Lately I�ve been wishing I could skip the words and go straight to images and sound. If only you could have been in my headphones listening to Alex de Grassi as the sun reluctantly and half-heartedly slunk over the horizon behind a think bank of clouds with just enough light to make the rain-soaked city streets shine like diamonds.

Or maybe you could have been on the phone with AJ, listening to him breathe into the receiver like a perverted crank caller while describing his favorite TV show, while I visualized every gesture that crossed his face and knew that I was right.

Or you could have been sitting, as I was, in the front row of my class as a well-known baroque opera singer gave us the finger and made everyone laugh at only 9:30, saying, �I hope I didn�t offend anyone.� No one in the class could have imagined a lecture on baroque gesture could be so much fun.

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After yesterday�s entry on guitarists I have known, I went and looked up my long ago friend Sher to see what she�s been up to and it turns out that she�s made a pretty big name for herself in the world of jazz guitar. Two of her CDs are up at iTunes, so I was able to download some songs to hear what she�s been up to lately. Her website suggests that she�s planning some concert dates in the Midwest in November. I�m hoping that means she�ll be passing through Chicago.

I always feel funny about these long ago friends, the ones you really liked but through circumstances never got the chance to know well enough to sustain a friendship across time and space. For one thing, I always assume they don�t remember me. But then I always wonder if they might. Perhaps I�ll send her an email. Perhaps I won�t.

Sher was a summer job friend, although one good enough that we saw each other a couple of times after summer was over. I didn�t know much about jazz when I met Sher and the LPs donated to my cause changed my listening habits forever. She also helped me ace a class my senior year in college. It was a course called Advanced Essay Writing, a generic term for a writing class at my college that applied to courses with diverse subjects at the whim of the professor teaching them. My professor taught his version of the class as Writing About the Arts, which seemed right up my alley. The class was run as a workshop. Each of the participants talked about our own area of artistic experience and we shared and critiqued each others work. Our assignments covered a broad swath of artistic areas, but in the second half of the course we settled into our own areas of expertise and began to write. One of the first essays I wrote was about Sher. I will admit here that although it is all based on fact, the way I strung things together is not quite how it happened. If I had been writing this as a piece of journalism, I would have gone back to verify things more carefully. In other words, I wouldn�t have put my job on the line for it. But since this was a class about writing and not a class about sources, I didn�t think it mattered. I concentrated on writing what was true to the Sher I knew.

My student readers liked it. My professor loved it. He wrote at the bottom of the page that I should go into writing about music and musicians professionally. Hi, Professor G. Guess what I�m doing?

I think I still have it floating around somewhere. Maybe when I get home I�ll post it here.

[There was a late second entry yesterday. Click back if you missed the birthday party.]

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