came outside and sat in the sun on the pump platform, watching us with an unusually tender expression on her face.
If we had all learned a hard lesson, so, apparently, had Mrs. R.
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11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1990s-2012)
SLEEPING UNDER TOADSTOOLS; THE SWEEPING SAGA OF RANGER RICK
The little Sonoma County Village of Occidental was and is so small that it’s only ever had room for one “street person” at a time.
In the late 1970s/ early eighties, as I recall, it was a red-haired, red-faced guy named Cliff, who seemed to just drift around town in an alcoholic haze, not appearing to interact with anyone who didn’t sell booze.
Since the village at that time was in the bumpy throes of dealing with integrating at least three distinct populations—newly arrived hippies and back-to-the-landers; second- and third-generation Italian families making the transition from cheap labor to owning half the businesses on Main St.; and arch-conservative ranchers, farmers, and grape-growers descended from Occidental’s earliest settlers—one more strange drifter didn’t cause much of a stir.
By the 1990s, Cliff was gone, replaced by Bill Bones (and yes, that was really his name; the Boneses were one of those early-settler families). Bill had apparently been an ordinary local guy until some circumstance (one story I heard involved a motorcycle accident; another said he’d been injured in Vietnam) scrambled his personality.
Though he also drank a lot, Bill maintained a certain dignity, manifesting periods of coherence in between repetitive ramblings and the odd outburst, and elevating his status somewhat by pushing a 10-speed bike wherever he went, as if he’d been riding through and had just stopped for a break.
Occidental, which had by then necessarily developed a live-and-let-live ethos, just kind of flowed around Bill and kept an eye on him.
Then Bill Bones was gone, and, as if supplied by a vigilant Occidental-street-person fairy, up popped Ranger Rick.
With his gnome-like face, and those acetylene-blue eyes blazing out of a cloud of snow-white hair and beard (the latter somewhat nicotine-smudged), Rick seemed to travel within his very own crackling electrical field, looking like a character out of Tolkien and sounding like a university professor on LSD.
His conversation could, almost in the same breath, vary from erudite to crude, knowledgeable to garbled. He could recite reams of poetry by heart, reel off accurate sports statistics, and zip through the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning, but might accost any or all passersby with inspired (if somewhat inebriated) rantings on any given afternoon.
Before long, by sheer force of personality, he had established himself as that one-step-above-street-person, a Colorful Local Character. I once overheard this exchange between a local and a tourist curious about Rick:
“But where does he sleep?”
“Under toadstools, we think.”
Some people loved Ranger Rick; others just wished he’d go away, but nobody could ignore him. He made friends/drinking buddies with many local folks, and enemies of certain business owners, who saw his lively and sometimes pugnacious interactions with tourists (one of the village’s main sources of income) as off-putting, pushing the boundaries of the allowable, and generally Bad For Business.
But whenever any of these worthies took actual steps to get rid of Rick, or just to curb his activities, a cadre of defenders would rally to his cause.
At one point, however, these ongoing tensions were beginning to escalate, with more support than usual for Rick’s expulsion. That’s when he essentially stepped in and saved his own bacon.
One day, he just started to pick up litter.
He must have received some positive reinforcement for this activity, because it soon became a kind of passion, and he just kept doing it. After awhile someone presented him with his very own rolling trashcan, rake, and push-broom, and he could be seen day after day, diligently cleaning up the sidewalks and streets of his adopted village.
As time passed, Rick was deputized to empty the public trash receptacles, entrusted with a key to the collective dumpster, and even voted a small stipend.
Year followed year of faithful service, until one evening, to his surprise, he was hauled off by some of his friends, bathed and barbered, shoehorned into a suit and tie, and conveyed to an official banquet in his honor, where he was ceremoniously presented with a Certificate of Appreciation for his work. You didn’t often see Rick cry.
Oh, he was still a character, could still be exasperatingly outspoken and outrageous, still a bit in-your-face with tourists (especially those who littered) and shopkeepers. He still stationed himself on occasion at “his” village’s single stop sign to holler at people driving through too fast or not halting sufficiently for his standards.
By now, however, he had become so much part of the fabric of things that many people had begun to refer to him as “the Unofficial Mayor of Occidental.”
On February 18th, 2012, Richard Bruce Kaufman died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 63. He was survived, it turned out, by his mother, two daughters and four grandchildren.
Along with the surprising biographical details that were revealed after his passing, there were the much more personal stories, people coming forward with tales of how Rick helped them in this or that emergency (the only calm person on the scene); made their child laugh instead of cry; listened when they needed a sympathetic ear; consoled them in a moment of sorrow; cheered them out of the blues with a kind word and a cup of coffee.
Over 400 people turned out for his memorial, filling the streets of Occidental with music, dancing and remembrances:
• "First and foremost, his role in the community was the greeter, the town crier, the friend of everybody. He had a little bit of craziness to him," said Robert Becker, a retired investment banker who let the near-destitute Kaufman stay in a small cabin on his property. He was so bright," he said. "But you had to go through the exterior to get to the true heart, soul and intellect."
• “Ranger Rick was a trickmaster monkey, a mystical coyote and the crazy river all in one. If he was human, I’ll eat my fedora. The Range was some other category of creature altogether. I rarely understood him, I often seemed to anger him—and I can’t imagine Occidental without him.” ….”—Frank Dice III)
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Some months later, Occidental, which in its 150-year history had never erected a statue of any founder, local hero, or civic leader, commissioned Sonoma County artists Patrick and Bridgette Amiot to create the sculpture that now stands in the center of town.
There he is: Ranger Rick, with his beard, his tools, his signature T-shirt, and his magical trashcan exploding with effervescent eccentricity.
if you ever get to Occidental, you can visit his grave, where he now sleeps peacefully among the toadstools in the (I kid you not) Druid Cemetery.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Novato, California; Dickens Christmas Fair, San Francisco, California; and All Over the Country. 1969-1980s and Beyond
COCK & FEATHERS; THE GENTLE ART OF MERRY MAYHEM
They called themselves “Cock & Feathers.”
Of course they did.
There were only three of them, but sometimes it seemed like a dozen—that onstage whirligig of hands, arms, legs (and other body parts), bizarre faces, strange costumes, flying objects, audacity, impudence, impropriety, irrepressibility, and whip-quick patter that consistently pushed the envelope of respectability.
In the early days of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire (before the Great Whiteface Ban of the early 1970s), they began as a trio of young mimes, already improvising surreal riffs on typical limp mime-schtick.
As season followed season, and the RPF was augmented by the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, the three coalesced into a practiced unit, unveiling a series of tightly knit skits and comically surreal set-pieces/improvisations laced with feats of juggling, acrobatics and legerdemain.
They were three zany youngsters, high on a Marx Brothers-like comic synergy and mastery of the unexpected, and you could generally locate them at any Faire or Fair by listening for roars of helpless and slightly hysterical laughter.
Throughout the 1970s, although they essentially remained a trio, they also took individual gigs between Fair(e)s, inserted themselves into the casts of Commedia dell’Arte productions, and were joined onstage on occasion by the brilliant Marque Siebenthal.
Part of their appeal and chemistry was how different in appearance and manner they all were. There was Jeff Gluckson (now Jeffrey Briar), the smallest of the three and a marvelous musician, his fey daffy sweetness contrasting wonderfully with the burly-bawdy antics of flame-haired Sandey Oxenhorn (now Sandey Grinn), and the tall laid-back elegance of William Quinn “Billy Q.” Barrett.
Their repertoire was as elastic as their faces and bodies: Commedia, slapstick, mime, juggling, stage fighting, fire-eating, tightrope-walking, semi-acrobatic keyboard duets, singing, dancing, fast patter, music-hall turns—if Vaudeville had still been alive, they would have been its life and soul.
In 1975, along with Marque Siebenthal, they joined the 12-member cast of “Dr. California’s Golden Gate Remedy,” the circus/vaudeville troupe with which I toured the US in a converted school bus barely large enough to contain all that energy (but what a show!).
As time went on, however, Cock and Feathers, like the rest of us, began to feel the weight (if not the gravity) of advancing years, and started to explore other, less knockabout, pursuits.
Jeffrey Briar, appropriately enough, became the Director of the Laughter Yoga Institute, based in Laguna Beach, California, and one of the leading American disciples of Dr. Madan Kataria, the world-renowned exponent of Hasya (Laughter) Yoga. He also moonlights as a serious musician and composer.
https://laughteryoga.org/jeffrey-briar-a-profile-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch… (Pianist/Composer Jeffrey Briar plays multiple works on multiple pianos.) Medley featuring moments from: Bach, Briar, Chopin, Debussy, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and more.) http://www.JeffreyBriar.com
Sandey Grinn went on to steady work as a character actor and puppeteer in TV and films (Beetlejuice; Babylon 5; Zoobilee Zoo; Child’s Play 2&3), for which he frequently donned facial prosthetics and strange makeup. In the late 1980s, he was (along with fellow puppeteers) twice nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for his performance in a TV series called D.C. Follies. He also appeared as “Bachelor #3” on one of the most off-the-wall episodes of The Dating Game ever aired.
Billy Q. Barrett continued as a freelance performer, working for Disney studios and at other variety events. The most accomplished juggler of the three, his jaw-dropping skills were captured on this grainy video footage shot at the “At My Place” nightclub in Santa Monica:
https://www.youtube.com/watch…
Nowadays, from what I’ve heard, they all live in Southern California, keep in close touch, get together on occasion to hatch out some silliness or other, and act as kind of Elder Statesmen of Screwball Comedy to upcoming generations.
The YouTube videos that capture some of their routines mostly come from that one performance on a crowded nightclub stage, and seem almost staid in comparison with their plein-air Faire shows. (But check out this exhibition of keyboard virtuosity, which starts out primly with Rossini’s “La Donna e Mobile”—translated by Jeffrey as “The Lady is an Automobile”—and escalates into sheer pianistical madness.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch…
They called themselves “Cock & Feathers.”
Of course they did.
They were holy fools and wholly fools, inspired and irreverent and somehow, in the midst of it all, crazy magical.
MY LIFE AS A BOY
Here I am in fifth grade; no frills.
Still growing into my teeth. We can wear pants to school and run wild at recess.
I've started slicking back my baby Dutch-bob haircut with my dad's "Beau Kreml" hair oil (drives him nuts).
I can read any book, climb any tree, and out-run, out-wrestle, and outsmart any boy in my class.
A lot of this will change next year when I turn into a girl, but for now, life is good.
(And thanks to Cousin Wayne Hill for digging up the photo.)
(Things Found in an Old Portfolio #4)
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH RAIN AND STRANGENESS
It was January-cabin-fever time in my little house under the redwoods. The annual winter rains had been pelting down for days, and I’d run out of good books, indoor tasks, and sewing projects.
Since creating art is something that always cheers me up. I decided to try finishing a self-portrait I’d started in sunnier times.
I’d completed the face, so I took off from there, but, perhaps influenced by the hypnotic drumming of the rain, all sorts of strange elements began inserting themselves into this up-to-then conventional scenario.
In came a large-mouthed bass with whom I’d had an intense conversation at the age of eight; the kitty companion of my teen years; the sassafras-wood staff (shaped by honeysuckle vines and discovered in the middle of a Pennsylvania thicket) that I’d carried in my Renaissance-Faire role as Mad Maudlen; Maudlen’s odd little companion, Willie, the “King of the Children.”
Since I’d recently been working on anatomical studies, I included my skull as I imagined it, and before I knew it, it had gotten friendly.
Circles; lots of circles, clear-cut or numinous; vague indications of skies and background and odd energies.
Then the sun came out, and I tucked the portrait into a portfolio, never to finish it, and pretty much forgot about it until a recent rediscovery, over 30 years on.
Oh, my.
Did I mention that my dad wouldn’t let me transfer to art school because he was afraid I’d turn out weird?
Oops.
16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sonoma County, California, 1979-Present
LINE BY LINE WITH THE SHRUBBER, Or,
THE EDIBLE AND HORTICULTURAL VIRTUOSITY OF ROBERT KOURIK
I first met Robert Kourik in the late 1970s, when we were both resident at the Farallones Institute Rural Center (now the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center), an appropriate-technology-based teaching community/garden/farm near Occidental, CA.
It wasn’t until 1986, however, that the two of us first began to collaborate on gardening books, notably the horticultural classic DESIGNING AND MAINTAINING YOUR EDIBLE LANDSCAPE—NATURALLY, for which I illustrated his “Golden Rules of Edible Landscaping.”
Back then, this type of gardening was a brand-new concept. Pioneer Rosalind Creasy coined the term in 1982 with her book EDIBLE LANDSCAPING, and Robert’s book (which is still in print), was the perfect how-to follow-up.
At some point I started editing Robert’s writing, and since then “The Shrubber” and I have collaborated on all kinds of horticultural books, newsletters, and articles, covering subjects as varied as cooking with lavender, drip irrigation, permaculture myths, beneficial fungi, lazy-ass gardening, greywater plumbing, and the care and feeding of worm bins.
50-plus years as a professional gardener and landscaper have made Robert garden-savvy to the max. Besides being an inexhaustible fount of information, he’s a great “nuts-and-bolts” writer, with an entertaining style that’s equal parts knowledgeable, humorous, and cantankerous. I’ve also continued to contribute occasional drawings, cartoons and illustrations to his growing collection of titles.
Cartoons from Lazy-Ass Gardening (from top): Fertility, Veggies, Xeriscaping
Back in the 1980s, Robert asked me to create a poster-like image to start off the slideshow he used to illustrate the lectures and workshops for which he’s much in demand. This image popped into my head, and Robert recently re-discovered it and sent it my way.
Thanks, Shrubber; it’s been my pleasure.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/robert-kourik/242524/
https://www.amazon.com/.../B004FV8ZK2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt...
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17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Forestville, California, 2010-2011
CALABASH! Or, OUT OF OUR GOURDS
In 2010, my friend Lorraine MacKenzie and I were recruited out of a scrum of volunteer envelope-stuffers to become doorkeepers/greeters at one of Sonoma County’s most prestigious charity events.
Each fall, a colorful bash known as “Calabash” was put together by Food For Thought, an organization now on its third decade of providing groceries and meals to Sonoma County residents with HIV, AIDS, and other serious illnesses.
This was how it worked: the FFT offices and distribution center, located on a back street of the tiny town of Forestville, were and are surrounded by a lush organic garden (then supervised by überMaster Gardener Doug Gosling) that provided bushels of fresh produce for distribution.
One of the most important crops each year was a substantial planting of the capacious long-necked gourds known as calabashes, long used by early settlers and indigenous peoples for everything from water vessels to musical instruments.
Each fall, the gourds were picked, dried, and delivered to Sonoma County artists, who went wild turning them into an astounding range of artistic creations.
These, along with cases of Sonoma County wines and other prizes, were then auctioned off at the two-day Calabash event, admission to which was by reservation or invitation only, and limited to 500 guests.
The cost of admission included delicious food and drink, entertainment, and the chance to schmooze with local artists, journalists, dignitaries, celebs, and the Russian River Chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the local branch of a national charitable organization of gay men and women who love to do good while dressing outrageously and adopting equally outrageous names.
A yearly riot of color, flowers, fascinating people, and amazing artwork, Calabash was held from 2000 to 2016, sometimes raising between $50,000 and $60,000 a pop. It was only discontinued when the growing amount of personpower needed to set it up began interfering with the food-collecting and -distributing work of the organization, and was replaced by other, less work-intensive events.
This all took place, by the way, in the era just before cell phones came equipped with high-quality photographic capacity, and as we greeted attendees and handed out nametags, Lorraine and I got quite used to hearing the refrain: “Oh, I wish I’d brought my camera!”
Luckily for us all, I’d brought mine.
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19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, and the Corner of Haight and Fillmore Streets; San Francisco, California, November, 1980
THE CLYDE CROW MEMORIAL TRASHCAN: A POST-THANKSGIVING TALE
The Dickens Christmas Fair, beginning with its inception in 1970, traditionally (though not this year of Covid) opens for business on the day after Thanksgiving.
In 1980, the event moved from the Cow Palace to Fort Mason in San Francisco’s Marina District. For many participants, including me, this occasioned a change in public-transportation options. Thus, at about 10 PM on a Friday night in late November, I found myself, after a day of relentless Victorian jollity, huddled in a chilly fog on one of the iffiest corners in town, waiting for the #22-Fillmore bus.
It could have been much worse. A year or so before, the corner of Haight and Fillmore Streets had been dominated by an all-night liquor store and a saloon called Hank’s 500 Club, and waiting for a bus there at any time of day or night was always a rich and terrifying experience, often enlivened by fistfights, drug deals, drunken solicitations, and the sound of shattering glass, usually bottle, but, on occasion, plate.
By the time of which I write, however, police sweeps and political law-&-order campaigns had closed down Hank’s 500 and imposed a 10 PM curfew on the liquor store, so the corner where I now waited was mostly just dismal, gritty, and a little sorry.
As I perched wearily on the window ledge of the liquor emporium that night, an unfamiliar presence began to loom into my field of vision, and I noticed that a recently installed trash container now hulked at the curb edge of the sidewalk.
No coy little wishing-well or swinging door affair, this, but a great squat squared-off pillar, seemingly welded to the sidewalk, armored and roofed with heavy enameled sheet metal, its sides sheathed in heavily varnished pebbled concrete. I was impressed.
Then I noticed the plaque affixed to the side facing me. It wasn’t large, but its dignified bronze could have graced a bank doorway or burial vault. In clear capitals it read:
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
CLYDE CROW
A TRUE STREET PERSON
AND FAITHFUL DOORMAN
DIED 1979
HAIGHT-FILLMORE BUILDING
All the way home on the bus, I pondered this inscription: who was Clyde Crow, and why was he immortalized in resounding bronze on the craggy side of a public utility on that particular corner?
“Say whaaaaat?”
I outlined the mystery to three of the prop-room fairies (who, it should be noted, were still on a massive tinsel high from a week of pre-fair bedizening), and their response was visceral: “You have to decorate it!”
They filled a large paper bag with a roll of tape and handfuls of glittering plastic packets containing every form of made-in-China holiday garland imaginable, including something labeled the “Supreme Beauty Star Flower Especial,” a gleaming, at-least-three-dimensional fold-out gold-foil construction laced with more fancy curlicues than the powder room of a Victorian bordello.
Arriving at the corner, which was strangely deserted for a Saturday night (although sounds of revelry and breaking glass could be heard from down the block), I faced off reluctantly with the Trashcan. It glowered forbiddingly at me. I glowered back.
With some trepidation, I unwrapped a pink-and-gold nine-foot-long foil garland, taped one end in place, and proceeded to arrange and twist it around the top struts of the receptacle. Not bad. I added a second row, this one of luminous blue and green chain-link cutouts, and stepped back to admire my handiwork.
“I see you’re decoratin’ Clyde’s trashcan,” said a voice.
I froze.
“Nice work,” continued the voice, encouragingly.
I turned around slowly. There, having apparently materialized out of the sidewalk, was a small, spry, and slender old fellow, sporting a red bobble hat, a rich mahogany complexion, a vigorous and bristling salt-and-pepper beard, and an adorable twinkle.
“Thanks,” I said, as casually as I could, tearing into another packet of glitz. “Did you know Clyde?”
“Shoot,” he answered, “EVerbody knew Clyde. He was the biggest, meanest black man you ever seen. He was the do’man.” (The word rhymed with “showman,” and I had no idea what it meant.)
“Where did he live?” I asked, glancing around at the near-empty buildings.
“That’s what I’m tellin’ you; he lived in the do’ways.” He took charge of one end of a glittering magenta twist and twisted it around so I could tape it.
“The folks who used to own all these places, they’d hire him to mind their do’ways. He was bouncer at Hank’s 500, then he’d go sleep in somebody else’s do’way. He was a mean man” —here his voice took on the cadence of the born storyteller; he might have been reciting Homeric verse:
“Wan’t anybody got past Clyde when you set him on a do’way. There was some that thought he was asleep, and oh, did they learn different. Even dead drunk he was fast as the Devil and strong as the Almighty— meanln’ no disrespect—and he’d take ten men with him if he went down.”
As we cooperated in wrapping more foil garlands, the story went on: “How big was he? Well, you and me, we’re little folks, but Clyde, he was a big fella...”
Clyde Crow began, in the well-worn rhythms of that voice, to take on ghostly flesh, a glower, a strut, a larger-than-life aura. I could almost see that huge shadowy figure reeling with furious strong breath from one appointed threshold to the next, probably used by neighborhood mamas as a bogeyman to keep entire generations of quaking kids in line.
Suddenly the act of decorating this dark and stocky memorial seemed much more appropriate, although I wasn’t sure whether my new friend and I were paying belated homage or placating a surly ghost who could have asked for no better resting place on that chilly night than a snug trashcan after a lifetime of cold do'ways.
I never did find out how Clyde met his end, or who erected this memorial in his name. We were just getting to that part when the 22-Fillmore bus lumbered into sight. Unwilling to spend another half-hour in the cold and fog, I thrust the half-empty paper bag, the tape, and the preposterous gold star/flower into my companion’s willing hands.
“Will you finish up?” I asked.
“Trust me,” he replied.
In the mornings, I was able to catch the #22 at a stop much closer to my house. Half-dozing in my seat as we approached the corner of Haight and Fillmore, I was alerted by surprised murmurs from my fellow passengers, and peered out of the window.
And atop its unspeakable but impeccable garishness reigned the "Supreme Beauty Star Flower Especial," fluttering and winking like an exotic and impossible striptease Christmas blossom—or perhaps the overdue flowering of a lustrous Fillmore legend.
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, and Wilson Borough, Pennsylvania, 1955-61; Bad Godesberg, Germany, 1961-62
CHOKE: A CHORAL PROGRESSION
The photo below was taken, not, as faithful readers might expect, at the Dickens Christmas Fair in the 1970s, but at a Wilson High School holiday concert in 1961. I (fourth from R.) was 15, the group was called the “Wilsonaires,” and this was part of my odd progression in choral music.
When I was a freshman at Wilson High in 1959, one of my greatest ambitions was to become a member of the 70-odd-member Mixed Chorus, which appeared in several concerts a year and went on field trips to sing in interesting places. Besides, all of the cool older kids I wanted to hang out with were Chorus members.
I wasn’t a beginner at the singing game. I’d joined my church’s Junior Choir at around age ten (the only requirements for membership were the ability to more or less carry a tune, get to rehearsals on time, and refrain from wriggling or throwing spitballs during church services).
Then, without benefit of audition, I became the youngest member of the adult choir, with its ambitious repertoire and professional soloists. This only happened because an elderly choir member, a fearsome dowager named Anna Wilson, had began to lose her vision, and needed a seeing-eye person to guide her about the church. I think I was selected because I was the only Junior-Choir singer who wasn’t utterly terrified of her.
So when I tried out for the Wilson Mixed Chorus, I wasn’t new to singing, only to auditioning. To my surprise and great dismay, I choked. Blew it. Didn’t make it.
In my sophomore year, I tried out again and, even after a summer of attending sessions at Penn State University’s Band, Orchestra, and Chorus (BOC) School, I choked again.
This time, however, chorus director Ron Sherry, who had also been at the BOC school as an instrumental instructor, took pity on me. Looking at my sad and desperate little face after I’d mangled and squeaked my way through a sorry version of “Blue Skies,” he said (and I quote verbatim): “OK, Dummy, I’ll put you in the Mixed Chorus.”
Once I was in, I reverted to being a competent singer, always on pitch and seldom forgetting lyrics. I was even given a brief solo or two, and, unknowingly anticipating the Glee “show choir” trend, even got to choreograph movements to “Whistle While You Work,” and “Louisiana Hayride.”
The following summer, I attended another BOC session, and Ron Sherry took a job at a different high school. This was sad, but he was competently replaced by another BOC instructor, a diminutive fellow whose name, Edwin Schatkowski, was quickly abbreviated into “Mr. S.” by students.
Mr. S. was an innovator, and one of his new ideas was the formation of a small sub-group of singers, to be called the “Wilsonaires.” (See above, cool kids, etc.) True to form, when I went to try out, I did less than my best. Mr. S. looked at me and said: “Ron Sherry told me you stink at auditions, but you’re a great chorus member. Want to try that again?”
I did, became a Wilsonaire, and, being less unwieldy than the entire chorus, we got to accept many more invitations to sing at churches, service organizations, hospitals and schools, and had our own part in concerts, even getting to dress up in rented Victorian finery to perform at Christmastime.
Then, at the end of 1961, I was selected to go to Germany as an exchange student, and had to leave the Mixed Chorus behind. The only choral activity at my German School was a select little ensemble for which (of course) one had to (gulp) audition.
I was a little disconcerted to see that most of the other auditioning students were clutching classical scores and warming up by humming bits of Bach and Beethoven, and realized that my less exalted repertoire was probably not going to cut it.
Just as I was about to slink off unheard, my name was called. As I entered the audition room, Herr Settegast, the choir director, was leafing through some kind of file. “Ah, Fraülein Hill,”he said, “I have here a note from your Mr Schatkowski. He writes that, although you are a good singer, you are very nervous about auditioning. Is this so?” I nodded.
“Then,” he said, “let us make this easy. Come to rehearsals, learn the music, and we see how we go on.”
With that lovely group, I got to learn ancient songs in Latin and sing Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in their native language. At Christmastime, we made the rounds of the embassies in nearby Bonn, singing German carols to doting audiences.
I don’t currently sing in any choirs, but when the holidays come around, I always think warmly of dear, fearsome Anna Wilson, and the three wise gentlemen who trusted me to find my voice.
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20. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Great Dickens Christmas Fair, San Francisco, California; Early 1970s
JULIE MEREDITH GETS THE BIRD, Or,
DON’T MESS WITH THE DIVA
I have no idea who took the first photo below, but I clearly remember the circumstances. That year the Dickens Christmas Fair had moved itself from a damp drafty disused warehouse to the snugger, warmer, drier Cannery, a former Fisherman’s Wharf fish-packing facility that was in the process of being turned into a shopping venue.
I was playing a number of roles that year–in Chinese-opera garb for the Christmas Pantomime; portraying a chambermaid named Dolly Muffins; drifting about as an angel on stilts; and appearing in the lecture hall as Charlotte Brontë, reading from “my” works.
Then in the evening I would don a tatty hodgepodge of outworn finery and sally forth as a saucy floozette in scarlet to engage in street theater and mischief-making.
In the first photo above, I’m lying in wait on a balcony located above the small stage of Mad Sal’s Dockside Alehouse, where the brilliant Judy (Kory) Beatrice reigned as the eponymous saloon-keeper.
The string in my hand was attached to a paper bird with a fluffy feathered tail, the better to bedevil Miss Julie Meredith, Darling of the Victoria and Albert Music Hall and Diva of Divas, who once a night deigned to slum it at Sal’s for the edification of the grubbier classes.
Corseted to the max in a many-flounced black-lace gown cut to reveal an unsettling expanse of creamy bosom; glittering with jet beads and faux diamonds; her hair caught up in an elaborate towering feather-topped do; Julie was truly a sight to awe the unwashed waterfront habitués of the Alehouse.
For her appearance there, she thoughtfully dumbed down her highfalutin’ V&A program to include a medley of popular sing-alongs, the grand finale of which was that classic Victorian weepie “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EN_wsQwfd4 (A lovely presentation of same by a different singer)
To add a touch of variety to the proceedings each evening, I would, as the final refrain began, lower the paper bird on the string so that its feathers tickled her ample décolletage. Never missing a note, she would bat at it angrily each time, as it was pulled up out of reach, then lowered again to plague her.
All this time, mind you, she was singing perfectly on pitch. Then, when she reached the penultimate high D on the refrain she would haul off and fire the note at me like a coloratura ground-to-air missile, causing me and my bird to scramble away to safety, and leaving her to dust off her elegantly gloved hands in satisfaction. It never failed to get a laugh.
On the last night of the Fair, at her last performance, she actually managed to outdo herself; after several obligatory bouts of angry batting at the feathered nuisance, she pounced.
With a deft swoop of her fan, she wrapped the string around it, yanked bird at all out of my hands, flung the creature dramatically to the stage floor, and stomped on it with a jeweled slipper just as she hit that triumphant high D.
At the same time she shot me a wicked grin that said clearly:” I could have done that at any time, you know.” I couldn’t help but join in the standing ovation that followed.
What a Dame!
ALL OF MY BLOGS TO DATE
1. HOW TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIRS (Even if You’re Not a Writer and Your Memory Isn’t What It Used to Be)
https://memo-howbooklet-amiehill.blogspot.com
2. THROWBACK THURSDAY MEMOIRS (This is not as daunting as it looks. Each section contains 20 short essays, ranging in length from a few paragraphs to a few pages. Great bathroom reading.
They’re not in sequential order, so one can start anywhere.)
NOTE: If you prefer to read these on paper, you can highlight/copy/paste into a Word doc and print them out, (preferably two-sided or on the unused side of standard-sized paper).
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part One
https://amiehillthrowbackthursdays.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Two
https://ahilltbt2.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Three
https://amiehilltbt3.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Four
https://tbt4amie-hill.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Five
https://ami-ehiltbt-5.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Six
https://am-iehilltbt6.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Seven
https://a-miehilltbt7.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eight
https://a-miehilltbt8.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Nine
https://amiehilltbt9.blogspot.com/
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Ten
https://amiehill10tbt.blogspot.com
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eleven
https://11tbtamiehill.blogspot.com/2021/02/w-elcome-to-my-past.html
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Twelve: https://tbt-adventuresamiehill.blogspot.com/2021/05/with-my-friend-wol-c.html
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3. ILLUSTRATED ADVENTURES IN VERSE
FLYING TIME; OR, THE WINGS OF KAYLIN SUE (2020)
https://amiehillflyingtime.blogspot.com/
(38 lines, 17 illustrations)
TRE & THE ELECTRO-OMNIVOROUS GOO (2018)
http://the-electroomnivorousgoo.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-adventure-in-verse.html
(160 lines, 26 illustrations)
DRACO& CAMERON (2017)
http://dracoandcameron.blogspot.com/ (36 lines, 18 illustrations)
CHRISTINA SUSANNA (1984/2017)
https://christinasusanna.blogspot.com/ (168 lines, 18 illustrations)
OBSCURELY ALPHABETICAL & D IS FOR DYLAN (2017) (1985)
https://obscurelyalphabetical.blogspot.com/ (41 lines, 8 illustrations)
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4. OTHER ARTWORK
AMIE HILL: CALLIGRAPHY & DRAWINGS
https://amiehillcalligraphy.blogspot.com/
AMIE HILL: COLLAGES 1
https://amiehillcollages1.blogspot.com/
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5. LIBERA HISTORICAL TIMELINE (2007-PRESENT)
For Part One (introduction to Libera and to the Timeline, extensive overview & 1981-2007), please go to: http://liberatimeline.blogspot.com/
