Giuseppe Verdi at 200 ~ Sustainable “Green” Melodies

Before the end of the month, pause and listen to Verdi. I have and I encourage you to as well.

Try this quartet from Rigoletto:

(It is never really wise for a man to use the same pickup lines on a new love interest when the old love interest is nearby. But that is human nature, and in Rigoletto a great reason for a beautiful famous quartet.)

So why listen now?

200 years ago, Giuseppe Verdi was born.  October 10, 1813. There has been a lot of musical commemoration of this bicentennial anniversary in the last few weeks. So as the month of October wraps up, here is a just one more. Short and sweet! Listen to Verdi.

And if you claim you haven’t listened to one of the greatest composers of Italian Opera, well, fact is, you have! You just may not have realized it, and if you still claim to be unfamiliar, then listen some more, right now.

His melodies are found throughout pop culture, movies and television soundtracks, anthems and political rallies. On the opera stage and in the concert hall. His music surged during a time of Italian unification, helping create the Italy we know today. And his operatic characters are just folks like us, singing as we might, about everyday emotions:

• the fickleness of women (Rigoletto), 
• a fallen homeland (Nabucco), 
• soaring freely from joy to joy (La Traviata), 
• making triumphant entrances (Aida), 
• drinking with friends (La Traviata or Macbeth), 
• or dreaming of gypsy maidens while hammering away at work (Il Trovatore).

Chances are, somewhere in your past you’ve heard one of his melodies and chances are if you love opera you will jump at the chance to hear it this season or next, in one of the great opera houses of the world. But if opera is not your thing, it is Verdi’s melodies that you should listen to just to experience a bit of the emotion he creates, the joy, the angst and the hope of humanity. Melodies that have survived the test of time. They are sustainable, and that's a cool thing today.

Arias, duets, quartets, choruses and overtures producing countless melodies, which are still heard around the world, 200 years later. Verdi in Italian means green. 200 years of sustainable melodies. That’s something. What did any of us do today that will provide such enjoyment for so many in the next 200 years?

The Building Blocks for a Meaningful Life

Last night at a reception celebrating the value of higher education, the speaker spoke about providing kids with the building blocks for a meaningful life. She was speaking about integrating separate academic disciplines into tangible cross functional coursework that prepares students for real world challenges. Multidisciplinary studies constantly shifting in this ever-changing world.

Wow. But my mind immediately slipped back to the age of six, and my childhood home on Long Island, where usually, on a Saturday afternoon, with a fire roaring in the fireplace, my Dad and I would build a castle, or a fort, or a village out of my wooden building blocks. My Matchbox cars were nearby in their navy portable carrying case, ready to drive through the gate, over the moat or down the newly paved driveway. Long before Legos and Playmobil, my building blocks taught me to imagine.

This memory is accentuated with the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Broadcast blaring in the background, If the Metropolitan Opera was in season: (Fall, Winter and Spring) listening to the opera was a given. For every Saturday, instead of college football, my Dad had the opera playing on the radio. At a later age, I remember not really wanting my friends to come over on Saturdays, in fear that the opera would scare them away, but that is another story.

Building Blocks. I remember having a variety of sets:  

• The classic square cubes with letters of the alphabet, two ridged sides and simple corresponding pictures that started with the same letters found on the block. 
• A multitude of large, lightly wooden dominos, about 6 inches by 2 ½ and colored dots.
• A wonderful set of primary colored building blocks with arches, and triangles, and posts.
• A puzzle set of blocks that created six different pictures. These were a favorite of Pepper, our Cairn Terrier, as today many from this set have chewed edges and corners.

And over the years, all these blocks were kept mixed together in one big  basket, or a large red Popcorn Factory tin, or probably if I want to be true to my six year old memory, a cardboard box, which my mother had reinforced and then covered in contact paper, (in the 60s, there was a lot of contact paper) and always that box of blocks remained nearby in the den, or what we called the sunroom.

While Tosca, Brunehilde, or Violetta always seemed to be screeching her angst in the background, I remember my Dad on his knees building. And typically that meant I sat and watched, or handed him a corresponding block to keep our structure symmetrical. See there you have it… the first grand example of needing symmetry in my life and later yearning for just the opposite. It all came from those early days of watching my Dad play with my toys and his compelling need to build in a traditional classic style, thereby creating order and beauty to our play project. So was it my building blocks that taught me to appreciate Classic Greek architecture and then later the modern asymmetrical aesthetic, or the many art history classes I took in college? 

About a year ago, I was back at my parents’ home, and I knew my wooden blocks would still be in that large red Popcorn Factory tin and went about looking for it, eventually found in storage in the basement, next to Carol and my old wooden toy chest, and the packed boxes of my Texaco trucks. Inside the toy chest I found our board games: Life, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mindbender, Chinese Checkers, Battleship, a few jigsaw puzzles and Cooties.

And I knew when there were younger children in the neighborhood; Mom would keep the red tin of building blocks on the first floor and bring them out when children came to visit. But times change and there weren’t many children around the hillside and the red tin had been relocated to the cold cellar. And inside the sets of blocks were now neatly arranged by set in ziploc bags. I examined all and then just like a kid, I selected a few sets and scurried up the wooden staircase and packed them in my suitcase to bring back to Seattle. They now sit in a oval wooden shaker basket right next to my grandparents’ mahogany hifi cabinet, long since rebuilt to serve as a nifty liquor cabinet. Building blocks as vintage décor? Building blocks for a  meaningful life? Or, as some would prefer, now just dust collectors? 

So back to the last night, there I sat, my mind stumbling on this concept of the building blocks of life, and cross functional disciplinary course work. The speaker was clearly speaking about the value of a liberal arts education and preparing young adults for life and career success, but I preferred to go back in my head and think about a few bigger things fundamental to my core, that have served me well. The “Yes Ma’am, No Ma’am, Thank You, Please and write your thank you notes” kinds of foundation. These were my building blocks. Some important principles that contributed to who I am today.

Build communities and then nurture them as if they were a garden, and fences make good neighbors.

Give thanks for the food on your table. Eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away. And eat in the dining room. 

Take pride and care for each other. Look out for your sister or your pet and your friends. 

Raise the flag and love your country. 

Always remember the mixing bowls principle. Look for the commonality of humanity and not the differences. Pull out a set of mixing bowls and find one large enough to contain everyone’s common core beliefs and once you do,  create the opportunity for an enlightened reconciliation where once there was dissension.

Spend the afternoon playing with toys and imagine what you can create.

Exercise. Read. Laugh. Apologize. And every so often, on a Saturday listen to the opera. Always keeping a melody in your heart. 

Your word is part of your character and keep your promises. 

Just a random few, but I guess these are what I consider the building blocks of my life. I sorta like my memory of building blocks better. They are more playful, and basic. 

When I look down on the floor and see my childhood blocks as décor, I ponder about where they all came from, did Mom and Dad go out and buy all of them, or were some gifts from others? Who contributes to building our foundations, our ability to think creatively, our power to imagine? And do we share our blocks so others can learn similar lessons?

So now, my building blocks make me smile. Maybe that's why I went searching for them last year. What was I am really looking for? When I see these blocks, I get grounded again around the simple life lessons learned as a child, the lessons we were encouraged to embrace in order to enhance and shape our character. 

I'm going make a better effort to keep the dust off them in the future. 

Chopin and my Great Aunt

Taking Time

I remember writing my Great Aunt BeeBee every week, when she was nearing a century of living and had moved into a nursing home. She had left the house she’d lived her entire life, had grown up in with her mother and father, sisters and brothers, and since she never married, remained there mostly alone for the next nine decades. But sometime in her early to mid 90s, her health declined and she spent her remaining years at a Nursing Home called Guardian Care. And somewhere in that urgency of her move, as a young teenager I started to write her every Sunday night.

She was a magnificent presence in my life: a piano teacher, a bible scholar as only staunch Presbyterians could be, a genuine and mysterious old person with wrinkles and a curved spine, and a keeper of M&M in the candy jar in the top compartment of the old oak antique refrigerator, referred to as the icebox. BeeBee, as she was known to all family, would lay down in the back bedroom every afternoon for a nap, had a picture of a very young Queen Elizabeth on her living room wall (a tie to her Cornwall, England roots) and her garden was full of Crepe Myrtle, Sweet Peas, Camellias and Richard, her old and tired black gardener.

On our visits to Henderson, to see my mother’s family, my mother's sister, would walk through her adjoining back yard to see her father (my grandfather), who was BeeBee’s younger brother by ten years. After checking on her father, she'd go on to the next house to check on her Aunt BeeBee.  This was a morning ritual.  So naturally every morning as our day began on these visits south, My Mom would join her sister (my aunt) and Carol (my sister) and I would tag along on the short stroll up to the next house to visit or check-in on BeeBee. 

It was less than a football field away, but on our visits to Henderson, North Carolina, going to BeeBee’s in the morning was like going back in time. It was fascinating to enter into her home, and to smell, and to look, and to listen.We’d spend twenty minutes or so there every morning, hearing about BeeBee's day, listening to family updates she’d received in her mailbox, making sure she was stocked from the grocery store, and a bit of world affairs and local news, and then we’d leave. She would take a nap every afternoon before teaching piano to neighboring children after their school day ended, her source of income and only joined my grandfather for the occasional Sunday noontime meal or family gathering. 

BeeBee was simply what we called her, but her name was Bertha Mabel Bunn. She died in March 1980, four days after her 99^th birthday. I was a freshmen in college. She always said: “March was the worst month of the year, because you were waiting for Spring. If you could live through March, you would make it another year.”

Writing those letters every Sunday night to BeeBee when I was a teenager, was incredibly important to me, there was a sense of urgency in it, and yet I anticipated no reply. It connected me to her and it felt as though I was just doing a bit more to keep her connected during her final years at Guardian Care, just one more family member feeding her mailbox, of news and activities. 

Sure enough, once BeeBee moved into Guardian Care and started having three “square meals” a day, she got stronger and thrived for a few years in her wheelchair, heading down to the community room and visiting and making new friends. I remember on one visit south, I took my piano music and I played Chopin: Waltz #1 In E Flat, Op. 18, "Grande Valse Brillante" to her and a bunch of other residents. For a 16 year old to be playing Chopin was a worthy afternoon recital, and I had been working all year with my own piano teacher back on Long Island on it.

 Chopin Waltz #1 in E Flat, Op. 18 Grande Valse Brillante

My sister and I always played the piano for BeeBee during our visits to North Carolina, usually a special afternoon visit in the living room where she taught music lessons, She'd get up early from her naps, to listen to us play. Her living room was adjacent to her sitting room, where our morning visits would occur while Queen Elizabeth watched over us, unless we sat in her dining room near the icebox, because perhaps we were having a piece of cake or potato pasties she'd made. 

BeeBee loved to hear our musical progress. So years later, in the sunny Community Room of Guardian Care, I plowed through Chopin, and BeeBee praised my ambition to take on Chopin, and gently reminded me to slow down and reflect, to take time with the music, in order to avoid stumbling over my own fingers.

And so today after reflecting on the last two years of my own life, I am reminded some 30+ plus years later, that BeeBee’s advice to take time is a worthy endeavor. In these days of instant texts, finishing all emails within the day, urgency to keep moving forward, there doesn’t seem a lot of value in taking time. We expect results instantly. I loved writing BeeBee every Sunday night and knowing about Thursday of that week, my letter would arrive in her room at Guardian Care, and knowing she'd then share my news with others. I loved the short walks to visit her, and receiving permission to reach into that candy jar, I loved knowing that it is okay to take a nap every afternoon to get to 100 and I loved looking at the Crepe Myrtle, Sweet Peas and Camellia’s and hearing her talk about her garden, which by the time I knew her, she just watched from her window. She encouraged me to dig up some Scottish Bluebells to plant at home on Long Island.

Taking time. 

I stepped aside these last two years. After what was probably the most difficult year of my life, I withdrew to take some time. Not many really understood it, many were scared to ask about it and yet, a few even challenged it. I stumbled a bit in life and ran over my fingers, and when I attempted to get back up, I was either knocked down or fell a few times. I retreated and worked quietly on myself. Losing your business, your mother, your financial security and your best friend was a bit too much for me to comprehend. 

I spent a lot of time looking for the Crepe Myrtles, Sweet Peas and Camellias. I lost all grounding and laid low and licked my wounds. I took time to grow my flowers and to walk Oslo. I played my piano. I took time to try and listen to my friends in need and share news of others and I took time to heal and exercise and become stronger physically and mentally. I stopped and paused and didn’t work, didn't advance my professional career. Was it luxury? Was it necessity? Was it right? Was it wrong?

Not sure any of us can answer that. But bit by bit you start to rebuild and you start to thrive again, you see yourself again in the mirror and you like what you see and you are ready for another adventure, a new challenge, a new course of action, or the next piece of Chopin. 

Taking time in life can be a good thing and then one day you are ready again. I think BeeBee would have understood my last two years.

July 4th, 2013 ~ Appalachian Spring

Appalachian Spring

Some thoughts on Independence Day and some favorite music. (Facebook Posting on July 4^th 2013)

Woke up early today, wanted to sit on my deck and watch the sun come up over the Cascade Mountains and begin to see daylight illuminate into my corner of this great country. If I am lucky and it is sunny I get to see the natural beauty of Washington State’s Mt. Rainier and the urban beauty of downtown Seattle’s skyscrapers. I love this juxtaposition.

It was cloudy, but regardless, it was time to raise the flag on this 237^th Independence Day.

Oslo’s attentive stand was probably more my hopeful mind mirroring my memory of helping my Dad hang the flag on national holidays over our front door to my childhood home on Long Island, or assisting my Uncle Boyd at the flagpole of our family’s cottage on Seneca Lake in upstate New York. But more likely Oslo was thinking about treats or when he’d get his morning breakfast and not the pledge of allegiance, but regardless, I was glad to have him as part of my own little patriotic tradition.

I thought about playing the National Anthem, or a patriotic John Phillips Sousa March, really loud to wake up the neighborhood, since the fireworks tonight will drive Oslo crazy… payback? But I decided that was unwise. Maybe I needed to quickly jump to ITunes and download Lee Greenwood’s country classic I’m Proud to be an American. Heck, the Battle Hymn of the Republic would play nicely with the 150^th Anniversary of Gettysburg. If I really wanted American, how about some Gershwin and Jazz.  Or something showy from Broadway by Richard Rodgers or Stephen Sondheim. How about Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the 4^th of July! My head was swirling with options, the thousands of pop composers and pop singers whose versions of our nation’s musical heritage are known to us all. Where’s Kate Smith and God Bless America? What about Scott Joplin (quick walk over to my piano and see if I can still get through eight bars without getting my fingers caught up under my hand) a syncopated ragtime piece could be patriotic.

Instead, I wanted to pause and be a bit more introspective, it was cloudy, but still beautiful… I wanted to think about my country. So I’m going this morning with Aaron Copland’s 1944 Ballet, Appalachian Spring.  It has been one of my favorite pieces of music for over 30 years. Written at a time when war was looming all around our country. I love the simple melodies reminding me of the beauty of our natural surroundings, I love thinking about it being played for the first time almost 70 years ago as a Ballet commissioned, choreographed and danced by Martha Graham. It was very modern, avant-garde.

I love the American folk themes woven throughout the work, including the Shaker’s Hymn, Simple Gifts. I love that Copland, a boy born in Brooklyn of Jewish Lithuanian descent in 1900, took the already 96 year old melody of Elder Joseph Bracket, a Shaker in Maine, and made his melody and his words come to life and to dance…

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

You can feel the yearning of day to begin in the early music, of spring waking up in the melodies, optimism and hope and for me, a country yearning to be at it’s most beautiful. I love the sharp contrasting conflict, scrappy disharmonies, discordant melodies, it reminds me of urban life, the growth of industry, changing directions and civil unrest, and the struggles and attempts to get it right when at first you don’t, it is all there in the music, heck it might even remind me of politicians in Congress or the Senate.  It is bold and victorious when it needs to be and easy and peaceful when it needs to be. I love listening to the silence when it is over, before I yearn to hear it again. It reminds me so much of our country’s greatness and our gradual recognition of the ever changing face of humanity. And somehow, makes it all seem hopeful and that we somehow will work through it all. And that was what I wanted to think about as I started celebrating our Nation’s birth and Nation’s history.

Copland won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945 for his arrangement of this Ballet for orchestra. It is a great piece of American music by a great gay American composer.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

Happy Independence Day.

Proud today and always of my country.

Gay Pride #5: Sharing our Stories: Stonewall

Friday June 28, 2013

I wrote a five part series and posted them on Facebook this year to commemorative Gay Pride and Gay History. Day 5

Today is Day 5 of PRIDE Week and my fifth and final “installment” of Milestones in the Gay Rights Movement. 

June 28th, 1969 ~~ 44 years ago! 

I like sharing and telling stories. And it was not surprising, that earlier this week, several of my friends reached out to me and said, “they had no idea what the Stonewall Riots were. So in the inclusive spirit of Facebook, and the diversity of my own mix of friends, (my quick unscientific tally of my friends still skewered the majority as straight, so my gay friends and straight allies bare with me), I’m gonna do the obvious today and talk a bit what happened 44 years ago. 

The Stonewall Riots 

There was a lot going on in 1969, Lots of social and civil unrest, a war in Vietnam, Black rights, Women’s rights, Woodstock. I have very vivid childhood of my grandfather McDowell, seeing a bunch of young people on a family drive through town and calling them “hippies!"

Here’s to Flower Power! Peace Heavy Dig It Baby Groovy Right ON! 

And it wasn’t like Gays and Lesbians, suddenly appeared in 1969. We seem to have been around since the beginning of time. (I took Greek Art History and looked at enough Grecian vases to last a lifetime.) But what did happen in the early mornings of June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village in New York at a small bar on Christopher Street, owned by the mafia and making payoffs to the police on a regular basis since no liquor license existed, was the usual going bad. Stonewall, was the only bar gay men could dance in New York. So as practice had it, fake names were used to sign in, and on this day 44 years ago, in the early morning, the police raid didn’t go quite as usual, and the energy escalated and suddenly there was just enough rage in this small gathering in the Stonewall Inn, that gay people, outside the club also joined in, and more police were summoned and there was a riot. The unrest continued into the next night and beyond… and later that year, the word “gay” started to show up in title of organized groups, an then a year later, on June 28, 1970 gay and lesbians coordinated marches in several major cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. (There are great detailed accounts of Stonewall on sites like Wikipedia and beyond.) 

That’s the quick and dirty, Stonewall is a foundation in the Gay Rights Movement and why PRIDE is celebrated in most cities in late June. And amazing progress has occurred in those 44 years. And that’s why we still march and celebrate and the beauty is it about diversity and acceptance. 

Thanks for reading this week. Hope some of the magic of dates, facts, events, and personal anecdotes I’ve shared over the last five days have opened, educated and broadened a few minds to pause, think and you’ll look just a bit differently at the rainbow flag as you see it flying. We all have stories, beautiful stories and when shared together we are sharing our humanity. 

Been a huge monumental week in gay history thanks to the Supreme Court Decisions and how wonderful those judgments were part of this week. Now, I’ve got some fun to be had, some parties in the street and some photos to take of a whole lot of beautiful happy faces, so I can get back to doing what we all do best on Facebook, and show off the fun we celebrate in our life. 

XO ~~ Happy PRIDE!