spynotes ::
  April 30, 2007
Band on the run

The city was gleaming this morning, still dripping from last night's rain but glinting with morning sun. It nearly took my breath away as the bus motored across Roosevelt road. In the Loop, armies of cheerful looking people in red hard hats were handing out boxes of cereal to sleepy commuters. Rise and shine!

I was already feeling virtuous before I got to campus, having written nearly five pages on the train on the way in. Gradually the knots I've created in the course of this long project are unraveling. In the last week I've gleaned enough material to finish a chapter that has stymied me. There is really only one more that is full of gaping holes.

In the chronicling of an historical movement, I find myself considering the idea of the origin myth. The ensembles I work on all tell the stories of how they began in their concert programs. And the stories are remarkably similar to one another. I don't mean to imply that these stories are on the same scale as stories of The Great Flood. But we seem to have an amazing capacity for common world views. It's too bad we don't seem to be able to have them when it counts.

The weekend was a blur. Friday, I did indeed play at the open mike. And Mr. Spy did have to stay home, which made us both a bit sad. It was a long haul out there and since Mr. Spy didn't come, I didn't stay long, but it was fun. The open mike is organized every couple of months by the friends we went to Saugatuck with a month or so ago and a couple who live across the street from them. They knew almost everyone who came. We were all crammed into the back room of a restaurant, a space that usually serves as a staff lounge, office and catering prep area. I have no idea how many people were actually there. Eighty, perhaps? It was so crowded that you could hardly move without kicking a guitar. H., one of the organizers, serves as the regular emcee. He's an incredible guitarist and he opened the show with one song I didn't know and another I vaguely identified as a Dylan song, largely based on the fact that he was playing harmonica while he played in between verses. I find it amazing when people can play multiple instruments simultaneously. I can only seem to manage to sing and fiddle when I'm singing the same thing I'm fiddling.

Our group went next with our version of "O Mary, Don't You Weep." I cribbed a fiddle part off of Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and adapted it to suit the ensemble and my lesser fiddling skills. Beforehand, my guitarist friend and I had worked out the basic plan. He commandeered a bunch of people to take different verses as solos (there are a million of them) and to serve as a chorus on the refrain. A friend of his played the drums and the emcee played harmonica. The number opened with just me, which I would have thought would have made me nervous, but there were so many people up there with me that I wasn't at all. As we ran through verses, the energy built and while we weren't perfect, we rocked. It was a lot of fun. Maybe now I'll have the courage to talk to my friend's son who wants me to play with his rock band. Because that would be the perfect solution to the fortieth birthday crisis that I feel compelled to have.

Saturday was a beautiful day and we headed into the city to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which was so full of babies and pregnant women that it kind of made you want to take birth control right then and there. All the animals were out lying in the sun. The lions looked like giant housecats snoozing on their rocks. The tigers were rugs. The wolf slept in the trees until a fire engine went by, siren on, at which point he climed on top of his rock, pointed his nose to the sky, and howled, causing all the children to stop and point. We wandered out of the zoo into the conservatory which was humid and lush and smelled heavenly. We took AJ to the Four Farthings Tavern, which was the first restaurant he ever went to, after an unsettling visit to nearby Children's Memorial Hospital when he was just a couple of weeks old. Everything we saw was beautiful or delicious or smelled good. It was one of those days.

Sunday I was in the garden putting some plants in the ground and pulling others out by 7:30 while AJ tore around the yard, waiting for it to be late enough to play basketball. We gardened and watched AJ play baseball. We ate all of our meals outside. I went for a run in the rain while the sun was still shining brightly. I didn't even think of posting. We collapsed into bed early and were wakened shortly thereafter by thunderstorms and AJ, who was scared of them. "I don't like thunderstorms. They're too thundery." I tried to explain to him that that's exactly why I liked them, but instead we ended up coming up with stories to explain the noise. Mr. Spy was always told it was angels bowling. I heard it was giants bowling. AJ prefers to think of it as clouds bumping into each other. In any case, there are no more clouds today, nothing to bump. Looking out the window of the homeward train, I can see a small boy in an orange shirt running excitedly across a playground to try to wave at the train. His mother, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and blue shorts, runs after him laughing. He plops down on the end of a sidewalk that stops short of the fence that separates the playground from the platform and grins, waving madly. A nice day and a train. That's pretty much all you need.


2 people said it like they meant it

 
:: last :: next :: random :: newest :: archives ::
:: :: profile :: notes :: g-book :: email ::
::rings/links :: 100 things :: design :: host ::

(c) 2003-2007 harri3tspy

<< chicago blogs >>