The Lady With The Gold Baton

My name is Kay Kemble, and at one time the radio people called me “The Lady with the Gold Baton.” I still get mementos from people now and then. See this pin? I used to go out and give talks to schools and such, and they had an organization, The National Federation of Student Musicians I believe it was. A little gal just stopped by a week or so ago at Swing City and she’d saved her pin from the Class of ‘49, and she wanted me to have it. 

I put it on my jacket here, and this other one, the music note, is from the Gold Pearl Glee Clubs. When we took the band around the country on the Gold Pearl Shampoo tour, we’d stop in the different cities, and we’d ask around at the ladies’ clubs, and Red Cross, and churches and synagogues, and YWCAs till we found a singing group, and we’d invite them to come along to our show. We’d put them on risers in front of the stage, and they’d all wear a navy blue suit. In those days, about every woman had a navy blue outfit, and those that did not, we put them in the back row. And they'd join in on our Satute to the Nation. This was when things were going badly in the Pacific, and France was occupied and so on, and spirits were low.

So we’d do “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Anchors Aweigh” and “America the Beautiful," and anywhere we went, the people could sing those. And each participant would be issued one of these gold-note pins to show that they had dome their part to help raise morale.

And yon know, I think there was something to that. Now that the war’s been over for 50 years, everyone knows that our side won, but in 1944 we couldn’t see the future. 

I had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. after quite a long time of teaching music and reading skills to young women who were about to be released from the prison system. Well, I was supposed to be teaching sewing, but I didn’t actually know much about sewing at that time. 

I had started out as a band director for a high school after their regular director had died in the middle of the school year, and because of the war, they couldn’t find a man to take the job so I had gotten it. But the high school kids were just silly, the young people just weren’t ready to settle down and learn anything. The boys all wanted to either go off to Hollywood and making talking pictures or join the Army and fight, and all the girls seemed to care about was how their hair looked.

I wanted to find some students who would really learn, and my sister was a social worker over helping the gals that were about to get out of Evans Women’s Correctional Institute. I went over aed talked to them about whether they might be interested in having music programs for some of these gals, and they didn’t have money in their budget for that, but they were interested in finding a sewing teacher. 

I told them that I really did not know about sewing, I could hem a little bit or put a button on. But one thing led to another and soon I was spending the afternoons with these teenagers and young women and women more my age, all of us together in a room full of big old gray steel commercial sewing machines, the kind really made more for sewing parachutes or tents or something. So I figured out quick that these women couldn’t follow a sewing pattern anyway, because none of them could really read. So that’s what I concentrated on to begin with. We would take the canvas covers off the machines, in case somebody came in and wanted to see us using the equipment.

 But we could also rig ourselves up some desks pretty easily.  ff the the right of the machine w as a metal table extension for holding up a lot of heavy upholstery or canvas or some such, and we would use these extensions for desks, and we practiced writing. Quite a few of the  relatives of these gals got the first letter from them they’d ever received.

In the evenings, we would push the machines on their trestle tables over against the wall, and set up folding chairs. This building was a quonset hut,  detached from the rest of the vocational center, and so we didn’t have to worry about noise as long as we were finished by 9  in the evening. So from 7 to 9, four nights a week, our little band would get together. I had a number of old band instruments that came from my old high school job -those young people were rough on the equipment, and w e’d had a large stock of trombones with bent slides and clarinets missing a key. I had a friend who did instrument repairs and so when I left my old job, I bought the lot of junk
instruments for a hundred dollars, and I had Frank them up. He could take the slide off one trombone with a Imaged-up bell and put it on another instrument with a bad slide and I ended up with a good inventory of working instruments and Frank kept all the pieces and parts for his use later on. But I still didm’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn't have too many interested, but since they were all on probation a.i d were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot c f people came around because they were bored. A few _ ed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their ba r r used am ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group w as growing and I needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instrument is the inventory room that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for then s he but there was a lot of rigamarole we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You w ouldn it. So I’d just wait until another instructor w as going mwr to get typing paper or Tampax and such and I would w er with her and come back w ith a saxophone or a ctnet And of course we were supposed to be sew ing like crazy and they’d issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, ^nd so for the weight, I w as putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases. All the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -just the bigwigs that would have blow n their tops if they
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Then something awful happened. There was a gal in my band that had sent another woman a love letter, and it got found and all kinds of trouble started up. The brass all turned on me, I think because I had a short hairdo and I smoked and played jazz music. When anything goes wrong in the military, they find somebody to pin it all on, and they picked me.
this
time, I was feeling chased around by everybody, and I was discouraged. But Gold Pearl Shampoo came through for me. On one of the WAC tours, we had gone through Lawrence, Kansas and while we were there I had met Joe Phillips, who made the radio commercials for Gold Pearl Shampoo. Joe had gotten the idea for an all-girl band, and he did not really care how qualified the musicians were. What he was interested in was that they had to have long pretty hair, in all different colors. The Gold Pearl theme song was “Blondie, redhead, or brunette, When you use Gold Pearl, you join the Smart Set.” He wanted something called the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra, and if a girl had good hair, she was in. I thought to myself that I had already had experience with girls who were more interested in their hair than in knowing that the B-flat scale has two flats in it, not one, but the situation being what it was, I agreed to conduct the orchestra for the commercials. They were moving out of radio, and the experimental advertisements were to be like film shorts that would play in the theaters between the cartoon and the double feature. But back in those days, it turned out people wouldn’t pay good money for a movie ticket and then Lave to sit through commercials before the show, so the idea was a dud. So there I was in 1945, signed to a contract with Gold Pearl and all these gals who had been signed and no
commercials to do. So the shampoo company decided to send us out on a tour of the United States, which I really didn't want to do. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, but I did put my foot down when they wanted to dye my hair gold. The} thought since I was the “conductress,” I would be standing in front of the orchestra with my back to the audience, that I should have big waves of golden hair cascading down my back.
I argued and said What did I look like, Veronica Lake? And nobody really has gold hair. And it would take months for it to grow out. And what I didn’t tell them is that when I was a girl, I was one of the Sun-Rays in Sunny Sue and Her Sun-Rays, which was me, my sister Dottie, and our cousins Mildred and Opal. We had sung on the Ma-Flow Syrup Hour and had our photographs made for magazine advertisements, and there was a woman whose only job was to keep our hair dyed sunny yellow, There was something especially strong in the dye, because our hair had to shine under the photographer’s light, and we only got to stop when the whites of our eyes turned sunny too because we had something close to jaundice. Both Opal and I had to stay in bed for six weeks and live on a liquid diet till our livers recovered. So I was not going to back down, and even though Gold Pearl Shampoo didn’t know why, they could see that they’d hit a brick wall on this. So instead I agreed to use a gold baton, though I was very annoyed when my package of gold batons arrived as they came C.O.D. and each one was 16 inches long. I’d never used anything but an 11 inch baron, because the musicians never look at it anyway. When my gold baton got famous, Artie Shaw criticized my sloppy technique, but that wasn’t really fair to me, using a 16 inch model is like conducting with a stick of stove wood.
seemed to satisfy everybody, so I signed up in 1942. For a long while, nobody in the military had any idea what to do with me, because at that time the military bands were either special bands for the parades and ceremonies, the separate bands for the specific technical units and training units, and then there were organizational bands that did double duty playing music and guarding supply trains and things of that nature. None of that was suitable for women at that time, so for five or six months, I was put into a basement boiler room with all the WAAC items jumbled together, including sheet music and army cookbooks with recipes for 800 and discontinued uniforms and heaven know what else. I spent my days digging through it all and finding the music and putting it in manila folders, which there were hundreds of
Then in early 1943, things took a turn for the better, because Glenn Miller joined the Specialist Corps, even though he was too old and wore glasses and had kids at home, and they made hima Captain and put him in charge of the Army bands, and he puf a swing to the Sousa marches and everybody was crazy about it. Then he switched over to the Air Force and he started doing a radio show called “I Sustain the Wings” which recruited and sold war bonds, and I guess that might have been what got women enlisting with the WAAC, but all I know we had a big jump in the women’s bands and we had the 400th, 401st, 402nd, 403rd, and 404th Bands, all female bands. Somewhere in there the WAAC turned into the Women’s Army Corps, and we were busy, busy, busy.
Despite my baton work, the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra turned out to be a wonderful band, because over time, all the gals who the company had picked for their hair turned out to be an expensive proposition, as they tended to get married and have young ones, or they skipped the marriage partner and went right to motherhood. Then we’d have to stop touring and find new players and rehearse with them, while we were still getting paid but not doing Gold Pearl shows. Now I happened to know a lot of gals that weren’t interested in marriage or young ones, and they were free to travel. After the Gold Pearl people had been through several elopements and pregnancy tests and all this, they started asking me if I could find more of the type of gal I was friends with. They called them “less expensive” girls, and that’s what they’d ask me for. “Kay, can you find some less expensive girls to work for us?” and I always could, because the same thing which had happened to me in the Women’s Army Corps had happened to a number of gals I knew, and they were all looking for work. The only thing that came up is that some of these women didn’t want to grow their hair long for the performances. They asked me couldn’t I work it out for them, as some of them had never been anyplace but a barbershop for a haircut for years. But I told them it was a shampoo company so what else could they expect, and the only concession I got from Gold Pearl was that they let some of the women wear these big loose lounge trousers, like Marlene Dietrich had worn in the movies, because the gals had to sit up on a stage in front of these men in the audience and if you had to play something large like a

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The Lady with the Gold Baton
Page 2 of 7
from them they’d ever received.
In the evenings, we would push the machines on their trestle tables over against the watt and set up folding chairs. This building was detached from the rest of the vocational center, and so we didn’t have to worry about noise as long as we were finished by 9 p.m. So from 7 to 9, four nights a week, our little band would get together. I had a number of beat-up instruments that i’d, bought for a hundred dollars when I left my band director job. But I still didn’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn’t have too many interested, but since they were all on probation and were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot of people came around because they were bored. A few stayed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their hair or used an ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group was growing and i needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instruments in the inventory room.that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for themselves, but there was a lot of rigamaroie we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You wouldn’t believe it. So I'd just wait until another instructor was going over to get carbon paper or soap and such and 1 would walk over with her and linger til! she was gone, then come back to the sewing room with a saxophone or a cornet. And of course we were supposed to be sewing like crazy and they’d Issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, and so ! was putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases for the weight. ! think the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -- just the bigwigs that would have blown their tops if they knew.
The band was shaping up very well, and now most of the girls could write home and teii what thef were learning in music class, and we had a couple of ready good numbers, a very snappy "Chattanooga Choo Chco" and a decent "Apple Blossom Time" and we were working on "Perfidio" but Xavier Cugat was a little advanced for some of these beginners. But we’d go over to the main prison building and play for the female population and they were so happy to see people. We could have played on some tin cans with a washtub bass backing us up and they'd have clapped and asked for more.
I wouldn’t have had any problems except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I felt quite betrayed as i had voted for him three : mes already and even after whahhe did to me, I still voted for him again in 44. But n telling you, he ruined things for me in '41 He started out with the CCC and WPA and aii this to gsve jobs to the people, and I was giad for it. but then some of these new appointed people came over to the Readjustment Center to straighten up the inventory room. After one of them opened a eupnonium case and found 19 yards of dotted Swiss, there was a brou-ha-tia about how I hadn’t requisitioned the instruments property. There were threats of s{ very unpleasant nature, and fora short v,- e it ooKsc -\<e I might be not be gang none nights after 3 day n prison
http://garbowrites.com/id 17.html
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saxophone and wear a skirt, there could be an unwholesome image there. So if the gals wanted to, they could choose the trouser outfit if they paid for it
MEMORIES OF THE BAND MEMBERS. . .
The best baritone saxophone player we ever had was Teeny Stockton. She wasn’t a bit teeny, you need a big girl to hold up a big horn. And she was the hardest working gal we had in the band. The rest of them, the minute rehearsal was over, boom, they were out the door to the bars or wherever, but Teeny would stay and we would work on arrangements. She was a wonderful arranger. She was a wonderful dancer too, and one thing led to another, and during the winter months when the band wasn't touring, she and I made our home together in Chicago, where Teeny’s sister lived.
There was a gal named Marcia Lucas, and she had kept company with Teeny and when her mother died, Marcia got religion. And that was when things went downhill for us P.D.Q. Marcia got into her head that she was here on Earth to help others on direct orders from somebody in Heaven, either her Mom or God. I don’t believe she meant harm by what she did; I think she really wanted to help turn us from the wrong path of life.
I never did get out of anybody who Marcia talked to, exactly, but I do know that she had taken one of our
electric bills out of the mailbox - which I thought was against the law, but I guess Marcia thought God’s law was higher than federal regulations and so forth - and took it in to somebody at Golden Pearl’s advertising division. Now this is the part that burns me up - if the company had just said, like the Army did, that they did not care for our type of person and that we were a poor influence on the youth of America and all that, you know - at that time, there was more people that felt like that than not. So we could have just blamed it on plain common ignorance and let it go.
But that’s not how they handled it. They started in on Teeny.
The Gold Pearl people never mentioned Marcia’s part in it, and I know that’s what started it, because they knew, right from the very start when Teeny came to play in the band, that she was a Negro. Everybody knew that - all you had to do was look at her, for Heaven’s sake. But if you can believe it, I got a call to go to the company’s lawyer’s office, and some man I never saw before in my life started asking me if Teeny was Italian or Puerto Rican or what. There was some kind of ordinance or something, he said, that came from the professional musicians’ union and the radio networks and the government working together, that the races weren’t supposed to work together for commercial purposes - oh, I can’t remember all of it now. So if Teeny was just dark-skinned Italian or even Puerto Rican, we were all right. Also if she was a legal immigrant from Brazil or Venezuela or someplace like that, we’d still be okay. They didn’t say what wouldn’t be all right we all
understood what that was. And I said, “You know perfectly well Tenny is a regular plain American Negro woman from Birmingham, Alabama.” And they said that we needed to tell everybody she was from Venezuela, and they would get someone to come around and interview her and Teeny would put a scarf on her head and talk with an accent or some such, and that would probably take care of it.
And I said, you know, I think there are quite a few people that are going to know Teeny is not from Venezuala, like all the people in Venezuela, and all Teeny’s relatives in Birmingham - it’s a big family. And also anybody with a brain in their head.
And the lawyer said in that case, I had broken the Gold Pearl contract because it said in there I wouldn’t do anything illegal or immoral, and I said, “Well, how come you can do immoral things?” because you know you are. And there was a heated discussion, I guess you’d say, and even with the door closed, people told me you could hear us down the hall and out in the street. Or hear them, would be more accurate to say, as I didn’t raise my voice as I had already given up. I knew what was coming.
Well, that afternoon I went over to see Ernesta Collins, who had been a good friend of A’Lelia Walker’s at one time, and A’Lelia’s mother Madame C. J. Walker had made a lot of money with specialty hair products. Ernesta Collins had been watching the Walker company and she'd

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gone off to develop her own products, including Enchanted Nile Pomade. I hadn’t been sure that Ernesta’s products were safe for the human head, but Teeny used Enchanted Nile Pomade and she said it was much better than chemical straightener and with the pomade you didn’t need a heated metal comb. So after I left the law office, I marched over to Ernesta Collins’ operation, as she had been after me for quite a while to quit Golden Pearl and come promote Enchanted Nile Pomade.
So we reformed the band as the Enchanted Nile Evening Orchestra - Ernesta wanted the “Evening” in there and it was her nickel - and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Ernesta had told me that they were going to kick everybody except Teeny out or make all the white gals say they were from France but she didn’t do that. Ernesta didn’t seem to care about anything except whether the band could play. She had a very strict standard; I have never worked harder in my life. It was difficult to meet Ernesta’s expectations, especially because she tired of our songs very quickly and always wanted new arrangements done,. Teeny and I stayed up very late on many, many nights creating new arrangements, and this began to take a toll on Teeny's health, as she was diabetic and had trouble with her kidneys to start with. The overwork and the late nights were affecting her, and the doctor said Teeny just couldn't keep those type of hours and expect to stay in good health.
We had to turn the band over to Ernesta, who promoted Edith Keefer, the first trombone, to bandleader, and they
went on to do very well, traveling to many states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Teeny and I went back to our Chicago apartment, where she got a job at the Post Office and I took work teaching sewing at East Vocational High School. I told them I had lots of experience, and fortunately for me the Truman Administration had long ago cut off the funding for the prison Readjustment Center so they couldn’t check my references. And I must say that having served as banker, nurse, and seamstress for the gals in the bands over the years, I had learned a little something about sewing. If I had been required to explain how to put a zipper in a skirt while reclining in the upper berth of a
They had up-to-date equipment, and the rooms were clean and nice. They had a good supply of textbooks, and I could teach myself from those, so that I was a lesson ahead of the students. I taught there for 16 years, and then when Teeny took her early medical retirement from the Post Office, I had put in enough time and was old enough that I could leave with a half-pension, and since I’d put most of my earnings into government bonds, we had enough money, if we were careful.
By this time, we were raising Cecily and Raymond, who were Teeny’s sister’s teenage children. Teeny’s sister Antonia had been killed in a car accident, and they had come to live with Teeny and me. By this time, it was about 1970 and people of different races could live in the same
moving train car, I would have been fully qualified. Eastern Vocational was the nicest place I ever worked.
apartment without causing too much consternation. That’s one of the reasons we felt safer about moving someplace else, and also my feet were bothering me a lot. I suppose it was all the hours spent in band rehearsal, but my feet were becoming very sore and painful, and the Chicago weather was becoming unbearable. People complain about Chicago winds, but it was the constant snow and slush and icy puddles that did me in. Teeny bought me any number of fleece-lined boots and Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts but if you step into a half-frozen puddle that’s up to your ankle, there is no boot on earth that is going to keep your foot warm and dry.
• We needed to find a place that was reasonably warn and where the kids could go to a good school and where Teeny and I might find someplace to do a little music if the chance came. We settled on New Orleans, where Teeny enrolled Raymond and Cecily at St. Mark’s Academy, where they hated the uniforms but we knew they would live to adulthood. Their mother’s life insurance policy paid their tuition all the way through, plus a little bit to start a college fund for each of them.    ,
• Not too long after we got down there, I was walking in the French Quarter when I ran into an older gentleman who knew my name. I didn’t recognize him, but it was Joe Collins, the man who had first hired me to do the Gold Pearl commercial films. He had bought a junk shop in the Quarter and had turned it into a replica of a US O canteen and he was calling it “R & R” but later he changed that to
Swing City. He invited me to get some musicians together and come down and play, and so Teeny and I looked up WOMEN MENTIONED EARLIER and they were all around except Jolene Hamilton, who had died in 1965. In fact, Elise Gordon was living just outside New Orleans, and Tess Wasserman was retired to Florida, just across the Gulf of Mexico.
We put together a little ensemble of the old-timers and some of their younger relatives and friends and a couple gals who I don’t know at all but play very nicely.
I sit at the piano for the group, which fills in the gaps because we never know how many trombones and clarinets we are going to have. We play on Friday and Saturday nights, and call ourselves Pearls of the Enchanted Nile. Of course the Nile is a river and doesn’t have any pearls in it, but after you’ve had a couple of drinks, as we had the night ' we thought it up, it sounds good. And WE sound good; Cecily sits in on tenor sax now and again, and when she and her Aunt Teeny get going, the tip jar on the piano fills up fast. We are saving the money to get our roof fixed, as the last hurricane that moved through New Orleans took a lot of shingles off and bent the rain gutters all out of shape.
We may need to pick up some weddings and funeral dates to pay for it all, but New Orleans is good for that.
FINISH WITH SING-A-LONG OF “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time”

Quack

 

The Cloverleaf Story

 

My hands were shaking, a definite vibrato tremble that said sensitive, high-strung, a nervous wreck. I wove my fingers together and rested my hands in my lap. Now the hands shook together instead of independently. 

I unwove my fingers, turned my hands palm down, and pressed one hand onto each thigh. Since my legs were shaking too, the effect was a coffee cup rattling on top of a washing machine in its spin cycle. 

But I didn't need to do all this work. She wasn't looking my way. How could she? She was trying to steer while peering through a frosty smudge about as big as a silver dollar pancake. The rest of the windshield was layered in fat puffy snow.

A whining sound that cut into my ears leaked through the closed window in the passenger door. I turned my head an inch and slanted my gaze over. There was a truck-trailer whizzing next to us, I mean next to us, grinding up the snowy road ahead and spewing gray frozen slush behind. I turned my head the other way. Through the driver's window I saw a van with a heating contractor's logo on its side plowing through the wet slush in the left-hand lane. The three of us -- car, van, and semi--  glided scarily around a curve in the cloverleaf, inches apart, wet tires loose in the snow and slush and water. 

A little noise of panic escaped from my throat. I swallowed it down, but it came back up as a rapid sentence. "I can't stand it," I said. 

Well, she'd found out. How long did I think I was going to be able to pass myself off as a normal person? Above-normal, really, since she'd insisted as seeing me as wonderful and I didn't want to be a disappointment. Now the truth had been centrifuged out as we spun around the cloverleaf. I was a coward, and a sensitive, high-strung, nervous wreck of a coward to boot. 

She needed to be at work in the morning, and that's why we were out in the cold dark, speeding through the snowstorm. But I really couldn't stand it. When I say I couldn't stand it, I meant that I couldn't stand it. Not fifty more miles of this, zooming in a light-duty pickup, sprayed at close range with muddy slush from two directions. 

She didn't turn to look at me, but I knew she'd heard me because, when the truck came to a stop light, she put on the signal to turn left.  The friendly bright rectangular sign of a budget motel shone from across the double set of highway lanes. 

"I can't make it that far," I was forced to say by my upset stomach. To get into friendly territory, we'd have to make the turn across lanes of cars and trucks and buses through white air speckled with tiny snow particles, off which headlights just bounced away. "Can we go to this one?" I used a tiny movement of my right hand to indicate a Motor Hall. The Motor Hall was on my side of the road, one easy turn to the right and we'd be in the lot. 

The clerk at the desk thought we were a shady-looking pair. Where was our luggage? her face asked. Why was one of us so grim-looking and the other so pale and trembly? I wanted to say have a heart, it's a blizzard, listen we wouldn't stay here if we had any choice. 

But I signed the book and dug in my jeans pocket for loose bills and spare change. Between us we had forty-nine dollars and sixty cents. The price for a single night's stay was forty-nine dollars and fifty cents. If I'd dropped one of my dimes and it had rolled down a heat vent in the lobby, I was sure the clerk would have turned us out into the storm, or worse yet, allowed us to stay under the burden of ten cents' worth of charity. 

For all the money we had, we got a big square motel bed, a blonde laminate dresser polished to an ugly waxy gloss, and a television on which we could choose any of twenty-four channels. We laid down without bothering to turn down the bedspread, side by side and stiff like miserable corpses. She put her forearm over her eyes, a gesture I'd learned to recognize as a sign of wretchedness. After a couple of minutes I sat up, scooted to the end of the bed, and leaned over to pull out the "On" knob on the TV. 

I clicked through the options, looking for an old movie, but all the channels were loud and ugly. I pushed the knob back in and the blaring light was sucked back into the void from whence it came. 

I scooted back up the bed, toward the headboard, wrinkling the bedspread on my side into ridges which humped up under my back when I laid back down. 

"We'll think this is funny tomorrow," I said.

"Hmm," she said as all patient spouses answer us when we are tiresome and don't know it. 

I rolled over on my side but was too self-aware to expect sleep. Lying that way resulted in an uneasy wash of acid in my stomach, which was unpleasant enough that I knew I'd have to get up. Sighing, I kicked my legs out, twisted them down onto the floor, sat up, then stood up. 

I searched the drawers of the shiny dresser first, finding nothing, then I opened the top drawer of the bedside table. The only thing in it was a postcard showing the parking lot of a place called The Dusty Diner in Palo Alto, California. I flipped the postcard over. On the message side, ballpoint pen message from a dutiful traveler: Dear Folks, Calif. is really nice. Bill and I are going out to eat tonite at this restar -- " The writer had attempted to squeeze a "u" between the "a" and "r," realized the futility of it, and stopped. 

I laid the postcard on top of the bedside table, picture side up, and opened the second drawer. Lying docilely at the bottom were four crisp but aged sheets of Motor Hall stationery.  

I turned toward the bed and started to say, "Hey, have you got a pen?" but I realized as I began that she might have found a way to sleep. She was generally able to spread a little tent of tranquility wherever she came to rest. The "Hey" was all that erupted from me. I turned it into an unconvincing cough, to which she did not react. 

I walked over to my jacket, heaped in the seat of a chair, and hunted around in the pockets till I found a golf pencil left over from a library visit. 

I stood next to the glossy dresser, using the top as a desk, and drew golf-pencil cartoons of two miserable women trapped in an ugly motel. When she woke up I'd show the cartoons to her.

 By the time I'd used up the last sheet of stationery -- the last cartoon showed us comically kneeling to kiss the oil-stained concrete of our own driveway -- my stomach had reached a reasonable pH level. I sat down on the edge of the bed, unlaced my sneakers and set them, one at a time, on the floor , checking between the the first shoe and the second to make sure my little rustle and bumping noises weren't waking her. 

The new desk clerk -- a young man  -- called at five a.m. as we'd asked. I got out of bed first, went into the bathroom to pee, then went to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain to peek outside. The room was still dark so I could see out into the pre-down shadowy parking lot. The snow had not only stopped falling, but had mostly melted away, leaving a few white icy lumps which glittered in the light thrown down by the tall light pole next to the Motor Hall sign. 

After quick showers we were in the car by twenty minutes after five. The truck started on the first turn of the key and we must have left the radio on because a cello's broad tone poured evenly from the dashboard speakers. 

After I got my seatbelt fastened, I noticed there was a wad of green paper near my tennis shoe. I bent down, straining against the shoulder strap, to pick the paper up and put it into the litter bag. She hated trash in her new truck. Then I noticed a President's white curled wig, and after a bit of unwadding, I spread the pieces of paper out with the pad of my thumb. 

"Hey,"  I said, happily, "here's one, two, three, four dollars!"

"Coffee?" she said, looking as though there was once again a reason to be alive. She put the lever into Drive and we pulled across the parking lot to a small sign with an arrow pointing out toward the highway. Under a cartoon sunrise that looked like the one on the Raisin Bran cereal box, the sign said "Enjoyed Your Stay? Please Visit Us Again!" 

"It wasn't horrible," I said. 

"No. It wasn't," she said. 

The six lanes of highway which had been so intimidating the evening before were now, at this early hour, nearly empty and shiny with melted snow. The sun wasn't up yet, but there was a hint of color along the eastern horizon, where a glowing sign for a Hardee's gave us a come hither. 

We were the third vehicle in line at the rive-thru when it opened at five-thirty. We each had a grease-heavy biscuit with ham, cheese, and a perfect disc of egg in the middle. And big coffees. I used my thumb and finger to extract the ham slice from my sandwich and held the ham wiggly in the air. "Want this?"

She smiled and opened her mouth and I put the slice in between her teeth. She drove like that for a minute, grinning at me around the brown circle before handing me her coffee cup so she could open her sandwich onto the paper wrapper next to her leg. She laid in the extra ham and re-assembled the sandwich. 

The truck was at the Hardee's exit onto the highway and the early-morning commuter behind us honked. "All right already," she said through a mouthful of breakfast biscuit, and then she pulled out onto the highway. 

As I gave her back her coffee, I looked to see if the honking had started us off in a bad way. No. She had breakfast and coffee she'd thought she'd have to drive home without, and she was happy. It was going to be a good ride home. 

If Sousa Had Been Syncopated at the Columbian Exposition

Note: John Philip Sousa and Scott Joplin both made appearances at or near the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Chicago had vied for the right to host the World's Fair, based on its experience with hosting the Columbian Exposition in 1893. I thought it would be interesting to wonder what Sousa's music would have sounded like during his St. Louis appearances if he'd previously heard Joplin's music back when Chicago celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World. 


Mr. Tomllns, dabbing at his neck with a damp crumpled handkerchief, marched across Jackson Park toward the golden Pullman car. The gleaming train carriage perched on a stub of the Illinois Central Railroad. At the point where the tracks ended, just the right number of extra rails had been added to ensure that the gilt carriage rested  inside the boundary of the park. 

The stiff soles of Mr. Tomlins' patent-leather shoes clattered up three wrought-iron steps. His knuckles rapped the door sharply in the exact middle of the panel, just below a large ornamental plaque. The plaque featured a gilt bugle, nested in a leafy wreath, the whole balanced on the outspread wings of a noble American eagle.

Sousa!" Mr. Tomlins shouted at the closed door of the train compartment. Hot and vexed, he folded over his limp handkerchief and used it to swab the inside of his celluloid collar. "You are required at the bandstand!" He rapped on the door again. "Sousa!" He rattled the gold knob, and the door swung inward, throwing him off-balance.

Having regained his balance, Mr. Tomlins surveyed the carriage interior. No expense had been spared. It was all splendid Persian carpets, velveteen curtains, and matching mahogany settees. At the far end of the car, on a bench pulled up to an octagonal walnut table, sat a spectacled man. His face, despite an impressive mustache, was unremarkable. However, his attire was eye-catching. 

John Philip Sousa's red uniform was tailored to fit him perfectly. The jacket, its buttons gleaming, was festooned with gold braid, while the fringed epaulets sat on the shoulders like a pair of tiny parlor lampshades. Sousa's center-parted hair was pomaded and neat comb marks organized each strand of dark hair. On the walnut table, a round red stiff-brimmed cap rested on a special velvet-topped stand next to an open dressing-case. The cap’s emblem was an eagle, a circlet of stars surrounding its head and sharp beak. The eagle emblem was reflected in the mirrored lid of Sousa's dressing-case. Its owner gazed gloomily into the mirror, slowly grooming his mustache with a miniature ivory comb.

"I regret to inform you that I cannot perform at the Opening Ceremony today," Sousa told Mr. Tomlins, placing the tiny comb on the table  with a tiny click. "I asked for a bottle of Doctor Brown’s Celery Tonic, and received very inferior ginger ale. My valise, containing a supply of Nu-Vigor Mustache Wax, has been carted away to some spot on the fairgrounds -- the Peristyle, the Ferris Wheel, or I know not where."

"You perfect ninny!" cried Mr. Tomlins, "The Fair schedule’s tighter than Grover Cleveland's cummerbund! The Manufactures Building has seven thousand ticket holders plus the entire Chicago Orchestra crammed into it!" He glared at the eagle emblem on Sousa's red cap. "The President of the United States just pressed a telegraph key which sent a direct signal to Washington D.C., then Mrs. Potter Palmer addressed the Exposition on behalf of The Board of Lady Managers, and Harriet Monroe bored us all with her Columbian Ode. Two overheated ladies and an intoxicated man have been wheeled off the grounds in bath chairs already, and it's not yet noon. Now, mustache wax or no, you double-time it to the bandstand and draw off that crowd! Give 'em ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ and ‘After the Ball,’ twice each. I don’t want us to look like a bunch of sick cats in front of the French dignitaries!"  

"Do these look new to you?" asked Sousa, brandishing a pair of white cotton gloves, each limp fingertip showing a hint of gray. "My contract calls for one pair of new white gloves per performance. I believe that this pair was plunged up and down in a washbasin of murky water, then draped over the settee to form whatever shape it would. I do have spare gloves are in my valise, but that probably whirls around the Ferris Wheel as we speak, obtaining an excellent view of Lake Michigan but doing me no good whatsoever."

Mr. Tomlins lifted his sodden handkerchief toward his neck, but noted Sousa’s glance of revulsion, and put it away. "Heard of a musical genius called Joplin? Brown-skinned fellow who plays ragtime piano? I can see from your face that you have, Sousa. Well, he’s on the Midway with a cornet right now. Didn't know he could play a horn, did you? He's catching the pikers on their way to ogle Little Egypt!" Mr. Tomlins held out a shaking forefinger. "You are not inclined to play for hundreds of people who've traveled from all over the world to visit Chicago, Illinois? Well, I know where to find a young man who is so inclined!" Mr. Tomlins spun on his patent-leather slipper, marched through the doorway of the Pullman car, thumped down the three wrought-iron steps, and strode vigorously across Jackson Park toward the Ferris Wheel’s ever-changing silhouette.

Five minutes later, Mr. Tomlins, accompanied by a distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, wearing a carefully-knotted cravat and carrying a worn but serviceable cornet, led a parade of black musicians toward the circular concert area in the middle of a broad lawn. As the group walked along, Mr. Tomlins' companion occasionally put the horn to his lips and filled the air with tumbling cascades of brassy notes. Mr. Tomlins urged the cornet player and the other musicians along the walkway toward the outdoor bandstand, shouting "This way, lads!" and "That’s the ticket!" 

In the distance, a technological wonder -- a moving sidewalk -- was slowly filling with daring tourists from the lakefront. The gliding walkway moved people toward a set of bleachers near the bandstand. Some Fair visitors, leery of the novel conveyance, walked alongside it, scurrying to keep up. Others enjoyed the slow-moving marvel, turning their heads to look at the decorated park filled with Fair visitors in bright summer clothes. 

As the bleachers began to fill with people, many of whom held hot pretzels or boxes of Cracker Jack or corned-beef sandwiches brought from home. In the concert area, Scott Joplin’s impromptu band had gathered around their leader, and "The Cascades Rag" rolled through the air. The late morning blazed with syncopated energy, as Joplin's cornet ran up and down unfamiliar but compelling scales. 

Fair-goers streamed in continuously from the Manufactures Building, flowing around the obstructions formed by strings of children towed along by nannies, by a group of engineers listening to a man from Western Electric pointing to the series of bulbs which glowed brightly even in the daytime all along the many turrets of the Electrical Building, and by one more maddening knot of people, the slowest-moving obstruction possible. This last was a group of people stuck in place near a wheeled wicker chair, in which a wasp-waisted lady languished, pushed by a Columbian Guard. Men, women and child were forced, by lack of the marrowest exit passage, to serve as escorts for this stranger, her eyelids drooping from heat, fatigue, or an extra tablespoonful of laudanum-based patent medicine. Happily, the cortage veered a bit toward the shore of the lake, and several hemmed-in people were able to find a place for themselves on the moving sidewalk. Whether they'd intended to come hear the music or not, that's where they were going now and the escapees all looked relieved to be free to move again, in any manner, going anywhere. 

More than a few of these fair visitors stepped off the moving walkway and made their way to the bleachers, where they settled themselves comfortably under the shade of striped canopies. The breezes blew through the park, flapping and snapping flags of the world displayed on tall poles surrounding Jackson Park. 

The bleacher seating was now mostly occupied. Some of the crowd which had poured from the exitways of the Manufactures Building, finding the nowhere to sit but enjoying the music of Scott Joplin and his pickup band, had simply laid their paper-wrapped parcels and fringed parasols on the summer-green grass and begun to one-step and tango, using vigorous dance moves to make space for themselves n the crowd around the open performance area.

Mr. Tomlins, without realizing it had begun tapping his feet happily to Scott Joplin's music. He found himself more relaxed than he's been all day. He re-folded his damp, creased white cotton handkerchief neatly and stowed it away. He'd been assigned the duty of providing lively music for the people eating lunch in the bleachers near the lakefront, and he has done his job. Overcrowded halls had emptied, making room for new visitors, and lemonade vendors change-aprons sagged satisfyingly with coinage. All was well, on-track, harmonious, at last. 

But wait... Mr. Tomlins saw, at some distance from the dancers, members of Sousa’s New Marine Band, red-uniformed and suitably white-gloved. They had finally begun to assemble itself, around a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus.  The plaque embedded in the statue's concrete footing read "1492-1892, Exploration - Determination - Progress," and scorched dirty spots showed where many pipes and cigars had been tapped out against the bronze plate. Sousa's band was going to play after all, now that another band was already in place. 

"Impossible man," sighed Mr. Tomlins. But then he should have realized, he supposed, that a man driven to succeed (even if persnickety and difficult) would not want to be outshone by a competitor. 

Near Columbus’ bronze feet on their stone pedestal, Sousa’s men were in a great hurry. They struggled to get ready without the benefit of a dressing-room or even a solid surface on which to lay items. Some band members were still getting alto horns  and euphoniums into position while sliding chin straps into place. Other musicians fumbled to fasten collar studs. Those who were fully dressed were having trouble tuning up, because Joplin's band, across the lawn, had moved to "Pineapple Rag," and between the music, the laughter, and the dancers' feet hitting wooden platform and/or surrounding ground, the park was much too noisy to hear oneself make a trombone slide adjustment. The members of the New Marine Band were in a tough place; their conductor, they well knew, was a man who kept others waiting, not one to be kept waiting. Despite loose flapping collars here and a tilted cap there, the band made ready to play.  At the drop of Sousa's golden baton, the New Marine Band struck up a waltz.  

Sousa’s large, elaborate dressing-case, atop the hand truck on which it had been wheeled across the park, served as the conductor’s lectern. As John Philip Sousa stood before it, the American eagle on his cap glittered in the early-afternoon sun. He looked good; his band looked good, and played well too. But the invigorating whirl of "The Belle of Chicago" didn’t pull the stream of ladies and gentlemen away from the ragtime rhythms reinforced by many shoes thumping the boardwalk. 

Annoyed that Sousa's band was interfering with the dancers that Scott Joplin and his band played for,  Mr. Tomlins,who stood just outside the bandstand, pulled the folded handkerchief from his pocket and wafted it back and forth to Joplin's music. Mr. Tomlinson, with not much of an ear for music, kept time badly, moving his tiny white banner less to Joplin's raggy rhythm and more in line with a hesitation waltz, but his nods and smiles and enthusiasm still seemed to  encourage the newcomers to come closer to enjoy the whirl of song and dance.  

His back to the statue of Christopher Columbus towering over him, Sousa crisply swept the air, his gaze averted from the sight of his own dingy white gloves, nearly as gray as Mr. Tomlin's pocket-handkerchief. The conductor, all gleaming buttons and tasseled epaulets, lurched the New Marine Band through "El Capitan," then "The Thunderer," and finally, "King Cotton." But the fair-goers still flowed steadily toward Joplin’s music, which had swung into a cakewalk as dancers spilled out onto the promenade along the Grand Basin. The bandstand's broad railings were festooned with jumbles of shawls, parasols, vests, and straw hats discarded by overheated dancers.

As the oom-pah drive of "King Cotton" came to a slightly-abrupt halt, and before a single mouthpiece could be lowered, Sousa shouted "The Liberty Bell!" and he lifted his golden baton once more. But at that moment, a tuba player crept from the back row of The New Marine Band toward the moving sidewalk. As the other red-uniformed musicians pulled in a very quick breath before the new number, the rogue musician, his middle encircled by the coil of his sousaphone, glided slowly away from the Columbus statue and toward the bandstand filled with dancers. When he stepped away from the moving walkway, he added his tuba to Joplin's arrangement, his instrument taking up "The Swipesy Cakewalk." 

Next, two piccolo players, a trombonist, and a huge man with a bass drum strapped to his chest all subtly drifted away from the New Marine Band, then stepped onto the slow-moving carrier and were brought to the ragtime bandstand. With a beefed-up band, Joplin’s cakewalk now drowned out Sousa’s formerly blaring march. 

"After the Ball!" Sousa bawled from under his limp mustache, now openly desperate. But even as the popular ballad -- gaps audible -- filled the air, he lost an oboeist, a snare drummer, and then, humiliatingly, the triangle player. Finally forced to acknowledge the massive desertion, Sousa adjusted his eagle-crowned cap, removed his tired gray-tipped gloves and let them drop to the turf and tobacco ash at Columbus’ feet. He motioned to the remnants of The New Marine Band to step gracefully onto the moving sidewalk.  

From inside the bandstand, the black jazzmen -- never missing a note -- obligingly made room for the new musicians. They finished their number, and then --with a quick glance at Joplin, who nodded and put his cornet mouthpiece to his lips -- began enthusiastically to pump out a sped-up, syncopated version of "After the Ball." All dancers had merged into one happy, overheated jumble in front of, behind, and even under the bleachers, whirling and stepping. The last of Sousa’s red-uniformed men, uneasily balanced on the conveyor, whirred along the margin of the promenade, taking advantage of the moment to pull off their own white gloves and let them drop all over the lawn like fallen gardenia blooms. The entirety of The New Marine Band began to follow Joplin's players, and to add a little bounce, matching the jazzy beat which echoed off the vast surface of the Grand Basin.

 

 

Subtle Order Everywhere, or, Success With Upturned Top Hats

 

The dress code at Baldwin Manor changed in 1994. For that reason I left my job after twenty-one years of employment. As required, I'd worn a white polyester uniform for the first four years I worked at the facility. I'd begun work at age 22, as a nursing assistant, and in the 1970s, all unlicensed staff had the uniform requirement. White, as we know, is not a color but rather the absence of color. This meant no conflict with my personal system of dressing by color.  

Of course I was happier and more comfortable when, in 1977, I finally completed the coursework to become a Geriatric Nursing Specialist. Then I was able to dress in my own clothing. This took place back when the facility was still known as Hillcrest House of Hospitality, and there were still some limitations. It was understood that I would wear a dress or skirt. Later, when the nursing home was renamed Baldwin Manor, the rules allowed me to wear any type of nice professional clothing.  

The rules worked for everyone, so we were all surprised when the new dress code changes came along. The rule change went into place when the Kijlstra Brothers bought the company. The Kijlstras grew up in the Netherlands and I suppose the culture is more formal there.  

Carst Kijlstra was all right to deal with, but his brother Yos was very difficult. I discovered this for myself a week after I got a sheet cake from the dining facility. It was yellow cake with buttercream frosting -- my favorite combination. It was a nice big cake, enough to share with all the staff -- nursing, kitchen, maintenance, case management -- and it had "21 Years, Congrats" written on top. The cake actually said "21 Years, Comgrats" because Bethany had been in a hurry to get the lettering done before the lunch slips were picked up and brought back to the kitchen.  

When Bethany handed me the spatula, I quickly cut through the middle of "Comgrats" and no one noticed the typo, including Bethany. The cake was delicious, very moist and the icing was from a mix but Bethany had put some real butter in it and you could taste that, as I told her. She liked that I'd noticed. It was nice to have had someone bake it; once a person gets into the mid-forties, the only birthday cake you generally get is a single slice brought out by the server after a group dinner. One rarely gets to choose the flavor. The sheet cake was for my work anniversary and not my birthday, but it gave me a pleasant happy-birthday feeling.   

So when Mary Ellen, the facilities manager, passed me in the hallway and asked me to stop in at Yos Kijlstra's office "when I had a moment," to be honest I thought Yos might give me a gift certificate to T.G.I.Friday's. Or tell me I could have the semi-official three-quarter-size parking space next to the official Employee of the Month spot near the back door. The staff all knew my Ford Festiva would fit in the short space without blocking the exit driveway, so maybe they were going to let me park there for a month or something.  

But no, when I rapped on the door frame of Mr. Kijlstra's office and stuck my head in, he gave me an odd smile and motioned me in. I came in and sat down in the chair in front of his desk, then looked back at the open door, wondering if I should close it. He said in his Dutch accent, "This will chust take a moment, Irene." My name came out as "Irrrene," and that was charming, even though Yos himself wasn't.  

Yos used his fingertips to press down something on his desk, then he gave it a little shove, and the object slid across his desk top toward me. It would have gone over the front edge but I caught it. I was holding a photocopied booklet, with a background so gray that I could barely read the front cover.  

I squinted and made out the words "Standards and Procedures, Baldwin Manor, efective April 1994." Seven words and a date, and one of the words was spelled wrong. I opened the front cover. The text of the booklet was not only off-center and tilted, but during binding, the stapler hadn't been pushed down firmly enough. The end of a wire fastener protruded from the back cover and it had scratched me on the inside of my ring finger when I caught the pamphlet.  

I didn't say anything about the scratch. I just waited, as it was clear that neither a restaurant gift certificate nor a special parking spot were in my future.  

As I looked down at the badly-made booklet, Yos told me that in the future I would be required to wear green medical scrubs during my work day. Five pairs of these scrub sets would be provided, and if I brought my soiled uniforms in, the facility would launder the scrubs for me. I hoped the laundry crew was going to get extra pay for doing all these uniforms for everybody, but that wasn't my main concern at the moment.  

"I only wear green on Thursdays," I told Yos.  

"Excuse me?" he said.  

I looked at him directly, which I didn't enjoy. Yos had the puffy face of someone who lived on beer and batter-fried fish. His mouth was very small, or perhaps the mpression came from his choice to hold his lips in a compressed pucker. Maybe he thought this made him look reserved and in control, but it didn't. He looked like he'd suddenly become unwell. He had whitish straw-like hair like Andy Warhol's but the effect was more like -- what? An evil scarecrow, perhaps. I really wished I didn't have to sit across from him and look at his face.

I kept my thoughts about Yos' personal appearance to myself and focused on the matter at hand. "I only wear green on Thursdays," I said again, speaking more slowly this time.   

Looking back, I'd say that our conversation would have gone better if Yos had asked me why.  But instead he said "Are you messing with me?"

Unfortunately, I didn't understand what he said because of his Dutch accent. So I told him I was sorry but I couldn't understand him, and could he repeat what he'd told me? 

He did, and this time I got it, even though he said "Are you messing with me?" through his teeth.

Happenstance bad timing, but he couldn't see it as the random event it was. So I said, "Why would I mess with you?  You're the boss." The whole thing was becoming ugly and unpleasant, and just a week after that lovely sheet cake, too.  

"I don't know what's going on with you," said Yos.

And I said "I don't understand why you don't understand."

And then he said "Well, the uniform is green and it is worn daily, so you will be wearing this uniform on Wednesday, but also on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Do you understand?"

"The problem is not that I can't understand you," I said. "I understood what you said.  I believe the problem is that you don't understand what I am saying. I am saying that I don't wear green on any day except Thursday."

And again, this was another opportunity for Yos.  Even if he had said, "Why?" in a brusque manner, we still might have gotten somewhere.  But instead, he said "You are suspended with pay for five days, and I am going to send you for a mental health evaluation.  If they clear you, we can talk about what your future is with this company."

I said, "Well, it's true that I am a little odd. But of the two of us, it seems to me that you exhibit more textbook symptoms than I do. Your reasoning is confused, you think others are plotting against you, and you perceive your power and sphere of influence as greater than they actually are.  I'm sure that's some kind of narcissism or personality disorder.  I don't have an exact assessment. We used the DSM II when I was in school, but that's been seventeen years so they surely are up to DSM III or IV by now."

Yos listened carefully to what I said and took me off the suspended-with-pay list. He put me on the fired-with-no-pay list.

Because it was an involuntary separation at my end, I did start getting unemployment after a couple of weeks. I also had COBRA health benefits for six months. So I'd lost my job but I was all right for the moment.  

Since I didn't need to drive to work, and since my car was having issues with the timing belt, I sold the Festiva to an art student who lived downstairs from me. Jason immediately drove to a vacant lot, removed the car's fuel line and the gas tank, then set the subcompact on fire. He filmed the blaze with a Super-8 camera.  

The next day, there was a bit of a kerfuffle at my front door with a police officer, as Jason hadn't taken the license plates off the vehicle and the plates were still in my name. But I had the bill of sale, and the Super-8 movie had a time stamp which said 15:20, which is tech talk for 3:20 in the afternoon. I had used the two one hundred dollar bills I got for the Festiva to pay my heat and water bill at 2 pm at the apartment building office. So there was proof that I'd had nothing to do with the flaming auto performance art and the matter was dropped, or dropped in terms of my involvement anyway. Jason abruptly moved out of the complex a week later, and I assume the film project had something to do with that.  

The car was sold and I didn't need to renew the sticker or buy gasoline for it, and that was the important thing now. I looked at my options for the coming months. I'd paid off the budget amount for the previous winter's heat, and the rest of the water bill. My unemployment would last until Halloween, or maybe Thanksgiving. This was April, so I didn't have to go look for another nursing job right away.

I wasn't sure I really wanted another nursing job, but I was too young to retire. I hoped to come up with flexible part-time work, something I could take with me wherever I went. My long-term plan became this: I would relocate someplace temperate all year 'round. I could get a little camper and drive it from place to place and see what life was like in climates where it never snowed. I hooked at my life-skill list, compared it to my preference, and decided to become a street musician. I'd them everywhere, and in tourist season, the cash seemed to pile up in their instrument cases and upturned top hats.  

Busking appeared to have a lot of advantages over any traditional job I could realistically expect to get, especially with the Yos' Kijlstra terse damnation entered into my Baldwin Manor employee record after "Reason for Termination."  As a street performer, I'd never be asked for my references.  I could get paid to accompany myself on a guitar while I sang, a definite ego boost which I needed after losing my job. I could spend my days near people without having to interact directly one-on-one. I'd be outdoors and would never have to listen to another fluorescent light fixture buzzing over my head. And I could get away from a uniform code. All of those expectations turned out to be true except the last part. More about that later.  

The first two weeks, I got up early every morning and happily carried my guitar out to the sidewalk. I found a stoop or a park bench, and I played music all day. My guitar case was open, a starter dollar bill lying alone on the inner lining, waiting for its numbered green friends to arrive. I wore what I liked and sang what I liked. After the first two weeks, I got a plastic milk crate to use as a seat. Then I could go to any street corner in New York. I always drew a crowd who would stand around and watch me.  Some people left in the middle of a song, some stayed till the end, and the ones who stayed clapped and said "Very nice."  But most of the people didn't put any money in my guitar case. 

A location problem, obviously.  I needed a specific corner, a carefully-chosen spot. I began searching Manhattan, looking at intersections.  Prime street-performance corners, of course, were always already occupied by some other busker or street merchant. So I did what the Americans did to the First Nations and what the English did to the irish, and what real-estate tycoon Donald Trump did to everyone in the city: I hunted for the exact spot i wanted and then I figured out how to get the current occupant off of it.  

I can tell you methods that don't work for this: 1. Asking politely. 2. Asking forcefully.  3. Offering a slice of pizza, any topping. 4. Offering an entire pizza, any topping. 5. Offering a cut of my profits in the new spot once established.

What worked most often was plonking down on my upside-down milk crate, putting  my guitar on my lap and singing really, really loud and pretty much constantly.  With this method I moved a guy off a good corner on 14th  Street. It was to his advantage, really. He had a card table with old paperback books and comics on it, and I didn't see how being so near Union Square made any sense. New Yorkers were rushing to trains or off trains, too busy to stop and look at collectible junk. Tourists wouldn't want to jam any of that stuff into a suitcase. The seller was better off moving closer to places people browsed, a street with little shops where you sent down the steps to the basement. A lot of those little places had a restaurant on sidewalk level with outdoor dining under awnings. Near a place like that, when the sky clouded up, the comic book guy could throw plastic sheeting over his stock and go stand under an awning if it rained. Better for him all around.   

But, gosh darn it, I didn't do well on 14th Street. The subway station made the corner too noisy, and people were always stepping on my guitar case, and once, a kid suddenly reached down and grabbed out a five dollar bill and ran off with it.

I decided to try the West Village. At the corner of Horatio Street and Greenwich Avenue, I got a spot by driving off somebody selling sunglasses out of an open briefcase which hung from a strap around his shoulders. Again, the original occupant benefited by my decision to move him elsewhere. The sunglasses guy was selling in a spot that was half a block up Greenwich Avenue from another sunglasses guy. By moving him away, I surely helped him find a better spot than his original corner. 

But Greenwich & Horatio was also a no-go for me. I tried a few other corners. There were a couple times where I couldn't make someone leave no matter how loud I sang. This did make me start to wonder if I had the right to rearrange these people's lives, and yet I thought I needed their corner. So I fought for turf a few times, and if I lost, I felt bad that I lost.  If I won, I felt bad that I drove somebody off from their spot. And after a month of going through all that, I concluded that location wasn't even the problem. No matter the spot, I couldn't prosper as a busker.   

In the heart of the West Village, right up the street from the Corner Bistro, I earned practically nothing.  I tried improving my musicianship.  I did vocal exercises in the morning while I waited at the subway stop with my guitar.  I introduced new songs to my repertoire.  But on a good day I was only bringing in four or five bucks, mostly in small change, which I sterilized at home in diluted bleach solution before I rolled it in brown paper coin wrappers. People weren't tipping me for doing good work. This was charity.  The nickels, dimes, and pennies came from people who felt sorry for me and saw me as a homeless woman with a guitar.    

If I didn't start producing serious income soon, I might really end up as a homeless woman with a guitar, and after I pawned the guitar, I would be a just plain homeless woman. My unemployment was going to run out no later than Halloween, and here it was the end of May. My unemployment check covered the rent but that was all. The heat and lights and groceries and subway fares all came out of my dwindling savings. Time was not on my side.

 .

One morning I sat down on my blue plastic milk crate, and first thing, the B string on my Yamaha acoustic snapped.  The string had been a little frayed near the tailpiece, but I'd been ignoring the sharp twist of wire that was coming loose.   Then snap! and I was down to five strings.  I was lucky that the end of the broken string didn't hit me in the eye, and I appreciated that, but after I took the broken ends off, I was not in a good place.   

The morning going-for-coffee crowd was passing me by, and I didn't want to miss them, looking for someplace to buy guitar strings. I quickly changed to DADGAD tuning minus one string, I adjusted the E tuner down to a D and used the high string as a kind of drone.  

As I strummed, trying to to look panicky, I noticed that I was getting even fewer coins than usual from people. I needed a plan and fast. The drone of the high D made me think of the sound of the Great Highland Pipes, which my father's father played. Those are the complex bundles of pipes, arranged in a large armful, the ones you see in the movies. We used to go and watch my grandfather play in piping competitions, and I loved the sound so much that for my ninth birthday, my father gave me a plastic chanter. the chanter is like a little recorder and it's the pipe part of bagpipes, the piece with the mouthpiece and finger holes.   

For a fourth-grader, I showed some perseverance with the chanter. Keeping my breath going to make the reed vibrate was pretty challenging, but I found learning the tunes pretty easy. With only six holes, the fingering wasn't complicated for me. For a couple years, I fooled around with the chanter, learning some Scottish tunes from my grandfather when he was feeling patient enough to show me. When I got my first guitar in sixth grade, I forgot about the chanter and learned to play "Dominque" by the Singing Nun.    

Now, on a street corner in the West Village, I leaned over my five-stringed Yamaha guitar and began fingerpicking slowly. Reaching back into 30-year-old memories, I pulled up the melody for most of "Ye Banks and Braes" and as much as I could remember of "The Bluebells of Scotland."  After that, my confidence grew. I went into "Scotland the Brave" from memory, then "Annie Laurie," and then I ran out of songs till I remembered how to play  "Auld Lang Syne." Then I thought I was done before I came up with "On the Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond."    

 

When I'd finished fumbling my way through the last "Oh, you take the high road and I'll take the low road," I looked into my guitar case and there was a pile of change and a sprinkling of dollar bills in it.  So I started the Scottish rotation again with "Ye Banks and Braes," and by the end of the day, I had made forty-six dollars.  Well, I'd made fifty-one bucks but I'd given five dollars to a woman wearing two coats who told me she was the deposed Queen of Hawaii and needed plane fare to get back to her tropical home.   

I used part of my bonanza to buy a set of guitar strings and four yards of Tartan plaid fabric in red and green.  I fashioned three yards of the fabric into something that resembled a kilt and used the leftover bits as a sash draped over my green turtleneck.  Women don't wear kilts in Scotland, but I figured an ethnic costume, no matter how culturally inappropriate, would bring in the dollars and was I right.  The most popular request was "Danny Boy," which has depressing lyrics, all about Danny Boy coming home to find that you've died and been buried, and it's an Irish song not Scottish, but I called it Celtic and warbled about mountainsides and glens, and I raked in the dough.  

Since I had the red and green plaid going, I could wear my Scottish ensemble on both Tuesday and Friday.  I guess I never explained about the colors and the days of the week, did I?  I have always had an anti-chaos agenda in my adult life.  Both of my parents were paranoid schizophrenics.  My brother Tim and I spent our childhoods behind blinds closed against enemy agents, CIA informants, and UFO high-frequency transmitters.  Tim and I didn't have freshly-laundered underwear, or nutritious food, or peaceful sleep.  When I was 11 and Tim was 9, the county came and took us to a foster home where we lived until I graduated from high school.  My foster family, the Hudsons, were very orderly and I noticed immediately how much better it felt.  Other teenagers resented having to be home by curfew or ready to sit down to dinner at 6 sharp, but I loved it. Tim hated it, became a runaway, lived on the street and started using injection drugs, and died at age 19. This convinced me I'd chosen the better path.   

Defeating chaos improved my relationship with the Creator, who I began to perceive as surprisingly organized.  I felt that the world only seemed disorganized, but really there was a system to everything.  The laws of the natural world were amazingly unbreakable compared to ordinary rules and regulations, like traffic laws.  People tapped their brakes briefly at stop signs and they often didn't stop at all for lights which had just turned red.  But a system like harmonics never changed.  Pythagoras knew 2500 years ago that if you plucked a string and got the note G, you could shorten the string by half, double the sound waves and get a perfect octave. You could pluck a string all day in random spots and claim there was no order to the notes but if you figured out the ratio thing, everything fell into place and ta-da!  Air for the G String.    

I often wondered if the patterns in my physical brain became more orderly with age and experience. With all the modern medical scanning available, I suspected doctors were finding more and more that some people's' brain grooves were orderly and some peoples' were chaotic.  I felt that the people with the organized brains were happier.  I knew from experience that when I looked at the the nightmarish jumble of urban architecture or the inside of a Wal-Mart, my brain began feeling like it was wrinkled up worse than cotton bedsheets left in the dryer overnight.  But when I looked at beautiful architecture, my synaptic network was aligned, and my thinking was clear.

I got a book from the library on sacred geometry, and it said that the largest Buddhist stupa in the world had a spire with a height which corresponded to the depth of the sacred relic box buried under it.  Another chapter showed how the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral and the Mona Lisa were based on the rule of the Golden Mean, which used geometry to imitate the way living things unfolded and expanded in nature.  It was comforting to know that I was not the only one who saw that there was subtle order everywhere.

There was nothing I could do about the horrors of urban chaos or Wal-Mart, but I could make choices about where things went in my house, or what colors to wear,  rather than slap together the elements of life randomly.  Why should I grab any old thing out of the closet when I could take a moment to learn the colors and which days they corresponded to, and be in harmony with universal forces? Why would I want to clash when I could harmonize?   

I couldn't know for sure, of course, if wearing gold or orange on Monday or red on Tuesday really made me smarter or stronger or friendlier or better-looking.  In fact, I knew that purple, the correct symbolic color for Wednesday, didn't work for me because certain shades of purple, especially near my face, made me look like I died an hour ago.  So for Wednesday I usually went with amethyst jewelry. Otherwise, I stayed within the color system. It made me feel organized inside.   

Wearing the red-and-green sash and kilt kept me in cosmic harmony two days a week. I wore a red turtleneck with my kilt on Tuesday, and a green one on Friday.  Since the Scottish thing was bringing in good money, I went ethnic on the other days too.  My mother's  Jewish, so I hung out near the Ellis Island ferry.  I thought I might catch tourists with family from Eastern Europe going to see where Bubbie and Zaydie first came out of steerage, blinking in the sunlight.  Ah, but I needed a Jewish outfit. Who should I dress like?  Golda Meir?  My grandmother from Queens?  Shari Lewis, with her puppet Lamb Chop on her arm?  I put together a flowing gypsy thing with bells and beads and told myself I was vaguely Sephardic.   

For the Ellis Island gig, I had once again to struggle a bit to find the best spot to perform.  Ellis Island already had steel drum players, acrobats, more of the many men who sell sunglasses out of suitcases, and a woman who painted herself green and stood on a homemade pedestal posing as a living Statue of Liberty. Lots of competition but I was the only singer in costume. I found a park bench I could commandeer if I got there early enough in the morning, and I hoped my music might draw an audience.  

Being out near the water in breezy weather was tough on my guitar.  The strings went out of tune, and the changes in temperature expanded and contracted the wood of the body. The Yamaha got a crack that I had to fill with Super Glue. The crack got longer and deeper. The glue softened in the heat and the wood pieces shifted and it put a strain on the grain lines. Pretty soon the glue wasn't going to work any more.   

I didn't have money for a new guitar. I had money for rent, and the water bill, and groceries (if ramen and big bags of oranges counted as groceries) but no money for new guitars.  Also, I was getting more people and that meant I played a lot more, and my fingertips stayed sore.  And once I'd gone multi-ethnic, II'd gotten into all these minor keys. The guitar wasn't working for the gig near the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. I went to a Sam Ash store to see if I could find a cheap plastic bagpipe chanter, the kind I played in grade school. I left the store with a Hohner Melodica.

The Melodica had remained in production and yet unpopular generally, the music store clerk told me, because people kept buying them for children. The clerk wished the people of America wouldn't. "Their children overblow," he said sadly. "That's what causes the screeching. The Melodica is too complicated for a child."

It was great for me, though.  If it rained I did have to stick it into a big Ziploc bag, but other than that, no issues with weather. The sturdy plastic didn't mind the heat or cold.  The Melodica was easy to carry, I didn't have to tune it, and if I was playing Jewish music, I had 37 piano keys with all the notes I needed.  "Hava Nagila," for instance, had a lot of black keys in it.

Once I got the Melodica, I expanded my "Sephardic" repertoire beyond Jewish tunes.  The instrument had an accordion-type sound, and I started  working on French café music, Czech dance tunes, and Russian folk songs.  But just as I could take tourists around the world via Melodica, I had to shelve some of my plans for expansion as, rather annoyingly, I found I'd gotten a job.  

What happened is that I was sitting on my Ellis Island bench, wailing out a little arrangement of "Tzena Tzena Tzena" I'd just improvised, and a woman in a taupe pantsuit sat down next to me and asked me if I knew "Tumbalalaika."    

I told her I had an old Barry Sisters record that had been my mom's, which I played on a  three-speed record player I'd inherited from my brother when he'd moved away from home. I told the woman that I not only knew "Tumbalalaika" but "Vyoch Tyoch Tyoch," and "Chiribim Chiribom."

The woman in the taupe pantsuit said her name was Judy Blasberg, and she was the Activities Director at the Herman Glassman Retirement Center, and would I consider coming by to play and sing for the people there?       

 

And I said, "Sure. Since it's indoors I could bring my guitar. I'm pretty sure the Super Glue is dry since I glued it yesterday."  

"You had to glue your guitar?" Judy asked. "Is it broken?"

"Not really broken," I said. "Just a crack in the back. A little Super Glue works if I keep it the instrument out of the direct sun. I think it's the sun that melts the glue and makes the crack in the wood open."  

"Makes sense to me," Judy said. "Would tomorrow afternoon at one be a convenient time for you to stop by the Glassman Center?"

"Yes, all right," I said. "Um, do I need to wear anything special?"

"Just whatever's comfortable for you," she said.   

"That sounds great," I said. "I'll be there."

Since the day I started, I have loved working at the Glassman Center. The people there enjoy the sing-alongs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Right after lunch I came in, and that is a good time, as sometimes  people in an institution don't have anything to look forward to except meals.  Once they eat lunch, they just sit there waiting for dinner to come around.  So the sing-alongs on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from one o'clock till three work out very well. We do "Shine On Harvest Moon," and "Till There Was You," and some of the residents dance, and a few more sng, and some make noises that are probably singing.  Some of them just sit and stare at me like owls, but I welcome participation at any level.   

I would be happy to volunteer, but the people at Glassman are very generous and I not only get a check on the first of the month, but they are able to continue my COBRA health insurance for a very reasonable premium, taken right out of my check.  

Since indoor work is so much more comfortable and pays well, I have stopped playing outdoors. A few months ago I took a Celtic version of the sing-along to the retirement center associated with St. Brendan's near 3rd Avenue and 17th Street, and I've begun to work there Mondays and Wednesdays.  That pays something too, so I am able to take Fridays off and I've enrolled in a course in sacred architecture at CUNY.

The group favorite at St. Brendan's, at first, unhappily for me, was "Danny Boy." Over time, I've  gotten the attendees interested in a few songs from other places in the world. In the last six months, I've tried out some of my "Sephardic" song list at St. Brendan's, and a lot of the residents seem to like it. At any rate, no one objects, and one gentleman always asks for "Hava Nagila," because he finds it "very peppy."  

I told him the title means "Let's Rejoice." What I didn't say to him was that I have always put a lot of joy into that song. If I need to get my mood into the best place, all I have to do is think about is the day I put my red-and-green kilt, the gypsy skirt with the bells on the hem, and an unworn pair of green scrub uniform slacks into the Goodwill donation box.