marylorson-blog - Tumblr blog

[marylorson-blog]

Found writing object from sometime in the late 80's...

[marylorson-blog]

“Rolling Thunder”  excerpted from Signals: a performance memoir 

                                      Featured May 2020 on          Unfictional https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/unfictional

I wasn't a bastard but I still felt kind of illegitimate. Dad and Mom had eloped, three months after meeting. My sisters from Mom’s first marriage loved him like mad, but then one day Dad vanished, before I could form a single memory of him. 

I've always wondered why that day was the finale. How do you walk away from a beaming little two-year-old face, one that looks like you?   I was there, but unaware. I want the scene.   

My sisters say: Dad was great.  

Mom says: All you need to know is he walked away. 

Dad said: Mom kicked him out that day, that he crammed his suits and stereo into the Mustang  and rushed to the city for a meeting, paying a kid twenty bucks to guard the car, which was empty anyway when he came back out. 

Later, once I knew him, I asked: “Was there another woman?”  

His answer: “There must have been.”   

THEY BLAMED IT ALL ON ALCOHOL. 

Mom said: infidelity wasn't the only problem; unofficial-seeming “bill collectors” were showing up at the house.  

My sisters said: Dad made life fun, played the piano, adored Mom. But skillets and invectives would fly in the night...and then Dad went missing, with hundreds of thousands of some investor’s dollars. 

By the time my sisters were 8, 10 and 11, they had lost two fathers.    

Mom hadn’t worked since modeling before her first marriage. She borrowed tuition for a full-time secretarial course and sent me to stay with her brother, another charming alcoholic with money problems and a fed-up wife. Mom and the girls stayed behind, in the lovely house on Manor Lane. 

I rejoined them fifteen months and few blocks but a world away, in a garden apartment behind the Country Club. Mom kept the crystal chandelier and her gown from the Kennedy Inaugural, and a suite of heavy furniture that wasn’t made for small rooms. 

Sometime later, Dad called Mom for a friendly chat. He was glad to hear she was in love and admitted that he and his girlfriend had a baby. He asked her to sign some papers for a Tijuana divorce. Sure, Mom said, and I’ll take the trip too. She came back with castanets and a tan. I remember understanding that my parents would never get back together.

I had Dad's nose and hair and musicality, but couldn’t remember a thing about him. Mom said I was lucky I didn't know what I was missing. The older girls talked about their happy chapter with my dad all the time, but I’d wait alone out front for the Mustang that didn't come.  

One day, though, he showed, and this was my own first memory of Dad: Christmastime, Chinatown, and three wrapped presents: a Dancerina doll, a Polaroid Swinger, and a camel hair coat from Saks. The surviving Polaroids show a serious dad and a manically happy me.

Dad promised that now he was going to bring all his kids together regularly. He'd repeat this song on our scattershot dates over the years, but that visit WAS the beginning, of our intermittent, fond, indulgent, dishonest bond.  After that, I lived in obsessive anticipation of the next visit, never knowing when it would be. 

(Band in)

A Dancerina doll, a Polaroid Swinger, and a camel hair coat from Saks. Dad gave me these, and went back to wherever he went.

During Kindergarten: I roomed with Mom, but she was out most nights. The big girls had the other bedroom. I wasn’t allowed in, but from the other side of the door I’d smell and listen attentively. Incense, patchouli, cigarettes, maybe pot? Talking, laughing, singing Joni Mitchell, CSNY...yelling, hitting, screaming, cursing. I swear I could hear the brushing of their long tresses, the swinging of their unhindered double-D breasts...meanwhile people kept mistaking me for a boy.

“You have your father’s thin hair,” Mom complained, so she took me to the barber on the corner, who gave me a buzz cut... and rationalized it this way: “It don't matta if she looks bad now; it mattas what she looks like when she's 18.” Mom thought this was a riot. There was none of this “you're beautiful because you're you” bullshit with Mom. You either looked good, or you didn't. 

THERE IN THE CATHODE LIGHT, NOBODY BEAMED UP BRIGHT                      ENOUGH FOR HER TO LIKE  NOONE TO WALK BESIDE 

YEAH, YOU HARDLY KNEW US                                       

 THAT WAS JUST OUR LIFE/THAT WAS JUST OUR LIFE

Then, In first grade we moved to Carol Avenue, and I almost had another sister!

 Jeanne! Jeanne! Jeanne! Jeanne!....Jeanne!

We had a great time together.

MOM MET HER FATHER AT THE GIANT STEP

A PIANO BAR IN NEW ROCHELLE                                   

SHE'D GOT MY DEADBEAT DAD THE GIG, 

AND HE SHOWED  UP                                                           

WENT DOWN SO SHE COULD GRAB THE TIPS, 

AND LET ADMIRERS BUY HER DRINKS                                  

LED BY THE VERY HANDSOME ED DESONNE

Mom was passionate and needed a rescue; Ed DeSonne was a prosperous investment banker. Both were raising broods of four alone. Ed wasn’t divorced yet, but soon he and Mom got engaged, and we were going to be like the Brady Bunch, with martinis. In the meantime, he was paying the rent on our roomy townhouse on Carol Avenue...

YEAH, IT'S NEVER SIMPLE

BUT WE'LL GIVE IT A TRY; MAYBE BE ALRIGHT

Jeanne too was the youngest of four. She was fearless and funny, and once the parents were married, she would be my roommate. But until then, I had to spend a few more nights with one or another of my unwilling sisters.  One such Saturday, Knockout Diane was supposed to watch me while Shy Karen sister went to a party, but Diane sneaked out. Karen wailed, but Mom had plans with Ed, who arrived in a cloud of aftershave and tapped his shiny toe in the foyer. Mom appeared in glamorous good cheer and ordered me to kiss him. I didn't wanna. 

“Go ahead: give him a little kiss,” Mom said, and Ed reached out gamely, but I wound back and fired a fierce little first-grade kick right into his suited shin. 

Today we'd say I was “acting out.” But back then, everybody just yelled. Then the grownups... went out. And the television...went on.  And then: Ed DeSonne disappeared, changing the channel on a whole other level.

 ED, WE HARDLY KNEW YE…

In first grade you learn to add 2 plus 2. I overheard the word “funeral” and didn’t see Jeanne’s dad for a week; these factors equalled --to me-- that he was dead. When Mom announced it, the big girls wailed like the world was ending. But I just said: “I know.”

I wasn't glad Ed was dead, but I wasn't sad, either. I didn't know how much we lost.         

Mom told everyone the aneurysm happened while Ed was driving; years later she told me the rest of the story.  She also told me that, in her grief, she'd called MY DAD, as a friend, and that he'd sneaked away to be there with her at Ed's funeral.

In the instant it takes for a blood vessel to pop, Mom became bereft, unemployed, and homeless. And our family dispersed like seeds in the wind. 

Diane went to live with her father in the city. The rest of us were taken in by another divorcee with a sun-porch we shared for the nervous, chilly months it took Mom to save up a security deposit.  Karen cried endlessly,  Mom cooing in her ear and breaking Valiums in half.  Fightin’ Joni moved in with her best friend. I got caught standing on our hosts’ kitchen counter in my loafers, stealing cookies from their Charles Chips tin.

But worst of all, Jeanne was sent into foster care.   

I only saw her once again after that, but we’re Facebook friends now. 

While we were staying with the other family, Dad got tickets for the TV show "Wonderama", for me and our host's daughter, and she won the big prize! Our moms picked us up, tipsy on high heels, loading the prizes in the back of a Checker, ignoring candy-starved Moonies in white shirts and dark blazers who tried to sell us carnations.  

(BEAT, then energy back down)

Mom found an apartment. It was in Tuckahoe, so we switched schools. I was in 2nd grade; Joni, 7th; Karen, 9th. I got sent to the principal's office for wearing pants; he showed me a paddle, said next time he'd use it. But maybe it wasn't just the trousers. 

Men landed on the moon. “Evil Ways” was in heavy rotation. And “Spinning Wheel.” Our apartment sat at a dead end by a highway. At night the passing cars projected an abstract slide show on our bedroom wall. In the living room, Mom would light a candle and drink wine. The apartment often smelled of the burned bottom of a saucepan.

That Christmas Eve, Mom fell asleep and the candles burned all the way down, through the tablecloth, and into the nice oak table. I woke up when the fire department arrived. 

YEAH, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU//IT WAS JUST OUR LIFE/THAT WAS JUST OUR LIFE

Karen was 15 and wanted privacy; I was seven and wanted company. One day these opposing desires clashed at a bedroom door, both sides pushing until the big kid won, my middle finger slammed in the door jamb.

The top was hacked completely off. Mom raced me to New Rochelle Hospital, where the surgeon told her to retrieve the tip of my finger or I'd have a stump for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, back at the apartment, Karen tried to flush my finger, along with her shame and horror, down the toilet.

Thanks to low-rent plumbing, my fingertip didn't disappear, and the toilet water even kept it alive. Mom carried it in a baggie back to the surgeon, who successfully reattached it. (Now, there’s a parent's errand.) They kept me in the hospital for a week, because I was hyperactive and the doctor feared I'd bang the stitches open.

It's possible I was on painkillers, because when Dad appeared he was like a dream, swinging down the hall with his great suit and smiling blue eyes.  He'd stopped at the gift shop, and gotten me a dozen long stemmed American Beauty roses and a music box. When you opened it, a ballerina pirouetted to this song: 

OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING/ OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY/I'VE GOT A BEAUTIFUL FEELING/EVERYTHING'S GOING MY WAY 

The roses died, of course. I kept that box, though, long after the ballerina broke off and the inside felt was smutty with lipgloss and melted JollyRanchers. Didn’t see Dad again for another 4 years..

[marylorson-blog]

“Signals” excerpt...

I found an ad for an agent and asked Mom to take me. The agent was a woman in an office. Mom took me to the meeting at the agent’s office, and the agent agreed to take me on.  The agent sent me to audition for the movie version of “Hair.” I had the album and knew it by heart. “You won’t get it, because they’re looking for older people, but the audition will be good experience for you.” Diane took me. We waited in line for hours --hundreds of hopefuls, songs in their heads, headshots in hands.  Someone working there spotted Diane. She told them she wasn’t signed up, but they said she should audition anyway. (She’s got it; now baby, she’s got it). I passed the dance part and was brought before Milos Forman and Twyla Tharp and a bunch of other people to sing...”

--from Signals: a performance memoir, by Mary Lorson

[marylorson-blog]

[marylorson-blog]

Real life and radio magic: Labor Day 2013

Labor Day 2013: Real life and radio magic...rambling and staying alive...

I’ve only ever in my life met one person who told me that they don’t like music, the character who used to deliver our water when we first moved here from the city and lived on the lake. Yes, it’s strange to buy water when you live on a lake, and it’s strange that someone who lives in his truck doesn’t at least listen to the radio, doesn’t fill the air with the sweet stimulation of music. What’s not to like? I bugged him. Haven’t you ever heard Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix? Marvin Gaye? Benny Goodman? What about the Stones? I kept on. Zeppelin? Beatles?  Classical? Nope. Just doesn’t speak to me.

I’m the opposite, overly stimulated by music. You’ll have to forgive me if we’re talking and a piece of music comes on, because I will continue nodding at what I hope are the right places, but my attention will be in the listening. There’s music in my head all the time, my own or others’, and I can completely understand how a deaf person could compose because it’s not really about ears. I love classical music, dumbass pop, big band swing, 50’s jazz, some Broadway musicals, rock. Newer songs on the radio sound over-EQ’d and over-compressed to me, but a good song’s a good song and I’ve always believed they have a certain power.  The hard-wiring for music is a part of my design, and it’s not letting go of its grip on me.

I spent time with old friends over Labor Day. We do not go willingly into old age, my generation; these friends were in their early 50s and had a new baby, so when they nudged, “you still doing music?” I only-slightly-sheepishly answered, sure, and then fully-sheepishly listed the myriad creative efforts I’m engaged in now. Might make me sound crazy, but some people make quilts, so why can’t I make music? Besides, for someone my age, I’m youngish by certain standards, and though my joints ache and my hair looks bad, I feel pretty springy. It’s not like I’m hoping to be a pop star. I just feel alive when I work on this stuff.

Labor Day weekend at the beach: a celebration of the wage slave, turned into a party weekend for the steroidal yuppies with the mansion on the water who insist on setting off a small-town-sized array of fireworks every single night at bedtime, applauding themselves for buying the explosives and lighting the matches, not thinking about the people with kids. My own morning beachfront iPod walks were reflective reality checks: my son is becoming an adolescent, requiring the next level of parenting skills; my sister just had her first chemo for breast cancer, an anti-picnic I’ve been through myself; our 82-year-old mother’s hearing is deteriorating precipitately; friends have serious tension to cope with. I’ve been limping this last year with hip pain. Labor Day weekend, which incites some people to go wild, prompts in me a pause to say goodbye to the summer I have just enjoyed and to get ready for the pile of issues that need to be addressed—external, internal, you name it.

My local orthopedist diagnosed a hip condition requiring a simple surgery that’s not performed where I live, so the day after Labor Day I had an appointment with the “The Guy” for torn labrum surgery. The Guy practices in Rochester, hometown of my dear friend Kathy who isn’t there anymore because she is wisely raising her children in the Netherlands, and of my other friend Don, who isn’t there anymore because he unwisely passed away last year.  I hit the road with MRI discs in tow, and realized that the date was Don’s birthday, that I was driving to Don’s hometown on the day that would have been his 52nd birthday. Whoa! Accordingly, I dubbed the drive The Don G. Memorial Rochester Birthday Tour, listening to the radio and thinking of my peculiar friend, who loved music more than anything.  He didn’t stay in Rochester long. He got into some trouble, didn’t finish high school, ran away from here to fashion a life as offensive to his middle-class parents as he could devise. He was sort of a spoken-word rock artist, celebrating the underbelly. To the end, he refused or was unable to consider solutions to certain habits; in the end, they drove him down.  We weren’t close anymore at that point. I, who have gone to great pains to stay alive, was angry with him as he ignored clear warning signs. I still cared, but it was depressing to watch.

University of Rochester Medical Center is a hyper-efficient Oz of healthcare.  No waiting. My paperwork and blood pressure are taken, my image files are uploaded, I am ushered to an exam room. Soon a petite man in his early thirties enters without knocking, and I have to ask, “Are you the doctor?”  The Guy is young but he knows his business. I do have a torn labrum, he says, but that’s not necessarily what’s causing the pain. “I see this a lot in women your age,” he says. “Be prepared: the years between 50 and 60 are tough.”

Even for me? Youngish me? I'm at the beginning of that age range.

You’re doing a lot of things right, he assures me, but this just a part of life at your age.

At my age. I’m chilled. This is not the heart-stopping cancer diagnosis. This is a quieter, clearer message: You’re not dying, you’re just getting older, which is to say that you are dying, only it’s natural.  Even for a can-do person like me, this isn’t about the fight. Things are just breaking down. The doctor gives me a cortisone shot. I’ll see him again soon and he’ll consider. Surgery might help some, but it might not. I might just have to live with pain, and this might be just the beginning.

I walk, stiff and numb, to the car, and get back on the highway. Am I going to start being an Old Mom now? Who’s going to find me attractive? Will I be able to finish my ambitious creative projects? Should I start working harder, faster? I’ve been listening to David Rakoff’s swan song, the novel in verse, the audio version he narrated so raspily through his terminal cancer. Should I see all my projects as swan songs? (Would that be positive or negative?) Or should I re-prioritize? Maybe I had my chance as an artist and should be glad about that, and should now focus on relationships.  

I turn up the radio and the asphalt swims through tears I don’t fight. Where is this all heading?

From the radio, a familiar drum-beat intro interrupts my thoughts. I turn it up more, and shake my head: it’s the title track from my old band’s second album, me from twenty years ago, singing on the radio. The old EQ and compression techniques make it sound a little dusty, but there we are,  right there in the airwaves along with the new kids. I feel a rush of missing those guys, Don and the guys in the band, who were my family then and who are now dead or offended or still-friends but with distance or just busy with their lives. I miss our time together, and I miss being young. I didn’t feel young then, but now 30 seems poised to do anything.

Don was thrilled about the little bit of recognition we got for that song; even though it was not the kind of thing he would have written or even necessarily liked, it opened a window of opportunity for us. Within three years, the window had swung shut and a disoriented disappointment led to the band’s breakup. There were hard parts about that time, but looking back, it seemed to me that we’d been lucky enough. Most of us moved on and are, with good fortune, going to experience what it is to grow old. Just not Don. He’s just not here anymore. 

But I am. I took a deep true breath and remembered: all we have that’s precious is whatever we have now.  I couldn’t get Don to look at his life differently, though I did try, for a time. I can’t take back my own mistakes. What I have is so precious: a sixth grader and sisters and living friendships and breathing and trying. And there's music, always. Maybe in twenty years I’ll have some music from now to listen back to and attach meaning to, and more importantly, people to hear it with.

[marylorson-blog]

by Roman Cote, Summer 2013

[marylorson-blog]

David Greenberger. I'm probably his biggest admirer.

[marylorson-blog]

The Freak Baby Chronicles, Part 1: starting in the middle.

Start in the middle, is what some screenwriting books all tell you; start a scene in the middle of the action because people don't need to hear the boring details that led up to the juicy bits you're asking them to get involved in.  Jerk them right into the mess. Makes sense. 

In this blog thread, I'm starting in the middle too, I guess, since even though I've been working on my Eva Tanguay screenplay, Freak Baby and the Kill Thought, for over four years now, I'm still in the thick of it. Writing, researching and steadily chewing the cud, I finally arrived at a draft worthy of imposing on some carefully-chosen first readers, and have now received their notes. The consensus is that they like some parts, but that the story needs to be tightened; there are too many characters and subplots, not a stark enough 'arc'. I know none of my writing is sacred and that all work, even the parts you end up leaving behind, is a valuable contribution to whatever process it takes to complete something of value. I've been immersed in this, via a parallel universe in my mind,  long enough for students who were freshmen when I began to be in college. I love this project and I know what I want it to say. I just have to work until the thing sings.

So I've arrived in the middle, the middle of digesting my first notes from my five friends and collaborators: these generous people have their own levels of involvement with film, with Eva Tanguay, and with me, so I think I've chosen well. Their notes have been thoughtful, honest and encouraging. I'm ready to revise.

In this next draft, I've both tightened and loosened the apron strings; I just sketched six different potential new opening scenes.  I love the ending right now--and I know that someone whose opinion I value could come back hating it. I know I'll have to let go of much of what I've written to make room for the character of Helena Price, based on my great-grandmother, who will be more prominent in this version. Her character's relationship with Eva will anchor the message more firmly in the terrain of women and sex and money.  When it's good enough, I'll send it out again, and while I'm waiting I'll return to Old School, my 1980's Boston TV show idea.  

Eva Tanguay was the original Freak Baby, but when I'm in writing mode I know that the reason she speaks to me is that that's who I am too, the ADHD little sister who means well but is inescapably obnoxious and can't sit still. I think it'll be a good experiment for me this year to follow this chronicle through my emergence from the closet as a writer, being braver about making these ideas into art.

[marylorson-blog]

Big Storm: hold steady, now...

[marylorson-blog]

The Big Count-Up, (reproduced from FB)

Here's the collection of FB posts I created in advance of my milestone birthday.  Not-shockingly, the festive anticipation of the event has yielded to a certain queasy mid-life mystification, but I have a pretty iron-clad disappointment shield: as long as I'm cancer-free, I'm pretty happy.  What's next? I'm polishing the screenplay to Freak Baby and the Kill Thought, working on my TV script Old School, writing the music for Becky Lane's web-series The Chanticleer. Plus teaching every day, buying and renovating a house and studio, and keeping up with my son.

+Installment 1: Friends, what's on my mind is this: it's T-minus-ten days to a major life milestone birthday (I'm working up to typing the number, but you do the math: Kennedy was president). I must have some cat in me! I'm amazed to be reaching this age and feeling so alive, and I'm super-excited to spend my actual birthday playing music in the city of angels. I hope you don't find it untoward, but I thought I'd

 choose 50 (whoops) songs to share from my musical past, moving chronologically from first recordings towards the present and landing on my birthday, where I'll be playing at the Hotel Cafe in LA on 10/6/12, 7:00 p.m. (including a brand-new tune). Don't feel you have to listen to all fifty--but if you like, they'll be there. And if you're in Los Angeles, I hope you'll join me as I gratefully celebrate my wonderful life. 

Let's start with "Beautiful John," the first song for which Madder Rose ever made a video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g_cnPdL38o

#2: Okay dear ones, Song the Second in my march down memory lane... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10fiQA9-3z0"

#3:  Good morning! This is one of my favorite MR projects, setting the Ernest Noyes Brookings poem "The Eiffel Tower" to music. (Thanks, always, to David Greenberger for making this happen, then and now--) Write me if you want the lyrics. One verse sounds like directions--very fun to sing!"

+This would be Number 4 in Mary's Half-Century Countup. We made this video in the environs of Rivington and Ridge, in the old Lower East Side. Time it was, and what a time it was..."

#5: Okay! Back on track here. Madder Rose covers "The Love You Save."  Billy Cote did NOT write this song, but as I go along, I'll be sure to note the ones he did. What Billy DID do on this one was ultra cool talking, shredding guitar when appropriate, and singular head-nodding. We recorded this in the second Studio Red in Philly, over one looooong weekend. Good times. This is number 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FMOaGWmwKc

Song #6 (I know I better pick up the pace here). This great tune was brought in by Matt Verta Ray for Madder Rose to cover. I had never heard it before--it's a great tune. I'm no Irma Thomas, but don't those guitars sound gorgeous? Recorded at Matt's studio on Ridge Street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqNGNkD1edA

#7: Chronology be damned, here's Madder Rose's first single, "Madder Rose," the song which was eventually re-recorded as  "Swim". Billy wrote this song, and it was always fun to play. I sound like I'm about 15 years old. Love them drum sounds.

#8:  "Z" Still in the early-Madder Rose phase of things. I was really more of a b-side writer during the MR days, but this song holds up okay; if you couldn't tell already, this marks the beginning of my deep yet one-sided love affair with Neil Young. (If he ever asked me to sing backup, I would quit my job to do so.)  Recorded at John Keane's cool house-studio in Athens on a day off. I remember Keane protesting a bit about the level and amount of feedback in relation to the lead vocal. Kind of a bedtime track...

Number 9: early loud-soft-loud-soft. This was one of the first songs MR ever played and recorded--always a favorite (as I love sad songs). So vulnerable. Penned by William John Cote, Jr.

Mary's song #10: Billy's sweet anthem to being down, Baby Gets High. Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando do a wonderful live cover of this song. 40 songs to go! But later: it's time to do Saturday things~! Enjoy the day, friends...the next chapter will visit later MR and onward...

#11 Sway: Madder Rose covered this amazing Stones song during one of our Peel Sessions...

+Coming in at number 12....not in terms of rank or chronology, just in terms of my fingers tapping here...and toes...

13: Time marches on! This song was a hit during World War II, sung by Marlene Dietrich, me, and many, many others.

Number 14: I love this weird-o psychedelic R&B song! Found it on a Bobbie Gentry album I bought on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn. Get hip!

Mary's Countup #15: ...and I'll wish all a good night with this gem from Billy Cote's pen. Tomorrow we'll ease through the later MR years...sweet dreams...

#16:  It's Sunday morning! Let's have some religion, in whatever way we feel is true... http://soundcloud.com/marylorson/true-religion

#17: "Altar Boy" appeared on Madder Rose's first album, Bring it Down. True story: when we arrived in England for our first big tour, the label surprised us with a box of honest-to-god LPs. Tears of joy came to my eyes, even after I saw the typo on that iconic Atlantic Records sticker: this song is listed as "Altar Bow." (Alongside "20-Food Red"...) Still, it was fun. It was even more fun when we played it live and Johnny banged on those toms with empty Volvic bottles and the feedback was singing. (PS: It was inspired by Kevin Salem, who evidently did catch fire, literally, while serving as an altar boy.)"

Number 18: "Foolish Ways." We recorded this for the album Panic On, at Water Music in Hoboken. Mark Freegard was producing. I was "between apartments," staying at the Edison Hotel on Main Street -long gone, I'm sure, and an anthropological experience all its own. After we got the last take of this song, I remember walking through a deserted, puddly parking lot to buy some cigarettes, with that fun outro playing over and over and over in my head.

‎#19: "Day In, Day Out" - This Cote Madder Rose song is a dear old friend, so simple but grand too, of a piece with Foolish Ways in the way it just stretches out and takes its time...

‎#20: "Hung Up in You"....so time marches on, Matt Verta Ray moves on to bluesier pastures with Heavy Trash, and Chris Giammalvo joins Madder Rose. What a bass player, what a friend, and what a situation he walked into! We finished the album Tragic Magic, one label boss loved it, then he left...yada, yada. We did our best. This link leads to our appearance (I think it was 1997) on an MTV show called "Oddville"--a misguided attempt at being bizarre. (Look closely: for all the gold paint and weird costumes, none of the show's regulars or guests looks like they're having any fun! But I was thin then so it's okay.) Another great song by Billy.

(Sheesh, did I really commit to this? Yes! I'm turning 50, dammit!) So, #21, "Delight's Pool" by Madder Rose, from Tragic Magic. We'd been making records for a few years by this point, witnessing the industry's workings and wastings first hand, and on a catching-up phone call with my dear buds Adam Lasus and Matt Keating, they mentioned they'd been staying with the owner of Matt's label at the time, Delight Jenkins. "We're having a great time in Cali," they essentially said. "Hanging out, recording, swimming in Delight's pool..." and I thought, "hey..."  No offense was ever intended towards Ms. Jenkins, of course. I just couldn't resist.

‎#22: Float to the Top. We've definitely left indie-rock land behind on this one! 

What's on your mind, world? It's early on Monday morning, October the first. This project has been very helpful for me, in looking positively at the past and hopefully at the future. For that indulgence, I thank whoever's with me on this! A few more Madder Rose songs and then into the next era. 

Song #23:  Madder Rose - You Remember

1998 or so. I had just bought my Fender Rhodes from Ted Oberhaus (for a song, as it were: thank you, Ted!) and copped a Stevie Wonder progression for this one. And did I ever swallow my gum when I heard it in my favorite television show of all time. (It's about 30 minutes into the penultimate episode, as background music in the Badabing. Somebody's murder is being plotted and a naked girl with implants is writhing around a pole, and you hear...us!)

Song #24: Madder Rose - Overflow from Hello June Fool. The dudes had fun putting sounds into this one, and somewhere along the line I got confident as a singer, I guess...Cooking Vinyl had put out the ex-US version of "Tragic Magic," and this album was our first full production with them. I believe Billy and I co-wrote this one?

‎#26. Madder Rose - Hotel On this one, and the next, you can really hear the solid band Madder Rose had become: Billy, Me, Chris, and Johnny/Rick. We'd been having fun with studio stuff (remember all the technology that exploded during the late 90's) but we also worked hard on the road, and this song shows, I think, that we were seasoned in both arenas. Plus it's a great song by Billy Cote. It's on our last album, but the work was a proud moment for us personally, and on this song, you can hear that we were still enjoying ourselves.

‎#27: Madder Rose - Goodbye June Fool. I think I'll leave Madder Rose with this track. For one thing, it brings us full circle, since while it was on our final album, it was one of the first Billy songs I ever heard and sang, rightfully revived. You can hear the old MR flavor: Billy Cote's wistful downtown story, tuneful and ballsy. (Stomp on that Rat!) The Madder Rose years weren't always pretty, and I know (now) I was a goddamn pill a lot of the time, but for what it's worth, there was a lot of love there too, amongst all of us (that includes you, Matt Verta Ray), shared and spread amongst the amazing people we knew and worked with along the way (Steve Yegelwel, Greg Spotts, Kath Berclaz, Martin Goldschmidt, Matt Butcher, Barry Everitt, to name a scant few). Thank you Billy, Johnny, Chris, and Matt, for putting up with me and for teaching me more than you'll ever know.

Here's #28, actually: Anywhere - Saint Low. I wanted to sound like Morphine on estrogen. (I know: ? But that's kind of what I was thinking. It's never so much about hitting the mark but giving it a go...)

#29, Saint Low - Johnson City There's one in Tennessee, too; my cousin lives near there. Ahhh, the sound of Electric Wilburland (again: did I mention that that's where "Hello June Fool" got its gorgeous tenor?). The gentlemen you hear singing with me are Eric Ott, Chris Gray, and Hank Roberts: that is, of course Richie Stearns on banjo.

‎#30 Saint Low Crash...my sister Jennie Stearns sang sweet harmonies on the first Saint Low album. Here she adds her gorgeous voice to "Crash," a song about regretting hurting someone's feelings by telling them the truth.

#31: Saint Low - Tall Trees 'Morning again, friends, and I repeat my gratitude at your indulgence. This project is like hubris meets therapy! So thanks, and don't think less of me if I'm annoying you; it'll be over in less than a week. I'm thinking about Saint Low now, and what comes to mind first of all is how bewitched I was by Wingnut when I first saw them at the Rongo, how streamlined and connected to each other they were (and are) when they play. I was thrilled when Mike and Zaun agreed to play with me (I was sad when Stahl moved on between the first and second albums but Walt stepped right in to the bass position, thereby completing the Wingnut/Saint Low connection). With all personnel, it was an amazingly supportive and committed band. The first two years we rehearsed on Monday mornings, a half-hour up the lake, and everybody made it. It was a hugely important time for me as an artist, to be the one at the helm for the first time, to put more and better effort into my songwriting, to hear a band differently than the only band I'd heretofore known. Amazing musicians, all. This is #31, Tall Trees, a lament about Ted Kaszinski. Richie Stearns and Billy Cote are featured here, doing what they do so well.

#32 for your listening (hopefully) pleasure: http://soundcloud.com/marylorson/saint-low-keep-an-open-mind. I love, love, love Mike Stark's artistry on this one, and Hank Roberts' cello makes the perfect punctuation. Jennie Lowe Stearns sings those chorus harmonies so sweetly.

#33: Saint Low - Walk On By Okay, we'll be leaving the first Saint Low album behind with Walk On By. This sad song is a true story, unfortunately. I loved my dad very much, and he loved me too, but he wasn't always able to take care of me. I used to use this story as an angry anecdote about what a jerk he was, but after we reconciled I could see the anger as sadness, which I think is better. Then I wrote this song, in Jan Quarles' house while she was in Boston one winter and had asked me to water her plants. My dad was definitely in the audience a bunch of times when I played this, and I would cringe a little, but we never talked about it. He understood the healing power of music.

Song #34, Mary Lorson & Saint Low - Friends, I Have Been Drinking from Tricks for Dawn, which Cooking Vinyl put out in 2002. 

In the fall of 2000, I got to tour Europe for two and a half months with the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Robert Fisher's ever-evolving brainchild of a musicfest. I had voted for Al Gore via absentee ballot, and will always wonder if it was counted. Otherwise, the trip was a gas: great shows, clubs, cities, and company. I was hired as the opening act and backup singer, so every night I got to play two sets with a great band, plus I had the pleasure of collaborating with amazing guests, including M. Ward, Jess Klein, Kurt Wagner. Mike and Zaun said I came home a completely different piano player, and I'd started a lot of the songs that made up Saint Low's second disc, "Tricks for Dawn." The trip left its scars, but they're in the rearview now, and I still have some great material and memories...

http://soundcloud.com/marylorson/mary-lorson-saint-low-long-way

#35: Top of the morning to you, dear friends. Of course this hike through the musical past has so much that's personal to it, but I'm working to respect and remember all the help I've gotten along the way. If I've overlooked anybody egregiously, please forgive and give me time to make it right. (For instance, Eric Knapp Harvey created the gorgeous image on the cover of the Saint Low debut disc, and Liz Fogarty played the gorgeous harp on "Friends..."!) More aft-remembered thanks are definitely on the way... 

But onward we dance with song #35,"Long Way Down" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ5l0l9u6Ng

I played this at an art gallery in San Luis Obispo this past July, and this neat woman very kindly told me it was convoluted. I can definitely see what she meant! But I like it anyway.  Walt Lorenzut had masterfully taken the bass position in Saint Low by this time, and Joe Myer was joined on strings by Judy Hyman and Karen Bergman. Mike Stark was in incredible form! As was Zaun Marshburn on the skins. The guest vocalist on the choruses is none other than Evan Dando, who was playing a Cornell gig booked by Mike Barry. Mike hired me and Billy to play as opener, so I roped Dando into contributing this vocal and he stayed with us for the weekend. It took the whole weekend to get it, but Evan contributed a gorgeous ragged harmony (so...him) and I smile whenever I hear it. What's not on tape is Mr. Lemonhead waking us up at 7:00 a.m. by strolling into our room strumming Billy's acoustic guitar and singing a Sinatra song.

#36: "Strange Gift," also from "Tricks for Dawn." Robert Haines chose this song to accompany his stunning photographs. I hope you enjoy both! Every album has one of those songs that kind of gets left for last in the production process, either because it's not high on the priority list, or because for one reason or another I'm not sure how best to put the track together....this song was one of those. The band had recorded the basics along with everything else, but most of the overdubs were done in a rush one afternoon right before mixing, rummaging through the toolbox (note the multiple vocal tracks; when in doubt, add a fifth harmony!). Matt Morano had loaned us a melodica, which helped too.

#37: Blast Off http://youtu.be/Hq7uwcgUt5k

I don't really expect anyone to be checking this now with the debate on, but I think I can listen and continue my review (revue?)....so here's Song #37 in Mary's count up: "Blast Off" from Tricks for Dawn. 

I started this song near the end of that long 2002 Europe tour; for some reason, I remember that the chord progression came to me in my Manchester hotel room, before the gig. I loved that trip: playing every night, traveling--lots of laughs, lots of friends, lots of music. I suppose it made me greedy. I'd had various dates added to the end of the Willard Grant trip, but eventually there were no more gigs, and I headed home. 

London to Ithaca can be a long trip. I remember starting out on a balmy British morning with a laughing Jamaican cabbie, landing in single-digit Boston eight hours later, crashing with friends for a night before boarding the 12-hour Amtrak from Boston to Syracuse. Ever take that trip in December? Ever watch "Dr. Zhivago"? ....hour after hour of snowy lunar emptiness, still, cold, sad. Silent. Yes, beautiful, but after such a lively time, the stillness of New York winter put me into a sort of shock. This song is a photograph of that.

#38? I think I lost track...

‎...picking up where I left off, with a disconcerting Presidential debate in between.... I was down, remember? The story resumes in December 2000, just after the coup-d'etat-we-do-not-speak-its-name (shall we have longer-than-short memories and take heed now?). I returned to regular life and started reconfiguring and writing again. I wrote this song --as an apology, an invitation, a celebration, 

an invocation--at Myer Farm, on Chris Sturr's fabulous 9-foot grand piano with the cracked soundboard. Saint Low played it w/Cote adding guitar and Jennie Stearns contributing backing vox; Paul Q. Kolderie mixed it, pro bono, generously. It has both good and bad implications, all depending on the spell. To quote Pat Smear, I love everybody (but not you, Mr. Romney). #39: Anything Can Happen http://youtu.be/5LTtLjKGGg4

‎#39, "Che," from the album Piano Creeps, by BC and ML. So I had the funnest (okay: most fun) pregnancy ever. One day I'd like to make a wacky comedy about it, starring a plucky young actress in a role where someone with the right attitude can take on practically anything. The highs and lows were brilliant: I toured the UK with Tanya Donelly, played SXSW, gained, lost, and gained more than a few jobs (of laughable stripes, some)...there's much more, but I'll save the details for the flick. 

One of the many interesting things I did during gestation was to mix and release Tricks for Dawn, and to create this album with Billy Cote. We'd begun to get our feet wet in film music, and collected some of those pieces, added some others, and put together this mostly-instrumental project disc, which Cooking Vinyl put out in 2003. This track, "Che," features Clint Swank in the swanky 60s-Brazilian guitar role.

‎#40: "E Guitar" The geek in me tends to remember things in terms of the gear (=toys) involved sometimes. This song, E Guitar, is from Billy's and my 2003 disc Piano Creeps. We'd been doing some film music, and wanted to do more, and so we assembled this mostly-instrumental project. The E guitar is a sweet old 3/4 Melody Maker, given to me by Matt Verta Ray ages back when I didn't own a guitar (t

rue: the first year of MR touring, I played borrowed guitars). It's even gold-colored, and weather-beaten; I love this thing. At some point I put into an open-E, and since then it's been called the E-guitar. The drum sounds at the top and end of the track were taken off of a goofball drum machine that came attached to my gorgeous Lowry organ (now residing at Electric Wilburland), bought at a Trumansburg garage sale for fifty bucks. Okay, geek-wise, that's all I've got; Billy did the rest of the work.

"#41: The esteemed theater director Sam Gold was young once too (perhaps he still is), and did his undergrad work at Cornell. His senior thesis film was a keen absurdist revel called "Two Left Shoes," and Billy and I made the music for it. This piece, "Old Man Dance," was created a scene in which a spry elderly gentleman, wearing a magician's duncecap and other fun regalia, busts some moves. Wish I had the footage; here's the tune. That's Joe Myer on the violin. http://youtu.be/4KjbxOoSc9c

#42: "Lonely Boy"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RRZE0sph6I

Mary's count-up moves on--I'm in the forties, and on this, the last day of my forties, I will be traveling to Los Angeles to connect with dear friends, play some music, and ring in the next decade. The last one has been, shall we say full? I'm so happy to be here. In late 2003, Elliot Smith died. I never met him but, like many, felt truly touched by his work. The week he died felt and was dark: about four days later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Roman was 15 months old. The world was spinning, but I had an amazing family and friends to support and help me, (plus I had health insurance). The time was filled with fear, mainly, but some hope, and I think both come through in the songs. This song, #42 is just about Elliot Smith, as I imagined him, things I wished I could have expressed to him. If anyone reading this knew the actual man, I hope you'll forgive my conceit.

‎"Lonely Boy" was #42. Let's ride the melancholy/wistful tide into #43, "Ties That Bind." I hope the song speaks for itself.  My amazing son is now 10 years old and smarter than me, and I cherish every day with him.

‎#43: "Spider" from 2005's Realistic. I liked this song but couldn't figure out what to do with it, how to put the track together. Of course my homegirl Kathy Ziegler knew exactly what to do, so I put her at the helm. She made it beautiful."

I'm learning to count at this late date! #45 will be "Serenade," also from Realistic. This recording makes me very happy. The image of 15 friends singing so beautifully in the living room at Planet Pleasant Grove will be with me forever! But it's a bitter song, born of the disenchantment from years of dishonest, profiteering, heedless leadership. I hope never to feel inspired in that way again.

#46: The Piano Creeps: "He Likes the Light."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_NLG1RS5oE

Happy Birthday to me! I am so lucky and grateful to my friends and family.  Best birthday gift of all: Mr. Roman Cosmo Cote. This song is about him.

#47. Mancub, from ML & and the Soubrettes BurnBabyBurn. Roman chose the title for this song, after we'd just watched The Jungle Book and I played the bass bit on the piano. OOooo, I wanna be just like you. Shorter posts today, as we rehearse for tonight's gig. Sending love to everyone. We'll reach #50 by the time we go onstage.

Okay--time's a wasting! Here's #48, along with Becky Lane's gorgeous video. "Lately." xx

This is #49, "Crystal Ball," from the Soubrettes album BurnBabyBurn. Recent posts have gotten briefer, but I can't let this project wind down without acknowledging and thanking Mrs. and Mrs. Leah Houghtaling and Amelia Sauter, whose encouragement and support and voices complete the Soubrettes. They are treasured collaborators and friends. Also on this track is Joe Novelli, lap steel player extraordinare. Nani Nehring Bliss made the gorgeous artwork for this disc.

Mary Lorson & the Soubrettes Crystal Ball

..Well, I gave myself a one-day extension on the deadline, since I was so busy having a blast on my birthday! Thank you to everyone who came to the Hotel Cafe last night, and to Rosa, Jake, and Kirk, for adding their talents to the music! 

Installment #50:Okay, friends and loved ones, I end this birthday project with a song that's not the newest but which expresses the way I feel right now. #50 for Mary at 50, "These Days, " from Tricks for Dawn. Okay, friends and loved ones, I end this birthday project with a song that's not the newest but which expresses the way I feel right now. #50 for Mary at 50, "These Days, " from Tricks for Dawn.

I wrote this song about ten years ago, home with newborn Roman bundled at the end of the bed while I played the guitar. It was a time of awed contentment. I'm as susceptible as anyone to the myriad intrigues and insecurities and energy-sucking distractions of life, but I feel now the way I did when this song came out. 

Here we are. Who knows what's coming down the pike? But now is good, and I'm so grateful. Thanks for all the birthday wishes! And for allowing me to do this. The journey continues.

Mary Lorson & Saint Low - These Days

From "Realistic" (2005), Mary Lorson & Saint Low's third disc.

Guest singer: Matt Keating. Mandolin: Gary Siperko.

[marylorson-blog]

Artists on Albums: Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark

(This piece appeared in the "Artists on Albums" column of the site Delusions of Adequacy)

Mary Lorson on…Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark (Asylum Records, 1974)

iTunes classifies this album as ‘country and folk’ and my first response is to choke! What? How clueless can you… but does it matter? Any country and folk tones on this album are just accents, window dressing; the spines of these songs are rock and jazz. Citified, certified LA jazz-rock, circa 1974. Cool.

It wasn’t my first record. Number One was an 8-track of the Jackson Five’s Greatest Hits. Number Two: some Partridge Family album. But then Court and Spark arrived, the same year as Endless Summer, right between There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.  Not my first album, but – for what it’s worth - definitely my first album entirely conceived by a woman.  It was hard to sing to but we all did anyway.

I was 12 and my sister Joni (yes, re-spelled from Joanie, after Blue came out) bought it, probably at the Korvettes just over the Bronx border.  My three sisters were much older, pretty hippies always out, anywhere but the apartment.  Home alone, I’d try on their clothes and makeup, read their paltry diary entries, peruse their top drawers (stray earrings, joints, birth control pills), and play their records more attentively than they themselves ever did. I found Court and Spark and through it eavesdropped on a sophisticated adult life, memorized it, never let it go.  Sister Joni didn’t love that one; maybe she’d been too steeped in For The Roses and Blue by that point and the new jazziness turned her off.  For whatever reason, she abandoned it; her name may be in high school Bic pen on the label, but my own sixth-grade initials are block-lettered on the front cover.  Last month, my son found it in the attic at his dad’s house and brought it to me, presenting it like a gift.

Peach-colored fold-out LP cover, not glossy, with raised painting in the middle - by the artist - and a beautiful screen print of Joni’s stunning visage on the inside.  How lost I got holding this cover while the record played, reading and re-reading the lyrics and credits (not knowing then who Robbie Robertson was), listening to Side 1, then Side 2, then Side 1 again. Complex melodies and harmonies, LA-classy drums and bass and Rhodes, emotive jazz piano chords, perfect electric guitar responses, mysterious affected woodwinds, the coolest open tunings, unexpected changes and embellishments… all the different parts perfect together forever. This collection’s musical depth supports the lyrical revelations of an articulate, self-involved, confused and power-hungry adult woman’s wonder at the world.

It was also, clearly, about her mystification with the men in her life, but I didn’t think about that at the time.  I just ‘got’ it.  My dad was gone and I mooned like a dumped girlfriend, soaking up Joni’s one-sided wonderings about the guy’s inability to deliver, to love, to show up as planned (waiting for his car on the hill).  My dad lived on the other side of town with his new family but didn’t visit me; he was always and never there.  Joni understood this: It’s down to you, constant stranger.  But she spiked her sadness with humor, and soupy Andrews Sisters harmonies, and insightful smart bitch lyrics with interesting ideas.  She didn’t just feel sorry for herself; she celebrated freedom, and I latched on to that too. I became a writer, and I mimicked her, and eventually became my own self creatively, and I’m still looking at life from that angle.

The album is a real whole, sequenced and self-referencing and magical:

“Court And Spark” straight to the serious business from the top, gorgeous dark piano figures, up-front voice here to confess while dancing up a river in the dark, sweeping syncopated breaks, then major-influenced openings of insight and perhaps comfort, then…I cleared myself I sacrificed my blues and you could complete me, I completed you… but I couldn’t let go of LA… an end but not a resolution…

Things pick up with “Help Me,” sexy, catchy-sounding (but you try to play it), strange wind pulses, didn’t it feel good? Of course it did, until we remember: we love our loving, but not like we love our freedom…

Sometimes that freedom is in the past, and can only be reminisced about, as in “Free Man In Paris,” a self-reflexive pop song about what goes on behind pop songs.  This is, for my money, one of the headiest singles ever, not just about the record business but about the people it chews up and spits out, even those on the winning side; a girl-on-the-wall’s view of the titan Albert Grossman, not from the perspective of the girl crying with her makeup running down. No; Joni’s mostly interested in the lament of her friend The Powerman, sharing a perspective with with him, of all people, and all in 3:03, and then the suite of music leads to the next hotel room, the same night, the same people,  from a different angle. “People's Parties” with its silken open-tunings, lovely and treacherous, a perfect meditation on how the 13-year-old in all of us feels from the corner of the party me in my frightened silence thinking I don’t understand.  She was probably road-weary when she wrote I’m just tripping on nerves and feelings with a weak and a lazy mind (talk to a musician who’s been on the road for a couple of years and they’ll confirm that that about says it) but she’s stuck in it and trying, laughing it all awayuntil the seamless segue into the melancholy but groovy “Same Situation” finds us still later in the night when it’s just the two of you in the hotel room, and one of you is silently praying; send me somebody who’s strong and somewhat sincere.

The setting changes for “Car On A Hill” and Joni takes on another role, the could-be-anygirl waiting for the guy who isn’t coming (this time he’s Jackson Browne, who evidently courted and sparked and then went away), and the dramatic tonal punctuation, insistent changes, nagging, wailing, and lamenting wheedle you into the album’s soul/centerpiece, “Down to You,” a bitterly clear-eyed inventory of inevitable sadnesses… love is gone…written on your spirit this sad song…love is gone… and then the gorgeous surprise of the album, a transcendent, transporting orchestral rite of passage that suggests a world of other possibilities for Mitchell and her music, for life on earth, a piece of music that brings us to places pop records don’t often go anymore (thank goodness for Joanna Newsom!).  “Just Like This Train” brings us back to the fun of everyday life in a world full of things to look at, toggling between the interior and the exterior in a more balanced way. I can’t find my goodness because I lost my heart but still kids got Cokes and chocolate bars, and the station master’s cutting cards. She sadly wonders; what are you gonna do now you got no one to give your love to? But you get the feeling she’ll be fine; she’s gonna have a nice ride on the train, taking notes on everything.  The uber-fey “Raised On Robbery” may be just a silly character sketch but perhaps it’s necessary fresh air before “Trouble Child,” Mitchell’s menacing ode to her mental patient self, fragmented and numb but always seeing, even under the thumb of the maid, seeingbeauty in ugly things; trouble child breaking like the waves at Malibu. But always such sad conclusions; why does it come as such a shock to know that you really have no-one? Always such sad conclusions…

...soon a lift into cool wind breaks, leading to final goofball doffing of the jazz hat with “Twisted” - the disc’s only cover - a hard song to sing but maybe the most accessible to pre-adolescent me.  They say as a child I appeared a little bit wild with all my crazy ideas…that one spoke to me too.

In 1974 I didn’t know what an eclectic, genre-challenging timepiece of a gold record this was.  I didn’t know I’d end up playing and pursuing a life in music or that my hippie sister would become a lawyer.  I didn’t read Rolling Stone or know anything about the music business.  I just found a record in my sister’s room, and played it over and over and over until it became one element in the periodic chart of my understandings of music and life.  To me, this record taught me and reminds me that life’s disappointments are interesting, and are met inversely with an intrinsic, wondrous beauty.

[marylorson-blog]

Jane 1966 (circa 1998); my "Sally Draper" story

   It was getting dark and Pamela Byrne's dinner was almost ready.   Of all days, the kid's mother was late; hardly unusual, but excruciating this time because it felt like the last time.  It will be the last time, Pam willed inside herself, thinking that she ought to feel happier. After all,  this once, her smile would be genuine at the sight of Carol Watson, late and more likely stinking of liquor through perfume,  too vivid with makeup.  Pam dried her hands on her apron and peeked into the living room.  Jim was opening a beer and settling in for the news.

"Where is she?"

"Still in the laundry, Pam."

They raised eyebrows.  Pam returned to the kitchen.

"I just want her gone."  Her voice bounced off the sink.

Jim was exhausted.  As the superintendent of the apartment complex,  his work kept him constantly on his feet,  and though he stopped home for coffee frequently he resented being dragged to and fro by the demands of these flimsy and overburdened structures.  "Fucking matchstick houses they built!" he erupted often, encountering the consistently lowgrade materials and undisciplined methods the builders had used: toilets that backed up after two years of normal use, weak hinges in soft wood,  viscous grout escaping from between bathroom tiles, doorknobs snapping off,  windows offtrack.  And roaches.  He shook his head but the exasperation clung.  The television news ended,  the day replayed itself in his mind,   and Jim wondered again how he had fallen to such distasteful circumstances.

                                                                                                      Two years earlier he'd owned his own auto repair shop, could afford the mortgage and the kid's Catholic school, and then an old and nearly-forgotten debt got called in.  I don't need all of it tomorrow, the guy says, just start paying me, okay?  But Jim feels confident, a little ashamed of being beholden to another man when his life is going so well.  No, says Jim, I can pay the whole thing, clean this up once and for all, business has been good, it's been nagging at me.  Eight thousand bucks,  and all of a sudden business, which had been steady, began to slow down, and then the IRS was after him... next thing you know, you've got nothing, after all that fucking work.  One year things looked good, not very long ago, the business and the house were his... but ownership is not permanent (though the word implies it) and Jim learned this as he witnessed the the whir of losses, the parade of his favorite things in life leaving him:  house, Mustang, the girl he would visit, his wife's summer rental. During this period he was disoriented, had lost his sense of direction, and could only be steered by the sound of Pam's practical, modulated voice.  She had talked him through the eye of the hurricane, staying with him unflinchingly, uncomplainingly despite her own fears.  Oh, that was a terrible time-- his mother's weeping recriminations (the only-ever tentative approval she'd offered him now withdrawn); Caroline's tears on their last visit together, the feel of her fingers on his back; the memory of Pam's smiles as she opened gifts of jewelry, and the resignation with which she  took them to 138th St. for pawn.  Pride, respect, sex, a little bit of power in the neighborhood, all lost, as this and that possession, friendship, privilege was taken away or sold for way less than it was worth.  In reflection he could recognize the signs of Pam's own distress (her silence, her glazed countenance) but at the time he'd been unable to perceive anything but the resounding drone of his own failure.

The experience brought deeper thoughts to the mind of a man who had been spoiled, self-important, not always polite to his wife, a person who had been lucky and somehow thought good fortune proved his worth.  He started to question things, as he started to pay attention to the evening news and to interpret his role in the larger world of humanity. We are tithed to our government, Jim considered while licking the stamp on the IRS envelope, a government which kills people based on their religion or (as currently) their lack of it...which hardly seems in keeping with the whole freedom thing.  What happened to thou shalt not kill, to the inalienable rights? he pondered,  empathy new and thrilling to him.   I'd rather give my money to the church, Jim realized, the one organization sure to act in accordance with my beliefs, sure to use it for good. Jim had always been showily generous to the church but now, though he gave less, meant it more than he did in the old days.  He felt proud when Father Caruso greeted him as warmly as ever; even though they didn't get to St. Catherine's every week anymore, the man smiled at him with compassion and respect.  A beautiful thing, Jim mused.   Father Caruso and Pam: the two people on earth whose treatment of him had not changed now that he was poor.

He had hated taking Thomas out of St. Catherine's--he winced now, in front of the television, at the thought of it.  But Pam had a levelheaded view of their financial recovery: it would take time and it would take sacrifice.  This current situation, as dingy as it was, had practical advantages: the rent and utilities were free, and there was no transportation cost.  Though the Byrnes had never wanted to live in Westchester,  it was universally acknowleged that the public schools were more respected and safer.  So they left the Bronx neighborhood where they'd both grown up and moved six miles north,  a universe away.  Leaving the brownstone they'd loved, they moved into the Country Club Garden Apartments in Larchmont to begin life over together, their family unity remembered and strengthened.  The superintendent's basement apartment was dark but sprawling,  large enough for Pam to take in  kids during the day. The plan was for Pam's income to cover the groceries and the phone bill with Jim's salary destined for the IRS; in four years they should be able to get rid of the debt and move on with their lives.  Jim took in auto repairs, which he performed on the weekend --this enterprise started slowly but would pick up, Pam assured him, as his reputation as a reliable local man developed.  Pam's business floundered  floundered from the start, despite her conscientiousness --the basement was too damp for little lungs, said one tennis-skirted  matron--all of 24;  there ought to be more light, said another, and don't you have a piano?  Pam took offense-- she fed the children fruit and milk, took them for walks, read to them, did coloring and finger painting, even had plans to take them to the Bronx Zoo during the warm weather-- after all, she was just getting started.  But the other parents weren't impressed with these offerings, and Pam would certainly not stoop to begging these snobs.  After eight months, her only lasting customer was this strange little Watson girl, who always looked filthy and today had shown that the condition was more than skin deep.

***

Jim sighed.

Pam was overwrought, disgusted; he wondered what she'd say?  A scene was coming, an uncomfortable scene with that Watson dame, broker than we are but what an attitude about her, the overblown dignity of the fallen and dishonored.  (Do I act like that? Jim checked himself.)  Once a Larchmont housewife with help, this lady had crammed her four brats and herself into a two bedroom apartment.

 "Five of them in four rooms!" Pam exclaimed with sympathy.  "How do they fit?"  Jim had been there to fix a leak in the ceiling; there were three single beds in one room and a double bed in the other. 

 "That can't be easy,"  Pam sighed.  She'd heard that the girls' father,  Bob Watson, had just taken off, just split in the night, probably to be with another woman.  Jim wondered if the Watson wife had always been such a drunk, such a phony. Who knows what she was like when she was happy, said Pam, and Jim considered that, to be fair.  She probably never worked a day in her life before the husband left, she was probably somewhat comfortable before.  Now she's got a whole family to take care of all by herself,  and can't keep up.  Late with the rent,  Jim reminded her, late to get her kid, more often than not sending one of the older ones,  one or another of this Jane's sisters, who were admittedly friendly but not much better-groomed.  Mrs. Watson was often seen staggering and slurring at night, stiffly trying to conceal the effects of vodka.  In her judgment Pam concluded that while Mrs. Watson was probably enduring a terrible time with the dissolution of her marriage, it certainly didn't give her license to neglect her children or her responsibilities.  If money was tight, how and why did she manage to get drunk five nights a week? It's no surprise those children were headed for trouble; she'd seen the oldest one smoking a cigarette in the parking lot.  Pam peeked around the doorway again, as if little Jane was a snake or a bat.  "Where's Thomas?" she asked, and Jim pointed to the spot next to him on the couch, where their 6-year-old sat, still not as tall as the couch back.

"Lord, where is she? Or where's the other girl? Today of all days they couldn't get it right?"  Thinking of Jane again, she shook.  Where does a small child --a four year old girl--learn such a thing?  Pam, who believed firmly in the concept of original sin, tried to find forgiveness and understanding but knew it would be impossible until the child was out of contact with her own family.  That child could no longer have any contact with Thomas--an inherently good child, to be sure, but of course, male and suceptible.  The way they are.  You can forgive them.  They get corrupted by bad women and it's decided before birth, the goodness or badness of a woman.  Some females are just bad.   Modestly Pam  reminded herself that she considered herself a good woman.  With this gift came tremendous responsibility, to be kind, to be fair.  To be forgiving.   She would have to try harder.

Jim, thinking of forgiveness on the couch, considered his own good fortune in Pam's pardoning of his sins.   She knew it all, every detail of the past, (the unclean money practices and the affairs) and she had not given up, had not deserted him to carry on his life pretending that he'd done no wrong, to be alone with his lies.  No, Pam knew his failings, and truly loved Jim anyway.   This was her power, it was Jim's eternal debt, impossible to pay in kind because he had neither the patience nor the heart that Pam had.  He didn't deserve her, some might say, but Pam took the marriage vow to heart and would be his wife until they left this earth.  He had hurt her and still they were family.   "None of us is perfect," she liked to say, but she hadn't said it today, Jim noticed. "Can I have another beer, Pam? Wouldja  mind?"  and of course she brought it, not like a servant but like someone who enjoyed doing thoughtful things for others. He opened the beer and drank deeply.  His brain and conscience were heavily burdened with these developments, a seesaw upon which a medicine ball kept rolling back and forth, back and forth. The kid hadn't hurt anyone.  It was just, well, indecent and strange, unacceptable, but not criminal.  He looked over at Thomas, who at five accepted what he saw and didn't know it was wrong until his parents told him so.  It had been this innocent's trust that led him to join the girl in the activity at which Pam had found them together in the laundry room, the girl holding herself against the edge of the folding counter, pelvis undulating against the edge, Thomas trying vainly to achieve the same effect.  "No, like this," she'd heard Jane correct him.  When Pam entered the laundry room the kids were chatting in the same tranquil tones they might use while building sand castles.  "Try it this way. It feels good," said little Jane, turning around and cupping her hand between her legs.  Thomas had begun to comply when Pam entered and then froze.                   

"Thomas,"  Pam had said as if she were walking through the lair of a tiger. "You come with me now and have your bath."  Obediently the boy joined his mother.  Mother and son left,  Pam's responsibility for Jane dropping like a key to hell, from the devil's pants onto the crumbling laundry room floor. They left and Jane resumed masturbating.

That was at a little after three o'clock. Pam had hunted Jim down in another building and (struggling with the language) told him the story and he calmed her down, saying things like she's just a kid and she doesn't know but inside he was very bothered himself.  This situation was simply another example of his failure as a provider, for they'd never have been exposed to such unseemly things if they hadn't had to leave home.

"What is wrong over there?" Pam had said, the closest to despair he'd seen her in this era of disappointment and loss.  "What kind of people are these? What happened to having decent neighbors, neighbors who were your friends?  Oh, I'm so homesick!"  It was her first confession of sadness, hers kept at bay during the yearlong driving litany of his.  Through the worst of it all, Pam had stayed focused on their survival.  Jim, depressed, had only been able to see the import, the impact on their future, the "reality," as he liked to call the worst possible scenario.  It scared him to see cracks in her armor.  It worried him to have to be the strong one.

"Honey," he embraced her.  "Pam, we'll tell her you can't watch the kid anymore."

"Tell her why?"  wailed Pam, unused to such topics and hating them.

"Not if you don't want to.  You could say you've taken in sewing and don't have the time to watch a kid while focusing on that.  You could say anything."

"But the money."

"Forget the money.  Ten bucks a week? Come on, are we that desperate?"   Pam was silent: they walked the line pretty closely.

A pause.  Pam's compassion rose, like mist on a lawn.  "What'll she do? Who else is there?"

"It's not your problem. If you want to stop watching the kid, you stop.  The End.  It's up to you. I don't want you so upset.  Sit here, relax, think about it. "

"She's still in the laundry?"

"I guess so. "

"We're committed until the end of the day."

"I'll go get her."

Jim found Jane at the bottom of the three stairs leading from the outside into the laundry room.  Unkempt as usual, the child was rocking herself, arms around knees, short little skirt riding up, the  steam from the laundry exhaust trailing into the doorway behind her.  Such a strange-looking kid, thought Jim.  If we had a little girl, I know Pam would let her hair grow a little, put a ribbon in it. This kid, this kid's hair's chopped off, she looks like a boy in a dress.  He wondered if the dress was to remind the world  that this was indeed a female person...but then, the way she ran around and got so dirty, it'd make more sense to put her in jeans. Cover up her scraped knees.

His own image of the scenario Pam had discovered slipped over Jim's mind like an acetate superimposed on real life for a second. A curious freeze frame, not unfamiliar to Jim but not familiar recently either.  His brain went to adolescence, older brothers' and friends' fathers' magazines, to rooftops and stairwells in the Bronx.  He was nostaligic for home, nostalgic for youth, nostalgic for money and nostalgic for sex, confused that what he had had once in himself,  which could certainly be described as normal adolescent exploration, could not be accepted as such in this situation.  But this kid was only four, not fourteen,

He wondered the unspeakable. Someone must have taught this kid how to stimulate herself, someone must have, and his eyes crept to her shamelessly exposed white Carter underpants and, not quickly, crept away.  He remembered being caught with a particular book in the upstairs bathroom when he was 14,  his mother's tears, his shame, the confessions and Hail Marys.  This girl didn't seem to feel shame.  Had no one told her it was wrong to touch herself?  Is that how this kid was being raised?  Had no one noticed?

"Jane," he said finally.  "Want to come in now?

"Is my mother here?"

"No, but she should be here soon.  Come inside and get warm--it's chilly here."

Jane got up and followed Jim distractedly down the damp concrete tunnel to the Byrnes' apartment. The door slammed itself, jarring a gentle murmur from the little boxed bell, and Jim went into the kitchen.  Six-thirty by the clock, and the meatballs smelled good.  His impatience swelled. If they could just sit down to a nice dinner as a family...

"Anyone call?" he asked and Pam shook her head.  She put her arms around him.  "You must be hungry, huh?"

He scowled more than he meant to. "Yeah, but let's wait a little."  They kissed, longer than usual.  In the living room, the kids laughed at a tv show.  "Ha-ha-ha!" bellowed Thomas, exaggerating himself.  Jane, lying on her stomach six inches from the screen, giggled hard, her narrow body shaking gently on the shag.  Pam leaned in the doorway, eyes like a detective, a psychologist, any seeker of clues to a human mystery....and she saw it (she thought), the beginnings of another episode.  Yes, Lord, the little girl shook herself silly with laughter, her pelvis remembered the floor, and Pam could see the beginnings of rhythm...incredible.  Right there in front of everyone. 

"Jane."

"Yes?"

"Do you want to have dinner with us tonight?"

"Can I?"

Pam shrugged at Jim and began to set the table.  "Okay.  But Jane, why don't you sit in the easy chair, and get up off the floor?"

The girl complied almost sweetly, climbing up and even smoothing her dress, enjoying the faux-leather recliner cushion.

Thomas bragged about how much he planned to eat while Jim helped Pam with the pasta, deciding that she was probably the kindest woman on earth--as usual, he would follow her cue.  Just as the pasta was finished, a low knock came on the front door.  Thomas answered it and found Jane's chubby sister Candy.

"Where's the little brat?" said Candy pleasantly.

Pam approached her. "Candy, where's your mother? Why didn't she call?"

"I don't know."

"But I expected someone to pick Jane up over an hour ago."

"I don't know. Sorry."

"Tell your mother to come talk to me when she can, alright?"

"Okay. Let's go, Brat."

 "I was gonna have dinner here."

"Well, you're coming home with me now."

Jane, not a complainer, deflated and followed her sister out of the apartment.  "'Bye."  Moments after the door closed the Byrnes, gathered at their kitchen table, could see the knees and calves of the Watson girls, one before the other, and hear their tired young voices as they headed across the way.

"Is Mom home?"

"No."

"Where is she?"

"Out."

The sun had set completely, and the Byrnes' apartment was not alone in being dark.

Jim Byrne joined hands with his wife and son, said a prayer of thanks.  Pam thought of calling after the girls, but there were two more of them at home...and it all seemed so disorganized...she'd decide about Jane later.  Thomas, beautifully unaware, gleamed at his father and mother before digging in. 

(1998)

[marylorson-blog]

A work in progress

  In the woods:  Somewhere in the middle of a work-in-progress

            I get lots of ideas for projects.  As with so many endeavors, the materials are cheap, but it’s the labor that’s costly.  For me, not everything gets finished, but I collect the ideas, and they have life spans, unique to each, captivating me until they’re finished or abandoned. This little offering I have for you today is about being in the middle of a project I love, specifically about the consciousness of being absorbed and fascinated with something and then realizing that excitement and commitment have morphed into listless wandering confusion. This effort, if you don’t mind, consists of me talking myself through this period of being lost in the woods of my own making. I’ve been here before and I know I’ll work through it, but it’s never comfortable to realize you’ve lost the map.  Thank you for your indulgence. I think writing this has helped.

            A little backstory: I was coping with an illness and read a memoir by someone who had been through the same thing. The author advised connecting with one’s ancestors as a means to promote healing.  I thought: ridiculous. None of my ancestors know a single thing about the life I have lived. They were shut-ins, seamstresses, Catholics, from Queens.  I’m not like them. Then one day my mother casually mentioned that during vaudeville her grandmother had been on the road with a famous performer named Eva Tanguay.  I’d never really thought about vaudeville—it seemed hokey and corny. I’d never heard of Tanguay but the little history available confirmed she was a huge deal in her day.  As I learned more about that time, a fascination with vaudeville sank in: there was no TV then, no radio, no movies, NO media but sheet music.  The performers lived on the road, taking the train everywhere; they must have been badass!  I wanted to read more, and found just enough to get me hooked. This Eva Tanguay had a Dickensian childhood and lived a long, raucous, colorful life on the road, and my great-grandmother worked for her, was close to her, witnessed it. 

            I had a really famous performer friend once—super famous at the time. Going anywhere with her instantly conferred a new status upon me. We weren’t true soulmates, just amiable running mates for a time, because we both liked to do bad things and I was fearless and organized and she was not. I liked the conversations we had about culture and books and the big picture.  Like Tanguay, she was a powerful person and yet she was a baby too and needed a minder.  Like my great-grandmother, I functioned in that role during one short season and I think that some of the things I learned and observed from her could be helpful to me in this work.  But I don’t want my play or film to be about that, a peek at the really famous. I want it to be about her experience. This is a split endeavour, because the bizarre facts are knowable, but what she felt, thought, wanted can only be inferred. This is what has hung me up for the past two years: there are the facts, and all the spaces in between.  

            Here are the facts along with  some of the questions they beg (perhaps Terri Gross might interview Eva thusly):

            You were a little girl when your father, an alcoholic physician, died and left your family impoverished. Not long after that, you entered a talent contest at Parsons Hall in Holyoke, wearing a dress you made out of an umbrella. You appealed to the good nature and charity of the people in the audience, you sang a song, and won a dollar. You were encouraged. After that, you started hanging around the stage doors of the Holyoke theaters and persuaded Francesca Redding to hire you as a touring performer. You started working full-time when you were ten, supporting your family.  You played all the kid parts, girl and boy. Did you ever regret that you didn’t have a more stable childhood? What kind of adult did this make you?

              You fell in love with a songwriter. He broke up with you, and fell in love with your niece, Lillian, daughter of your sister Blanche, a dipsomaniac who married four times. The songwriter married Lillian the day after she turned 18. You sang his songs your whole life long. Did you ever get over that?

              Your other niece, Florence, was quite possibly your secret daughter, though you never admitted it. Evidence: her birth-date is recorded inconsistently on the records, you begged off a prominent tour, citing “exhaustion” right at the time when Florence was feasibly born. Florenceshe was raised for a time with your mean brother Mark, whose wife gave birth to another “daughter” very very close in age to Florence (ie: his wife definitely did not give birth to Florence). Then for some reason you took her from there and supported her in a big mansion by herself with just two distant relatives to care for her. You sent her to private school, and sometimes you brought her to New York to stay with you for months. You didn’t do this with any of your other nieces. Who was Florence really? Did something bad happen to you? The songwriter wrote a song for you, called “If I Were Mother Eve Instead of Eva.”  Did he know the truth about Florence?

              Some nice devoted guys wanted you, but you mistreated them.  You fell for the mean or unavailable men. Some of your boyfriends were thieves, one guys pulled a gun on someone over a window dispute on a trains, some stole from you, another hurt you physically. You were engaged to your devoted manager one year but that fell apart—why? The next year you were publically engaged to your dear friend the drag queen Julian Eltinge; was this a publicity stunt or a beard kind of thing? You married a guy you hardly knew, the year after the songwriter married your niece. What were you thinking?

                          You worked very hard.  You negotiated and managed and produced. You could sing, dance, do comedy. You were audacious and cheerful. The audiences loved you to bits. You were a professional who could withstand years on the road without a break.  You danced the best Salomé. You pulled publicity stunts like pretending to be kidnapped, pretending to be robbed, pretending to be a waitress during a salary dispute.  You were capable of hearing a compliment as an insult and having a temper tantrum onstage. Twice you were arrested for assaulting people; one time you really did hurt the person. Sometimes you went AWOL, skipping performances with full houses waiting to see you.  You gave cars and houses to your family, and bought tons of useless expensive junk.  At the height of your fame, you were arrested for stealing a potato. You earned more money than any of your contemporaries, but you died broke. How can you explain this?

              You said you were a Christian Scientist, but there’s no record of this.  Did you ever consult a medium or psychic, a quija board, like people of your day?

              You finished school at age 10. Did you like to read? If so, what?  Maybe you read kids’ thins, like Call of the Wild, Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan. Were you aware of the popular and important theater being produced in your day? The Importance of Being Earnest, Chekhov, Ibsen?  Did you know the work of Colette, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton? Charles Ives? Samuel Barber?

You said you didn’t drink, except sometimes you did.

You had mishaps with plastic surgery.

You won first prize in a contest where people competed to do the best imitation of you. What could that have felt like?

--------------------

(end of imagined Terri Gross interview.)

  ASSUMPTIONS:

These are all facts, biographical details. I will have to pick and choose, to compress, and conflate.  I’ll have to assume. I will definitely have to presume.

I will keep the nieces, the songwriter, the drag queen best friend, the money issues.

I will conflate the bad boyfriends; they were basically all the same guy anyway.

I will assume she could be fun sometimes; audiences loved her for a reason.

She hurt other people, so I’m tempted to presume that she did some violence to herself. Choose a method of self-flagellation.  

I will presume she deserved some understanding. No one is one hundred percent bad. She was mulish, erratic, spoiled but she was one of those powerful women in whom people don’t invest much compassion, women who have to be so heavily defended that sometimes they don’t realize that they’re actually the ones on the offense.

I’ll assume she was lonely, and I believe she deserves some sympathy for that.

I hope to have her show us something about being tough and living on fire.

                        CONCLUSION

So the thing is in progress. It is in progress because I think about it all the time and add to it daily. Sometimes I think of it as a toothpick Taj Mahal, sometimes as wine that’s fermenting and can be opened at some point in the future, but the first concept is grandiose, the second a bit lazy. No matter how I look at it, the history is too big--it won’t all fit. I have to make some decisions and accept them.  I will get some things right and some things wrong, but I have to suck up and deal with it. 

ADVICE TO SELF:

Back to Rule One for artists: don’t fall in love with your stuff. 

And Rule Two for Artists: don’t fall in love with the truth!  (Leslie Daniels taught me that.)

If I combine two characters for the sake of delivering some  important essence, it’s okay. Rule Three for Me: Neither force nor lament; neither prohibit nor exhort.

  I hope to shape this story so that it says meaningful things about performing, about girls, about friendship, about alcohol, about the last century of life on earth, about our incredibly short collective memory.   This Friday, I am going to Parsons Hall in Holyoke to film the place where Eva performed for the very first time, where she wore the umbrella dress and won a dollar.  

I have 66 pages of a script so far.

It starts with a 10-year-old girl in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, eating chicken while watching the pornographic late night show (known as “blue afterpieces”) on the stage she just came off of. 

[marylorson-blog]

Yesterday morning, pre-dawn dog walk, sending up a spiritual flare to my friend heading in for major surgery...thinking about signals and smallness...

[marylorson-blog]

"This is the game that moves as you play" - X

[marylorson-blog]

....backstage at a festival, my son did not want me to go onstage! But minutes later he was smiling again.

[marylorson-blog]

The All-Clear (fiction by MBL)

        The MRI is an experience I wish Stanley Kubrick had turned his camera upon. Only he could have done justice to the beneficent alienation of the modern hospital hallway. In this scene, the patient, you, stripped of fashion and choice, are plunged into an absurd netherworld where you are the monkey in the middle, lost between knowing and not knowing, healthy and sick, between having and not having (your clothes, your freedom, a future…).  Between being you, and not being you. You're not you in the hospital.  I once walked down one of these hallways into a surgery where they removed one of my body parts, walked myself in wearing little flappy rubber-bottomed slippers and seeing everything blurry because they took my glasses; walked in able-bodied and whole, and emerged weak and wounded --which they did to me-- feeling like a victim, feeling sicker but supposedly saved.

            But back to the MRI—not a surgery, just a test, a piece of cake. An IV is inserted in your arm outside the test room, where you then sit for twenty minutes reading a three-year-old House and Garden.  Eventually they call you into the exam room. The technician gently instructs you to lay face down on a platform with two holes cut out of it. Behind this stands the MRI machine, a massive, impersonal robo-whale that brings to mind the grizzled grin of Robert Shaw.  Mindful of the gentleman technician on the other side of the two-way mirror, you deftly open your robe just as you lie down, and the kindly female nurse tries to make you comfortable--extra microwaved blankets on your legs, (bleached and clean-smelling, almost pleasant), a bolster under your right arm where the IV will receive the contrast dye.  She places a black squirty bulb in your right hand and tells you to squeeze it if you need to stop. She tells you you must remain perfectly still. What about breathing, you ask?  I want you to breathe, she says, of course, but the images are of your chest. This is worrisome to you, because that’s where all the breathing happens, and suddenly you remember now that the last time you had this test you compromised the image because you couldn’t stop thinking about your breathing and your nervousness made it shallow and fast. Although you have just answered no to the question about panic attacks and claustrophobia, you realize that indeliberately you seem to have lied: you couldn’t breathe normally during the last MRI.  You don’t even consider telling the nurse this now. You just lie on the stretcher, and a machine slides you into the tube, and the sounds begin.

            The baseline tone is a gently pulsing hum, almost like a techno track from the 1990’s, a drone which, alone, can be interpreted as hypnotic and soothing, but it’s quickly followed by a clanging beep of such intense volume that you wonder what’s hitting what in there.  More sounds follow, and they could indeed comprise an industrial symphony in your mind, but they’re all out of time with each other. You choose one and compose a bass line to it,  but just as you’re getting into it, that sound stops and another takes its place. It’s a low, whining harangue, a soulfrightening and hateful sound in which you perceive a taunting, “we’ve got you, we’ve got you, we’ve got you….”  You could actually cry at this point but that’s definitely too much breathing.  If you mess up their images we’ll have to do this all over again.  It’s horribly loud, and it sounds like hell screaming at you that you’re going to die, possibly imminently. There are breaks in the process which are never explained to you, so you lie still whether or not the tormenting sounds are happening. Finally, your arms tingling asleep and your feet freezing, the sounds stop, and you hear a door open, and you know it’s all over.  You gather up your jewelry and glasses and clothes from the wooden locker, and get the hell out of there, into the real world again, where things breathe and live.

I don’t start the car right away. I enjoy the winter sunshine. I put in a CD and listen to my new favorite song (“The Big Guns” by Jenny Lewis).  The song ends and I play it again, singing along loud, as if it was my song.  I love the air, the light, the living.  That fucking test.  Now I have to wait two or three days for a result, and it might be bad.  I usually somehow forget about the cancer, but it’s impossible when there’s a test result impending. Everything might change soon.  I want to hide, to forget the word.  I don’t know what to do.  No one I know was with me; it’s as if none of this cancer stuff has ever happened—I could pretend that.  I could retreat into my very own mental awaystate, forget I am a wife and a mother.  But I am those things, and it’s tiring to pretend.  I decide to go home.  Passing stores and coffee shops, I consider stopping for one treat or another, but I don’t really want them.  The house is silent, everybody out. After a nap I start to move about.  I get out the Korg mini-synth, the Moog, my guitar and distortion pedals.  I plug things in and start my computer, opening a new file in the recording software. I start tinkering. The Korg has a perfectly awful tone which suits for the main MRI drone.

“What the hell is that?” smiles my husband from the doorway.

“I’m trying to recreate what the MRI sounds like. It’s insane-sounding,” I say.

He shudders and makes a wordless sound.

“It’s okay,” I say, looking in his eyes.  “You won’t believe it if I get it right. But it’s louder than this.”   I spin the volume dial up as far as it will go, and indulge in a headbanger’s evil smile.

The next day is December 20 and we have no Christmas tree.  James shopping, Henny at daycare, Bell at unseen girlfriend's, I head out on my own and take a turn that’s tempted me for weeks.  The sign reads, “U-Cut Xmas Trees, $35.”  I had no idea such remote and lovely areas existed so near to us. Driving along I start to imagine I’m in Vermont, or Wyoming, someplace rustic where people enjoy their fresh air and are not so reliant on mall culture. The road sits in a valley between two tremendous hills. Farmland in New Jersey.  The fields and pines are covered with snow; corn harvested, they look like Normandy in negative, white with black spikes symmetrical and reassuring in the prismatic shiftshow they present to the passing eye. 

            The Christmas tree farm is closed, but there’s a sign that says to use their saws and leave my money in the slot on the door.  I love feeling so far from the suburbs and their pressure to appear organized.  I am in something of a hurry, partly because of my own schedule, and partly because I really want the tree, want to feel good about the holiday. I have not yet received my MRI results and am thinking that if this ends up being one of THOSE days, at least it might help a bit if there’s a cheerful totem in the house. It’s cold and silent and I wish I had worn my torn old knit gloves, the ones I save for chores, rather than the nice new black suede ones. I choose a nice little tree with a straight spine and a good shape despite a small barren region somewhere around my shoulder level.  I bend down, thankful for my long johns in the snow,  relieve the tree of its tangled, inconvenient and wiry lower branchlets, and then I set to the real work.

            Cutting through the first half of the trunk is easy; it’s only maybe six inches in diameter, but something makes the second half more difficult. I tire, my hands get cold, and I remember that I can rest for a second, and appreciate the moment. It’s utterly silent and I feel alone for miles.  Starting to saw again, I hear my breathing, and the little noises I make in my struggle against the wood. My grunts and sighs belie more than the physical effort-- somewhere behind my nasal passages I feel an old familiar feeling, a reminder that you can cry sometimes, that it can be a good thing to do. I say out loud, “I am so scared,” admitting to the air the basic reality of my life now. Just as my MRI music reconstruction has a baseline track, the baseline of my existence is a fundamental fear of being attacked again. Cancer patients often feel an affinity with those in war-torn nations---the fear of the lion in the bushes, the bomb, the germ.

I let myself have a little weep, and then I return to the cutting job.  My jeans and long johns are now soaked, and I grunt openly, free in the wind, and after several attempts at different angles, fell the little arbor, heave it over my shoulder, and proudly stomp through the snow like someone else in a different time, a sturdy farm woman during the Depression, maybe.  I get to the van, shove the tree in the back, and take off my nice gloves, which are now soaked, covered in sawdust and losing their shape.  I feel good heading back into civilization.  Out of the hills, the cell reception returns, and my phone alerts me that I’ve received a message.  With joy I hear my doctor’s voice saying that the MRI was clear.  I pick up Henny at daycare and take him to shop for presents for Adele and Bootsy and his daycare provider, and we go home. I make a delicious little pasta and some unsightly gingerbread cookies, and put the little guy to bed. Bell comes home with “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and he and Adele and I watch it while James paints a dresser in the attic. I am so grateful for this pass that nothing can really get me down.