A STORIED LIFE
by Sonia Fricker Brock
Copyright © 2008 Sonia Fricker Brock
Thanks go to Chris Larcombe for tireless proofreading and valuable suggestions.
Thanks also go to Jack Cooper for many helpful comments on the Podcasts (on which
this volume is based) and to my other faithful listeners, including Tony Burns.
CHATHAM, ONTARIO
My name is Sonia Brock. I was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. My father was British
and my mother an American. We often teased her about being a Yankee and she would,
indignantly, rise to the bait every time.
In truth our borders were more fluid in those days. Her father worked in Port Dover,
Ontario and also in Michigan, although he was Canadian. Grandad had been an efficiency
expert in factories. The girls there were paid for piecework, that is to say by completed
pieces of sewing, so they were grateful to be shown how to produce more items, faster.
Chatham was a farming town trying to be a city. The number 30,000 was very important
since it defined Chatham as a real city and not just a town.
I guess everybody’s life has a soundtrack. I know mine has. It started back in Chatham,
Ontario my home town.
Chatham had been a terminal on the Underground Railroad, so there were a fair number
of black folks round there, in Dresden and around Kent County.
Back in the 50s when I was coming into my teen years there was an unspoken kind of
segregation going on. There was a black restaurant and a white restaurant. No signs were
put up but everybody knew. White, middle-class kids went to one restaurant and black
kids and rebels and working class kids went to the other.
The music we were exposed to at home was mainly classical and mainstream stuff. My
mother had trained in opera singing and piano. My dad loved classical music and opera.
He thought that black Gospel singing was screaming. He loved opera which I thought
was screaming, so we had a sort of a stalemate there. I came to change my mind about
opera but he didnt change his mind about gospel singing, unless it was Mahalia Jackson
or Judith Anderson on a recognized TV network.
In his younger days he had worked in sales at the Heintzman piano factory in Toronto
and taught himself to play piano by ear. When Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist,
was in town he was hired to play at the Revival Meeting. His specialty was Almost
Persuaded which was used to lure the shy up to the front so they could be publicly saved.
At night, in Chatham, when the AM signal was better, you could hear the black radio
station signal from Detroit, Michigan some 50 miles away. That sound would come
trolling down into southern Ontario and it was very, very different. I stuck with it, learned
to understand it a little. I even began to imitate it. This was several years before Elvis hit
the airwaves and popular music was very, very white with some notable exceptions like
Nat King Cole. Little Willie John singing Im Glad over the AM radio waves coming from
Detroit, late at night defines this whole musical period for me.
Chatham Town Characters and Stories
Some high school lads were hauled up in Court for painting a farmers cow blue.
Why did you paint that cow blue? the Judge asked sternly.
Because, Your Honour, we didnt have any red paint.
There was a local woman of loose morals. No-one remembered her real name but she was
called Mrs. Pickle. This may have been a phallic reference. She had many, many children
all of whom she loved very much but they were as near wild as children could be and the
school system groaned in anticipation as little Pickle worked his or her way through the
system, soon to be followed by the next wave of Pickle kids. The children were all named
after priests or nuns or Catholic saints.
On a more professional level there was a local house of ill repute. Some high school boys
called the place up once and asked the lady in charge how much they could get for $5.
She replied, Not even as sniff, boys. Not even a sniff.
Catholicism was a mystery religion to us. The Catholics had two very big churches and
the main on downtown was loudly marched by on a Sunday in July by the Orangemen.
Catholics were called Dogans, a derogatory Canadian term no longer much in use.
There were Catholic French Canadian misses in my Girl Guide group. They taught us to
swear in French. We thought allez au diable was a fiercely bad thing to say and practiced
it carefully.
There was a teaching nunnery called The Pines and I can remember seeing on a wooded
path leading back to the main house a group of young nuns in their novice habits joyously
dancing a kind of ring-around-a-rosie. Their happiness was so pure that it evoked in me a
longing for the contemplative life of a nun.
Then, there were cautionary tales. The one I remember is of a local worthy who went into
a downtown drugstore with a soda counter one very hot summer day and ordered up a
whole glass of cracked ice. He downed the lot and promptly died of a heart attack.
Children would be solemnly told this tale with the tag line, And let that be a lesson to
you!
There were local sayings, a kind of dry rural wit. The one I remember is, Do you think
the rain will hurt the rhubarb. (rhubarb can handle any amount of rain). wAnother was,
Quite a spell of weather were having. This suited all occasions.
I also remember High School legends about getting high if you added aspirin to Coke.
Never tried it so I cant say if it worked or not. Reminds me of the urban legend in NYC
in the 60s that the inner white lining of banana peel would have the same effect if
smoked. That one I know was not true.
WWII had impressed a number of prisoners of war and allies with the benefits of living
in Chatham so we had Japanese, and German and also Dutch immigrants, as well as a full
load of sojourners from the British Isles. I remember one Dutch family that saved and
scrimped and put all their money into farm equipment and livestock and the like but they
had a wood stove in the house and not much else until that magic moment came when the
investment paid off. We were unaccustomed to such disciplined frugality.
These Dutch farmers had an enormous manure pile next to the barn, a veritable hill of
bovine end product and this was carefully spread over the fields in the early Spring when
it was cooler. You could tell where the manure ended by how green the field was or
wasnt as the case may be.
WWII
When I think of Chatham in Summer I see milkweed and monarch butterflies and my
mind drifts back to an earlier time remembering that we were saving milkweed down
during wartime. Bags of milkweed fluff were used in military life jackets during World
War II.
Tinfoil was rolled into balls and saved for the war effort. It was dropped in strips to
confuse enemy radar. Dumped in quantity, these strips simulated armadas of bombers on
Radar screens of ground controllers, who would then misdirect intercepting aircraft and
anti-aircraft guns against tinfoil while attacking bombers would sneak past the distracted
defenses.
Tin cans were saved and flattened too. A poster told us to Prepare Your Tin Cans for
War:
1 Remove tops and bottoms,
2 Take off paper labels
3 Wash thoroughly
4 Flatten firmly.
Tinfoil was rolled into balls and saved for the war effort. It was dropped in strips to
confuse enemy radar. Dumped in quantity, these strips simulated armadas of bombers on
Radar screens of ground controllers, who would then misdirect intercepting aircraft and
anti-aircraft guns against tinfoil while attacking bombers would sneak past the distracted
defenses.
In school we bought little Victory War Bonds at, I believe a quarter a week or some such
amount, to be accumulated until there was enough to buy a bond.
River Road
During or just towards the end of WWII my mother rented a house that was partly a farm.
The large backyard faced on the muddy Thames River and the front of the house faced a
street called River Road. River Road has since been made popular in a song by Sylvia
Tyson. This was a rural environment, just outside the small city of Chatham, Ontario.
Farms were all around us. Located in Southern Ontario, the Chatham/Kent area is kind of
a Canadian bread basket.
Across the way from us was a farm where they had the most wonderful apple orchard.
We liked to sneak over there and pick up the wind falls, apples that had fallen naturally
from the tree, because they were very sweet.
Mother pig and her piglets had the same idea. The piglets were there and we found them
and we thought of them as toys. I was between the ages of seven or eight and my sister
was three years younger. We were munching on apples and tossing apples at the piglets
and listening to them squeal. Then came a monstrous apparition, the mother pig. She was
gigantic. She was angry. She was coming straight at us and I knew that we were in a
whole lot of trouble.
Apple trees have fairly low limbs, thus theyre pretty easy to climb. I ran for the nearest
accessible tree, dragging my sister by the hand behind me. I started to climb up but she
couldnt climb because she was too small. She was wearing a short, print cotton dress and
not much else because it was summer. I dragged her up the trunk of that tree, ignoring all
obstacles such as bark and projections, to where I was and then up a little higher, so that
we were well out of reach of mama pig who was snorting and huffing around the tree
below us. We stayed up that tree what seemed like forever. Eventually the mother pig
forgot what she came for and wandered away. Very carefully and very quietly we went
down that tree trunk. I lowered my sister . She was all scratched and scraped and bloody
and dirty. I was in somewhat better condition but I knew I was in for it at home.
I dont remember if I told my parents about the pig but I may have said something about
climbing trees. In any case I got what we called a lickin for that, a good, old fashioned
one with a strap. Id saved my sisters life, not because I was so terrible fond of her at the
time but because Id have been in SO MUCH TROUBLE if the pig had eaten her!
You may remember in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy fell in the pig pen and the
farmhands were in such a hurry to rescue her. Well, pigsll eat anything. Go figure!
Spring Fever
I used to run away just about every Spring, starting when I was five or six, I guess.
Something about springtime would get into my blood and Id run off to join the Gypsies. I
never found them but Id run off to join them anyways. One time I scampered off when I
was just a toddler and ran across a field with a bull in it. Nothing happened to me. I think
animals know when a body is too young to fuss with. I ended up in Chatham at a Police
Station where the policemen fed me ice cream.
This may have encouraged me to continue to run away each Spring but I suspect it was
just Spring Fever.
I always came back and, after a while, my folks got to the point where theyd say Wheres
Sonia? Oh, its springtime. Shell be back when she gets hungry.
The Sugar Beet Factory
Just down the road from our farmhouse was a really big sugar beet factory. Sounds
harmless but in summertime the smell took some time to get used to. There were
mountains of sugar beets which they processed and then the leavings were dumped across
the way. They had built up a hill there with a road going across it. On either side of this
road there were big pits. Thats where they dumped the leavings which fermented and
produced a pervasive odour. I guess the rent was cheap thereabouts.
One time a truck slipped off the road and into the wbubbling morass of sugar beet
leavings never to be seen again. The driver escaped but the truck is still down there
someplace.
The sugar beet processing plant is gone now and I think theyve changed the name River
Road to Riverside Drive. Where the sugar beet dump was is solid ground now and theyve
built a subdivision on it. That dump has become prime property.
The Story of Rooster Booster
My mother kept chickens and had a Victory Garden. It was part of the war effort to grow
your own food. She started out with Bantam chickens which are very small. She had hens
and a rooster and the hens laid tiny eggs.
Later, she got some Leghorn chicks and they guaranteed that these chicks were all female
but one of them slipped under the radar and and he was male, very much so. When those
little chicks were growing up Rooster Booster, the Bantam, used to pick on that Leghorn
rooster chick. He gave him such a hard time. Of course the Leghorn chicks got bigger.
The Leghorn rooster started to get tall and lanky. As an adolescent he was still scared of
the Bantam rooster who would chase him around.
This little Bantie rooster chasing around this big old Leghorn was quite a funny sight to
see. One fine day the Leghorn rooster realized that he was bigger! He turned on the
Bantam and, well, that was the end of Rooster Booster. You could say that it was the end
of tyranny or whatever you want but it was curtains for Rooster Booster.
Winter
One of the things I remember best about my hometown of Chatham, Ontario is the
weather. There were real seasons back then Spring Summer, Fall and, of course, Winter.
It could get pretty snowy. I can remember, like Good King Wenceslas , walking in the
footprints of other people to avoid the deeper parts of the snow on the way to or back
from school.
One of the most beautiful and deadly sights then was an ice storm. Cold rain would turn
to ice about the same time it hit the branches of the trees. The trees would become a
crystal wonderland. It was wonderful to see but if a wind came along all the little frozen
branches, sheathed in ice, would break, causing much destruction to the parent tree.
I have other memories of cold. I moved up north to Atikameg Alberta 200 miles north of
Edmonton and above High Prairie. Atikameg was a Cree Indian Reservation. Now, I was
expecting at the time and, in fact, Id had the child by Caesarian. I was healing from that,
having been released by the hospital. Things werent going well and I didnt know what
was wrong. I was isolated in a little log cabin up on a hill (The Teacherage where my
husband worked had burned down recently). We were part of the Anglican Church
teaching facility on the Reservation.
The Catholics were on another hill were next door, if you call next door a considerable
tramping distance in snow. There were two Sisters there, by Sisters I mean Nuns. They
had some medical training, so I thought Id better go and see them.
To get there you had to go down a long road from our hilltop, along the main road a bit
and then up another long road to their hilltop. I thought Id take a shortcut. Straight from
our hilltop to theirs.
Snow, where Id come from, was a relatively mild affair but up there it got pretty deep. I
found myself trying to plough up the hill in waist deep snow. I was using bushes and
branches to pull myself along. Its a wonder I didnt fall into a snow crevace and get frozen
or something. Finally, I made it up therel to the Station. Nothing they could do for me
really except to say that Id better get into town pretty darn quick.
They gave me, and this was all they could do, an enormous gelatin vitamin capsule. A lot
of it was cod liver oil I found out from subsequent burps. So, they weighed me and they
gave me this enormous pill. I said, Why is it so big?
They said, They think that if one pill is good, then the whole bottle is best. Theyll take it
all at once to save muss, fuss and bother. So, we give them the biggest dose that they can
take at one time and send them away. Then, when they come back, well give them
another dose.
I took that pill and struggled back down the hill and made arrangements to come back
into town. Turned out a had a Staph infection in my Caesarian incision. Staphylococcus is
no joke and it was rampant in that bush hospital. I survived that but I didnt eat for about a
week, due to the nature of the illness. I think the enormous vitamin pill the good Sisters
gave me saved my life. There you go. You never know.
Another story involving cold was in New York City. I was using an ice pick to get the ice
out of the refrigerator freezer. There was a gas in there called freon. I accidentally
punctured the part of the freezer that held the freon and the gas started coming out. I
thought it was dangerous, so I grabbed up Cathy, my daughter. She wasnt wearing any
clothes at the time, just little panties. She was so mortified that Id dragged her out into the
hallway in her skivvies. Turned out the freon wasnt all the dangerous and we repaired it
so that it was okay. My goodness. That was an adventure in the cold!
My first husband, Bob Bates, may he rest in peace, had a little bit of trouble keeping jobs.
One time he managed to get a relief job in a place the dealt in frozen foods. This was in
August during the summer holiday time which is why he was doing relief work. It was
the best job hed had in a while. Hed get occasional free frozen food and they supplied a
snowman suit and the pay was good but all good things must end. The other fellow was
coming back from holidays. Bob was upset to hear this. I guess hed been telling himself
that he might keep the job. He was so dismayed that he ran out into the street in August,
and August in New York City is hot, in his snowman suit, claiming he was going to jump
off the Brooklyn Bridge or some darn thing like that. I think he ran about four blocks and
then the heat got to him. He dragged himself back to the place, gave them back their
snowman suit and got his final cheque and that was the end of that.
The weather nowadays is chancy. There are some terrible storms out there. Its all very
well to look back and laugh at Winter but Winter can be deadly.
FAMILY: My Mother, Phyllis Fricker, writes:
Myself & Grandma Fricker
Mother and boyfriend.
Aunt Addie and Mother (left)
My grandmother, Mary Faulkner was a twin. She married my first grandfather, Captain
Brock. He was captain of a three-masted sailing vessel at Port Dover. Captain Brock was
robbed of his money one pay night and was thrown overboard and drowned. Like many
sailors in his day he could not swim.
Grandmother had three children by him: Kenneth, Clara, & Percy. She eventually
married again to Frank Faulkner and had one child by him Hilda. Mary and Frank
Faulkner lived in Port Dover in a little stucco cottage. They had about an acre of land
with a couple of barns and a large chicken yard - fenced in. They had two horses, a Jersey
cow, lots of chickens and geese and a few ducks. They had a strawberry patch, a
raspberry patch, and a very large garden.
My mother told of her Grandma on their large front veranda - sitting in an old rocking
chair with a large two-quart jar full of milk and cream. She would rock and shake and
rock and shake and eventually the result was buttermilk and butter. The buttermilk was
the best my mother had ever tasted. Then Grandma Faulkner would put the liquid into a
big wooden bowl and use a butter sieve to draw out the pieces of butter.
Frank Faulkner
Frank Faulkner was a kind and friendly man. I dont remember ever seeing him in a suit,
although I suppose he had one. He always wore bright flannel shirts and overalls and
work boots. He worked hard. He had a horse and wagon with which he would go down to
the beach at Lake Erie and take a shovel and fill the wagon up with gravel. I suppose he
sold the gravel to contractors and builders. He and Grandma never seemed to have much
money to throw around - but I dont remember ever hearing a harsh word from them.
They just made do with what they had.
He always had a healthy appetite. After lunch he always laid down on the couch by the
window in the kitchen and had a nap for an hour or two. The window sill always had
geraniums on it. After hauling all that gravel he was, no doubt, tired and had sense
enough to rest awhile."
On the Farm
"Grandpa had a plough and would work up his acre of ground. I can remember helping
him to plant potatoes, He always kidded me and said I was putting them upside down and
that they would grow down to China. As a child I thought this was a wondrous thing and
visualized Chinese children finding potatoes in their garden and wondering where they
came from. Grandpa would take sides of pork and hams and smoke them in the smoke
house out by the barn.
He married Grandma when she was a widow with three children - Percy, Kenneth, &
Clara. He fathered two more children - Bill & Hilda."
The Root Cellar
"Sometimes Grandpa would disappear down into the cellar. This was a dark pit dug out
of the ground with a dirt floor and a narrow little stairway leading down to it. I suspect he
had a little cache of home-made brew or hard cider or corn whiskey. However, I never
saw him the worse for liquor.
He would go out to the barn and milk the cow. He tried to show me how to milk - but
squeeze the teats anyway I could - I could never produce a drop of milk.
Grandpa's son, Bill Faulkner, joined the Services during the First Wold War. He was sent
overseas and died during the terrible influenza epidemic."
My Mothers Paternal Grandmother - Mary Faulkner
Mary & Frank were almost self-sufficient, though not rich. They had fresh eggs from
their hens, also chickens to eat. They had jersey milk from the cow, also butter and
cream. The had vegetables from their garden - Potatoes, carrots, beets, and squash &
onions stored in the root- cellar for the winter. They had berries from the garden Grandma made jams and jellies.
Grandma cooked on a huge iron cook stove which was fueled with wood. It had an oven
and a water reservoir. She was a good cook. Breakfast was always a hearty meal. Bacon
& eggs and fried potatoes, toast and coffee and usually a pie of some description which
was served up on a beautiful glass pedestal dish.
Grandma wore cotton print dresses every day, very long, and usually covered with a
voluminous apron with large pockets. When she went out to work in the garden she
always wore a sun- bonnet. It was not stylish in those days to be tan. She was a tall, gaunt
woman with thick, beautiful white hair. She had false teeth which must have been
uncomfortable because she usually put them in her apron pocket. I can remember starting
out to Church with her. People said that we walked exactly the same - toes out & fast. We
would get partly along the way and shed say Oh shaw, we have to go back. I would asked
why and she would say I forgot my teeth, I left them in my apron pocket.
Grandma was an avid quilter. Sometimes she would have a quilting bee at her home;
inviting 5 or 6 other ladies. They all sewed like mad and never stopped talking and
gossiping. Then tea or cake and cookies would be served. It was a very pleasant social
event and the results were lovely quilts in various patterns - Log Cabin, Wedding Ring,
Goose Tracks, etc. Every scrap of material would be saved - cotton & wool & linen.
There were no synthetics then. She must have had a sewing machine because she made
most of her clothes and dresses, also for Hilda and Clara.
Grandma was a great one for visiting. She had many relatives and friends in Dover. We
would walk out almost every day and call on someone - Pete & Eva Brock, many of the
Lowe family, 2 old-maid sisters who lived together and many others whose names I cant
remember.
•
Black Diphtheria
When I was in Port Dover one summer I met some American girls who were interested in
art and we used to go out sketching along the River Lynn and other picturesque places
around Dover. We were out on one of our daily sketching tours down by the fishing boats
and the dock when I was overcome by a feeling of dreadful sickness. I went home to
Grandma as I was running a high fever. She called the Doctor and when he came he
diagnosed my illness as a particularly violent case of Black Diphtheria.
I will never forget how I suffered. My throat was swollen to the point where I could
hardly swallow and was filled with a grey, crepey phlegm. The Doctor told me to gargle
with hot salt water. This seemed to help me and to relieve the soreness. Of course, in
those days, they did not have the wonder drugs that they have now and I consider myself
lucky to have survived this dreadful illness.
Boating on the River Lynn in Port Dover
I used to love going on a boating excursion up the River Lynn with my Father. We would
rent a rowboat and row down the river, it was beautiful. There were always lots of
seagulls, and lots of red-winged blackbirds. These were happy times.
Pete McNabb
Of course, my boyfriends from St. Thomas used to come down to visit me at Dover.
There was Pete McNabb, a Catholic fellow I was very fond of. He had two brothers who
were Priests. One was a school-teacher in Toronto and the other was a missionary in
China. He had two sisters who were nuns. Pete did his best to convert me to Catholicism
but never succeeded.
Saturday Night Dance
There were always Saturday night dances at the dance hall down at the lake. Edna and I
used to go down together.
This one Saturday night we went and there were not very many present. We sat like
wallflowers for a while and then this farmer-looking fellow came up to Edna ans asked
her for a dance. They got out on the floor and he said to her, Theyre aint very many here
tonight, and she said Nope, there aint. and that was the sum total of their conversation for
the rest of the dance. Needless to say, we went home in disgust. This is not the end of the
episode however. We sneaked into the side door and quietly went to bed at 9:30. The next
morning after breakfast Mother and I were washing dishes and I said that we were going
to go to the movie theatre. That night. Mother said, You are not going anywhere tonight.
You didnt come home until three oclock this morning and Im grounding you. I was so
mad that I took a dish I was wiping and smashed it against the wall and flounced out of
the kitchen.
Running Away
In the afternoon Mother went shopping with Grandma. I packed a suitcase and ran away.
I was picked up by two young fellows in a sports car, and they took me to St. Thomas.
When I arrived there I went to stay with a special girl-friend of mine, Elma Strickland.
The Chase
Mother and Dad were sure I had run away to Pete McNabb, the chap I had been going
steady with in St. Thomas. They were afraid I was going to get married to Pete. Dad
high-tailed it to St. Thomas. I was not with Aunt Clara, where he thought I would be , so
he went to see Pete. Of course, Pete didnt even know I was in St. Thomas. However, as
fate would have it, my cousin Frank saw me on Talbot Street, talked to me and found out
that I was staying with Thelma. The cat was out of the bag. So Dad took me back to
Dover. Edna upheld my story that we were in early from the dance and peace was
restored. Relations were strained between my Mother and I for some time.
Aunt Clara And Uncle Bill
Taken from my mothers memoirs - life in Port Dover, Ontario in the 1920s. The words
are hers.
Aunt Clara was my mothers fathers sister. Clara was a kind loving and giving person. She
lived in St. Thomas. She took in my mother,father and mother when they were destitute
because of the great market crash in 1929. Her daughter and my cousin, Edna, and I were
like sisters. We got along famously. If we got a cold Aunt Clara would doctor us up with
mustard plasters or onion plasters.
She was an excellent cook and I well remember her famous casserole, macaroni and
cheese. Aunt Clara was an active church worker, although Uncle Bill never went to
church at all.
I remember Edna and I, one time, were removing all the wallpaper from the font and back
parlours. We had to soak it with hot water, then scrape it off with paint scrapers. What a
monumental chore! While we were staying there my father put in new hardwood floors. I
suppose this was to help pay for our keep.
Aunt Clara was an active woman, quick-moving, always busy. She was very close to her
sister, Hilda. One of the happiest times of my life was living with Aunt Clara and Uncle
Bill. We were never made to feel like poor relatives.
We really enjoyed her front veranda where we would sit and visit and watch all the funny
people go by.
We often visited Grandma Faulkner in Port Dover
After Uncle Bill died Aunt Clara had the house divided into apartments. It was a large
house.
Uncle Bill Miller was an engineer on the Wabash Railroad in St. Thomas, Ontario. He
was a awful tease and a coarse sort of man. He would say, Well, I had to marry Clara.
She got me out on the end of a pier in Port Dover and told me that, if I didnt marry her,
shed push into Lake Erie. Well, I cant swim a stroke, so I had no alternative but to marry
her!
Aunt Clara would bite every time and say, Oh, Bill, you know thats not so!
Bill was an aggravator. He would put sugar in his tea and then take his spoon and stir,
and stir, and stir noisily nearly driving everyone crazy. He loved his beer and drank a lot
of it. His hobby was growing roses. He had some beautiful rosebushes in the back yard
and would spend hours tending to them.
They would go out and gather English walnuts every year. Bill would spend hours down
in the basement , hulling them and cracking them and painstakingly picking out the
nutmeats. Then, Aunt Clara would bake date and nut bread. Mmmmm, good!
Being an engineer and shoveling coal all day long he would be black all over when he
came home. He had a shower installed in the basement which he would always use when
he came home from work.
Although Bill never went to church he was dead set against the Catholics. I had a
Catholic boyfriend who would call me on the phone every night about 6:00 oclock. Bill
would wait for the call; bust his ass to get to the phone first and yell, in a voice you could
hear down to the next block, Phyllis, heres that damned Dogan* on the phone again!
What could I do. I was so embarrassed.
* Note: A Dogan is a Canadian Catholic. It may derive from a common Irish surname or
may have been created to sound like a typical Irish last name.
MY FATHER, William Fricker
A Family Secret
Im going to talk now about a skeleton in our family closet. It was something that
bothered my father all his life . The shame attached to illegitimate birth is not as strong
nowadays as it was in his day, so Ill tell the story here. My father was a remittance baby.
A Remittance Man was someone from a good and presumably well-to-do family in
England who was a black sheep for one reason or another gambling or drinking or
whatever. The black sheep was exiled, in effect, to the colonies, Australia or Canada. In
this case it was Canada. Those so remitted were paid a stipend to live on and this sum of
money was paid as long as they did not return to England.
My father was only guilty of the sin of being born an illegitimate child of the privileged
class. On his fathers side were ship builders. Their last name was Cooper. His father had
an affair with the gardeners red-haired daughter and the offspring of that mismatch was
my father. His fathers family did right by him and found a couple who were willing to
emigrate to Canada, taking the little William with them.
Ive always had a question in my mind as to whether his adopted mother might have been
his real mother, since she also had red hair. In any case, they emigrated to Canada. Bill
was a toddler at the time. He was running about on the deck of the ship with a lollipop in
his mouth and fell and jammed it down his throat. He survived. They got to Canada and
settled in Mount Forest, Ontario.
He was raised as their own child but when he was about fifteen he found out he was a
love child and that was a big deal in those days. His adopted mother or father must have
spoken to someone in confidence and the word got around town.
WWI
Bill was mortified and ashamed. He used to doodle around on the piano when he was
disturbed and didnt want to talk. His adopted mother talked to him from behind the piano
bench. He told her he had decided to join the Army. He was only 14 or 15 at the time, so
he had to have her permission and, somewhat reluctantly, she gave it. He had to stay in
school for another year until he was sixteen.
When his Mum packed his bags to go over to England to join the British Army for WWI,
she he rolled up the name and address of his fathers family in a pair of socks she knew he
wouldnt unroll for a while. When he got to England he found the information in the
rolled up socks and contacted the old boy, his granddad, was about all that was left of the
family because it was the custom in WWI to put the officers in front of the troops where
they promptly got shot. There werent any young males left in that family, They had all
been killed. My dad was the only one left of the younger generation but he was a wild
lad. Were it not for that he might have come into some money and recognition but, as I
say, they found him a bit wild, so it didnt happen. The granddad found him a
Commission in the Channel Patrol which later became the R.A.F. This is why he ended
up in the Air Force in both wars.
Now this secret was kept very close. He told his wife, our mother, and she passed it on to
us. There are mysteries attached to the story. I tried to get information from his British
war records but most of the stuff usually listed there was missing.
We do have his blackthorn walking stick. Someone attacked him with the blackthorn
stick when he was posted over in Ireland during the Troubles, the Irish Rebellion. Ive still
got the stick with the blackthorns sticking out of it and its hanging on my wall, a bit
cracked from age.
He used it as a cane in later years because he had a war injury that he got in WWII.
The Smelly Ghost
Sometimes, in WWI, soldiers were billeted in fairly palatial quarters, not always, just
sometimes. In Ireland it was a place called Lep Castle. Not sure of its location but I know
its reputation. Lep or Leap Castle had a great tower and there was a hole in the top that
went from the top down to the dungeon. In the bad old feudal days if the Lord of the
Manor or Castle didnt like someone they were marched to the top and invited to leap
down the hole and be dashed to pieces below. That was why it was called Lep or Leap
Castle.
This same place had a peculiar, smelly ghost. It made noise too but that was not its most
noticeable feature. The lads billeted there were sitting down to dinner one time and the
Lord of the Manor was present. They heard were noises and bangs then a really dreadful
smell. They all looked at one another and the Lord of the Manor said, Dont pay any mind
to that. Its just the ghost. Hes a smelly ghost. First Ive heard of such but apparently they
do exist.
WWII
I dont know too much about my dads WWII services. He was a Bombing and Gunnery
Instructor on this side of the pond being a bit old for active duty. At one point in time he
was in a plane, a training flight I believe. The plane went down and everybody in the
plane was killed except my Dad, That’s where he got the leg injury that he used the
blackthorn stick or cane for. He never quite got over that deadly crash.
It was a kind of Why me? Why did I survive? Everybody else is gone. kind of thing.
Those who have had similar experiences can relate to this. I can only tell the tale. It
affected him. He would go into depression sometimes and go into his basement den and
listen to Bach and Opera and just get away from it all.
He was a good man and a good father, very honourable. He raised us well. There were
four of us children and my brother, Brock Fricker, was the long awaited son.
My Aunt Gertie
I remember my Aunt Gertie well. Her name was Gertrude but we called her Gertie.
Aunt Gertie was a perfectionist. She had standards. Her standards were the standards of
her day and she applied them firmly and with an air of righteousness.
She helped to raise my mother in part. My mothers mother was pathologically attached to
her own mother and left her husband taking my baby mum with her. My mothers father
crossed the border into the USA and kidnapped her back to Canada. Thus, my mum was
raised by various people, including Gertie, who was not a blood relative but a
relative-by-marriage. Aunt Gertie became the family aunt. We all lived in the same town
of Chatham, Ontario, which was a moderately-sized city deep in southern Ontario
farming country.
When she grew up and married my dad, my mother used to dread Gerties coming to visit
the house. Gertie would check for dust and looked under things, She sought
imperfections and found them! She would call these imperfections to my mothers
attention. Now, Phyllis, perhaps you didnt notice but there are dust bunnies under the
couch... etc. There must have been an orgy of housekeeping before she came to call or,
God forbid, if there was an unexpected visit, despair. Gertie, however, was not given to
unexpected visits. Her premise was Let them do their best. Ill still find something wrong!
Gertie liked to do was visit people in hospital. She would tell patients about all the people
she had known who had suffered from the same complaint and then died. Eventually, the
hospital barred her visits because she just wasnt cheering up the patients.
Another thing She liked to do was attend the funerals of people she didn’t know. Lets just
say she was interested rather than nosy. I don’t know if she commiserated with
everybody. She was probably just curious about the cause of the deceased persons
demise. A bit macabre when you come to think of it but that was Gertie
She was a widow with no children. Her apartment was perfect. In the dining room there
was an oak dining table and a glass-fronted case with bone china cups in it as well as the
good dinner service and a tea set. She had a neat little kitchen and a sun room. The living
room was the jewel. There were needlepoint chair cushions and framed needlepoint
works hanging on the wall as you came up the stairs to enter the living room. These were
not done by herself. She wasn’t a crafty person. Needlepoint was the accepted feminine
art of the day so she collected some. The mantelpiece held Royal Doulton figurines
which used to fascinate me as a child. A beautiful oriental rug in tones of red and blue
was on the living room floor. Everything in the room was just as it should be.
In the bathroom on the back of the toilet ledge there were two rather unusual antique
Plaster of Paris figures of small boys sitting on chamber pots. One had a broad smile on
his face and was labeled Billy Can. The other was sunk in gloom with a dejected frown
on his face. He was labeled Billy Cant When my Aunt, in her elder years was getting
ready to go to a Home for the Aged she was giving away different things and she gave
everyone their choice and I chose Billy Can and Billy Cant. I still have them.
My Aunt Gertie was not wealthy. Her husband had died relatively young and his pension
did not keep pace with inflation. I believe she minded children for folks and in her elder
years she took in boarders. Young males on limited income would occupy the guest
bedroom. Some of them worked for Chathams CFCO AM radio station which was short
on pay and long on opportunity and experience. Some joined the Chatham Little Theatre
group where my mother was the doyenne. I dont know if these young men stayed in
radio. Its a hard place to make a living. Some of them were decidedly Gay and my Aunt,
all unaware, referred to them as the dearest boys.
My Aunt Gertie was not wealthy. Her husband had died relatively young and his pension
did not keep pace with inflation. I believe she minded children for folks and in her elder
years she took in boarders. Young males on limited income would occupy the guest
bedroom. Some of them worked for Chathams CFCO AM radio station which was short
on pay and long on opportunity and experience. Some joined the Chatham Little Theatre
group where my mother was the doyenne. I dont know if these young men stayed in
radio. Its a hard place to make a living. Some of them were decidedly Gay and my Aunt,
all unaware, referred to them as the dearest boys.
I once took Gertie some embroidery I was working on and showed it to her proudly. She
promptly turned it over and said firmly that someone (presumably an authority) had told
her that the back of embroidery should be as neat as the front. I can still hear her voice
saying this, too late for rebuttal because it is, of course, complete nonsense.
At the end, and endings are often sad, she was in a Home for the Aged. My mother would
visit her there. Mother once said to me, Oh, Sonia, its terrible. Shes not even wearing her
own clothes and they dont fit. She was so neat and now shes all messed up.
ATIKAMEG, ALBERTA
My first husband, Bob Bates, got a job teaching on an Indian Reservation called
Atikameg, which means Little Whitefish. I went up north. By up north I mean
Atikameg, Alberta
200 miles north of Edmonton near Little Slave Lake. I was expecting at the time. Bates
managed to burn the Schoolhouse and Teacherage down before I got up there. The house
was heated by a cast iron stove, wood-fueled. The cold kept him from carrying the ashes
and cinders out too far from the house. He threw them in the snow next to the house in
the full belief that the snow would put them out. The live coals in with the cinders burned
through the snow all the way down to the Teacherages wood foundations and up she
went!
This was the biggest excitement of that winter. All the kids showed up, with bells on as it
were, and, as Bob and the adult Indian workers tried to throw the schoolbooks of the fire
area to save them, the kids threw those books right back in the fire. Take good aim.
Throw that book back in the fire. Their aim was very good. I guess they werent into book
learning.
The only place left to live was a little Indian log cabin way up on the hill closer to Indian
territory rather than Anglican Mission territory. They got horses and men and everything
trying to drag that thing down to the Anglican settlement but it gets 30 below up north.
Frost and cold had a good grip on the foundation. The cabin wasnt moving!
We settled in up there which was considered a great shame. That little log cabin was
really snug. The old house which had burned down would have been cold and drafty.
Theyd built it like a regular frame house further south. This was far, far north and very,
very cold. The only time it warmed up was when the Chinook came over the mountains
carrying a warm wind from the ocean current. From Fahrenheit 30° below it would
sweep up to 20° above Zero in about an hour- something to look forward to.
I was a solitary soul. Folks expected that I would visit with some of the more
Christianised Indians and the daughters of the Hudson’s Bay Post Factor and so forth. I
liked to read and think and do things with my hands. Now, I had lots of time to do that.
Reading was precious. I had one book of literate horror stories. Most other books had
gone up in flames. I remember reading Kafkas Metamorphosis . I would allow myself
three pages a day from this book, so I wouldnt run out of reading. Most of the books up
there had perished in the flames when the Teacherage burned down.
As the days went by I got bigger and bigger because, hey, I was expecting. Bates settled
in to teaching with some disturbances. The Indian boys liked to slip shotgun shells into
the cast-iron stove which gave the subsequent explosion a really satisfying reverb. We
had some pictures of them. Ive got them now. Pictures of the Indian boys riding quarter
horses or small horses dressed in, basically, cowboy regalia, riding bareback and doing it
very well. Its just a strange image of them all dressed up as cowboys. I guess they
believed in sticking with the winning side.
The preacher was British, as was his wife. He was about 70 and had spent many years in
the frozen north as Anglican missionaries to the Indians. The Indians on this reserve, by
the way, were nomadic Cree. They had a special way of looking at time which was
embedded in their language and in their culture. This made for some problems when it
came to court cases because the past to them was, apparently, yesterday or many moons
ago. Nothing in between. This made Where were you on the night of such and such? a
little bit precarious. I dont know what their future tense was like, or if the even had one.
All I heard was about legal matters.
The Indians were fishermen and hunters and they worked on the oil rigs from time to
time. For fishing in winter they cut a hole in the ice and it was proprietary. Whoever cut
the hole could fish there and no one else. I found that out after a polite visitor came and
informed me that I had been fishing in his hole.
If you did catch a fish, all you had to do was throw it on the roof of the cabin where dogs
or bears couldnt get at it and that fish was frozen in no time.
NEW YORK CITY
My Dobro
I got my dobro-style resonator guitar* when we moved to the Lower East Side of New
York City. Across the 2nd Street and down a ways towards Avenue B, Sammy Blank had
a little hallway of a store. It was long and narrow, an Aladdin’s cave of stringed
instruments. Guitars, mandolins, zithers, violins and banjos hung from the ceiling like
musical fruit. That’s where I picked up a Dobro-style guitar with very high action and the
rusted steel strings - at a bargain price. I took that thing home and started to woodshed.
(High action means the strings are further from the frets and it takes more force to push
them down and play)
I was used to the unchallenging gut strings of a ukulele but I liked that steel sound but Oh
my goodness! pushing those dobro strings down was something else. I worked at it day
by day until the tips of my fingers literally turned blue. I made myself practice every day,
even if was for only 5 minutes, every day! Learn this chord - play it. Learn the next chord
- play it. After a while the ends of the fingers on my left hand became almost like wood. I
could tap them on the plaster wall and it sounded like wood tapping on a plaster wall
I started to play some of the blues numbers I had learned then and they helped make the
load easier. Somehow or other the blues made it easier to deal with the things that were
going down.
Trouble in mind Im blue,
But I wont be blue always,
That old suns going to shine on my back door someday
*the term dobro has come to refer to any acoustic guitar with a metal resonator set into
the body (also known as resonator guitars or resophonic guitars).The bridge of a
resophonic guitar over which the strings pass is attached to a metal resonator which
produces and amplifies the sound; the body of the guitar does not play a significant role
in sound amplification.
My Parents Visit Me In New York City
My mother and father lived most of their lives in the small city of Chatham, Ontario,
Canada. Chatham was 50 miles from London, Ontario and 50 miles from Detroit,
Michigan in the breadbasket of southern Ontario. The Chatham-Kent area was famous for
growing corn and peas and tobacco. Chatham was the hometown of Fergie Jenkins,
baseball player, DArcy McKeough, a man of politics and Sylvia Tyson, well known
Canadian singer.
I had moved to New York City after living in Detroit, Michigan. I ended up on the Lower
East Side which was a poor neighbourhood at that time. I lived there with my young
daughter and my common-law husband in an apartment that nowadays rents for a
phenomenal amount back then it was then under rent control which made it a highly
desirable location.
My mother wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, so we went down to the tip of Manhattan
Island. Id been covering the expenses up until then but when we got the Staten Island
Ferry docs she said she wanted to pay for the ride on the Ferry Boat that rode you around
and past the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island and back.
I said, Sure, mother, you can cover this! No problem. Then she found out that the fare,
through tradition, was a nickel. That was a humorous moment. <chuckle>
Shes sooner have gone to the island the statue is on and climbed up the steps and looked
out the hat and so forth but she had some arthritis in her spine and I didnt think that was a
good idea.
Now my dad, he was what he was; he had prejudices but he tried mightily to overcome
them in my presence. I flourished best in a culturally diverse environment of immigrants
and people of colour and what have you.
I was with my dad and we were walking down the street and there was a typical New
York street hustler going into a phone booth, probably to make some call about numbers
running or dope or something like that. My dad spotted a quarter on the sidewalk outside
this phone booth and he was on best behavior. He retrieved the quarter and knocked on
the door of the phone booth. The hustler looked around and opened the door. My dad said
to him I found this quarter on the sidewalk. Could it be yours?
The look of astonishment of this fellows face when this old white man offered him a
quarter….I wish Id had a camera ...it was priceless. This was a man who thought he had
seen everything was very surprised.
The big deal with my mother was shopping but I wasnt going to take her down to 5th
Avenue or places like that where shed spend much too much money. I was living on the
Lower East Side. I decided to take her on a tour. So, she saw Orchard Street, the
pushcarts and all the little stores with the handbags and things hanging like ripe fruit from
their racks. We went into Katzs delicatessen where we could read the slogan in the
window Buy a Salami for your boy in the Army. Katzs had many salamis hanging up
over the counter. It prided itself on rude waiters and free seltzer water. We had a corn
beef sandwich there.
We ambled over towards Delancey Street and ended up in a shop that specialized in
ladies hose. The lady was trying to sell my mother these sparkly, gold, almost lamé
stockings that the proprietor thought were very glamorous and would really suit my
mother. My mother thought otherwise. She was trying to find an excuse not to buy these
things and said, Oh, Customs will never allow me to take them across the Border.
The shopkeeper replied, No problem. You just roll them up and stuff them in your
brassiere. Theyll never know!
I went with my Mum to some other places that was, perhaps, more of interest to me than
to her. I felt they were of significant cultural importance, such as the site to the Triangle
Shirtwaist Fire. This fire occurred where Jewish immigrant girls on an upper floor were
slaving over sewing machines and the lint built up. The fire escapes were locked shut.
There was a great fire and it claimed the lives of 146 young women. Some were the main
support of their families, so it was very tragic. This was back in the early 1900s.
This was the 60s so we were able to go to Washington Square Park to hear the
folksingers around the fountain circle there and I explained to her that this was important
cultural phenomenon, or something like that. We went to some Museums - the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and so forth. My mother was a painter.
I think my folks had a good time and they certainly had something to talk about when
they went back to Chatham. Not sure they understood my chosen lifestyle but they tried.
Parents do.
St Marks in-the-Bowery
A.H. Blackwell Blackwell
All That Jazz
Vincent Hickey was a drummer. He patterned himself after a New Orleans drummer
called Baby Dodds, who was the brother of Johnny Dodds, a well known clarinetist who
had played in Kid Ory's band.
Vince was a member of a radical group I belonged to in the 60's. Vince and I became
friends because we both liked traditional jazz and, as he put it, the other members of the
group were a 'bunch of tin ears'. In other words, they didnt get it' when it came to music. I
sort of 'got it', although I was green as grass.I had already started a collection of
traditional jazz music with Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver and Kid Ory, and
the like.
I had a plastic slide whistle, sort of a kid's version of a trombone, and I learned to play
against those New Orleans jazz records, to improvise. That kind of music, when they're
all playing together in a session without the solo bits (and there wasnt as much soloing as
there is nowadays) they actually played counterpoint. If you separated out the different
instruments, the lead instruments like clarinet and trumpet and so forth, then they each
played different tunes over the same chord changes and the tunes all worked together.
This really caught my imagination because I'd always loved counterpoint from hearing
Bach. My Dad really played Bach a lot. Here coounterpoint was again but it was jazz and
that was absolutely terrific. In with the jazz was also that golden root - the Blues.
Vince would come over from time to time, particularly if I fed him. He showed me some
things about drumming. He was quite amazing to my neophyte way of looking at it. He
could play something called 'the spoons' which was as old time instrumental time keeping
trick involving kitchen cutlery. He could crumple up paper and make it sound like
brushes. Vince could turn just about anything into a drum kit. He was a good drummer.
He was the son-in-law of Victoria Spivey. Vince himself was half Irish and half Italian
and, boy, could he make meatballs! He was married to Victoria's adopted daughter and I
got to meet the family through him. I went to the Victoria Spivey (she always pronounced
it Speevey) /Lonnie Johnson Reunion at Gerdes' Folk City. That was a stellar night,
covered in another podcast.
I continued with my interest in traditional music although what I was hearing around me
was the kind of wishy-washy folk music that was popular. There were some really
excellent musicians that came out of the folk music boom but a lot of it was crap. In
between the cracks there the real stuff was coming though. My ear had been trained by
listening to that early jazz music so that when I heard the real thing I recognized it as
being part of the root. A lot of this early jazz music was blues-based. The blues had sort
of seeped in to New Orleans. W.C. Handy was actually a field researcher for these early
blues tunes and copyrighted everything he laid ear to - God bless him.
I was at Washington Square Park one time and an old colored gentleman showed up with
his guitar and a promoter. I dont know who he was but he was obviously a known
traditional blues musician, a pioneer. When he started to play a herd of young blues
wannabees clustered around him quite quickly and started playing too. I dont think it
mattered if they were in tune or even playing the same song as long as they could say
afterwards, that they had played with this particular blues pioneer. I didnt much care for
that. I'd have sooner heard the old guy and what he had to sing but there you go.
Another time in Tompkins Square Park on New York's Lower East Side they had brought
in a five part gospel group, just vocals. They were just standing on the grass and singing
and it was quite, quite marvelous and what was really good about it was that I knew what
they were going to sing in the next line. I had learned. I had picked it up and here it was
alive and standing before me. It was all familiar to me. The music of the South had
become, mysteriously, my music.
I also heard Gil Evans in that same park and that was another good and real experience of
a different kind.
I was wood shedding a lot at this time, learning to play guitar after my fashion. I was
singing these old blues numbers over and over again. I never got tired of them. There was
something new about them every time. They werent like popular music at all. They had
legs. They had staying power. And, of course, they were about real things that happened
to real people. It was folk music but folk music that was still alive and still kicking!
One thing that was very much a part of my life in New York City was jazz. It was all
around me. The church where I went to during my religious phase, St. Marks in the
Bowery, used to have jazz concerts in the old graveyard beside the church and by old I
mean really old. It was an ancient church by New World standards. Peter Stuyvesant was
buried beneath it.
In the churchyard, where the tombstones were all laid flat because well, they just were,
we would sit on the grass or just perch in this iron fenced in little area. There was a tiny
stage and local jazz musicians, very avant-guard, would get up and play and we would
listen. We didnt always get it . Like I say it was very avant guard jazz but it was free, it
was lively and we enjoyed it.
Another group that featured jazz musicians was the Communist Party. Well, I am not
now and never was a member of the Communist Party but, speaking of parties, they
threw the best parties (fund raisers). They had everything organized and talent lined up
and you could go there and have a good time. We would go to their parties which were
generally held in a loft or some such and I remember one occasion when there was an
avant-guard trumpet player. Now, I remember his name as Freddie Redd but there was an
older musician of the same name so I may have that wrong. Whatever his name was he
was an avant guard player who couldnt help it he played hot trumpet, He wasnt cool. He
played hot avant guard which is .... interesting.
Now I dont have a lot of self consciousness so I would get up with a willing or unwilling
partner and try to dance to this stuff. Well, the beat was all over the place. It was like a
free form impressionist painting in sound but if you knew a little bit about ballet and
modern dance you could fake it which I did probably to the bemusement of the band who
were laying down their souls in abstract notes.
Now this same fellow, whom I remember as Freddie wrongly or rightly, was involved in
a plot, along with a lady from Montreal and some other people, to (ahhh SIGH) blow up
the Statue of Liberty. Now this was before there were a lot of blowups. It was even
before the race riots. He was really radical and they were going to do that. There was
dynamite and I wont know all the details. It was in the newspapers. I think it was the
F.B.I. That got wind of this and they all ended up in the slammer, in jail, including
Freddie and I just wonder about that sometimes because he was a delicate little fellow
and he must have gone through hell in prison. Maybe hes out by now. I dont know. Ive
lost track of all those people from the 60s.
Elvin Jones stayed next door to us on East 2nd Street for a while and youd see him. You
could walk down the street and you could see people. Youd see Clark Terry or Lena
Horne.
Matter of fact my young daughter was introduced to Lena when my old man spotted her
on the street. Said to Lena, Shes going to grow up to be just like you, Lena and Lena said,
Just be yourself, honey, just be yourself.
Didnt hear much blues back then except in the folk clubs or on the radio from the white
roots bands. I caught Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard and was mightily confused
when he played with his back to the audience but it was beautiful sound, beautiful sound.
That was the best of the cool. That was it. There was a place called the Blue Note and we
went there.
This is not jazz but there was a juke joint on my street between Avenues A &B on East
2nd Street. I wanted to go so bad because Id heard about the roots music coming from
juke joints and places like that. They wanted us to come because they thought wed add
tone to the place. Always beware of places where you add tone. My old man wouldnt go.
He was a jazz guy and he said they were low class, no account people. Well, that was the
whole point! Thats where the music started. My old man played a bit of trumpet but he
wasnt very good at it. He just faked it. Mainly he was a singer.
There were other musicians around. There was one who was attached to my radical
group. He was a bass player and he wanted so badly to play but he didnt have a blue suit
which you had to have to be on the bandstand. A stroke of good fortune came his way
when Gerry the Marshall kited a cheque and started giving away money (I was out of
town when this happened. Heard about it later) So he got himself a blue suit and now he
could play because he had the uniform as it were and, gol darn it, couldnt have been more
than a week or two days and somebody stole his blue suit. Life is not fair
I already talked about Vinnie who played the drums and taught me a lot about early jazz
He got me started and taught me how to play one hand with one time and the other hand
another time and back beat and stuff like that. There was Latin music all around us but
for me the true sound of New York in those days was then and always will be jazz.
Les Deux Megots - New York Citys Lower East Side In The Sixties
I remember Les Deux Megots in New York city on the Lower East Side, sort of halfway
to Greenwich Village. We used to go there in the evenings and drink strong, strong
expresso coffee while sitting at a little four chair table - talking and talking and talking.
We were not poets. We were aware of the poets but they were in a different, parallel
universe, you might say, and we were in our own. What we talked about was Astrology.
My friend, A.H. Blackwell later went on to become an eminent professional astrologer.
The others? Well, they came and went. Mainly it was A.H. And me.
We talked politics as well, radical politics, because A.H.s father had been in the Spanish
Civil War He was an Anarchist. A.H. had a far broader grasp of politics at 16 than most
young men. We thought then that we had the solutions to all the worlds problems. Most
young people in the 1960s thought that they had a handle on the worlds problems. Our
views, A.H. and I, were somewhat different and we would argue the differences. Whether
a collective society could be run without elected leaders and stuff like that.
There was a very special, dare I say peculiar, energy to Les Deux Megots. Ive learned
since that it had had a very dynamic proprietor in its heyday. We were there at the nadir
when it was not quite ready to close but getting there. It was an important place in our
lives. Other places were not like it. We felt energized while we were there. We felt things
were possible. We felt importance. What we said and what we did were somehow, in that
context, important. There was some sustaining force at the place that brought ideas to
life.
Gerdes Folk City
We were there at the end, the last night Les Deux Megots was open. The manager offered
us free pastries because, hey, they werent going anyplace since the place was closing.
The pastries were a little bit stale. I remember the taste of peanut butter but, hey, they
were great because they were free. We ate them with our last strong coffees and mourned
the closing of an establishment that had become a special focus point in our lives.
I used to go to Gerdes Folk City which was located just on the eastern edge of Greenwich
Village, just before you got to Washington Square Park. I dont know who owned it but
they sure had the feeling for a trend because Gerdes became the epicente for new talent
during the folk boom of the 60s. We would go in there and stand opposite the bar where
there was a high wooden railing facing the stage. You could lean against it and catch the
action on the stage without paying the cover or tips that you paid if you sat down. We
were poor so this was a good compromise. Youd nurse your beer and stand for a couple
of set, or as long as you could handle standing and got some real entertainment. The
tables beyond this folk singers mourners bench, so to speak, were more expensive but
standing you could get drinks from the bar and had a birds eye view of the action.
We usually went on Monday nights for the Hoots, the open stage. I saw a number of first
there. I saw Brother John Sellers, who was a blues and gospel shouter and acted as an
M.C. He had a fresh-faced boy up there one time. Two of them, in fact, because both of
them were young. I dont remember what the other one was called but the one I do
remember was called Bobby Dylan. First time I heard him I said to myself, Hell never
make it! He only knows three chords and he sings through his nose. Well, I made a
mistake because he did make it and he did fairly well off the music business. He ended up
leaving Gerdes and Sellers and everybody else in the dust.
Mighty Times these were, as the saying goes. People who were my neighbours got
recording contracts. Hugh Romney, a sort of stand up comic, became Wavy Gravy of the
Hog Farm and psychedelic bus. Someone you were sitting next to in a coffee house could
have become a folk star by the next time you got around there.
I had an interview with John Court, who was Albert Grossmans right hand man.
Grossman had Dylan, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia and Peter Paul and Mary under his
management wing. My interview didnt come to anything in the end but for about two
weeks most of my friends were kissing me off. I guess they figured Id do the same to
them once I got on the golden trail.
The Reunion
of Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson
at Gerdes Folk City.
I remember the return of Victoria Spivey. I knew her son-in-law, Vince Hickey. He
belonged to a group I also belonged to and was married to Victoria Spiveys adopted
daughter. I met Vicky through Vince. Vince was a drummer in the Baby Dodds style.
Victoria Spivey was a remarkable woman. From Texas originally, she has been the
ingénue lead in the first talking, singing black movie, Hallelujah I saw that movie
double billed with Birth of a Nation, two opposites. Hallelujah had a formula plot and
lots of clichés and stereotyping. Vicky was good in it. She was real. She was
believable but, most of all, she was Victoria Spivey. Victoria carried that movie
experience with her. Her latter years were a bit like a replay of the movie, Sunset
Boulevard . Yes, she was a blues singer. She played stride piano very well but youd
better not forget that she was a movie star in the old star tradition.
Gerdes Folk City made the reunion of Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson a big deal.
Victoria and Lonie had performed together many years ago and were pals. I was there for
the opening show. When she first came in Lonnie was already on stage, opening up. He
was wearing a gold lamé jacket was was doing those wonderful things he did on guitar.
He saw her and reached into what you might call the literature of the blues and said
something like, Big leg mama with the meat shaking on her bones. Vicky didnt take too
kindly to the notion that she might be fat. She went into a pout and they had to send
people to coax her on to the stage. Of course you couldnt have kept her offstage with a
bulldozer but it was very dramatic at the time.
When she did come in to do her part of the set she was wearing a white satin gown. Her
big hit had been the Black Snake Blues - Get that Black Snake out of my bed. As I said
she was wearing a white satin gown and there was a big, velvet black snake with
rhinestones and sequins across the front of that dress. It kind of wobbled when she
walked. She made quite an impression with that. When she sat down at the piano it was
the real thing and she swung into Black Snake Blues and wowed us all. She did a whole
bunch of other number and she a Lonnie sang togethr beautifully.
I remember especially a song of Lonnie, not a blues but it stuck in my head,
What a difference a day makes,
Twenty-four little hours,
What a difference the sunshine can make to flowers...
He wrote that one and had a hit with it. He also claimed to have written Careless Love.
He might have. He was a composer. He might have adapted it and written more lyrics. He
felt strongly about this. Lonnie Johnson was a kind and gentle man, a gentleman in a
southern way. I had sung one of my songs on the open stage during intermission one
time. He heard me and was kind enough to tell me that he liked it. I appreciated that then,
and I still do.
Russell Blackwell and one of his doodles
Cuba Libre
I came into New York from the wilds of Alberta, by way of Chatham first to recover
from the medical complications inflicted on me by a northern 'bush' hospital.
My then husband, Bob Bates had gone down there first to settle himself and get some
kind of job. We set up housekeeping in a big room of what had been a hotel but which
was now a sort of tall rooming house with shared kitchens on each floor. I used to take
the laundry up to the roof to hang it out on the lines available. Hanging laundry in the
breeze up so many stories above west Manhattan gave me the whim whams because I
have some fear of heights.
The folks who looked after the hotel/rooming house in the sense of cleaning and repair
and so forth were expatriates from Fulgencio Batista's Cuba. This was just before the fall
of Batista and the exhilaration of his downfall at the hands of Fidel Castro and his
revolutionaries.
People dont remember too much nowadays but Batista was a bad guy especially to
Liberal thinking people and leftists. He was a U.S. supported dictator. Fidel Castro and
Che Guevara and the like were the good guys in our eyes
Radical Days
The Chatham Public Library was a good source for all kinds of books, thanks to Louise
Schriber the Librarian. I got most of my real education there. I wanted to know
something about everything, for reasons of my own, so I read just about everything I
could get my hands on - 5 or 6 books a week. Id see a book and say to myself I dont
know anything about that, so Id check it out. This led me, in mysterious ways to
Thorstein Veblin, who coined the phrase conspicuous consumption and wrote The
Theory of the Leisure Class. And to Karl Marx, who was very dull and Hitler who was
duller.
A humorous British book called Comrade, 0 Comrade had a profound effect on me. The
book took potshots on the various radical movement then current in Britain and the only
ones spared were the Anarchists. The author didnt favour the Socialists too much and
certainly not the Communists but really thought the Anarchists were kind of o.k.
When I got to New York I sought out an Anarchist group and found the Libertarian
League. They had the use a a large room half way to Greenwich Village near St. Marks
Square. The landlord insisted on labeling his tenants The Liberian League which may
have helped to keep the group safe from surveillance by the three letter boys as we called
the FBI , CIA etc.
The Libertarian League
The Libertarian League was led by two worthy gentlemen, Russell Blackwell and Sam
Weiner, also called Sam Dolgoff. Sam favoured Anarcho-Syndicalism. He was in the
IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, also called the Wobblies. His famous speech
was called Anarchism and the American Labour Movement, which was given every time
another speaker stood us up at our weekly meeting. We got to know that speech very,
very well.
Russell Blackwell was an first a Communist . He got kicked out of Mexico for that. He
spoke Spanish well. Afterwards he had gone over to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In
Spain he became disillusioned with the Communists due to their dirty tricks and went
over to the Anarchists.He wandered about there, as was his habit. He would wander into
the damnedest places. In the process of doing that after the war had ended, he caught the
attention of the new authorities and ended up in Barcelona prison as a spy. He wasnt a
spy. He was just curious.
Barcelona prison was apparently in the middle of an artichoke growing district and thats
what the prisoners were fed morning, noon and night. Russells wife petitioned the
President and the Congress and so forth and finally, after a long while, got him out - with
a lifelong hatred of artichokes.Somehow or other he ended up with the Libertarian
League. He and Sam put out an Anarchist magazine called, mundanely, `News & Views.
On The Picket Line
I dont like picketing. It makes me feel like a professional martyr but I was on a few lines.
I picketed Woolworths for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). The Puerto Rican kids
who always followed Russell around would march around proudly for a while and then
dart into the store to buy a candy bar. Theres no way you could explain to them that was
not what it was about.
I took part in one street march - something about Teachers Union - and I found out that a
crowd can turn into a mob and had a different kind of mind than an individual. A crowd
could do some fairly dangerous things once it got started on that path. This helped to
form my lifelong pledge to stay a way from crowds and, if I saw one forming, I went in
the opposite direction. I had picketed also down at the New York docks with some real
Spanish people from Spain against a ship that Francesco Franco had sent as a training
exercise for young sailors. The Spanish picketers were very glad to see me and they were
lovely people. This was a rather quiet picket line and I marched and marched around in a
circle, and then I went home. That was about the end of it when it came to publically
doing active radical things.
Later, when I went to work for Canadas Federal Government I did not advertise my
political beliefs but simply practiced them. I worked for the whole office and not just my
little section. I organized a computer club and took an active roll in leading events that
were for the benefit of all. I tried to help civilians who came to us for help. I did not
recognize boundaries.
When out Union went on Strike I was made aware that they were using goon tactics to
intimidate workers who did not wish to strike by calling their homes and frightening their
children. I refused to be part of this fascistic approach and crossed the picket line daily
sometimes facing screaming mobs of picketers.
Indeed, their cause was just but their tactics were tainted. They did not recognize the will
of the individual and that went against my Anarchist principles.
Radical Songs
I remember the radical songs I learned in the 50's and 60's. I'll start with that anthem of
the Left, the International. I used to sing a slightly tongue-in-cheek Country and Western
version.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation
Arise, a better world's in birth! ...
Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place.
The international working class
Shall be the human race.
The G.P.U. Were a unit of the Russian state secret police. A parody song which I thought
was from Dave Van Ronk and Dick Ellington's 'The Bosses Songbook' is actually a
Trotskyite ditty and signals the end of the Left's romance with Communism.
When I was a lad in 1906, I joined a band of Bolsheviks.
I read the Manifesto and Das Kapital and
I even learned to sing the International
I even learned to sing the InternationalI sang that song with a voice so true that now I am
a prisoner of the G.P.U.
I sang that song with a voice so true that now I am a prisoner of the G.P.U.
A member of the Anarchist group I belonged to, Russell Blackwell, had gone to Spain to
fight in the Spanish Civil War. Spain was testing ground for the Fascists before WWII.
There were all breeds of radicals there Communists, Anarchists, Socialists. The
Communists, almost predictably, sold the Anarchists out. In a power struggle the first
thing the far Right or Left does is get rid of the Anarchists. A couple of songs from that
movement were popular in the 60s are Los Cuatro Generales, talked about some bad guys
on the other side.
Los cuatro generales, (The four generals
Los cuatro generales,
Los cuatro generales
¡Mamita mÃ-a! (Mother mine)
Que se han alzado, (They will be hanging)
Que se han alzado
Then there was was Freiheit, which is the German word for freedom.
This was an anthem of the Anarchist civil war movement in Spain.
Spanish heavens spread their brilliant starlight
High above our trenches in the plain
In the distance morning comes to greet us
Calling us to battle once againChorus
Far off is our home yet ready we stand
Were fighting and dying for you
Freiheit
Freiheit!
The other leading light of my small Anarchist group was Sam Weiner. Sam was a long
time radical and used to give rousing public speeches in public squares on a literal soap
box. He met his wife, Esther, that way. He was I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the
World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. He represented the was the Anarchosyndicalist/union movement side of our little radical group. Anarcho-syndicalists view
labour unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change.
We would sing union songs, some of which are still used by todays unions such as The
Union Maid by Woody Guthrie sung to the tune of Pretty Redwing
There once was a union aid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks
And all those guys that hung around the bosses
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the time came round to vote youd hear her say
Oh, you cant scare me, Im sticking to the union,
Im sticking to the union, Im sticking to the union.
You cant scare me, Im sticking to the union,
Im sticking to the union til the day I die.
Also
Must We still be slaves and Work for wages?
It is outrageous.
Has been for ages.
For the earth by right belongs to toilers
And not to spoilers of liberty....
Ill end this reminiscence with The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum (re-use,
re-cycle) and thats sort of a wrap up of my radical, musical days in the 60s. The Red Flag
was usually sung at the funerals of our radical brethren. Maybe another time Ill talk about
the songs of the Civil Rights Movement which was another singing movement. All the
good political movements were and are singing movements.
The Red Flag by James OConnell, 1899
The workers flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead;
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their life-blood dyed its every fold.
Chorus:
Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Beneath its folds well live and die.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
Well keep the red flag flying here.
Crossing The Line
Forty years or so later I came to have a very different view of unionism.
My early years were filled with reading. I was an omnivorous reader, reading any and
everything. Two books that radicalized me were Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure
Class and Ethel Mannins Comrade O Comrade. From the latter I determined that
Anarchism was the best brand. When I got to New York Citys Lower East Side in the
60s, well before it became gentrified,
I sought out and joined an Anarchist group called the Libertarian League. Affiliated with
this group was a relic of early American Unionism, the I.W.W., also known as the
Wobblies, spearheaded by Sam Weiner. From Sam and the others I learned to venerate
unionism. It became self evident that the means of production should be in the hands of
the workers. If I had known then what I know now my view of unions might not have
been so rosy.
Now these were primarily armchair Anarchists, long on theory but short on practice.
From them I learned that the end does not justify the means and long after I left New
York I carried this belief into all my future endeavours.
The I.W.W. or Industrial Workers of the World, felt that worker control of the means of
production was the way to a true Anarchist society where none would lead but all would
participate. The unspoken belief was that man was basically good and, if not tied down
by external forces, folks would head in the right direction. Doing the right thing in a
morally correct way was very important. T hey were idealists and so I became an idealist
too. Dirty tricks, lies and bullying were not acceptable tactics. In opposition to the
Communists we did not believe that a worthy end was justified by unworthy means of
achieving it.
I was in the group just before and in the time of the Civil Rights movement in the USA.
Seemed then like everyone I knew was seeking higher moral ground.
When I came back to Canada I ended up working for a group affiliated with Government.
At that time there were many support staff. Bubbling under, during the years that I
worked there was a grievance identified as Pay Equity. Support staff were not receiving
equal pay for equal work. We were living in the tail end of a top down paternal system
which assumed that women would be paid less, no matter what they did.
Now, this was a very just cause. No question about it. There was unfairness and it was
not being addressed. I went to many union meeting and listened to this and listened to
that. As we geared up to Strike I was immersed in union propaganda. I received all kinds
of encouragement to go on strike. I was debating the matter in my head.
There were certain people who fell into an area between management and support staff.
Their positions were covered by the Union that wished to go on strike. Some of these
folks did not support the strike for reasons of their own which I was not privy to. One of
these was a friend of mine, originally from Czechoslovakia, and she had been the
recipient of the attentions of the Soviet Union during the ill-fated 1968 Prague Spring
movement, when the Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush this pro democracy
movement.
Certain members of the Union in my own workplace, and Im not saying that the whole
Union supported this, were phoning those who refused to go on Strike and threatening
them over the phone. My friend had such a call. His children were there and one of them
answered the phone. This child was threatened with reprisals by a Union member because
his daddy was a bad man who was going to cross the picket line. My friend told me about
this.
She said, These people are amateurs. Ive been bullied by professionals.
I could not take a light-hearted view of this, and other instances of bullying. There were
others who were threatened with nastiness as well.
In my mind, morally, the end did not justify the means. Without question the cause of the
Strike was just. Unfairness needed to be addressed. This all needed to be sorted out but I
could not support their tactics, I could not, I could not, I could not support their tactics.
Bullying was wrong. I made a decision. I would cross the line.
Cross the line I did. I was faced daily by a screaming mob as I tried to go to work. They
never jostled me or physically assaulted me. It was all verbal. These were the people I
worked with and their supporters. They were standing there screaming in my face as I
tried to get in the door. One time I turned around and retreated. They followed me, almost
chasing me, so I stopped and faced them again and they moved back. It struck me then
that they were cowards.
At one point they were blocking the door with their bodies. I was nose-to-nose with the
one who was closest to the door handle. While they were screaming at me, a
businessman, walking by with his suit and his briefcase stopped and said, Leave her
alone! They heard that more than anything they might have heard from me.
Obviously a meeting was held and a decision made because the next day there was no
more screaming. They just turned their backs on me as I walked in. If a reporters camera
had caught the confrontation the day before it would have been bad publicity for them, I
suppose. Either that or they may have sensed that I was not going to give in.
I was told to use an entrance at the other end of the building where some of the folks I
worked closely with were stationed. There, I had some name calling, Scab! and so forth.
Management had to escort me in those doors when that became the entrance, a job they
did not relish.
Inside, perhaps by coincidence, the air conditioning had gone off, so there was no air
circulation, and no-one would come in to repair it. This was in a closed building and the
air became very dead and muggy, unpleasant to breathe and hot since this was in the
summertime. Everything was deathly quiet. I had to sit at my computer and do what work
there was, not too much of that, until the allotted time for working was over.
Things had ground to a halt, due to the Strike. I helped with some technical stuff,
accessing data and so forth, which I could do because Im a demi geek.
I was not very happy. I was quite shaken. I would go into a washroom stall and meditate
on a pillar of light trying to armor myself against all the animosity. It wasnt easy.
When, finally, the long Strike was over, and they won, working with those who had gone
on Strike wasnt easy. For the next several years, as long as I worked there, I experienced
animosity. Some folks gradually mellowed but the he die hard Union people certainly
didnt. I wasnt best beloved but I was what I was and some of them came to accept that.
I never told them why I had crossed the line. It involved another person and my reaction
to the telephone bullying and I just figured they did not have the ears to hear me, so I said
nothing. I just kept it to myself and gradually the wounds healed over.
Im not too big on moral stands but in this instance I had to cross the line.
MAGICK, GHOSTS AND VAMPIRES
Magick
When I was living on New York Citys Lower East Side I started writing a novel called
Murder by Magic. Not knowing a lot about magic, I got books out of the Library, some of
them quite thrilling.
I used most of the standard clichés from in horror movies and fiction. The anti-hero
died as part of the plot and I went into mourning for him. This process of identification is,
I understand, not uncommon amongst fiction writers.
Doing deeper library research, I found that the occult was not at all like the movies.
Later, in Toronto, I started writing another book which I never finished. This second
book involved an occult order dressed in black robes with a secret headquarters, secret
passages and a heroine the whole nine yards. The book got sillier and sillier as time went
on. It became a bit obsessive, so I dropped it.
Anxious to know where I had gone wrong I sought out some actual members of the
occult community to find out what was really going on. I had learned a few things
already through my research. I wanted to know more. I joined an group called the OTO
(Ordo Templi Orientis). This was Aleister Crowleys Thelemic group which was sex
magick but I wasnt into that part of it. I was, perhaps, the only celibate member of the
group but - there you go.
I wrote this song is the 60s in New York. I must have channeled it since my knowledge
of magical practice at that time was limited.
All Hallows
The pale moon is riding alone oer the trees
The doves are all resting in dark boweries
I call to my love come away
Quench the lamp it reminds me of day
Come away, come away,
Theres no reason to stay. Come away.
I will plait you a garland of damp forest leaves
We will not be alone in the wild forest trees
The Sabboth of Night comes as last
We will dance in a ring on the grass
We will dance in a ring and well merrily sing.
Come away.
© Sonia Brock 1965
Fortune Telling
My mother was an excellent tea leaf reader. She had some theatrical experience and read
the leaves with a dramatic turn to her voice. Mother seemed to really believe what she
was seeing in those little, drowned tea leaf fragments.
There's a house. I see someone going in. Oh, there's a tree hanging over the house. It casts
a dark shadow... and on it went. We looked forward to these thrilling sessions which she
didnt do too often. Fortune telling to me, at that time, was fun.
This may have influenced my own involvement in Astrology, which I studied rather
carefully. I was not good at math and Astrology is, if nothing else, mathematical. I did
manage to get the rudiments down and I started reading charts for people, not just their
personalities, which were always interesting, but present, past and FUTURE!
I was just a teenager. This was a sport to me, a novelty, something to bring attention to
myself and give me a sense of importance.
A lady who lived nearby in the Veteran's Land Act subdivision of Sprucedale had two
adopted children. One of them was a 'difficult' case. He was quite unmanageable. This
boy would throw his books away on the way home from school. He would walk in
muddy puddles and then march around the dining room table grinding the mud into the
rug. He seemed to be daring his adopted parents to hit him, as if he wanted to be hit to
affirm something. He must have had the experience that everyone did hit him eventually.
Perhaps he wondered why these people werent hitting him too. For whatever reason, he
absolutely had to test them in many ways. He'd run off and be found sleeping in the side
of a dry ditch. This testing went went on and on. Her husband had a heart condition, They
didnt want to send the boy back to the institution. She was desperate, quite literally
desperate, to know how things would turn out and asked a teenage girl who did
horoscopes what his future would be.
Reluctantly, I cast his horoscope. Virtually everything in it was in the House of Prisons
and Institutions. The boy would be institutionalized his whole life. I know now that many
convicts have subtle brain injuries that came from being beaten about the head as children
or from alcoholic mothers. This may have been part of his problem. I knew that I could
not give his young adopted mother such bad news.
Whether you believe or dont believe in Astrology is not the point. The reading just came
out that way and I could not tell her the what the result was, so I gave up Astrology for a
while. I didnt need that karma dogging me.
I didnt think too much about fortune telling again until I moved to New York City in
1959. I started doing fortunes again. My best friend, A.H. was an apprentice Astrologer.
He later turned professional. A.H. was fascinated by the movements of the planets and he
developed his own Sidereal system of Astrology. He stuck by it quite closely and it
worked for him. My own Astrological efforts used to annoy him because he was, I guess
you could say, a scientific Astrologer. It was all by the numbers and very carefully
plotted. I was an intuitive Astrologer. I used a chart like a crystal ball, a sort of starting
place where anything could happen. A.H. and I used to have a game where one or the
other of us would present a chart of someone known to both of us and I would have to
guess which acquaintance it was. A lot of the time I could beat him because this was an
area where intuitive Astrology worked well. We would sit with friends over espresso
coffee at our favourite East Village coffeehouse, Les Deux Megots, and talk shop about
Astrology into the wee hours, to the bemusement of the acting manager who was not
mystically inclined. Coffee houses were very popular in the 60s, but not so much on the
Lower East side. Les Deux Megots was the only one of its kind in the area. (More on Les
Deux Megots http://www.chefjuke.com/mom/drop1a.html)
A.H.'s father, Russell Blackwell, was a member of my Anarchist group and had been in
the Spanish Civil War. Their ancestors, A.H.'s and Russell's, had come over on the
Mayflower, so they were gentry of a sort, although by no means well-to-do. Living on the
Lower East Side at that time in the 60s meant you were not wealthy.
I learned the hard way that when you tell someones fortune they give you all kinds of
clues as to what they want to hear. Involuntary movements, intake of breath, facial
expressions, words. Eventually, I would only do a reading if the subject promised not to
speak. I would do the reading with my back turned to them so as not to pick up on their
freely given clues as to what they wanted to hear. This is something to think about in case
you are having your fortune read. Dont prompt the person telling your fortune.
I began studying occultism at that time as background for a book I was writing called
"Murder by Magic", a really dreadful first novel. Never mind. I learned many things and
one of them was the importance of fortune telling in occultism. I moved back to Toronto,
had some hard times and then I settled in, got a decent job and had some leisure time.
'Mudder Bar De Door', when I have leisure time!
I joined the O.T.O. which was a occult order, was initiated to a small Degree and learned
that these people and this particular philosophy of magic placed great emphasis on
fortune telling of various kinds. There was something called Gematria which was derived
from Jewish mysticism and involved finding hidden meanings in the numerical value of
words. These folks would sometimes change their names so the Gematria would come
out more favourably. Fortunately, my own name was in the lifeboat, so to speak, so no
change was required.
The Lodge Master at that time was an Astrologer with some good 'creds' . Other members
read Tarot. I did Tarot for a while.
Tarot readings are sort of about the future but they are more like a weather report for the
soul. That phrase is a steal from Truman Capote. In New York City he came on TV to
give a weather report as a way of plugging a play of his currently in production. He was
was billed as an addition to the weather man that night. What he gave was a 'weather
report for the soul' and this phrase stayed in in my mind. The New York TV station
personnel didnt 'get it', by the way.
When push comes to shove that's what fortune telling is all about. It's not so much about
what is going to happen in the future because, oh my golly, that is such a collection of
variables. It's more about the state of where you are right now with certain strong
inclination lines indicated. Paracelsus, one of the world's greatest astrologers, said: "The
stars incline; they do not compel", which meant the element of free will was not
eliminated. Astrology and fortune telling give you a mirror to look at yourself. Perhaps it
is a fun house mirror but a mirror none the less. You can look at yourself in a different
way and from a different angle. It makes you think about yourself, about where you're at,
about the state of your soul, your body and your mind. When you're doing Tarot,
Astrology or whatever, all three - body, mind and spirit - come together. There's no split
up between practitioners of disciplines - medical doctor, psychologist, priest. It's all
combined, as it should be. This holistic approach and the new point of view you get are
probably the most important things about reading cards, the runes or the stars.
•
Three Ghosts
I never knew whether I really believed in ghosts until I became one.
Ghost One
I had, when I was quite a bit younger, just under the age of consent, stayed with my dear
Aunt Addie in Brantford. She was unaware that I was planning to elope with a young
man who was quite serious and quite honourable. Being African American he was not
looked on favourably by my folks.
Frank and I thought all would be well but I foolishly left a note explaining my intentions.
I was captured and put in a local hoosegow jail cell until my dad came to pick me up. I
was in disgrace and the elopement didnt work out at all. It was a very agitated and
emotional time for me.
Ten to fifteen years later when I was older, if not wiser, I was staying with my Aunt
again, although she never quite forgave me for pulling such a dirty trick on her. I was
staying in the same room I had been in on the night of the failed elopement of many years
ago. I couldnt sleep or rest. I felt agitation.
I sensed, I never saw, but I sensed, the presence of a young girl who was very agitated
and full of excitement and full of anxiety. She was very much there. I wasnt just reliving
something that had happened. She was there. That room was haunted and the ghost was
me. My earlier self.
Ghost Two
Time moves on. My brother was in Chatham. My mother had just moved into an
apartment and he was finishing things up at the house she had left.,just checking to see if
anything had been forgotten .
He spent the night there but didnt get very much sleep because he was tormented by the
vision, and I guess he actually saw a little red-haired girl who would not let him sleep.
She was agitated. She was upset. She was moving around. She just wouldnt let him sleep.
I had red hair when I was a little girl. I must have left some trace there. I’m wondering
now how many other places I may be haunting that Im not aware of. Its as if a place
where something has happened is like a photographic negative that takes an impression
of highly emotional events or circumstances. Thats my guess.
Ghost Three
My third ghost story isnt about my ghost. Its about the ghost of a church member. I was
active and ran the Sunday School at St. Stephen in the Fields in Toronto for a time. A
long-time church member had passed on just before I joined the congregation. She had
been very dedicated to the church. I knew her husband quite well. He was a Sidesman,
along with my husband.
I played guitar at the folk mass, which was held before the regular service at this
Anglican church. They tried to get me to sing modern made-up white hymns but I
claimed I didnt know how and mostly played Southern gospel hymns, both black and
white, which I coerced them into learning. We were doing our little folk mass quite
simply in colloquial English.
At a certain point in the Mass you do Prayers for the Living and then you do Prayers for
the Dead. While we were having the Service there was quite a commotion in the church.
Doors were opening and closing with loud bangs. Winds were blowing. There were
rattling noises. Things fell down. It was a ghostly agitation.
Somehow or other I knew sometimes you just know things that this was the lady who had
passed on who had been so dedicated to the church. I started, because she was so active
with banging and wind blowing etc., to put her in the prayers for the living. I stopped
myself, I waited and then, under my breath, I put her name quietly spoken no one else
heard me in the prayers for the dead.
I felt and I still feel at this time, thinking of it, this tremendous warmth. Someone came
up behind me and put their arms around me and gave me such a warm and loving hug. Of
course there was no-one visible there but all the noises stopped and everything was quiet
and peaceful from then on. I realized, then, that sometimes ghosts dont know that they are
dead. I had, almost accidentally, done this lady a great favour by telling her that she was
indeed amongst the departed, that she could now move on in peace. She was no longer
needed at the church. Her duties were over.
These events are very subjective and personal but they are also very real.
•
Vampires
Vampires have been a recurring them in my life. It started with the old black and white
horror movies with Boris and Bela bringing the monsters to life. It all started with the
book. That Irish fellow really knew how to work out a terror tale. He was wise enough to
follow along with existing European folklore mixing legend with fiction.
I am a fan of horror fiction. Ive read most of the classic stuff and some of the newer stuff
that sort of segues into science fiction and fantasy. In spite of Stephen King saying that
the vampire has (ahem) no more steam in his shorts, every now and then up pops another
take on the vampire theme.
I think the vampire theme is based on a kind of psychological reality that is subliminally
touched upon in vampire stories. Vampires are very, very needy creatures. They are
perpetually unsatiated, unsatisfied. Demanding that we participate in their unending ritual
of I need. I need. I need.
Now, in this sense we all have some of the vampire in us. We have our own neediness
above and beyond the call of what we actually have use for. The object of desire is
wanted but, in the true sense of the word, not really needed. The eye never tires of
looking. We always need new stuff. We want new shoes, new clothes, new toys It never
ends. No matter how much we have, we always want some more..
I found myself thinking yesterday, I need...I need a shelf stereo system. Well, I dont need
it. I have three of them. Granted, the tape cassette deck doesnt work on one of them and
another of them, an earlier model, is the size of a small airplane hanger but I dont need
another shelf stereo system. Thats just the inner vampire in me, telling me I need things.
There is, however, another kind of vampire. I met one very recently. Theres a local group
where, if you got stuff that you dont want. then you can give it away to someone who
needs it. People on this forum post messages saying I want this or I have this and its up
for grabs or this has been taken , so dont bug me.
I posted thre a book that people could have for free. It was a lengthy tome on
Fibromyalgia. This fellow showed up to take the book . He was a nice enough but he
sucked the soul right out of you with his neediness. He was a psychic vampire. I was very
glad to give the book to him and get him out of my life. I had met his kind before.
I have met other psychic vampires that suck you into their world, an artificial world, not
real. They make you part of their scenario to help fulfill their wants because they are so
very, very needy. They are also control freaks. Its part of their fantasy world that what
they desire has to be contained, controlled in order to meet their needs. A peculiar feature
is that, if the present need is met, they are only briefly satisfied. Like the vampire, they
are perpetually hungry.
Often they have the power of voice, something that is spoken of in the Dune Trilogy
where the Bene Gesserit Order used it to attain their ends. Something in their voices can
be like a good radio voice . With it they just work their will on you. You can end up
supporting their fantasy world, fulfilling their artificial needs because its such a strong
demand.
So, theres more than one kind of vampire. There are vampires in fiction, in film and in
fact and, sometimes, I am the vampire.
•
Computers, Pagans And The Wicnic
I am, myself, not socially mainstream. My mind still harks back to my hippie days on
New York Citys Lower East Side before it became the East Village. I developed, early
on, a fascination with computers and that fascination soon translated into useful job
skills. My hobbies sometimes become jobs. Computers arrived before the computerskilled staff at my workplace. As the only computer hobbyist on board I became, for a
brief time, the computer Guru in residence. I wore my crown lightly being more
interested in the technology than my temporary fame.
I formed a User-group where people could share knowledge. We met in the main
boardroom. Reluctant secretaries were pressured into going to these meetings by their
bosses. We talked about the new technology and computer programs. It soon became
clear who were the front runners, and who were the reluctant tail draggers. My moment
of glory would be brief. Those secretaries, once they learned a few necessary pieces of
software, became the guardians of knowledge.
This knowledge they fed in trickles to their bosses. Knowledge is power.
The word IT stands for Information Technology and it is the branch of engineering that
deals with the use of computers and telecommunications to retrieve and store and
transmit information.
LAN stands for Local Area Network which is a local computer network for
communication between computers; especially a network connecting computers and
word processors.
The new IT staff were on their way. All at sea, management got it half right. They hired a
very capable woman to teach all of us, secretaries and officers, word processing. We
were unaware of the underlying scheme to have the guys do their own typing, and the
great downsizing of secretaries that was to follow.
Their second choice, for the LAN and IT Manager, was not so lucky. They listened to the
candidates and chose the most verbally accessible. He was what we used to call in CB
lingo, a bucket mouth. Good technical staff are often taciturn to the point of near
muteness. Management chose a man with a great line of bull about how great he was,
zero social skills, good hardware skills and some software knowledge. This was a recipe
for disaster. Techs tend to be either hardware or software guys. Some can handily
combine both but, often, this is not the case. Edward was a hardware guy in a software
position.
The company hired outsiders to come in and wire up the LAN. Edwards job was to make
the software run and work with us, the oddly named, end users.
I was doing most of the software support in my division and, tired of being lied to, I said
to him once, Edward <pause> Go piss up a rope! The phrase was new to me. I thought it
was very funny. Edward didnt. His large and fragile ego was punctured and I became his
enemy for life. Fine with me. I worked better without him.
When the computers were rolled out it was management that got them first. My boss,
then, was of the father knows best school of management. He favoured liquid lunches
once a week on Thursdays. After such a lunch he would come r-o-ll-i-n-g back to the
office, tanked to the gills and would sit behind his desk, planning great plans. He had his
new computer placed behind him, where he could not see it. It was always turned off,
except when I logged into his account and printed his email for him, all of it, whether of
interest or not, both English and French, ALL of his the email. Many a tree was sacrificed
to this mans refusal to view his monitor. Sonia, I feel like its watching me, he told me
once in confidence.
As an aside, managers, to a lesser extent and, more importantly, top brass had visions.
No humble officer or support staff member would dare to have a vision. In the case of the
lower orders such a vision might be categorized as an hallucination. Every year, certainly,
and possibly every six months, we got a new vision to implement. These visions were
vague enough to be one size fits all. I suspected that they sprang full-grown from the
inebriated minds of executives after a Thursday liquid lunch.
An unrelated Anarchist vision I recall said Put the tools of production in the hands of the
workers. Looking back to my old office I can see that the introduction of desktop
computers fitted quite handily into this vision. Top down management was about to take
a lesson from the bottom-up democracy, fostered by computers but that, as Kipling would
say, is another story.
Administration thought that computers were for word processing and accounting and all
manner of serious stuff. I knew they were for web surfing, gaming, email and organizing
people into niche groups.
Some early adopters of the Internet and computers were journalists. These newspaper
people had to slap the rubber cups from their luggable computers on to a pay phone and
send the story back to the mother ship.
Then there were the pagans...... Why pagans? Well, Paganism appeals to computer guys
and gals. Given the power of communication they did not seek to proselytize.
(As the Jewish vampire said to the blond lady waving a cross at him, Sorry, lady, Im not
that kind of vampire <Smile>)
Instead they saw it as a means to share texts of importance to the initiated with each other
and, more importantly, as a great way to socialize. Although many pagans are solitaries
they like to club together for social events. One great social event of the year, for us, was
the annual WicNic.
Now there was a reason so many techno-pagans were solitaries. Theres many a slip twixt
cup and lip. Little covens and special groups of brethren breed rivalries that can become
deadly when mixed with off-brand religious belief. Such groups are havens for little Jim
Jones emulators and other tin pot messiahs. If you want to believe the great god Pan has
returned, then you might also believe that Brother Joe is incarnating him which is a
sobering thought.
Cyber pagans are remarkably free of such delusions. There is something about the
terseness of text messaging that takes the punch out of declarations of godhood. Also, the
logical training of the computer literate causes them to question such assertions, or ignore
them.
Back to the WicNic:
The WicNic was an annual affair organized through the Homestead Knowledge Bulletin
Board System (or BBS, an early, local Internet Forum). I was the communications arm. I
collected email addresses and send out bulletins to the effect that The WicNic is coming,
Hooray, Hoorah!! then I would give out the particulars.
We had to be in a Park with a fire pit, for which we would obtain official permission.
Knowing the drill, we would drift into the area in twos and threes, until a critical mass
was reached. Then we would form a circle and participate in whatever home-brew circle
ceremony the nominal priest and priestess had prepared for our edification.
The ceremony I best remember was created by the System Operator (Sysop) of
Homestead BBS and involved a technical metaphor comparing life and its troubles to a
computer system, most especially the hard drive.
Spin, Spin, Spin. Protect us from all viruses and malware.
Defend us from the Ad Bots and spyware,
Defragment and join back together the broken bits of our lives.
Optimize us that we may function well.
Blessed be our zeros and ones, so we may prosper.
All present understood the technical references and grooved on their spiritual application.
My limited computer skills have been bolstered all along by kind souls who actually
understand the technology. I count such folks as friends. I appreciate their logic and
clarity. I also appreciate the willful abandonment of same when having a good time in a
park with cyber friends I otherwise seldom saw in person. Our mutual and somewhat
comical suspension of disbelief for ceremonial purposes was welcome as was the shop
talk and community gossip. As I write, my section of the globe is in the cold grasp of a
late winter. Although I have moved on, I miss casual commingling with my cyber friends
in the warm summer days and sitting about the fireside with food and drink and laughter.
SHOW BUSINESS
Folk Music
My interest in folk music started with a trip to the Chatham Public Library. . Looking for
new reading material, I found a tiny section devoted to folk music and borrowed a book
of American folk songs and started picking through the tunes.
My mother was a trained musician and church organist. I had learned a bit of piano, so I
could play single notes.
That Christmas (1955) I had been given a ukulele (an instrument made popular at that
time by the well-known TV host, Arthur Godfrey).
I discovered that folk music consisted primarily of three chords and, guess what? I knew
three chords on the ukulele!
I learned a few simple tunes like:
• Down in the Valley
Finding that too easy I branched out and learned:
• Go Tell Aunt Rhody
I found a Canadian radio program hosted by Rawhide and got to hear other people
singing folk music too. They sang:
• Dark as A Dungeon
Gradually, I learned about Canadas East Coast with all that wonderful
Irish/Scottish/Canadian music. I learned also that folk music is dependent on regional
accents and I started trying to learn the basics of these special speech pattens.
• Is the Boy That Builds the Boat
• Squid Jiggin Ground
I started to read about the history of the music and about Appalachian folk music, while
struggling with the regional accent that was part of it. I would talk the lyrics to try to get
the rhythm of the speech then sing it.
• Wildwood Flower (talk it first)
• Bury Me Beneath the Willow (talk it first)
Nobody would mistake me for a native but I was getting there.
I began to turn to gospel music, not because I was particularly religious but because of
the grand energy of it.
• Poor Little Jesus
I found there was something called a back beat that swung the music and turned it on its
head.
You can almost hear the wheezing of the harmonium in the straight version of
• What a Friend (straight)
Put in a backbeat and its a whole new song.
• What a Friend (swung)
Then I got married and moved to New York.
One Easter Sunday I went to 5th Avenue to catch the Easter Parade. Right at the
beginning of 5th Avenue is a little park called Washington Square Park with a round
cement fountain, which then was always dry. As I walked up 5th Avenue admiring the
Easter bonnets I came to this park and heard music, familiar music. Guitars and tub
basses and voices rose in song.
• This Land is Your Land
I had discovered the roots of the new folk music boom and, guess what I was part of it! I
never became a professional folk musician. Its not in my nature to perform publically for
a living, but I know and remember those songs and I always will.
•
Blues
Its not easy for me to talk about the blues because the blues are such an integral part of
my life. First I fell in love with the poetry of the blues. Those wonderful words resonated
within me and carried the culture into my psyche.
I needed to believe in that sunshine coming along.
Then came the music. I would pick it out on my guitar from song books and learn the
melody line. Then Id sing it and teach myself the chords on the guitar and sing it some
more and sing it and sing it and sing it again - until it became part of me.
I stuck to the old chestnuts, tried and true,
Every Day I have the Blues
St. Louis Blues
Backwater Blues
Sporting Life
and on and on.
Every time I sang them I found something new and different; a turn of phrase, an
increased depth of meaning to the lyric, a slightly different rhythm. I never grew tired of
them.
It mostly started in New York. My husband had moved to New York City to become an
off-Broadway actor. His success in this field was limited. We ended up living at 171 East
Second Street on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side had been a ghetto for new
immigrants for nearly 100 years. I was surrounded by echoes of poverty and striving.
There was no place to go but up.
I learned things that were not in the lexicon of Chatham, Ontario. Gefilte fish, and Buy a
salami for your boy in the Army ( that was a sign in the window of Katzs delicatessen).
There were pushcarts still, a wheeled cart and you were in business. There were also drug
dealers, numbers runners, petty thieves, muggers, welfare recipients and folks left over
from previous waves of immigration.
We were not well to do. Times were hard and the blues definitely suited my lifestyle. I
even wrote a few blues numbers. This was at the beginning of the folk boom. Everybody
was singing. Being a musician seemed simple. Pick up a guitar, learn four chords and you
were set.
Michael, row the boat ashore
I would go to Gerdes Folk City, especially on open stage nights, to hear Bob Dylan and
other folk notables. Ian and Sylvia debuted in New York at that wonderful venue.
I heard Jimmy Witherspoon and Lightnin Hopkins, Brother John Sellers (he was the
emcee), Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson.
It was was good to hear and see what I had garnered from books and records and radio
made real on Gerdes tiny stage.
I was thirteen years on the Lower East Side - from Senator McCarthy and the Communist
witch hunt years, to Lyndon Baines Johnsons presidency.
I went back to school, to college, Pace College to be exact, it was an academic business
college. There were student riots at this time and I thought a business-orientated college it
would be safe.
Hah! Construction workers barreled through the plate glass entrance to the college,
injuring students in the process. They were seeking student radicals and by accident they
came to a business college. So you could say that the blues followed me to school.
I didnt check out Woodstock I dont like crowds.
Didnt join the march on Washington for the same reason. Gave my tickets to somebody
else but I was there in spirit and I sang their songs.
•
A Night At The Apollo Theatre In New York City And Some Comments On The Chitlin
Circuit
(written for a Guest Spot on BLUZ.FM
on jazz.fm http://www.jazz.fm)
The black urban theatre circuit, popularly known as the Chitlin Circuit, stretched across
the United States.
Ill name some of these theatres. There was the Apollo Theatre in New York Citys Harlem
where I spent a memorable evening, the Regal Theatre in Chicago, The Howard Theatre
in Washington. D.C., The Uptown Theatre in Philadelphia, The Royal Theatre in
Baltimore and the Fox Theatre in Detroit.
These venues were very special. When blues and what not moved out of the country and
into the city it became a different kind of music. African American entertainers,
comedians and musicians played this circuit to great effect. Audience participation was a
given. These were people that appreciated their musicians and told them so in more ways
than one. The Chitlin circuit was the starting place for acts like Cab Calloway, Pearl
Bailey, Ike and Tina Turner, Patti LaBelle, Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, Etta James, Nat
King Cole - and more - Gatemouth Brown, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Aretha
Franklin, James Brown, The Jackson Five. The list goes on and on and on.
Movie houses, back in the day, had elaborate prosceniums, gold trim and fancy double
curtains. These were palaces of entertainment.
There was a special item at the Apollo Theatre in New York Citys Harlem. This was a
round platform which was part of centre stage. This platform could be lowered and
performers dressed in their stage attire could step on to this platform down beneath the
stage, invisible to the audience, and slowly rise up through the stage - the head, then the
shoulders, then the rest of them would come into audience view. In this day of rock
shows and special effects this is maybe not such a big deal but it was a very big deal back
then. To see a headline performer coming up through the stage that way was an amazing
thing.
These were the acts that I caught when I went to the Apollo. Red Foxx, Pigmeat
Markham (famous for his courtroom parody Here come de Judge), and Tito Puente. Now,
you might not think that Tito Puente belonged in such a venue but he was from the hood,
from Spanish Harlem. He was known and respected for his wonderful drumming and his
band.
Ruth Brown came tripping out on to the stage in a gold lamé gown so tight around her
legs and feet that looked like a mermaid she could could barley tippy-toe, waddle up the
the microphone but once she was up there and started singing
Mama he treats your daughter mean.....
everybody knew the song. Everybody was with her.
Then Pigmeat Markham, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, came on and did his Here
come de Judge routine. There were screams and roars of laughter because these people
had been through the court system, so seeing it parodied on stage, with black folks
playing judges and cops and so forth, was just a real hoot.
Tito Puente came on. Tito was a native of Spanish Harlem in New York, so he was from
the hood, as it were. The audience liked his music just as well because, golly, it had the
rhythm, it had the beat. So, they were with it. They were really, really with it.
Now, if you didnt perform up to standard and there was a very high standard, you could
be in a mess of trouble, particularly on open stage night. There was a guy with a long
waist high hook who would come out from the wings. I may be remembering this from
another performance. It might have been a clown-like figure with a noise maker.
Performers was were not up to audience specifications would try to duck the hook or
noisemaker and eventually it would haul or drive them still gamely singing off the stage
into the wings. You dont really find that sort of thing in, say, a polite folk club nowadays.
Very much a part of the show at the Apollo, or in any of these venues, was the audience.
You get a very special kind of audience reaction when youve got common culture. The
entertainers played to this commonality and told jokes about sorghum and blue gums and
what have you and got the audience going along with them.
Urbanized country folks were part of the audience. Here was a place where the audience
was on fire to hear their own people performing and these were often class acts that later
on became very, very famous.
The audience knew these performers were good and knew they were theirs, their own
people on stage. The audience was on top of everything that happened on stage - every
reference, every musical note, they knew the language that was being spoken. It was
theirs and they dug it!
In a white world, before the civil rights movement took hold, you could step into a theatre
and hear your talk, your people talking about things that concerned you. Making fun of it.
Making music out of it. The rhythm carried it and it was just total immersion in a vibrant
culture.
People up here in Canada are really nice but, sometimes, theyre too polite. Sometimes,
the absolute best thing to do is to get down and dirty with that performer. Yell when you
like it and say when you dont and maybe even get out the hook. Both audience and
performer will be better for it.
•
Burlesque
Im taking a look <smile> at feminine and female dance forms. Ive done a little bit of
research on this and I have some past history I can talk about. One of the things that got
me started was a dancer my dad spoke about. He was in WWI in the R.A.F. and he spoke
of a music hall turn featuring a lady called Lottie Collins.
I looked up Lottie Collins in Wikipedia and found out that she wore flouncy skirts and
that she kicked very high, revealing her stockings held up by sparkley suspenders. People
could see her whole leg! This was scandalous in those days. She was British and a very
popular symbol of the Naughty Nineties. . Lottie went abroad to dance as well. Her dance
was a skirt dance, a sort of Can-Can done as a solo dance with the flouncy skirts and the
very high kicks. Heres the song.
Lottie Collins lost her drawers
Will you kindly lend her yours
Cause shes going far away
To sing Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay
Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay
Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay
and so on.
I looked up skirt dance and apparently even respectable ladies back in the gay nineteys
would do a graceful skirt dance, leaving out the high kicks but, perhaps, allowing an
occasional shocking glimpse of ankle. Can you imagine!
When I went to youtube.com to try and look up skirt dance what came up was belly
dancing. My goodness, the costumes those ladies wear! Aside from being a belly dance
this dance form, with the costume, and the pompoms and the spangles and what have
you, is a skirt dance!
Leaving out the all the percussive effects with the heels and the castanets when you just
look at the costume you can see that Flamenco is also a skirt dance.
Now Burlesque, and thats what Im working up to, is not a skirt dance. No, the skirt is off
or, if it is on, pretty soon its off. My first husband I decided to take our vacation just
around where we were living which at that time was Detroit. I had never been to
Burlesque and I wanted to see what it was like. We went downtown to this hall that was
like an old movie palace. There was even a pit orchestra, absolutely essential for the
timing to emphasize bumps and grinds and for the drum rolls needed by the comedians
for their punchlines.
Comedians like Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle got their start in Vaudeville, which was a
theatre show featuring an assortment of short acts sometimes called bits or sketches.
Burlesque was the last shimmy-shake hurrah of vaudeville. There were actually baggypants comedians but Ill get to them in a minute but first the ladies.
The ladies wore pasties with tassels on them and one very talented dancer could twirl
these tassels in different directions. I wondered if she had a motor or exactly how she did
that.
Each artist that came on, as we watched this revue, had a different shtik , a slightly
different take on the same old thing and the music from the pit orchestra was a hoot
because it was going
Boomp ta boomp,
Boomp ta boomp,
Boomp ta boomp boomp BOOMP!
as they moved their flesh in different directions
Boomp ta boomp - there goes one hip.
Boomp ta boomp - there goes another hip.
Boomp ta boomp boomp boomp - a triple pelvic thrust.
I found it entertaining. I wouldnt say it turned me on. The chaps in the front row were
certainly very interested.
Then, they brought on one lady who was certainly well past her prime. Her dimpled flesh
resembled cottage cheese due to cellulite and you felt that if you poked a finger into her
ample thigh that the impression would stay. She got up there and did basically the same
boomp ta boomp routines as the other ladies but it was really strange to see it being done
by this over-the-hill person. She was well over-the-hill, but she knew the moves and just
about made it work because she knew the moves.
Now, the comedians. Oh, my goodness gracious! The reason for those baggy pants was
they did these blackout sketches in which the talent and the comedians would set up
various unlikely scenarios with the exotic dancers as their foils, also known in the
business as straight men. I can tell you that the exotic dancers were much better at
bouncing their flesh around than they were at acting. Ive never ever heard such wooden
dialog in my life but there they were. They were beautiful and the comedians just,
basically, carried it.
The comics would get up to a point where they were going to do something very very,
very naughty with these ladies. Then theyd reach into their baggy pants, held up by
suspenders, searching for something down there and BINGO! The lights would go out. It
was a blackout. They did quite a few of these blackout sketches. It was a standard
routine.
The comedian were pretty funny, in their own fashion. It wasnt prime time television
humour but it was what it was. It was was the last gasp of vaudeville and the vaudeville
comedian before their act were cleaned up and moved to television.
Trouble in mind, Im blue
But I wont be blue always
That old suns gonna shine
On my back door some day
RADIO AND TECHNOLOGY
Computers 101
I like new technology so I caught the computer bug early on. I took a night class where
they told us about mainframes and Basic programming and showed us punch cards. We
got to write our own little programs on punch cards. Mine was much too complicated for
a first try. I figured out later that Dungeons and Dragons was not the best model for a first
attempt at programming. This exposure, however, satisfied some of the itch for the new.
I lusted after some very early computer models. I used to go into the downtown Eatons
Department Store and stare at them. Through watching them, I learned to program a loop,
so the computer screen would say, endlessly, Hi, Im a machine or whatever. It was a big
thrill to give that first command and see it obeyed.
These early models were sold alongside scientific calculators. I would hang around and
look but I wasnt ready to buy yet. I really wanted something called an Exidy Sorcerer
which was featured at a little startup store on Queen Street East.
Being downsized from my job with an life insurance company, I took a portion of my
retirement funds and studied on purchasing my first computer.
There was a man called Harold who was the driving force behind the local shortwave
listeners club here in Toronto (ODXA). He knew technology and was a very practical
man. I trusted his judgment. Whatever he was going to buy, I was going to buy. So I
watched and I listened and wrote him emails and made a general nuisance of myself.
Then, I got exactly what he got, an Apple II+, an early Apple clone. It was one of the best
investments I ever made. Apple did not turn out to be the model most businesses chose
but every job I got thereafter was based on my knowledge of computers. Even knowing
just a little bit about the new technology went a long way in those early days.
With the Apple I got my feet wet. I used to go to Apple Usergroup meetings in a big high
school auditorium. This auditorium would be pretty well filled by computer hobbyists,
early adopters of the technology. Floppy disc sales were at the back of the hall. I would
study the list of programs and games available and buy little programs on 5 1/2 inch
floppies.
Eventually, I ended up running the telecommunications SIG (SIG is short for Special
Interest Group). We met at a local library and the staff let us run a long extension cable,
after hours, from their phone to our 1200 baud modem on the meeting room machine. We
could go on line thus proving that we could. There wasnt as much to do then on line as
there is now but, hey, we were there.
I also got involved in Unix and attended a local group called Unix Unanimous. Yes, you
heard that right. Unix Unanimous was the name of the group.
I also got involved with Usenet. A very kind man, Bruce, helped me to get started there. I
had by then segued over to an Amiga, an early multitasking computer with excellent
graphics and a Unix flavour. With Bruces help I was able to set up my own Newsgroup.
The first in Toronto to do this on an Amiga 500, which was a big deal in those times.
I joined an Amiga user group called ABUG and later ended up chairing the group at the
519 Church Community Centre in Toronto. ABUG was popular with a small group of
loyal fans. I scoured the Internet for public domain programs to demo at this group. Like
most such groups, it was a hands-on Show and Tell kind of production.
In the meantime, at work, I had learned to use the AES Word Processor/Computer.
AES Data, successfully marketed its brand of word processors worldwide until its demise
in the mid-1980s. It was a true office machine and organizations, such as medium-sized
law firms, could afford an AES. A big selling point for the AES machine was that it
could be learned and operated by secretarial staff. They were big clunky machines. The
printers were extremely noisy and had heavy plastic covers to mute the noise so you
could hear yourself talk during a print job. Technicians used to come in regularly about
every two weeks and fix them up. They broke down a lot. Later on, I learned to run a few
simple CP/M command line instructions on the AES Data machine
A law office hired me as a temp because I had some computer background. That first
AES job was a baptism of fire. Had to figure everything out myself but, thereafter, the
AES machine was my meal ticket, as a temp at Environment Canada and later as a temp
and then full time employee with Industry Canada.
CB Radio
I inherited from my father a sort of compulsion to try new electronic gadgets. He was
always the first to have the latest electronic whizzbang. This compulsion led me to
getting any number of devices for which I had no real need, such as a Scanner radio
receiver which allowed me to tune in on police, air, fire and private company broadcasts
on special radio bands. Listening in meant long moments of boredom interlaced with a
few moments of great excitement when the cops were chasing somebody or some
gangster was having an argument with his girlfriend over their cellphones.
Because it was on sale, I got myself a CB Base Station at the time of the CB radio craze.
A Base Station is different from a car CB. A base station is meant for your house. I knew
nothing about antennas and all sorts of things that you need to know to get on the air.
There was a fellow who went by the handle, George, the Book Bandit. Everybody had
Handles, that is to say Nicknames. You might get to know their real names eventually, or
not. It didnt much matter. George ,the Book Bandit, was a CB hobbyist, big time. He
caught my very faint signal, as I tried to reach out to talk to people. He happened to be on
the Channel I was trying to broadcast on. My voice was as strong as I could make it but
my signal was very weak but he heard me. This was a man who managed to pluck out a
broadcast from the Solomon Islands that came in on the skip very faintly on an odd
channel. George had good radio ears .
The Skip happens when the scattered patches of relatively dense ionization that develop
seasonally within the E region of the ionosphere reflects and scatters radio frequencies.
When frequencies reflect off multiple patches, it is referred to as multi-hop skip. E-skip
allows radio waves to travel many miles beyond their intended area of reception.
George and I managed to make contact on air and he got me set up with a Radio Shack
big stick antenna which was mounted halfway down my back yard. George put my big
stick up and anchored it with guy wires. Then I had a very strong signal. This was really
important because there were characters out there called carps who liked to walk over
another CBers signal, to drown them out. If you had a base station with a good antenna
the carps didnt stand a chance.
Eventually, a group of adults came together on air. We werent interested in hurling
insults at each other or talking nonsense about nothing. Well, we talked nonsense but it
was about something. We started to congregate on the channel that was just above the
dime. Channel Ten or the Dime was the channel that regular CB radios ended on. More
expensive CBs had the upper channels above Channel 10. You got rid of a lot of the riff
raff if you worked above the Dime. We gathered up there and talked. I got to know some
of the regulars like Ingmar. He was a computer systems guy who remembered when
mainframe computer tubes were bigger than beer cans. There was the Blue Goose.
Heavens! There were all ll kinds of people.
Then, I heard Mike, the Irish Viking. I was kind of stuck on him for a while. He had this
great, deep radio voice and I have a weakness for radio voices. Through Mike I met John,
the Earthworm who lived in a basement apartment. Along came Starfighter who was a
born communicator. Starfighter, also known as Craig, later went to to do some regular
radio broadcasting as a DJ on AM radio., not making much of a living at it but still....
At that time I was into Dungeons and Dragons. I was a Dungeon Master and ran games
where I made up the plots and told players who had won each fight . I transferred
Dungeons and Dragons to the CB radio. We met on one of the legal upper channels and
had a game going with dungeons, of course, with grey stone corridors and with great
hairy monsters with green dripping fangs and red flashing eyes and swords of magical
power. I would throw the dice for the gamers. We had quite a good game going there.
One time, a trucker, who was just cruising the dials, started sandy-bagging, just listening
in but not speaking) . Finally he couldnt stand it any more and he shouted out. What do
you mean theres a green hairy monster coming down the corridor after you and you
pulled your sword and youre going to stick him in they eye? YOURE ALL CRAZY!!
Well, maybe we were but we had a lot of fun. We grew quite close in the game. Roleplaying games are funny. They have a gestalt, a sort of a group existence. At one time if
someone was wounded in the game, seriously wounded, then an accident would happen
to them in real life and that got a little Oooh, oooh, oooh spooky. It was all part of the
game.
The big event I remember in the Dungeons and Dragons game on the CB radio was when
John the Earthworm fought Death and won. His father-in-law had just passed away. John
was very fond of his wife and had seen her suffering while watching the old boy go, so he
had a bone to pick with Death.
When he came into the game I, more or less, extemporaneously, created a skeleton
monster called the Death Man, or something like that. John was a Paladin, one of the
good guys, he got out his sword and he fought death. It was a fierce fight and the dice
rolls were going against him but he kept on. He lost some blood and he lost some points
and then he WON! That was a really, really big deal.
You heard tales on the CB from older folks who had some kind of story worth listening
to. There was an old trapper who got on one night and talked about the guy he knew up in
the bush who had a mink jock strap. The fur was on the inside. Go figure.
Then, there were veteranss of WWII who had been in battle and would talk the strategy
and tactics of certain battles in their corner of the war. George the Book Bandit had been
in Germany in WWII and he had had some adventures there.
CB Radio had its time in the sun. Nothing lasts forever. The CB radio was a really great
fraternity of radio people and I learned from it. CB radios legacy is that I can still talk
about anything to anybody, anytime - and that is useful!
Voices
I have been impressed by the power of the human voice.
I spent about a year fooling around on the CB radio. I listened to many other amateur
broadcasters and found that certain voices have the power almost to hypnotize. A fellow,
Mike, that I met over the CB, had a real radio voice , deep and reassuring. He had
followers. There are a bunch of channels on a CB radio. When he came on a Channel the
word would spread and people would throng on to that channel. If he said something nice
about someone that was a big deal.
Guys, and ladies too, who are radio announcers will tell you that fans out there think of
them as friends because theres a one-to-one quality about radio. It is as if the presenter
were talking only to you. People become mesmerized by the voice of the presenter and
tune in every week for a nice visit.
I was flipping around the dials and I hit on a program on Torontos jazz.fm called bluz.FM
with Danny Marks. The first thing that caught my ear was his voice which was deep,
resonant and friendly. You felt like this guy could be anybodys friend. I felt like he was
talking to me. I later learned that this is the sign of a good radio host. Danny is also a very
accomplished guitarist.
More than his voice, there was the music taking me back to the 50s and 60s, when I
listened to rhythm and blues from the Detroit radio station. Here was all that music all
over again sounding as new and fresh and wonderful as the day it was made.
I started emailing Danny. Hes good because he works with his audience. He writes back
to everyone. Its his signature that he does this. We got a little correspondence going
which was mildly flirtatious, until he found out how old I actually was. When he did find
out there was an awkward pause and, then, I adopted him and I adopted his Show and
thats how I became, in his words, the Blues Mama. It all just started with a friendly
exchange in email.
That email conversation ended up with me running his website and Ive done 25 guest
spots on his Show. I specialize in blues history which I research mainly on the Internet. I
review his Show every week, because entertainers need feedback. In the beginning,
before I came to know him, I was just simply mesmerized by his voice.
Voice in the Dune novel was training originated by the Bene Gesserit, permitting an
adept to control others merely by selected tone shadings of the voice.
There was a fellow, early on in my online Guild Wars multi player war game who had
this power of the voice. He built a team of accomplished players. He was a very good
player himself because he pretty much spent his life in the game. Later I found out that,
outside the game, he didnt have much of a real life but in the game he was a towering
figure.
We had something called Teamspeak which let use use our computer microphones and
headphones to talk to each other while the game was in progress. Without Teamspeak our
fearless leader was just another player. With Teamspeak and the power of his voice, we
would follow him into the most terrifying depths of the Underworld. He had fatal flaws
and even the veneer of his mesmeric voice could not hide these flaws over time. I ended
up leaving that guild but for a while, oh God, I just lived to follow this fellow and fight
things with the rest of the team. We all had our roles and our special armor and we were
good at the game.
In another Guild now, I have been invited to use this microphone and headphone
capability but I have refused. Ive learned my lesson. I have a suggestible personality and
knowing this, I am careful.
I have received an occasional piece of fan mail from listeners to my Podcasts in England,
the USA, Brazil, Mexico and even Australia. Something in my voice and the stories I tell
has reached them there. We all have, to one degree or another, this power of the voice
and with power comes responsibility.
•
Back to my association with radio.
I have access to a whole lot of blues music. I was interested in blues history. Danny
invited me to be a guest on his Show. That was kind of nervous making but I made a
good decision on the way to the interview. I decided I was going to breathe and relax,
breathe and relax. I would slow down and just talk about what I knew. Hes a very good
interviewer. We did some questions and answers, some of which were surprising, and I
just relaxed and talked. We had a friendly conversation on air and people seemed to enjoy
it.
Ive done 25 of those guest spots now, and counting, doing different perspectives on the
blues. Weve covered different sections of the USA like the Piedmont area of Carolina,
New Orleans, Texas and you name it. No competition with Danny in all this. Although
we like the same kind of music our picks are quite different.
Friends have told me that our conversations are as important to them as the music. They
like the banter between Danny and me. Hes more than a a bit of a comedian and that
makes it fun.
Doing real radio was new to me. I had to learn to talk into a microphone, I had to learn
how close to speak into the mic and how to angle it to get rid of those explosive plosive
sounds - the Ps and Ts.
I had thought of a radio station as being a glamorous place. Not really. Where you do the
recording is like a large closet with different kinds of sound baffles on the walls so that
they dont pick up ambient noise and so forth.
I didnt realize how much editing went into doing a Show. We did a few retakes, not too
many because Im pretty much a straight on performer. He has a tendency to ramble and
would listen to himself and say, Well, thats not really important. Lets cut it out. This
helped tighten up the final take.
I learned a lot from the experience of being a radio guest. I learned how to edit. I got a
notion of how a sound board works and the kind of music that worked with the Show and
how to talk about things that were of interest to people. When we were talking it was like
two people having a private tête-à -tête to which everybody was invited, which was
great.
Jazz.FM is only partially funded by advertising. The rest of its operating budget comes
from listeners. This helps the Station be a little more open than a commercial radio
station. I chip in during fund drives and between times with my body, going in there to do
the guest spots. Its been fun. If you need something to do Id recommend adopting a radio
show.
Torontos Jazz.FM can be reached on the web at http://www.jazz.fm and its 91.1 on your
radio dial.
Listening In
To say Im a radio fan is an understatement. I listen in all kinds of ways. I started, of
course, with regular radio. I have some favourite programs. On Saturday nights its Danny
Marks blues show on jazz.fm 91.1 here in Toronto, Ontario. During the week I listen to
CBCs Radio One: Quirks and Quarks, Stuart McLean, Randy Bachmans Vinyl Tap and
Eleanor Wachtels Writers and Company.
I am an early adopter of technology and got this USB computer attachment which allows
me to transmit audio from my computer to my stereo system in the next room. I like to
listen to some BBC programs on the Internet so I started beaming them to my stereo.
Dave Raven creates his program, Raven n Blues from his houseboat on the Thames just
outside of London, England. Its a really good show and I listen to it often.
I have a friend who is from Great Britain. Before he got a high speed connection, up
north, I used to record a BBC program called Sorry I Havent a Clue for him on my
computer. When I had recorded a nice handful of them Id send them on to him along with
other stuff that I hoped hell find interesting.
From the BBC and Radio Netherlands I went further afield and discovered Australian
radio. I discovered that some regular radio programs could be downloaded as mp3 files,
which saved me a lot of recording. Thats how I got into the Podcast world. A Podcast is
just an Mp3 sound file that can be listened to when you have time, either on the computer
on on an iPod or other Mp3 player. I went online and purchased some software called
FeedDemon to collect my favourites for download. I like to listen to Mark Blevis from
Ottawa with Electric Sky. I subscribe Dave Ravens program too and Austin Riffs.
I started putting my radio and Podcast mp3 files on a Creative Zen mp3 player, so that I
could listen to them at night. I have a condition called Restless Leg Syndrome which
keeps me awake sometimes, so I always have something interesting to listen to: talk
shows, documentaries, drama and music. A Podcast called Thomas Edisons Attic has
early music -- some pieces taken from wax cylinders and some from very early 78s. Its
like having an ear into the past.
I like radio theatre: plays and skits and early radio sitcoms like Burns and Allen, Fibber
McGee and Molly, the Great Gildersleeve and some dramatic programs like Inner
Sanctum. In radio they seem to like dramas that have you on the edge of your seat the
boat going down with all hands or something dreadful coming up from the basement. I
have a fair number of those.
Im picking up little catch phrases from listening to old time radio skits such as saying, for
someone whos a skinflint, that theyre tight as a toreadors pants. We always used to say
tight as the bark on a tree but I thing toreadors pants covers it, ahem, adequately.
Im doing my own Podcasts now which gives me an appreciation of what goes in to
producing these things. It takes some learning.
What Im trying to say is that through the Internet you can listen to the radio from
anywhere around the world, including the USAs NPR (National Public radio is big) and
PRI (Public Radio International). Im getting a full-fledged education just lying in my bed
and listening to the world.
I sometimes take my Mp3 player with me when Im traveling around and people wonder
why Im so plugged in. Well, Ive got something to be plugged into.
I have a fairly extensive website and on it are some pages of interest to the listener.
My listen live links where you can choose a radio station to listen to are at
http://www.quartette.com/sunny/listen-live.htm
I have a page for world radio at
http://www.quartette.com/sunny/world-radio.htm
When I did this chapter as a Podcast I put a little sound clip at the beginning that was
taken from a 1902 Edison gold-molded record from
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php
where they have thousands of these early recordings, many on wax cylinders that have
been transposed for listening in. I put it in to illustrate that folks have been listening for a
long, long time.
I was at Hughs Room in Toronto to hear Maria Muldaur not too long ago. At the same
table were Suzie Rotolo (Bob Dylans former lady) and Bob Harris, a well known
presenter from BBC Radio 2.
Suzie was surprised that I listened to WNYCs Leonard Lopate on a regular basis.
Bob Harris and his friendly associate were also surprised to learn about my collecting I
Havent a Clue from BBC Radio 7 and that I also listened in to Dave Ravens Raven n
Blues and Westway, a radio soap opera. We had an instant commonality. Radio is the tie
that binds.
Im listening away and Im picking up my guitar and vocal skills to begin and exit these
little Podcasts because people like music and they especially like it when its free.
My Adventures In Podcasting & Listening
Since this book is taken from the transcriptions of my Podcasts I thought Id go into some
of detail on how I got started recording these autobiographical Mp3s for what has turned
out to be a global audience. A series of events cascaded to produce that first Mp3. I
bought a Stereo Receiver from a local electronics store and I turned out not to need it.
Feeling sorry for the salesman, I traded it in for a Creative Zen MP3 player. Now, I had a
player with quite a lot of memory in it and all kinds of features. What could I do with it?
I started collecting all sorts of Mp3s to listen to and then I tripped over Podcasts.
Podcasts are produced in Mp3 format and can be played on any type of Mp3 player. I
started working with an aggregator, called Feed Demon, which collected Podcasts for me.
It just polled them from my list of favourites to download on command.
I found out that some Podcasts were too long. I preferred listening in shorter bursts.
Maybe I have a short attention span. Sometimes when travelling, the shorter Podcasts are
better. On Replay Radio I discovered something called Mp3 Magic which allowed me to
take an hour long Podcast and break it into 15 minute segments seamlessly. If I was
interrupted while listening it didnt matter because I could go back or on to the next
segment without fiddling too much with the controls.
I started to refine my interests. I liked documentaries, so Radio Netherlands was a natural
for that and the BBC, of course. Some BBC programs and many CBC programs, like
Quirks and Quarks, are available as Podcasts. I was learning how to Podcast by listening
to them.
I also monitor a few Blogs but Blogs are written not spoken. I discovered a Blog that
operated out of New Orleans at the time of the hurricane. They were operational during
the entire time of the flood and gave daily, sometimes hourly reports from inside the city.
It was operated by an Internet Service provider who kept their own site and their clients
sites up. They started rescuing other companies data for them from computers which
were in high rise buildings well above the water line. The actual job of the fellow who
was running the Blog was Security. He was ex Special Forces with a technical
background and had a the ability to communicate in simple language just exactly what he
was seeing. It was almost like being there on the ground. Although they were ten floors
up, in downtown New Orleans using a generator for power.
I discovered WNYCs Morning Stories and others.
I got into vintage radio programs. I discovered that listening to Charlie McCarthy and
Fibber McGee and Tallulah Bankhead and Bob Hope was really interesting. I felt like I
was back in time to a place where I was quite safe and some of the bad things that were
happening now werent happening. I got into really early music, Edison cylinder and disc
record rarities, many not heard since the old man himself stashed them away. I heard Tin
Pan Alley pop songs, ragtime, vaudeville comedy sketches, flapper dance bands, old-time
country tunes, historic classical music, laboratory experiments and other musical and
spoken artifacts all dating from 1888 through 1929.
I used to listen to Jeff Healeys jazz from the 20s to the early 40s on his jazz.fm show My
Kind of Jazz. From him I relearned an appreciation for the fine musicianship back then. I
was able to download some vintage big band Podcasts with Harry James and Red Nichols
and His Five Pennies and so on. The commercials were interesting too. My goodness, did
they ever talk up cigarettes in those days. It was almost seductive how they went on about
how round and firm and fully-packed they were.
I listen to the Podcast programs at night mostly. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping, and
they put me to sleep. Certain kinds of voices on the radio will do that. They lull me off to
dreamland. Lord knows what subliminal messages Im taking in :-)
In the morning I delete the programs Ive listened to and add some more from the
Podcasts Im downloading on a regular basis.
I started recording my own Podcasts in a series of short sound files. I put them on line
and a fair-sized circle of fans enjoy them quite a lot. For the technically inclined I record
in Mono at 44100. Not all Mp3 players can reproduce stereo properly. It also saves some
bandwidth/download time.
I have lived a longish life. Im 71 and gaining. Ive had some interesting times, living in
the Canadian north and Chatham, Ontario; Detroit and New York City. Back in Toronto
Im combining my experiences to tell stories about my life. Its my audio biography to
share with my daughter, my family, friends and perfect strangers who stop by and listen
in.
Note: That small circle of friends and family has expanded into 7,000+ hits a month. I
had a nice note from a lady in Brazil telling me she enjoyed my Podcasts and used them
to help her learn English because I spoke slowly and clearly. I guess that explains why
my Statistics show I have 7% subscribing from China. A nice man in Mexico wrote to
tell me how much he enjoyed them and when I wrote back and mentioned the book he
wanted to buy a copy.
My Podcasts can be accessed on line in Mp3 format at
http://www.soniabrock.com/index.html
and the Feed is located at
http://www.soniabrock.com/Podcasts/chatham1.xml
Precious Memories
(How to Get Your Granny or your Senior Citizen Mum to Podcast Her Memories)
Your senior citizen granny or mum or auntie probably doesnt own a computer or, if she
does, she uses it for emailing the kids and for family pictures. She might belong to an on
line Forum but thats unlikely.
Her thoughts on Podcasting might be:
Microphones, Oh my God, and youre on stage, How embarrassing.
I dont know what to say, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking.
Forget about it!
Get yourself something that will record telephone conversations to your hard drive.
Granny is used to the telephone. She can talk quite a while on the telephone, especially if
reassured that the cost is minimal because you are using your computer to call her. I
bought a service called Gizmo where for about $12.00 Canadian I get 6 hours of phone
time. I can phone anywhere in Canada or the United Stated to a regular phone. For 15
minutes it only costs me about 50 cents, maybe less. The important part is that while you
are talking to granny on the telephone using Gizmo, or Skype with some additional
software, you can record your conversation to your hard drive. I found the audio quality
to be fairly good; not nearly as good as a commercial recording but fine for the somewhat
less exacting medium of Podcasting.
A Podcast is A method of publishing audio files to the Internet for playback on mobile
devices and personal computers. In other words you record, edit and then save the file in
the Mp3 format for playback on the listening device of your choice.
Heres a word to the wise. Do not let Gizmo or any other Internet phone service pluck out
contacts from your Microsoft Mail otherwise it will send cheerful notes to all your
contacts. Type your contacts in manually and do not include their emails.
Call Mum or Grannie up and get her talking about the old days. Dont barrage her with a
whole bunch of questions. Have a few really good questions ready to prime the pump.
Encourage her to ramble on. Dont worry if she doesnt follow your mental script. To
quote the sound engineers famous last words Well fix it when we mix it!
Get a good piece of sound editing software. I like a free program called Audacity for first
takes and then I edit the resulting sound file in Adobe Audition. You save the good bits
and you discard the boring bits. <http://audacity.sourceforge.net/>
Plug in a few reminders. Granny remember when we used to go camping and we had a
tent and there were mosquitoes and bears.
Shell go on about how the bears stole the blueberry pie and how she hooked your dad in
the eyebrow when he was trying to teach her fly fishing. The local vet pushed the hook
through and snipped it off but wouldnt take any pay because he wasnt supposed to treat
humans.
Now, you piece those memories together. To older folks the past is sometimes more vivid
than the present and the whole interview process should, therefore, be a pleasant
experience.
You can get the good stuff because you know where the buttons are. Youve heard these
stories more than once but what you want is to have a sound file with her voice telling
them again. Just nail these stories down and your interest in what she is saying is going to
put enthusiasm in her voice which is what you want, her natural voice (or his natural
voice in the case of Granddad).
Once its edited play it back for her. You shouldnt put it out there on the public scene
unless shes had a listen. Emphasize the fact that its for family and grandkids first. It
would make a nice Christmas CD.
She may be very pleased with the whole thing and quite proud of herself. Never mind
that you spent several hours editing what may end up being a relatively short audio file.
Its probably best to do these thing in 7 or 10 minute bursts of storytelling. When you are
recording you can stop periodically and save and then start again. Its easier to edit short
files and you can paste them together later.
This tutorial is just a guideline on how to record your family members and then put the
Mp3 sound file out either as a personal family CD or as a Podcast. Once youve got the
hang of it you can interview Uncle Ted and Aunt Addie, or Cousin Bill. Theres no end to
it!
You might even be brave enough to use a computer microphone and recording software. I
use Total Recorder or Audacity to record that way. You may have to fiddle with the
settings to set it up for Microphone. Total Recorder is nice because you can schedule and
record Internet radio broadcasts but thats another story.
I should mention that, although I am a Podcasting Granny, I am also a demi-tech. I used
to do software application support and Im a retired Web master. Im used to public
speaking and entertaining. Ive been a communicator my whole life. That doesnt mean its
easy for Granny, so give her a helping hand!
•
My Virtual Life
As I wrote this, it was August, and it was very hotthere, and theyd had forest fires. We
chat online in the game and used to do quests and mission together. After joining an
Australian Guild (The Blitzers) with many European members, I used to have a little
world-time thing on my status bar telling me what time it was in Spain and in Australia
and so forth. Eventually the global time differences started to be an impediment, so I left
the Blitzers and joined Aeon, an American Guild. My buddy in the Canary Islands is on
my friends list. I can see when hes online and chat with him and do a Mission or two.
Some folks I know met online and ended up getting married. Its funny how in an email or
a text chat you can get a very good perception of what the other person is like, just from
the way they use the written language. The current Leaders of The Blitzers Guild recently
got married. Guild members met together in a suitable amphitheater-like place in the
game framework (Henge of Denravi, in the Maguuma Jungle in Kryta) to bear witness
and to raise a virtual toast, as the leadership of the Guild was passed on while they took
two weeks leave for the honeymoon. There was free virtual beer. Theyre Aussie so beer
is important.
Ive also been party to organizations with a real-time existence but my connection to them
was mostly virtual. I do publicity for groups from time to time. You can get all kinds of
people coming out to a meeting that is organized entirely through email or an online
Forum, such as Meetup.com. This non-tangible way of reaching out to people brings their
actual bodies to a place at a given time. This communications method has been used to
good effect by cyber wags to organize (Im making this up) Everybody meet here and
wear a false nose and a virtual mob descends on a real time location. There are also flash
mobs that act as virtual vigilantes but that is outside my personal experience.
For many years, I forget how many but it must be about 12, Ive been going to EMCC, a
computer systems programmer matinée beer bash at the Imperial Pub here in Toronto.
We go upstairs where they have old time classics on the jukebox, Dave Brubeck and
Peggy Lee and so forth. There we sit with a nice Guinness and talk computer shop and
anything else that comes to our attention. Their keen, analytical programmers minds (Im
not a programmer but they are) can dissect just about anything. I remember one
discussion about whether camels were kosher. With the help of the barkeep and a Google
wifi connection it was determined that they were not kosher. Wrong kind of feet. They
chew the cud but they only have partially split hooves. Giraffes are kosher but their necks
are too long, making Kosher butchering problematical.
This group keeps in touch virtually. We mail each other obscure computer-related jokes
and snippets of news. Our fearless leader reminds us of the date of the next meeting
through emails. I wont go into the origin of the EMCC name of the group. Its obscure and
computer-related.
Theres a sort of interweaving of virtual life and real life. I havent made any virtual
enemies that I know of although there have been a few virtual tiffs. I have run across a
few virtual predators, mostly harmless. In my case, early on, it was teenage boy trying to
connect with a female, any female. The usual line was I LIKE older women. I dont get hit
on too much. Guess Im not cyber cute and a little too inclined to say, Well, youre being
silly, arent you?
Now in the pre-Internet days back in my home town things worked a little bit differently
socially. I remember that sometime after my mother became a widow she was paid a visit
by a older farmer, also widowed. He came to see if he could have some of her corn stalks
from the back garden for his pigs. She gladly gave consent for him to take the stalks but
did not encourage him by asking him to come in and sit for a spell. He came back a few
more times and finally admitted that he had absolutely no need for corn stalks as he had
plenty of his own. He just thought she might fancy a clean old man as a suitor.
People Google me or find me through my Podcasts and write to me. A young gentleman
in England, interested in magick because of the current Harry Potter craze, wrote to me. I
have a Podcast on Magick with a k on the end. He found it and we corresponded a bit. Im
not out to sell anything in the magickal line, so I just warned him politely about some of
the attendant dangers and pitfalls.
That Podcast on Magick got over 4,000 hits in July 2007, which is a lot for me, not for
someone else, but a lot for me. The popularity will pass. The hits corresponded with the
release of the last Harry Potter book. These things go through phases.
Speaking of magic, with or without a k on the end, I remember a sleazy stringer for The
Toronto Globe newspaper, a so-called Christian, who wrote a tell all piece of slanted
journalism that appeared prominently in the weekend paper. He had lurked and listened
on a Pagan Bulletin Board System I frequented. He then wrote a piece coloured by his
own religious bias. It was rather nasty. He came back on the system briefly to catch the
furor and I organized a Lets out Jesus him and turn the other cheek campaign. He simply
did not know what to do about being forgiven by <gasp> Pagans.
I have a daughter in Montreal and we dont always get along in real life but through
cyberspace we manage, now and again, to connect and share news. There we form a
relationship that doesnt exist in real life, only online, but still, were connected.
If there is any point to this somewhat rambling discourse, it is to say that cyberspace has
interconnected with my life. Its real. I am part of a global community connected by the
gossamer strands of email and Internet links.
HOBBIES AND INTERESTS
Cloth Dolls
INTRO The Clapping Song
My Momma told me Clap, clap
If I was goody Clap, clap
That she would buy me Clap, clap
A rubber dolly Clap, clap
My Auntie told her Clap, clap
I kissed a soldier Clap, clap
Now she wont buy me Clap, clap
A rubber dolly Clap, clap
Cloth dolls move and theyre soft. They can be hugged. They are people.
When I was smaller my mother used to read the Raggedy Ann stories to me. The most
fascinating part was that, when the people were away, the dolls would stop being still and
come to life . They would have lives of their own, doing things and having adventures. In
my mind, this became a sort of template for what dolls do when people arent around. As
time went on I continued to make dolls, mostly for younger relatives. I was making the
kind of pretty, cute dolls popular at the time. I found patterns for them in magazines like
McCalls Needlework & Crafts. My approach to doll making has changed over time.
I still make a fair number of Raggedy Anns but now but I also make the politicallyincorrect but dearly-beloved Golliwogs.
Raggedy Ann is a stereotype doll but shes also iconic like Marilyn Monroe or other
cultural icons. Raggedy Ann is an important culture icon. She represents an innocent time
when dreams were real. Such dreams tell us things about ourselves, about our childhood
and about our world. They are a kind of shorthand for larger ideas. Raggedy Ann has
readily identifiable characteristics: red hair, usually curly, black shoe button eyes, a redtriangle nose and a smiling mouth with a little red center. She has a heart embroidered on
her chest. She wears bloomers. She has a calico dress and a white apron.
Later on it became important to me to make dolls that were different. Dolls made from
my own patterns or from the other original doll-makers selling patterns that were not in
the common mold. These dolls were different.They had character, and were NOT for
children.
I dont think an artist chooses an art form or a musician chooses his instrument. The art
form or instrument chooses the artist or musician, and dolls chose me. Friends have asked
me Why dolls? Youre talented. You could do anything, meaning I could do something
more acceptable or commercial. The implication is I am wasting my time on cloth dolls.
Its not a waste. My small universe, my apartment, has every surface covered by cloth
dolls. There are dolls of various kinds, various shapes, long-haired, short-haired, smiling,
frowning, wide-eyed, sleepy-eyed. I cant say why they are important to me but they are.
Dolls develop as you craft them. You start out with one concept and it morphs into
another one.
I dont know why I make cloth dolls.
I do know that I have to.
When I get an idea for a cloth doll a whole little world opens up and the creature Im
making starts to talk to me, to tell me what kind of hair she wants, and what colour
clothing in what design and how her face should be. The act of creation becomes a twoway street.
•
Stitches
I just bought a new sewing machine. Its a Janome in the 400 class. I already had a
Janome in the 300 class and, well, I broke it again. I was making a purse and the fabric
layers were too thick. I pushed or pulled a little too hard. It didnt go over the hump and
that bent the needle and threw the timing off and this is the second time this has
happened.
I cannot begin to describe my extreme panic at being without a source of mechanical
stitches. I sew. I make cloth dolls. Ive made them for years, art dolls and folk dolls and
what have you but my latest thing is purses.
I am prone to obsession. When I start doing something I do it full-tilt boogie and here I
was, mid-purse, and I had no working sewing machine. I fiddled with it and said to
myself, Maybe its the thread and this and that and back and forth then, finally, I bit the
bullet. I found this lovely place where they come to your house on a service call. Sure, it
costs you but they come and tinker with your machine and make it work again. However,
I was NOT going to be in the position of having no sewing machine ever, ever again!
I wanted to buy a second machine. I thought of buying one that does heavier stitching
but, guess what, theyre commercial class and they start at $700.00 for the most basic,
used model and go up from there. No, thanks. Then I thought of getting a reconditioned
machine, maybe a Singer with only straight and zig zag stitches, not top-of-the-line, and
already having seen some use. I found out I could get a newer Janome, which is my
favourite machine brand, for half as much again as I would pay for a reconditioned
machine.
I had to reach into my reserves to get the new machine but, again, I bit the bullet and
bought it and, boy, am I happy with it! My new machine does smocking and buttonholes
and, Lord knows what all. It is familiar because its similar to my repaired Janome but it
has more features.
Speaking of needs and wants, what I really needed was a decent, large, flat-screen
computer monitor. I play war games on line. I need to spare my eyesight. My large CRTs
flicker was doing me harm, but when I found I was without stitches my choice was clear.
I needed a flat-screen monitor but I wanted a new sewing machine. The sewing machine
won.
Im very happy with my new sewing machine. Having reached into my reserves for it Ill
now be able to save up more quickly for the needed computer monitor. Im stitching away
making a Humbug bag, in the shape of a British hard-candy of the same name. Im
knitting purses and doing linings for them too.
Im really into retro purses which look like they are from 1920 or 1930. Ive figured out
how to get old vintage photographs on to fabric, using special paper-backed fabric for the
printer. Once printed I cut them out and stitch them onto the purse or create a crochet
flower border to stitch around the printout, so the purses have a little nostalgic touch. I
can add old fashioned buttons too. I use the kind of handles that were once fashionable.
The vintage aspect of all this is really fun. Theres a whole crafting niche our there of
ladies who make purses of various kinds, some of them artitistic. When push comes to
shove you only need one of the darned things. When you wear it out, you get another
purse in basic black or navy and youre ready to roll. Thats much too mundane for we
ladies who sew purses.
Now, when I go out I have a different purse to take with me each time. I have one with an
African-Violet, patterned fabric that I take to African Violet club meetings. Its whats
called a wristlet, a simple zippered rectangle with a strap that just hangs from your wrist
and contains just basic stuff - a comb, a wallet and your keys. Im making a bunch of
wristlet bags for people. These handy items are themed on what the person is interested
in. In one case its a lady who is obsessive about her pug dog and shes going to get one
with a pug dog playing a drum kit on it. Shes in the music business.
My young niece is into cherries. Theyre a fad at her school, so, obviously shes going to
get one with cherries on it, and so it goes.
Im pleasing myself and pleasing my friends and family. Ive got a new sewing machine
and a redundant machine thats been repaired and Im one happy camper!
Cat Poem
What a particular miracle is a cat,
Wrapped in particolour,
Softer than milkweed down and warm,
Resonant with purring hallelujahs.
What a moving miracle is a cat,
Claw-pawed or kneading softly,
Kitten shadow wrestling or ice-eyed hunter,
Walking the fence between the wood and the tended corn.
What a sleeping miracle is a cat,
Belly up, paws half staff,
Eyes serenely closed
Breathing careless breaths - but step near and in a flickering,
Alert in readiness to fight, to flee.
What a loving miracle is a cat,
Leaning towards affection,
As to a source of sustenance,
Dearer than milk,
As if lacking it were death
And drawing out in response
A human love forgetting gulf of species
Head to head the minds respond
Each to its nature and together.
© Sonia Brock 1987
Knitting
Tara had an opinion on most things, from a cats point of view of course. She was not
loath to express this opinion vocally, sometimes very vocally. Tara was a world-class
complainer, telling me where to get off on many occasions. Although not perfect -- was
picky about her food -- Tara was very affectionate and a loving companion. I miss her.
Fur is so comforting. Cat plumpness (because they like to eat) is wrapped in warm fur
and purrs. Its a comfort to have a cat beside you, interested in whatever you are doing.
Having something to care for is important. It is important to think not just about yourself
but about another living being who relies on you for sustenance , shelter, love and
<laugh> brushings, the w-h-o-l-e nine yards. Rest in peace Tara diddle, Tara the cat.
The same week that Tara passed on to her reward, my sister and I went down to the
Humane Society. There I picked out another lovely cat. She has a wonderful
temperament and shes a talker. My new cat, and I are bonding very nicely. I still miss
Tara but Smokey is filling that cat-sized hole in my life.
Smokey is a six-year old Tortoiseshell, very muscular and friendly. (She just climbed up
on me and gave me a back-of-the-neck massage while I was watching TV). My sister
thinks Smokey has some Siamese in her because shes got the skinny tail, the squeakyhinge voice and shes very smart. Smokey got out the front door onto the patio and went
walkabout, in the rain, for some time. She was back, however, in time for lunch which
shows that she knows where she lives already.
My comfort during this time of stress has been knitting, rediscovered after a longish
absence. I now have four, even five knitting projects on the go. Im knitting dishcloths
with knit and purl designs on them. The one Im working on right now has a motif in the
shape of a cat. Another dishcloth on the workbench is a leaping dolphin over waves.
Then, theres a mystery dishcloth from a Mystery Dishcloth of the Month Yahoo forum.
We receive 10 pattern rows a day and try to guess what it will turn out to be. The first
part of the month is a dishcloth with a pattern on it. - a lighthouse or an oak leaf or
something like that, worked with knit and purl stitches. The second knit-along of the
month is patterned or lace stitches, which is a wonderful way to sample stitches in a
small, do-able project. A dishcloth isnt very big. You do it in pretty colours, then roll it
up, tie a bow around it and theres your stocking stuffer. If you dont need it yourself,
youve had the joy of knitting the thing. I use them as washcloths and theyre wonderful
for that
The best pattern so far was the leaping dolphin over fancywork-patterned waves. I may
make another one of those and turn it into, you guessed it, a purse!
I used to be devoted to cross stitch and have a charting program for it called PC Stitch.
With the Stitch-Along you only get 10 lines of the pattern at a time. Like cross stitch it is
based upon a grid of small squares. At the start of the month I just chart the pattern as it
comes along and then view it in my cross stitch grid. If I like the picture, I can knit it up
and it is great fun trying to guess what the picture is going to be as the pattern is sent to
the Forum bit by bit.
This way I save my needles for the mid-month patterned stitch-along.
Purses are my current obsession. Ive knit several purses and felted one in a mossy-green,
variegated pure wool. I got the wool on eBay. You knit an item to be felted bigger than
its shrunken
size, and on larger needles. Next, put it in the hot washing machine for 15 minutes with
some heavier washables. It comes out smaller, thicker and denser, felted. You pull it into
shape and set it to dry. This process is also called fulling which is A finishing process in
which the woven or knitted cloth is subjected to moisture, heat and friction causing it to
shrink considerably in both directions and become compact and solid. In heavily fulled
fabrics both the weave and the yarn are obscured, thus giving the appearance of felt.
It took a while and people kept saying What are you knitting. Is it a scarf? because a bag
when you start knitting it looks an awful lot like a scarf.
I also knit up a sampler purse of various patterns on circular needles using mainly moss
and seed stitch. Its finished. Im creating I-cord on a knitting knobby which is one of those
spool knitters with 4 pegs that creates a long hollow tube of knitting. You work it by
putting loops a yarn over the pegs. It creates a nice strong cord. When this cord is is
threaded through the loops created for that purpose while knitting my sampler bag will
have a very Victorian or 1920s look. Nice, if I do say so myself.
Im addicted to wool now and have started to accumulate a pretty fair-sized stash. Stash is
an important word if you are into any kind of crafting. I have a collection of stashes from
various crafting adventures: beads, cloth, glues, paints and now, wool. Im a real yarn
collector. Oh boy! Stash is everything. I have to have these yarns, both wool and
synthetic, and their combinations, and cotton yarns too for the dishcloths.
During this time of grief I have comforted myself with wool more expensive than I
usually buy. It helps, as does the moving meditation that knitting is.
I am prone to obsessions in handicrafts. One obsession was making purses - all kinds of
fabric purses, lined and quilted and what have you. I use them. The problem is you sort of
have to have a purse kit containing your keys, wallet, comb, credit cards etc. all ready to
go so that when you change purses you dont forget your keys, your coin, your cards
whatever. Im getting the hang of that. I only forget my keys now and again.
My knitting obsession started when I began to knit a purse and it snowballed from there.
Theres an on line facility called Meetup.com (http://www.meetup.com) which helps
niche interests, no matter how obscure, to meet up at local venues such as coffee shops,
restaurants, etc. I joined up with the local Stitch and (starts with B and rhymes with
stitch) group that meets on Wednesdays in a coffee shop. Fifteen or so of us, maybe
twenty, sit there for two hours and just knit! We talk about everything. These are very
intelligent ladies with decided opinions. Knitting, particularly the fancier bits of knitting,
are not so simple and require a certain amount of brain power and persistence,. Knitting
acts like a filter to get a bunch of lovely, intelligent ladies together. I really enjoy it. I go
every single week and I sit and knit. Ive learned not to take my more complex patterns to
the meetup because you get to talking and youre going to drop a stitch or miss part of a
pattern. So I just take the simple stuff hats that are knit in the round, scarves and things
like that.
Speaking of scarves, oh my gosh, there are fancy yarns called ribbon, ladder or eyelash
yarns and for my young nieces I have put together scarves made with eyelash yarn that
are very fluffy, fancy and colourful. I added a nice brooch to go with them because they
are short scarves. The brilliant pastels make them really fun to knit and to give.
I get bored fairly easily or I have a short attention span, something like that. In any case I
need variety. Some dont like this phrase but I practice a form of knitting that I call knit
and hurl I have, a whole bunch, of knitting projects on the go right now. Two scarves, 2
hats, a pair of socks, a cotton dishcloth, a dress for Barbie which Im trimming with some
extra eyelash yarn to see what it looks like, a lace pattern bookmark and, oh yes, another
hat. When I get tired of one project I pick up another. It keeps me from being bored. Ive
got plastic bowls with handles which I got cheap at a dollar store. I keep my knitting
projects in them and move the plastic bowls forward or back, depending on which of
them holds the project of the moment..
Thank goodness for the Internet! What a wealth of patterns are out there, quite
unbelievable. I was looking for a pattern for a bolero shrug. Im not quite up to sweaters
as yet. Im sticking with smaller projects because Im afraid of getting bogged down. I
found 6 or 7 bolero patterns before I settled on the one that I wanted. You can get these
patterns free because
1) knitters share knowledge
2) wool companies need to sell wool.
Knitting is fashionable right now.
I took my knitting to a local pub for the computer folks EMCC beer bash. These system
programmers and the like meet every 6 weeks. Being a senior I was immediately
classified as Miss Marple because of my attained years and bag of knitting. I get along
with these guys and gals, been with them for quite a while. I sat there doing my knitting
and sipping my beer. Ive scaled down from Guinness to Upper Canada dark lager. We
had a wonderful time. Theres something about knitting that promotes conversation. It was
almost as if my computer-folk outing had turned into my knitting group, although I was
the only one knitting. That was funny.
Knit I must and everyone will get a scarf or a hat or a dishcloth this Christmas.
Thereafter, Ill have to go into production for myself. I think Im going to have to focus on
socks a fair bit or start knitting purses again. I dont know how long this obsession will
last. I never do. Cloth doll making lasted most of my life. I hope knitting lasts a while
because Im enjoying it very much and I have a LOT of wool now!
Seashells
This Podcast is about my mother and and her hobbies. My mother was a keen hobbyist, a
craftsperson. She should have been a professional but shied away from that. Somehow
being a professional didnt seem like the right thing to do, especially when it related to
things like art. I dont know why some women are that way but they are, and I am too to
some extent.
My mother had any number of hobbies over time. She would catch a fever for doing
some particular craft. I remember seashell jewelry. These were made from tiny, little
white shells from Florida dyed pink and green and yellow, even purple - you name it.
Their chalky white surfaces took well to pastel dyes. Clear plastic circles and ovals were
used as a backing whereon these tiny seashells were glued. Clear cement for gluing the
shells had recently become available to general hobbyists back in the 50s, beyond their
more specialized use for gluing model airplane parts together.
Mother would meticulously, using tiny tools and toothpicks and things, torture and
manipulate these little coloured shells into various designs, often as rose petals.
The flowers could be large, taking up the whole backing, or smaller, forming a bouquet
of variously-coloured blooms.
This was an ephemeral art, somewhat fragile. I was just on eBay seeking out old-time
shell jewelry and there were a few good examples there. Bidding for them was fairly
fierce. I was outbid twice on one shell jewelry collection I had my eyes on. Oh well, I
didnt really need them. It was just for the memorys sake. Theres something about being
on eBay and rummaging in the western worlds attic that is curiously addictive. Any
hobby or craft from time gone by is out there, hanging on by a thread. Collectors are a
special breed and will traverse all obstacles in search of the desired item. Another phrase
for collector is pack rat.
My mother would spend hours making shell jewelry brooches. Im not sure that she wore
them much. She wore them somewhat. The excitement was in the making of them,
pulling all the bits together to create a beautiful, artificial bouquet. It was a conversation
piece.
Then the fever passed, making way for another fever. Some of these fads lasted longer
than others. She took up oil painting. Our family friend, Moyna would drive us out into
the country in search of a good scene. We kids would play around in the fields or, as
often was the case, in an ancient country graveyard where the tombstones made a good
place to perch while eating a picnic sandwich.
My mother would sit on her artists stool with her easel in front of her and paint. She
painted a fair number of trees, trees were good. She had talent. A professional artist once
complimented her work as being neat by which he meant well-composed and thought out,
tidy and well-balanced. She was very careful about her compositions. It gave her work a
sort of mannered style, but it was art. She ran out of storage space for her canvasses and
the less-favoured ones were stacked up on a high shelf in the garage. The better ones
hung on our walls, of course, or were given away as gifts but were never sold.
In her later years she went into pottery, making pots and bowls and plates and mugs - all
kinds of things from clay and, again, she was very, very good at it. She had been
persuaded to initial her works at this point by someone she had taken a course from.
There are pieces of pottery all over southern Ontario bearing the initial P.F., for Phyllis
Fricker, on their bottoms. They will be around long after most of us are gone because
pottery is rather durable. She worked with glazes and had a kiln and wheel to do her pots
on. Again, she refused the title of professional.
She wove. She was a weaver and made articles of clothing and rugs and placemats and
hangings. Her colour sense was a bit primary. She liked orange and red. I think it was
part of the palette of the times. Different eras have different palettes. She had a beautiful
four-harness loom and other looms. A whole room upstairs was devoted to wool.
Apparently there is some wool packed up in my sisters basement which I am supposed to
take sometime because - Guess what? - Im a hobbyist too and a craftsperson.
My own fever, at present, is for something called ATCs - Artist Trading cards.
These are little 2 ½ by 3 ½ inch pieces of cardstock decorated with decorated with a
montage of bits of art, ephemera, postage stamps, etcetera. They can also be stamped
with rubber
stamps. They are to art what sampling is to music. Some of them are hand drawn or
painted or digitized but, for the most part, they are accumulations of bits until the whole
is greater than the parts.
Not unlike, in some ways, my mothers seashell jewelry.
Stuff
The first day of Christmas my true love gave to me
A Partridge in a Pear Tree...
and a whole bunch of other stuff I didnt really need. I think I have too much 'stuff'. All
my life I've been collecting 'stuff'.
Back in time, when I was in Grade School I got to work as an humble page,in the school
library which was a subset of the Chatham Public Library. There I learned to shelve book
according to the Dewey Decimal System and repair books. I developed a taste for
peppermint library paste which was not harmful. It was a lot like ordinary flour paste. We
used that to apply leatherette to the spines of books. When they were past mending, no
longer popular, or dated, guess who got her pick of the discards? Yes, me! The discards
were added to my book collection.
My book collection, now the size of a small elephant, started back there. I found a
second-hand store that had antique books, not really good books but interesting books
because they were old. Someone's collection of sermons, in an old binding with yellowed
pages, with the stamp of history upon it. You dont read it. You just collect it and I did. I
got one of those.
I started in on records, 78 rpms at first and then 33 1/3rds/. I collected Gene Autry and
popular jazz.
Stuff, stuff, stuff! It was starting to pile up a bit.
When I moved to New York I became moderately expert at finding stores where there
were odd things, Ethiopian crosses and strangely-patterned fabrics and so forth. I collect
fabrics because I sew. In collecting the components of a hobby you end up with a stash. If
your hobby is knitting you end up with a wool stash. If you're into sewing or quilting,
then it's a fabric stash and on it goes.
Like my mother I have had multiple crafting and hobby ventures throughout my life. I
remember that one of her crazes was for shell jewelry. She collected tiny little shells that
came from beaches in Florida and elsewhere. I know she bought a lot of these shells
when she went to Florida on vacation. They were dyed in pretty pastels pink and blue and
yellow and green. You used the kind of glue that makes you high, airplane glue and put it
all together on a piece of clear round plastic. This would become a rose made up of little
pink shells with a fake pearl in the centre and little green leaves. These shell rosettes were
actually quite attractive. Not built for the ages but while they lasted they were nice.
I've gone through, oh my goodness, so many hobbies. One was cloth doll making, the
components of which take in almost every art and craft, so you end up with pieces from
painting and stitching and beading, weaving and, you name it. It all goes into a pot and
out comes a cloth dolly at the other end, a so-called art doll. I question the art part in that,
because its artsy-fartsy, artsy craft - never mind.
I started knitting. I have 4 bins of wool -I will never knit it all - and there's always more
wool to buy. My Stitch and Bitch group every now and again has a yarn swap where
everybody tries to get rid of their extra yarn, their stash, and ends up walking away with
more yarn than they came in with. Everyone has come in with their extra yarns and
they're begging you to take their yarn and you do. Thus, instead of diminishing my stash,
I somehow increase it.
I remember collecting spices. I use 5, at the most 10, common spices,condiments, herbs
and so forth, in my cooking. Still, I had to have them all because some recipe someplace,
sometime, would probably need fennel, so I got some, as well as everything else featured
in the store's spice shelf. They sit around for years. I have more than one spice rack where
they're all in alphabetical order. Sometimes it's useful. If I happened to need ground
cloves I can find them. Others I will never use but I had to have them. It's called being a
'completist'. You have to have them all or the collection is incomplete.
When I worked downtown I made more money than I actually needed to live on and,
instead of sensibly saving it, I would go out each lunch hour and look for something to
buy. Something to buy was usually books. I haunted the sales tables in bookstores. I have
shelves and shelves of books. I'm gradually now giving them away. I try to find out
whether they are going to good homes because books are sacred. You dont burn them.
You dont throw them away. You pass them on. I'm trying to do that.
I was a seller, for about a year on eBay. My main stock items, aside from doll patterns
that I was no longer using, were books. I did fairly well because I had a really large
occult book collection. There are people out there in search of a means to power who
really dig this stuff. Occult magazines were collector's items and sold well.
Speaking of magazines, I was into cross stitch and I had to have those magazines and
innumerable patterns. I have a pile of maybe ten cross stitch projects on the go, many of
which I'll never finish. I sort of nibble away at them from time to time. Thar fever has
passed. I no longer have to cross stitch all the time. Part of that came from a pseudo
Fibromyalgia caused by the statin pills I was taking for blood cholesterol. They gave me
muscle weakness and pain. All I could do was sit in a corner and cross stitch for about
nine months. Other activities were too much. Then, I figured out it was the pills, after
reading several reports on the Internet. I threw the pills away and I was better in two
days. <sigh>
I have a lot of cross stitch and embroidery stuff and books on the blues and music in
general and books on folk music. I have a awful lot of reference books on everything
from wild birds to pharmacopoeias that I got before the Internet was as popular as it now.
Now, I collect graphics from the Internet, and Mp3s which I buy legitimately on line to
avoid possibly picking up nasty viruses from the free ones. I have lots and lots of
software, much of which I also buy on line. I need an ever-increasing hard drive size to
fit in all this stuff much of which I use once and then forget. Still, you never know when
you might need it. Most software that I do use I'm just utilizing the tip of the ice berg.
The rest remains unknown to me while I just twiddle around fixing the colour balance on
some photograph or some other simple task.
I'm trying to get rid of my stuff. I really am. One of these days I'm just going to have to
bite the bullet and all that stuff, like the obsolete computer hardware sitting around in
bins. There is a lot of computer hardware stuff the purpose of which Ive forgotten: all of
that has got to go bye bye. I'm hoping to have a technical friend of mine over to look at it
and tell me what it is and if it's okay to throw it out.
Just cataloging what I have is an effort in itself. I must simplify. I must practice non
attachment. I must get rid of all this stuff. I dont own stuff. Stuff owns ME.
•
Martial Arts
Over the CB Radio, some time ago, I met an interesting chap whose handle was Mike,
The Irish Viking. I have a weakness for good radio voices and he certainly had one of
those. Mike played a Fighter/Hero in my CB radio D&D game, and he played his role to
the hilt. He was into the mythos of martial arts. Bruce Lee was his hero. He'd seen a
number of Bruce's epics more than once. I became interested and, being a doer more than
a dreamer, I signed up at a Tae Kwon Do gym. Mike was dumbfounded.
Now started a more rigorous physical regimen that was completely unfamiliar to my
sedentary office body. It was like paying to join the Marines.
I learned the difference between good and bad pain. Good pain comes when you're
pushing your body to its limits. Bad pain is from an injury. You work through the one but
not the other.
I have a physical anomaly. Cant do aerobics. Once my heartbeat gets up to a certain level
it starts skipping a beat and oxygen does not get delivered to my brain in a timely fashion.
At least that's how it seems to me.
I could get through the warm ups in martial arts classes but once I'd done them I was
functionally stupid. Couldnt learn the fancy moves for beans. Adding to this problem was
an inability to form pictures in my head. I think in abstracts. Works for me. Doesnt work
in Tae Kwon Do or Tae Chi or any of those disciplines with fancy moves in sequence. If
you cant see them in your head, you cant do them. End of story.
The classes tired me out a lot so I went on Fridays, so I would have the weekend to rest
up afterwards. This is how I met my doom. Fred, the martinet, was the teacher on Fridays
and he didnt allow anybody any slack at all, at all. I never got beyond my lowly white
belt BUT I did develop a lovely turning back kick. My one skill and a powerful weapon
in unarmed combat.
After some back and forth over the CB, Mike and I arranged to meet in a local park. He
wanted to test my real martial art skills against his imaginary ones. Bad move Mike. He
tried to CATCH a turning back kick and ended up with a badly sprained wrist and severe
embarrassment.
I observed several interesting things in martial arts class.
Two attractive, upscale, young ladies of the evening came in to learn to defend
themselves and they were the most dedicated and sincere students you might ever hope to
find.
There was a piece of arcane equipment on the dojo floor. It was a rope with a loop in it
run through a pulley in the ceiling. You put your foot in the loop, grabbed the other end
of the rope and pulled your leg heavenward. Limb flexibility and stretch were prized
objectives.
The room just before the marital arts practice floor served as a kind of parlor and in it
were stacked the trophies won by students for the Master. Most of these trophies were
quite tall and spiky. They were everywhere, on shelves and on the floor. You'd could
have met your demise in there, if you'd tripped and been speared by a trophy.
The Master of the Tae Kwon Do establishment was doing reasonably well. He decided to
open up a more palatial establishment across the street and one flight up. It was done up
splendidly with polished hardwood floors and fancy fittings. A party was held there to
celebrate the grand opening. The Master sat on a throne-like chair with his teachers
around him. The students of varying degrees hung about on the edge of what would later
be the practice floor but which was now a dance floor. Music was playing but no-one
wanted to be the first to step out on that pristine hardwood. Black, brown and red belts all
held back and waited and waited. They were, God forbid, embarrassing the Master.
A tune came up that I liked. I think it was 'Eye of the Tiger'. I stepped out on the floor
and danced solo for about one minute. The ice was broken and the other students began
easing out on the floor to dance. The Master smiled a little smile and his head teacher
gave me a very formal martial arts bow.
I won that one!
War Games
I am now and have been for some time a war gamer. It all started with chess. Chess is not
an easy game but I tried to learn it and I became a chess player on the Internet playing
with various people online or by email. I played with Monta Machan, a retired war
veteran in British Columbia. We sent each other an email move-a-day for years. Monta
and I had a lot of good games. He won some and I won some. We were about the same
level, which is a good thing.
When I was younger I got interested in a game, called Dungeons and Dragons, also
known as D&D. D&D was entering its craze phase. There was a store in Toronto called
Mr. Gameways Ark that had all kinds of games, board games mostly. They had a
Dungeons and Dragons section and I used to haunt it. Then, I found out they had kids
who played on site. You could come there in the evening after hours and go upstairs and
play. I joined in and the kids were a little weird about playing with an adult but they
tolerated me and I learned about playing live.
I discovered another place that sold D&D stuff and got invited to one of their games
offsite games. I went out on a very rainy night to a high-rise apartment building, taking
my life in my hands, but I found out that war gamers were, as it says in Douglas Adams
book, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, mostly harmless. I guess they take out all their
frustrations in the game. We sat there and played but I decided that I was a damper on
that party too. A significant part of their playing was smoking weed and I wasnt really
into smoking weed with strangers, miles from nowhere on a rainy night. So I trekked off
again having learned some good pointers from these stoner gamers.
I studied the D&D books and formed a group at my local church hall. There were some
young people, my nephew amongst them, who were very intelligent but they were
unsocialized. They didnt fit in anywhere. They didnt fit in at school and were halfway to
delinquency. My Ministers son and my nephew pulled in other players and we started a
game - all boys, of course.
D&D is is a great socializing mechanism. It brings together folks with brains and
imagination and lets them play in terms of the game. These boys went on to become
friends and associates and they still keep track of each other. I would say that it made
them sane. Instead of being outsiders they were insiders, with a special clique of their
own and friends and other things that came out of it. It was a good thing, a really good
thing.
Now there was one kid in the game, I wont name him by name, but he was what I call a
splodger . A splodger is, well, people dont believe in telepathy and empathy and that sort
of thing but I have to explain it in those terms. A splodger is someone whos mind is
broadcasting static continuously because theyre in a negative state. This boy came from
an abusive home environment where the kids got hit and the kids hit each other and so
forth, so he was in that mind set. I took about as much of it as I could but I could feel it in
the game, When he got excited he just dumped mind waves of agitation over the whole
thing.
Finally I said, Look, this is what youre doing and I cant handle it because Im an empath
and I hear this stuff. What Ive got to do is put you out of the game for a while.
That was a big tragedy for him because the game was very important. It started him on
the road to controlling the mental static. Now, hes a new-ager and carries around big
crystal rocks and stuff like that.
Another kid was a (too smart for the group) shit disturber. I ran an in-game voodoo
ceremony and transferred his mind into the brain of a chicken. He was stuck there as a
chicken for quite a while. Didnt like it. He quit eventually.
All this was in interest of the game gestalt. Everybodys got to play together in a certain
way, as a team. Friendships are formed this way. I went on to form a second group made
up of little kids. Bringing them through and they just loved it! My first group hated them.
When I went to visit my sister in San Antonio, my young niece and I started playing. She
was using her smaller toys as avatars for the various dragons and monsters and knights
and so forth. She really got into it. Sitting down to do that daily game-playing became a
very big deal. I dont know if I had any influence but shes now in graphic design and has
worked with Electronic Arts in British Columbia.
My siste in British Columbia introduced me to Guild Wars. Guild Wars is a competitive
on line role-playing game and is fiercely addictive.
In another part of this book I talk about playing D&D over the CB Radio but thats a
whole other story.
In short, I like war games. I like Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons and now I really like
Guild Wars. Its not just about killing thing, spilling pixelated blood. Its about social
gathering and teamwork and winning against odds.
•
Guild Wars
I started playing in the massive, on-line, multi-player world of Guild Wars towards the
end of December 2005. I am sort of addicted to war games. Im always playing one of
them, Dungeon Siege, Diablo and so forth. I used to be a Dungeon Master in Dungeons
and Dragons. That was a long time ago. Ive made friends in Guild Wars. Ive joined a
Guild. You can play solo but, if you want to get ahead in the tougher parts of the game,
you need to join a Guild. The game is based in large part on co-operative game play with
other, real live human players located all around the globe.
I found my Guild through my sister on the west coast of Canada, who was then a member
and recommended me. Her niece had tired of the game and gave me her account. Now, I
have two accounts and around 19 different characters. All of them go through basically
the same scenarios, they share the same adventures. In these shared adventures each
character has different talents.
You and your party are alone in the game,except for game-generated characters called
NPCs (non-player characters) and monsters. It is a challenge to the intellect, to reflexes,
to character building (called Builds). You have a choice of skill to put in your skill bar.
You give points to a list of characteristics like strength, tactics in the case of a Warrior
character. Weapon strength, your armor and how many runes youve applied to your
armor help to protect you and give you advantages. It takes thought and experience to do
this well. Players often share Builds with each other, so a body of common knowledge is
built up.
One of the more interesting characters is the Necromancer who is always saying, Kill
more! I need the bodies. He resurrects these as zombie-like minions which fight away on
your side until they sort of fade off like old soldiers. I should mention that there are a
number of character types, so the build and talents of a Necromancer differ from those of
the healing Monks or battle-ready Warriors. I like to have a character for each class, so it
adds up. New installments of the game have added new character classes such as the
scythe-wielding Dervish and the Ninja-like Assassins.
You bring your character along through various hairy adventures of gradually increasing
difficulty. You fight your way through all kinds of terrain, The scenery and graphics in
the game are gorgeous. You go through the fire-blasted landscapes of post-searing
Ascalon, through the wintry Shiverpeaks fighting Ice Imps, or through Kryta, a semiforested area. Then, theres the jungle where there are poisonous spiders and Trolls and
other hideosities. You might fight a very nasty group of NPCs (non-player characters)
called the White Mantle who are conspiring to do dreadful things to the Chosen, whom
you have sworn to protect.
Then, theres Prince Rurik, who is royal but stupid. Youre always protecting him because,
if he dies, then you dont succeed at that Mission. Each Mission gets you to a different
part of the map and you work your way through until you reach the Crystal Desert where
there are, oh my goodness, Hydras and sand lizards and all kinds of thing running about
and nipping at your heels.
If your character is a bow-wielding Ranger you can have a pet and train it up. My current
favourite pets are a dune lizard and a wolf. I generally keep the sound off because the
wolf has a tendency to howl.
I have a Mesmer character and she mesmerizes. She casts her spell and mesmerizes the
enemy so that they are inhibited in their fighting skills.
I have an Elementalist who plays with the Elements earth, air, fire and water.
My Ranger shoots poisonous arrows and lays traps. My Warrior is just sort of hammer
happy and hits everything. There you go. Thats his job.
One of the most popular characters in the game is the Monk, the healing Monk. Oh my
gosh, the party cant go out without having a Monk. Some Monks are a temperamental
bunch of neer-do-wells but I tend to play my Monk fairly straight. Her name is White
Tara, named after the female incarnation of the Buddha, and I have another one called
Blue Tara. Shes a pretty decent Monk. She does the right thing by her fellow players, to
the best of her ability.
This can be a solitary game. I do many quests and mission solo. For the more difficult
areas I venture forth with other online players or with members of my Guild. The Guild I
was in when I wrote this was run by a crazy Welshman called Jenkins with a slight
fondness for the bottle. He had a wild Irish sidekick who liked Irish Cream and had no
sense of humour. There were some lovely ladies from the southern United States and
another from California. There are players from Alaska, New Zealand, and then theres
myself, from Canada.
We text chat within the game but a lot of it is done with a side program, called
Teamspeak. Using Teamspeak you can talk over the Internet and listen to what the other
players are saying . The leader can give directions such as, Hold back! Let those
Mursaats pass! and Were all attacking and targeting the Mesmer Boss. A Boss is a high
level monster created by the game software You you can sometimes capture valuable
Elite spells and excellent weapons from these Bosses.
Military-style commands from the leader, spoken and heard by the players, are actually
quite useful, especially during difficult Missions. One of the better young lady players is
an ex-Marine and her husband is a Marine too. No wonder she was so good in a fire fight.
At the time I wrote this there was great excitement because a new installment of the game
was coming out, called Factions. Once youve bought this game or one of its different
Chapters (Basic, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North) then it is free to play on line.
Within the game there is a thriving economy. Guild Wars and other on line war games
help support young men in China who play to acquire gold and weapons which are sold
from Internet sites. In the past Ive bought gold and Ive bought a few weapons when my
character needed that extra edge. I dont recommend doing this any more. The gold is
soon gone and Id sooner farm when I need more. Farming is a term used for doing repeat
search and destroy forays to get stuff stuff, which can be sold to a Merchant NPC in the
game for gold You need the gold for better armor and high-price runes to empower it, etc.
There are other ways to get the fancier green weapons in dreadful places where you can
go and fight horrific monsters and, very likely, die. These monsters sometimes drop some
very nice stuff, if you can live long enough to collect it.
The game can become obsessive. Somehow, the little triumphs in the game can make up
for lack of same off-line. The game can become a habit that is hard to break.
Still, I owe a lot to the game. More for friends made on-line than for the adventures
which are nearly forgotten once completed. Now, excuse me, Ive got to go and kill some
Corsairs.
Photoshop
In Photoshop I am presented with a series of small problems to solve when creating a
work of digital art. Right now, for instance, Im working on a fantasy sea lion; combining
a regal, male lions head with a sea lions body. Ill put in a background and bits of scenery
to suit. This process of combining images is called photoshopping. Really, you can no
longer believe any photograph that you see since anything can be pasted, believably on
anything. This digital editing of photos is a favourite hobby of mine and I belong to
several online forums devoted to the pastime of photoshopping.
Im learning to use the tools and a series of shortcuts, Alt key this and Shift key that, or
the V letter key to pick the Move tool, or any number of other alphabet keys and
combinations. These are tricky at first but once memorized they save a LOT of time.
When working with a brush, for example, I can hit the left or right Bracket keys to make
the brush head smaller or larger which is a lot better than switching back and forth to
little drop-down menus.
The work I do is progressing much faster with these aids. When I wrote this I was
focusing my attention on Artist Trading Cards. Artist Trading Cards, or ATCs for short,
are 3 1/2 inches high and 2 1/2 inches wide, or visa versa. On this small canvas a
miniature piece of art is created as a collage. Photoshop is often about collage and the
Internet is full of public domain clip art of various sorts. If the graphic was created before
1923, chances are the pictures are in the public domain and can be used freely.
This fixation on before-1923 has produced a groundswell of digital-collage artists. Some
do paste up with real paper and special glues and bits of whimsy and ephemera. Ah,
ephemera! That can be anything from an old black and white photo, to actual old ads and
paper material from long ago. Some - and alas I am not one of these - can actually draw
or paint art upon the card and are thus freed from glorifying silent movie stars and the
like. I am drawn to digital paste-up and that means Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or any
one of several fractal-generating programs.
I am working my way through various levels of learning. I have found to my delight that
there are a fairly large number of short video tutorials I can access on the Internet. These
give me an introduction to using the Tools and some fine points in the Settings. This
helps to build pathways in the mind, so I can see and remember that I go here to Distort,
or there to Fade, and so forth.
On eBay, from a British supplier, I bought two fully packed collections of Actions aimed
especially at Photographic work. Actions in Photoshop are a series of machinememorized steps that allow you to do some pretty fancy footwork automatically. An
example would be the two Actions I created myself for my eBay listings. One would take
my scan of an item such as a dress pattern front cover and reduce it to the smaller,
thumbnail-size shown at the top of an eBay listing The other Action would create the
properly-sized larger shot for displaying further down in the listing. Actions save time
and make you look smarter than you are.
Then there are Plugins, which are more elaborate than Actions, almost like little
programs. I have one called Flood, from a company called Flaming Pear, which I used
extensively in the series of 6 Artist Trading Cards on the theme of Bathing Beauties. The
Flood plugin allowed me to add a convincing layer of rippling water at the feet of my
aquatic beauties with a realistic reflection to boot. Some of the ladies in these Artist
Trading Card Bathing Beauties swap were rather prim, pre-1923 semi-nudes.
When someone, like the publishing house Dover, pulls together a collection of publicdomain clip art the collection is copyrighted but individual items, as many as 10, can be
used in a single, composite work of art. I know you really wanted to hear that.
I should mention that the Cards Im rattling on about are produced with the intention of
trading them with other card makers in a series of swaps. Typically, this could be a
named theme. A fixed number of cards are sent in before a deadline date. In due course 6
cards, each by a different artist, will come in the mail to be added to an ever-expanding
Collection. This trading is global in nature and the artist of one may be in Kansas and of
another in Australia or even France. Trades are usually organized in Internet messaging
forums. I keep my cards, thus received, in 9-card plastic binder pages or in individual
sleeves which are widely available since they are used by the Sports Trading Card bunch.
Ive been mounting my completed Cards on the web at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/soniabrock/ which is a good graphics hosting site. ATCs
are a niche group and there are a multitude of such special interest groups on Flickr.
I print out my cards, still at 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, but at a higher resolution of 300 dpi
(dots per inch) on glossy 8 x 10, photo card stock. I get, therefore, 9 cards to a page and
cut them up carefully with scissors for post processing. I add a few baubles and beads,
bits of lace or trim, and other suitably flat, lightweight paste-up ornamentation. This
makes them more tactilely interesting and more appealing to the paste-up crowd. Pasteup ATCs are close in technique to the current Scrapbooking and Cardmaking hobbies.
The digital Artist Trading Cards are closer to the computer graphics and photo enhancing
hobbies.
When Im working on a specific theme for a group swap, such as The Arrival of Spring or
St. Patricks Day, it focuses my mind and I produce more. Im starting now to work on
personal themes. My current works in that area illustrate folk songs such as Tom Dooley
or the playing card sung about in the ditty Jack of Diamonds. You have to figure out how
best to capture the idea visually from all the various bits and pieces that make up the
composite canvas. On the web what you often see is a small picture or thumbnail, which
you click on to see a larger picture. The placement of the various objects in the card are
such that even when seen in the small form, it attracts the eye in and makes you want to
see more. This element of composition is another interesting problem.
Ive almost stopped on-line war gaming. Oh, I drop in every now and then to keep my
account active but for the most part I no longer play there, because Im too busy learning
and using Photoshop.
Another thing Im busy with is collecting the various artistic bits and pieces. This is done
either through purchase or on some wonderful sites that have collections of public
domain ephemera.
Theres a great group on Flickr that does this.
<http://www.flickr.com/groups/collageimages/>
Im building a library of images, so chances are, whatever it is I have to do, I can reach
into this digital library and retrieve something relevant. Then again, each new challenge
asks for different things. I never thought Id need a sea lion, for instance, or a Confederate
Army uniform for Tom Dooley.
In other words, Ive got myself a brand new hobby for as long as it lasts. I hope it lasts a
while because its really interesting. Im a little old, right now, for it to turn into a job This
what usually happens with my hobbies but one never knows ...
ARTICLES
The Mall
Back in my home town in the 1950s, folks who were smart got out of town pretty fast.
This left a work force, somewhat less than smart, to man positions in the banks and store.
Thus was created a sort of endemic stupidity in the workforce. These were nice people.
They were simple folks without a lot of intellectual depth. They were what they were.
Things are different now, of course, but back then that was how things were.
I have found a sort of recreation of this process in my local Mall, which I call the BrainDead Mall. When you go in there and ask for service they dont have a clue. Theyve
worked in the store for some time and they do what they do. There will be one Supervisor
whos a smart person and everybody else will be really borderline. If you asked them a
question that doesnt have a standard, canned answer, you were in a lot of trouble. Trying
to find out something technical is virtually impossible. They may not know what a
grommet is. Theyre pleasant enough but extremely self-centred. Like everyone else, their
world view revolves around themselves and the way that they see things. By asking a
fancy question you become an instant outsider. You see things differently. They have a
strong suspicion that you see things that they dont and maybe youre trying to be a smart
ass on them. Well, that wouldnt be too hard to do.
Now this is sort of a malicious piece because its talking about people who are about two
cents short of a full load but somebodys got to staff these positions in stores in not very
popular Malls. The pay is wretched and the work place is second-rate. I wish I could
think of a song about that but melody escapes me.
In your wildest dreams you could never imagine talking to these people about politics,
religion, or books. You could probably talk to them about television. I have a biased view
about the kind of things they watch. They probably watch Gerry Springer a lot because,
well, it doesnt challenge them and it goes to show that there are people dumber than they
are by quite a bit.
Now, theres a famous story by C.M. Kornbluth called The Marching Morons, originally
published in Galaxy magazine in 1951. Those were the days. This story is a Science
Fiction classic. Except for a minority of intelligent people who are holding the whole
structure up, the whole earth, is full of the unintelligent. Some guy who works in a menial
position as a bus driver or whatever is actually keeping these people from destroying
themselves. They have cars which have artificial elements that indicate that they are
going at a great speed but actually they dont travel very fast because, if they did the
stupids would kill themselves. Someone rescued from the past develops a scheme to send
them into space to an alleged paradise of a planet. Bye-bye!
All this was due to a low birth rate among the intelligent and a much higher one amongst
the unintelligent. Perhaps there is a lesson in this.
In any case this is the end of my Boxing Day rant against the intellectually challenged.
The next piece will be a little more positive. I promise.
Influences
My good friend Jack said, Run out of topics? Let me suggest some.
His suggestion was that I talk about folks who had influenced me over the years. The
folks who influenced me came, mainly, from books.
I started working in the Chatham Public Library when I was in Grade 6. There, I became
an omnivorous reader. I was determined to know everything about everything. In the
course of this pursuit of knowledge, I started reading biographies.
Ernest Thompson Seton was a Naturalist who wrote books suitable for young people. His
book Two Little Savages had a profound influence on me. It was about 3 boys one sickly,
one a farmers son and one a little redneck. They all worked together to learn Indian ways
and build teepees. They did all sorts of interesting things in the woods, guided in part by
an actual frontiersman. Through this I really got into natural history and woodcraft . I
ended up joining the Girl Guides (thats Scouts in the USA).
Another influential book was Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island. In my mind, I
was Jim, the cabin boy, having adventures on the high seas and especially on Treasure
Island. Thats why my little gang called itself The Bloody Pirates Club.
As I grew older I became interested in towering figures, such as Mahatma Ghandi.
Reading his biography I was very impressed by the freedom movement in India, the
march to the sea to make salt and all of that.
Earlier on I had been impressed by Rudyard Kiplings Kim. I read that book aloud to my
daughter when she was young. I had read it myself several times over when I was
younger. This is not the Disney version but a tale of a Caucasian child raised as a native
in the Indian Raj. He meets a holy Tibetan Lama and becomes a spy as well. Its quite a
story. My daughter later became a Tibetan Buddhist nun and I think reading the book
aloud to her at an impressionable age may well have influenced her decision to take
vows.
On the flag of India there is a spinning-wheel because Gandhi preached about making
ones own clothes, from cotton thread hand-spun. This was instead of buying Europeanstyle garments manufactured in Britain from Indian raw materials. He respected the work
of the hands. I took this as a very great lesson that I should always be making something
with my hands, and this was a worthy thing to do. As a result of this and also from the
influence of my mother who was a great sewer and potter, painter and crafts-person, I
always have some kind of needlework ready-to-hand, whether it be cross stitch, garment
sewing, cloth doll making, knitting, crochet or beading. My hands, when not typing on a
computer keyboard, are almost never idle and, as strange as this may seem, I owe that, in
part, to Mahatma Ghandi.
Another person who had a great influence on me, again through reading his biography,
was George Washington Carver. Not too familiar to people nowadays, he was a
prominent African-American agricultural chemist. He helped to popularize peanut butter.
He was a brilliant and public-spirited man. His father had been a slave and his mother
was stolen back into slavery. He developed a series of procedures to create almost
anything from a peanut. He found over 300 uses for the peanut and worked tirelessly his
whole life for something he believed in, sometimes under adverse conditions. He
developed a crop-rotation system that revolutionized Southern agriculture
Ill add one more to this trio of folks who influenced me and this third worthy will be
Peter Kropotkin, sometimes known amongst my Anarchist brethren as Prince Pete. Peter
Kropotkin was born to a noble Russian family. He became an Anarchist. He believed in
mutual aid. The ability of people to help each other was an integrally-important
characteristic of an ideal society. His views, which I obtained from his book titled Mutual
Aid, had a great influence on how, in later years, I worked with groups. I ended up
working for the Canadian government, where I was considered to be an unusual
employee because I put the good of the whole office, the group, above my own little cell
or silo. I worked for everybody and over time this affected the whole office, partially
because of communication. It made me a natural bridge between separate groups in the
office that would not otherwise talk to each other.
Books and people have legs. They help to take you through your life and make you what
you are.
Diabetes
My doctor had told me that I had borderline diabetes, which is also called impaired
glucose tolerance. Well, I was kind of fond of cake and cookies but, apparently, its not so
much about that as it is about getting older, and being sedentary and a bit overweight, that
plus heredity.
I didnt pay too much mind to it because it wasnt bothering me any. I was on a diet for a
while but then I went off it.
I started to get really, really sick. I was tired all the time and rest didnt help. I couldnt
breathe properly. I had to have the head of my bed raised up at night to help my
breathing. My vision got blurry, especially in the morning but also, periodically,
throughout the day. I wondered if I was losing my eyesight. I was making more trips to
the washroom than I could count. Parts of me started to swell up my feet and my hands.I
went into the doctor and told her I thought I had a heart condition. She took a look at me
and all the things that were wrong and said, Diabetes. She cut right to the chase. She said
it looked like I had full-fledged Diabetes 2. Well, darn!
Diabetes seeks out the weaker parts of your body and produces symptoms there.
I had the A1C blood test and, of course, my figures were over the moon. I had to learn
everything there was to know about diabetes now, because thats the way I am, if
something goes wrong I research it. My first resource was the Internet. I went looking for
Diabetes Forums with Chat Rooms and found some.
A Microsoft Network group called Diabetes Fun and Friends was very helpful. They
were mostly from the southern USA and were very polite about my being from Toronto,
Canada. I found out that there were people out there who had Diabetes symptoms one
heck of a lot worse than I did.
I got books to help me understand it all and I learned that Diabetes is a disease where you
have some control. You can manage it, and are wise to do so, by watching your diet and
your blood count and taking your pills as required. I studied these books about diabetes
and my symptoms.
What had happened to me with the breathing was edema, pulmonary edema and its
serious and thats why I had to straighten up and fly right. My diet became very, very,
very strict and I got a blood glucose meter and strips. I leaned how to punch holes in
myself with little jabbing needles and use my strips on the little drops of blood The little
test machine turned these blood samples into numbers that meant something. I couldnt
get my figures down where they should be. I tried one medication and proved to be
allergic to it. Tried another and I wasnt as allergic but it didnt work very well. Now, Im
on a third medication which is working so far. However,diabetes is a progressive disease
so I may have to change this medication by and by.
I cant do too much exercise because I have arthritis but that also acts as an excuse. I have
to do as much exercise as I can while avoiding that No pain, no gain slogan and easing
off when it started to hurt. Slow and steady wins the race. Gentle, low impact exercise is
a good thing.
Diet is another story. I eat more whole grains now, lots of vegetables and fruit and lean
meat in small portions. That part of the treatment is under my control.
I dont mean this article to be a downer but, rather, an advisory in case someone else out
there gets the early symptoms. I want to say its not the end of the world. In fact, Im
feeling better now than I have in years, and thats progress. Thats due mostly to diet with
some exercise.
Ive started taking 1000 International Units of Vitamin D daily and my blood sugar counts
have improved a lot since Ive been doing this. We northerners have to watch that we get
enough vitamin D because of our long cold winters. Some tests are starting to show that
extra vitamin D supplements are effective. Better safe than sorry, I say, so I pop that 1000
mgs of vitamin D twice daily, along with a multivitamin, folic acid and calcium
supplements.
If youve just been diagnosed with diabetes bear in mind that coping with the disease
through positive strategies will help to rein it in and youll definitely feel better for it.
Non-diabetics should note what my doctor says, Everyone should eat like a diabetic.
On Aging
As my 70th Birthday approached I found myself having to come to terms with reality. Im
very good at fooling myself. Most of people are.
I once fooled myself into thinking I was a body builder This was when I was younger. I
went into the gym with the big guys. I lifted weights and I used the machines and so
forth. The net effect, was stronger arms and legs. The other effect was that I went up a
bra size, not in front, from the muscle development in my back. I also gave myself a knee
injury from which Im still recovering, (Dont try to press more weight than you
reasonably can and expect your bent knees to hold. Ooops!)
My other self delusion was that I could do Martial Arts. I claim that I got my pink belt.
Actually, it was white, the lowest rank and I never got any higher. I cant remember dance
moves or Tae Kwon Do moves or Tai Chi or anything like that. I dont have visual
memory. I cant see pictures in my head. If you cant do that, then you dont have the
necessary map in your head, needed to do a chain of movements, and youre sunk!
To digress a bit, in computer war games you need to map. There are vast terrains and
missions over them and so forth. I am heavily dependent on the online Wiki database that
exists for my game, Guild Wars. For Missions I depend on PUGs (Player User Groups)
which join together, however briefly, to do a Mission and then disperse. I carry my
weight, Im a good fighter. I just cant map.
Back to reality, it doesnt matter how much makeup I slather on, or whether I go to the
hairdresser or whatever. Im still seventy years plus. When I went to the hairdresser last
we got to talking so she just kept fussing. When she was almost done she picked up the
curling iron and, because I was a *sigh* Senior Citizen she made little tight curls all over
my head. My hair is getting rather thin and is quite white. This was interesting, not my
normal style but there you go. Then, I went to a reception for volunteers at jazz.fm and
my friend, Danny Marks, hauled me up on stage where I did a rousing version of
Midnight Special. I rocked the house. The spotlight on those tight curls and sparse white
hair made me look BALD in the resulting photographs. Oh well, Im still 70 and counting,
so thats par for the course.
Another thing that does not improve with age is short term memory.If I need to do a
bunch of things such as the list below:
Buy a table
Send a Get Well card over the Internet
Add items to grocery list
Tell Don I cant make it to the computer Beer Bash this time
Make egg salad for sandwiches
I get stuck on buy a table over the Internet to the detriment of all the other items listed.
Then, another item will pop up at random, so Ill do that and worry vaguely that there was
something else I needed to do. Bit by bit. most of the items surface, triggered by who
knows what, until, with luck, I get most done. Sure, you say, write it down. Well, I do.
By the time Ive got to items 3 and 4 Ive forgotten 5. It will surface later when I get
hungry enough to remember I meant to make egg salad sandwiches. You can only deal
with this fragility of short term memory philosophically. Remember what you can and let
the rest go hang. Some charitable researcher said that this weakness comes from having
too much information in our heads. Too bad you cant do head cleaning the way you can
do house cleaning.
In my family we look about 10 or 15 years younger than we are, until one day the boom
descends, and we suddenly look older. People dont realize that I am at my attained age of
70 plus. Its about time, however, that I started realizing it. Ive started looking at older
faces with a more discerning eye, looking for the beauty that is there, if you look for it.
We are so predicated in this society on youth, on idolizing youth, but one day thats all
gone and it aint comin back. I had to revise my self image, which was permanently set at
about age 45. That was a reset from many years when it was permanently set as a 16 year
old boy. I was a tomboy when I was a kid. Took me a while to grow out of that too.
So, I was permanently set at age 45. Well, Im not 45 It was hard to give that up. I had a
bout of depression and then I decided Theres not a darn thing I can do about it. I had to
accept something that I could not change and that wasnt easy. It was a real reality check.
Here I am and, apparently, Im going strong. Things that used to interest me no longer
interest me as much. Im not as competitive. I take up some new things. Im still growing
plants and reading and knitting and sewing a bit. I go out every 6 weeks to my computer
guys beer bash with other old geeks and demi-geeks like myself. We sit around and talk
about whats wrong with Microsoft and why we may or may not like Linux and so forth.
There are a few other social outings too. Its a good life that I have. Im very lucky to be
alive and reasonably well, even if Im aging.
Sayings
Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb? That was a common joke saying in Chatham.
We figured it would take an outright flood to do any harm to rhubarb. I didnt know, then,
the joke answer, Not if it's in cans and I just found out it was a line in the Gene Kelly /
Judy Garland movie Summer Stock.
To me it epitomizes the dry humour favoured by farmers, like the Irish travel directions.
How do I get to Galway?
Well, if I were you I wouldnt start from here.
and quite a spell of weather we're having which is vague enough to suit kinds of weather.
Another weather-based saying was, Never rains but it pours, eh? but that was a bit more
mystical, more in the line of Trouble comes in threes. I still find myself, in times of
misfortune, counting and hoping to arrive at that final third event.
In my family, recently, my youngest sister had emergency gall bladder surgery, my other
sister had a fall and got a cut that needed stitches. Niece had skateboard accident and is
all over bruises. There! That's three and let that be an end to it. Never rains but it pours.
"And let that be a lesson to you!" was said after after plans went awry. The example
given was of the overweight, middle-aged man who went into a drugstore soda fountain
on hot Summer day and ordered a full glass of cracked ice. He swallowed the lot in short
order and died on the spot from a heart attack and let that be a lesson to you.
Blown to smithereens! is another familiar phrase and without knowing its origins it is still
easy enough, in the mind's eye to see something blown to bits and scattered.
A friend added to this collection with a deliberate substitution of Old-Timer's Disease for
Alzheimer's Disease.
Someone whose appearance is none too neat "Looks like he was dragged through a hedge
backwards"; a tradition which I try my best to uphold. He might also seem to be like "The
Wild Man from Borneo", a sideshow attraction named after the Bornean Orangutans.
They have long hair which makes them appear unkempt.
A computer friend told me, My grandfather (and his family) used to use a good one to let
you know that they had enjoyed a meal and were full.
"My sufficiency has been suffonsified. If I were to partake of but another morsel, I would
most assuredly burst."
I though that was uncommon but apparently it is a Canadian standard saying.
Since Hector was a pup is a bit more involved. Hector's mother, Hecuba, got turned into a
dog for killing the murderer of her older son, Polydorus. Thus, Hector by extension was a
dog's son and he lived a long time ago. The phrase seems to have become current in the
1920s and was a favourite with my mother, who had been a flapper then.
I figured Plant you now and dig you later came out of the 1960s but I was wrong.
Apparently, it dates back to sometime in the 1930s and migrated from black street slang
into the Beat generation vocabulary. It shows up in Pal Joey as hip street talk.
My friend, Joan in Wiltshire wrote:
I met a Scottish lady the other day and it was so good talking to her. She came from
Edinburgh, whereas I am from the West coast. We were comparing places which we both
knew and had a chat about them. She did make me laugh because she mentioned one
town where she reckoned they considered themselves upper class. "You know what I
mean" she said, "Fur coats and no drawers!" (All show and no substance.)
I'd almost forgotten that this is how most Scots talk. They do tend to call a spade a spade.
To me that is a good thing because you know exactly how you stand with them and most
wont tolerate anyone trying to belittle them. Anyway, she was a breath of fresh air that
day and it cheered me up no end.
My father was a salesman of pianos, home organs and heavy appliances at the Eatons
Department Store in Chatham, Ontario. He had a favourite saying which I consider to be
his legacy. Like most salesmen he was not canny about saving his money but his
favourite saying has carried me safely though thick and thin. It was
"You can slide further on bullshit than you can on gravel!"
"All done up like a Christmas tree" was a saying of my mother's. She also liked Done up
like Lady Astor's plush horse. Lady Astor was a well to do American-born lady who
became, through marriage, a British upper class lady. She held a seat in the British
parliament. Another favourite with my mother was I'm so mad I could chew nails and spit
rust!"
"I'll break your arm off at the elbow and hit you over the head with it" was a mock threat
used by my mother. Dont know where it came from and there are too many words for a
credible Google search or so I thought until I published this piece on the Internet and
found out I was now the source.
She also used "Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket" to cover any degree of
illness or fatigue.
When I asked friends for familiar family sayings they would tend to say I should just get
them off the Internet. Well, the Internet is good for research but I wanted original folk
sayings instead of an Internet list. Disney has taken over our childhood mythologies and
Disneyfied it with cute bottoms and quirky little cartoons. The Internet, in a somewhat
similar fashion, is homogenizing our memories.
My friend Steven C. from rural Illinois contributed
"Feel like I'd have to get better to die"
and
"Feel like the little end of nothin' whittled down to a point."
"Hot as the hinges of hell!" was another common saying from my childhood.
I pick up little catch phrases from listening to old time radio skits, such as saying, for
someone who's a skinflint, that they aretight as a toreador's pants. We always used to say
tight as the bark on a tree but I think toreador's pants covers it, ahem, adequately . I'm
sure many of my mother's sayings came originally from radio and movies in the 1920s
and 30s.
When defeat was confirmed beyond all doubt we could say they "beat us all hollow".
"Had the biscuit" was another common saying from my childhood. I looked it up and
found that it refers the the Catholic last rites when Communion was given to a dying
person. the communion wafer was, in this case, the biscuit.
I'm sure I will run across other common sayings over time but for now I've had the
biscuit.
Selling Online
Having a lot of interests, I accumulate a lot of stuff. I decided to sell some of my surplus
stuff on line. I started first with eBay. Doesnt everyone? I gathered up a collection of all
kinds of things sewing patterns and books and magazines as well as Golliwog dolls which
are popular with British ex-expatriates and Australians.
I did fairly well with the books on eBay. Then, I got more professional and moved my
book stock to an operation called AbeBooks online. They had a wonderful downloadable, catalogue-utility program where I could plug in the ISBN number. That's
important for selling books. Every modern book has an ISBN number. I typed in in the
other details, such as the condition of the book, and uploaded my listing. People looking
for a book can do a search on Abebook online and, if you have the book on the topic
searched for, it will show up on the website listing showing its details, condition and all
pertinent data.
In one phase of my existence I was accumulating occult books and I had quite a few of
them. In Rosedale, which is a high income neighbourhood in Toronto, someone put out
boxes and boxes of books at the curb. One of my relatives grabbed them for me and
hauled them over to my place. I catalogued them all.
My sister reads a lot of mysteries so I ended up with quite a mystery-novel collection.
I was selling off parts of my own book collection because my shelves were groaning with
books. I had books I had acquired and books I no longer needed, so I started selling them.
I met a lot of interesting people. These were simple transactions. You want it. I've got it.
You buy it I mail it. I used PayPal, of course. Credit card transactions through PayPal are
a mainstay of online selling.
I should emphasize that, in selling online, the most important thing is honesty. You have
to be scrupulously exact in describing what you are selling.
I bought a little postal weighing machine on eBay, so I wouldnt have to go to the Post
Office. I'd just set my item on the little scale, then calculate the postage from the Post
Office tables on line.
I got a postage meter, which was a bit of overkill, but I also sell CDs online for an
entertainment group, so I needed to have the postage meter for that. Now, I use the
excellent Canada Post Internet utility called Ship-In-A-Click
Between eBay and AbeBooks I did about $2,000.00 worth of business one year. A fair
amount of work went into setting up listings, especially on eBay. There, you need a
picture and a description and you have to categorize it and state the time frame of the
auction and so forth. You have to decide on a price that will attract eBay buyers, because
they're all bargain hunters on eBay. You set your initial price not too high and not too
low. Then, you wait to see if the fish will nibble at the bait.
In the beginning I was looking all the time to see who was hitting on my auctions, not
bids but traffic, which would show up in the counter I had on my listing. Then, I found
out that counters made for slower load times. People's attention span on the web is
remarkably short, so the less load time it takes to bring up a webpage the better. You dont
really need to know who's looking. You only need to know who's bidding.
If you have a lot of listings, eBay has good software to handle and keep track of all of
them.
I had a lot of cloth-doll patterns I was no longer using. The named-designer patterns went
very well. The occult books, too, went very well. There was reproduction item of
Crowleyana that was sold to a fellow in Florida. I think he ran a bookstore. They were
having a heavy-weather event there. This was just before Hurricane Katrina and
everything was flooded and discombobulated. I was just about to cancel that auction,
because it was taking too long for him to pay, when a desperate note came from his
friend's computer in another State saying, Hold on! As soon as the water goes down he's
going to pay you! and he did. He certainly did.
If I was going to give tips for selling on eBay I would say, have a very clear picture of the
item and work on your description and your key words. Your title is really important
because it's a grabber. Sometimes that's all they really see. Research the pricing, so your
item is placed not too low and not too high. If someone else is selling the same thing in
the same frame of time, you might want to hold off, or you could price your item a bit
lower. Pennies count.
I learned while selling books that the most off-beat thing, like mountain climbing in Peru,
will have a niche audience. A little pamphlet about an obscure automobile, published by
the company that made it, with cartoons, years ago, has someone wanting it because they
are a collector. You can look up prices on the Internet to get an approximate worth for
your item. The auto pamphlet went to someone in a museum in New Zealand. That's the
other thing. You are selling globally. I sold a fair amount to the Far East, to Australia
and, as mentioned, New Zealand. I sell primarily into the United States and Canada,
where I live, but I have sold to Britain and to France, parts of Scandinavia, to Holland
and so forth.
It's quite exciting when you send your parcel off into the ether. Postal services quite
wonderful. It continues to be amazing to me how a parcel sent from my corner mailbox
can safely arrive in France.
That's my story about selling on line. Basically, anyone can do it, if you just have the
patience to list stuff in the database or on eBay, each in their own special fashion.
It was fun while it lasted but I'm burnt out now and I'm not going to do it any more. I've
got over 600 positive responses (called Feedback) on eBay, with no negative Feedback
on my record. I'm proud of that but, like I say, Game over.
I still buy on eBay. There's stuff you can get there you cant get anyplace else.