Steven's Journal

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No Way to Buffer It
From the time my friend Cindy was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer nearly two years ago, she and her husband Charlie have been facing this directly and openly and gracefully. I know Charlie and Cindy through my local shapenote community. They had become less active in recent years, but after Cindy's diagnosis we saw a lot more of them again. During Cindy's final weeks, when she was in home hospice care, they would invite small groups of singers over to their house on a regular basis just to sing. These singings were lovely times, in large part because Cindy was lucid and she was not in major pain, right until the end.

Cindy wrote about her illness in her livejournal at times. There was one particular entry last July that I just loved. Cindy had taken a break from work for chemo treatment at a time when she was starting to have serious trouble with her balance. She noted in her livejournal how very helpful everybody had been all day, opening doors and helping with elevators and helping her get up. Then later in the day, after returning to work, more people had been helpful to her when she needed some assistance with her tray at lunch. Apparently all of these people had come forward to go out of their way to help without being asked. When she returned to work after lunch she sent an email message to the manager of the work cafeteria to say how grateful she was to the people who had been so helpful and polite. Then she noted that the chemo went smoothly and she felt fine for the rest of the day.

Now me, I kept thinking that Cindy was having significant difficulties walking, standing up, moving, carrying things -- all on a day when she had a chemo treatment mid-morning. But this didn't stop her from going to work either before or after the treatment. She really didn't want it any other way. Nor did it stop her from spreading a sort of sweet grace to all she encountered. I don't think she could have helped that part.

Charlie and Cindy organized Cindy's memorial last month, while she was still able to attend. I know at first glance that seems strange, or at least unusual, but it was very much on the theme of "give me the roses while I live" -- words that appear in one of the songs in the Sacred Harp as well as in some oldtime country songs. Women from Cindy's bellydance troupe danced, co-workers she had become friends with during a strike of University workers a couple of years ago spoke, and there was lots of singing. We celebrated her life while we still had the the opportunity to tell her so. I know this may not be what some of us might wish for ourselves, but it felt like a perfectly natural thing, and Cindy was radiant. My understanding is that Charlie and Cindy meant it when they said this was the memorial, and there will not be another one now.

So here's my point. You'd think that with all of this facing of Cindy's situation directly, of having the amazing opportunity to have lovely fine times during a friend's final days, of knowing of the fairly sudden turn for the serious over the last few days and even having two days' warning that there likely was not much time left -- you'd think that would prepare you for the actual news. You'd think that might cushion the blow, that this time it wouldn't feel so much like a sword suddenly plunged into your heart.

But you'd be wrong.

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/cindykissee/journal

The singer as dancer, the dancer as singer
The Great Northern Border Morris team had a really fine danceout on Tuesday night, at the quirky and quite promising pub called Merlin's Rest on East Lake Street in Minneapolis. We danced for about half an hour on the sidewalk, then a little bit inside the pub itself. Here's one set, all blocked up to dance:

There were many things that contributed to the success of the gig. It was an unusually warm night for this time of year, it's that time in the season when dances are coming together, the pub management loved us, the light was good -- just lots of things. And that may be why that night when I sang for three Molly dances the singing and dancing came together as well as it ever does and I felt just wonderful.

I say "may be" because honestly, I don't know what makes for those times when I, as the singer-musician, feel like one of the dancers to the extent I did that night. It's not a question of being in voice -- one of the best times we ever had was when I sang for the Molly very late on the last night of one Midwest Ale when my voice was reduced to rough-hewn dregs and you could barely distinguish one note from another, and yet I pounded out the rhythm and belted out the volume and we practically collapsed in joy when it was over. At a minimum you need to provide volume and rhythm and steadiness, and you need to respond to what the dancers are doing, but sometimes there is an extra rhythmic twist, a touch of syncopation, a series of collective surges, and something comes alive. You want to analyze this, to try to make it happen every time, but if you could isolate the factors and reproduce them it would kill the dance dead.

One thing that I do like to bring to the Molly singing, one of the key reasons I do not like it at all when somebody joins in with me in the song, is that I immerse myself in the words and story of the song. This could tend towards schtick, to overdoing things, but there are times when I'm singing the same story I've sung a thousand times (of the lady who happily runs off with her gypsy lover, of the gentle tailor who loses his sweet love to a macho sailor, of the jolly sailor who charms a willing lady) and I am there inside the story. I literally see the scene as I sing. I can't always do this and I can't make it happen, but when the dancers are moving and they are moving to the music made only from my voice box and lungs and I am inside my story I am on another plane. That, I think, is what makes for those times when it happens for me.

Always at the end of the dance -- always, without exception, at performance and every practice -- Derek or Temple, or Matt, always somebody, will make a point of thanking the musician by name. You'd think I would expect this, but at times such as last Tuesday I find myself surprised, drawn back to reality, because when the dance is over (and I end the dance with the same final arm gesture as the dancers) I am still lost in that other place.

Here's me singing for the Molly dancers, who are clearly dancing too fast to be caught on film:

Here, later, is Denise playing for a group dancing inside:

Doesn't it all look like fun? Line up folks, it's time to dance:

[Photos courtesy of Amy Muldoon's iPhone]

Did They Dance the Piccolino?
I was witness to a wedding this weekend of two fine dancers with many in attendance from their various dance communities across the country. This meant for one amazing moment of spontaneous choreography such as I don't think I've ever seen.

At one point the wedding couple danced the traditional wedding waltz -- beautifully, of course, wearing their stunning Norwegian ethnic clothing. There comes a point in this ritual when the announcement is made that the couple would like to invite their guests to join them in the dance. Suddenly -- boom -- instantly -- the floor filled up completely with beautifully dancing couples. Perhaps 90 percent of the guests were on the dance floor, in the space of half a measure, gliding around the room in perfect counterpoint to the music. I've never seen this happen so fast, so completely, so thoroughly, so gracefully.

It was like a scene from an Astaire-Rogers film, after Ginger sings and then Fred joins her in a spectacular dance and then all the dress extras fill the gleaming deco dance floor to the accompaniment of the large orchestra, having picked up the complicated new dance perfectly through quick observation alone. On Saturday the dance floor did not gleam and the orchestra at that point was a Hardanger fiddle, but the spirit and sense of the moment were the same.

Sometimes life is just like the movies.

Youth! Recruitment! Morris! The Folkie Cult!
The wonderful documentary about the Maple Morris weekend for young Morris dancers has set me off thinking about a bunch of things.

I posted the link to the documentary on Facebook yesterday, and I post it here again.

http://www.maplemorris.com/movie/

This is a 25-minute film that presents itself as a response to a BBC report early this year that no young people are taking up Morris and that it will die out as a result. Scholars said the same thing about shapenote music in the 1930s (since only the elderly still sang it). Come to think of it, people said the same thing about shapenote music in the 19th century, but most of those people had competing tunebooks of their own to sell.

The film documents a weekend in which college-age (and slightly older) Morris dancers from different teams gather to work on dances and do some public performing. I highly recommend taking a half hour and watching this film, even -- no especially -- if you are not a Morris dancer or don't really know about Morris dancing. What I realize I love most about this film is that it shows the interconnections between the dance itself and everything that surrounds it: The people, the singing, the getting out in public, the kitting up, the drinking, the joy. It also makes clear how very hard the dancers work. These are experienced dancers who are picking up some new traditions, which they then dance with power and grace. The actual dancing in the film is shown in small snippets, but this should give you a sense of what the dance is like.

Two of the people featured in the film (Adam and Justin) were the instructors for the Morris Intensive class I took at Pinewoods last summer, and the filmmaker (Stefan) was supposed to be an instructor as well but he was ill and could not attend. Rafe and Corinne were in the class with me. Rose was on crew at the camp. The rest of the folks I don't know, but they seem like great fun. At the end of the film, don't you wish you knew them? Watching this makes me want to dance so badly I can feel it as an ache. Is that just me, or does it make you feel that at all?

Along the lines of the BBC report, I have heard a lot of discussion about how the Morris revival in the US centers around a particular generation -- one that is about 10 years behind the generation in England -- and that it doesn't seem to hold much appeal to younger people. I think this is true to some extent, but there are significant exceptions, and my question is what makes for those exceptions (and I also think that the interest skipped a generation, as I think it has for contra dancing as well). At the beginning of this film, note how excited the dancers are about getting together for the weekend -- and to do what? To work hard, on dancing. To be with other people who enjoy the dance as much as they do. What switch has been turned on here? Why do most people look on this stuff and think of it as something weird -- or, more likely, something invisible and outlying and insignificant -- while for others it yields the delights that are so very evident in this film (and that I have often tried to describe in this journal)?

Note how the singing is key here, for the folks in the movie, just as it is for me. Why is that? I of course have my thoughts about this -- about how powerful it can be when music and song and dance exist as a separate thing from the music industry and modern commercial culture. Powerful as this stuff is, it remains culturally marginal. How do you open the window on this?

So my thoughts here are not just how do you get "the young folk" to take up the dance. I mean, they will or they won't and it will continue or it won't -- nothing needs to exist simply for its own sake. But what can get people in general to see and appreciate this subworld? Recruiting younger dancers is, I think, a subcategory of getting more people to understand the world in which what gets dismissively called "folk" culture is vibrant and living (that is, unfossilized) and anything but quaint.

A funny wormhole of time
Honestly this isn't a "that makes me feel old" anecdote, although it will be hard not to tell it as if it were. On my Facebook friends page just now there was an update from a really lovely young woman I met at Pinewoods last summer where she was on crew (she is one of those sort of beatific types who make you happy just to be around, even at that age) . She is now a freshman at Smith. She rarely updates her status, which is good because she shouldn't be wasting her college time online says fuddy-duddy I in my dad mode. In her update she noted that the Equality march in Washington last weekend was awesome. There were also some wonderful photos of her and her friends at the March, looking like great kids (as of course anybody of that age who attended that march would be).

So I decided to comment on her status, and note how these photos got me thinking back to a similar march in 1987 and then -- well, you can probably figure out how quickly I realized that this was a few years before she was born.

I know, I know -- this is an obnoxious thing to point out, as I was compelled to do in my comment, and perhaps even borderline creepy. But it actually made me feel wonderful to sense that connection, to see those pictures, to see a sort of unbroken tie. I'm not entirely sure I understand why, but this small thing just put me in a wonderful mood.

He can knock eleven ladies for a loop-a
I'm finally getting around to checking out the historical novelty musical madness that is YouTube and boy oh boy is this addictive. It's a treasure chest of songs and clips and performances I have literally been searching out for decades. I used to sort through hundreds of boxes of 78s and sheet music at flea markets to find the occasional jewel, but the yield is hundreds of times greater on YouTube. For example, I've been looking for a song about Princess Papule (who has plenty papaya) since I first heard tell of the song nearly 40 years ago -- and there it is on YouTube, several versions of it. Unfortunately it turns out that most of the performances on YouTube are from modern groups that have unearthed the sheet music and who overdo the suggestiveness. I mean, come on, if you've got lyrics that say "The Princess Papule has plenty papaya and she loves to give it away" you absolutely do not need to emphasize the sexual nature of the lyrics. In fact, you wholly ruin both the joke and song if you do.

So forget about the Princess. Instead consider Yuba, who plays the rhumba on the Tuba. Who plays the rhumba on the Tuba down in Cuba (oompah-oompah-oompah). And who has led me to a clip I'm absolutely obsessed with.

I first heard this song many years ago (at least 30, probably more) when the NYC PBS station would sometimes show some odd sing-along films from the 1930s called "Screen Shorts" made by the Fleischer Studios. I remember Baby Rose Marie (who grew up to be Sally Rogers) belting out "Love Thy Neighbor" (which I remember for the painful rhyme of "Walk up and say how be ya'; Gee but I'm glad to see ya', pal"). I also remember the Mills Brothers in their early years singing (a cappella) "When Yuba plays the rhumba on the tuba". The musical phrase has stayed in my head all these years. So I thought that maybe YouTube would have the film clip. YouTube, unfortunately, does not have the film clip I'm looking for -- or any of the bouncing-ball clips I'm remembering, which makes me think they fall under copyright. I have found a listing of the clips on the web, but not the clips themselves.

Disappointing as this was, it did lead me to a gem of a clip I have become obsessed with, and it's not even a vintage clip. It turns out that "When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba" is not all that rare of a song. There are many old recordings of it, including a horrific one by Rudy Vallee (who I have read was an absolute asshole, and you just have to listen to his pretentious recording of this song to believe it -- he trills his Rs and pronounces "Rhumba" as "roombah"). It also has been arranged as a novelty piece for tuba and band, and it gets played a lot it seems.

What I've found that I love so very much is a recording of an unnamed community band in an unnamed location playing this piece, with a tuba player who sings -- and who is identified only as "Paco" but that may be a joke. Now tubas really don't lend themselves to melody like this -- if you've ever heard a tuba play the piccolo line for the Stars and Stripes Forever (as which of us bandies has not) you'll know what I mean. But this guy just has an absolute blast. He switches registers. He triple tongues. He riffs outrageously on the melody. He's also really cute.

That alone would be fun, particularly since absolutely everything about the clip is completely familiar, in an old-home comforting sort of way, to those of us who have spent countless hours standing in the back of the band at outdoor venues like this. But then halfway through the clip this guy puts down his tuba and starts to sing the song. My ears perked up and my jaw dropped because he sounds EXACTLY like a 1940s big band singer (except he does a little bit more rhythmic playing than a big band singer would have done). When the melody drops down low he plays with his tone.He wiggles his eyebrows at the suggestive lines (in pleasure at the words, it seems, not so much in lewdness). I love that at 1:52 he wiggles his hips on the one word "mean" ("He blows a meeean horn"). His intonation is astoundingly clean. Then he picks up his tuba again and goes into more tuba tour-de-force, playing more notes per measure than any arranger would dare give a tuba (at about 2:50).

There's also a clip on YouTube of Lawrence Welk's tuba player (Buddy Hayes) singing and playing this song. He may be a professional, but he can't hold a candle to Paco.

As I say, I'm just obsessed with this clip. Maybe you'll want to play it over and over as well:

There's still a song I've been looking for all these years that I haven't found yet. In the New York area back in the early seventies there was a radio show called something like "Danny Stiles Trivia Nostalgia", on which they played 78s. I could swear I once heard a recording of the Andrews Sisters singing a song about Hokokus New Jersey, and I seem to remember the line "The fracas will be raucous when Hohokus meets Secaucus". Perhaps that will appear on YouTube someday as well and then my life will be complete. But only if "Paco" sings it.

[FOLLOWUP: One of the recordings on YouTube is of a 78 of Harry Reser's orchestra playing this song, and the singer is a classic vaudevillean bright-voiced tenor who rings out on the top notes, but when the melody line at the end of each verse goes way down (the melody is meant to be an instrumental thing really, not a vocal line) he goes into rhythmic talking, while the tuba plays the melody he should be singing. So bravo Paco for being able to handle it.]

Why I don't Readily Call the Doctor
There are many things that go into our choices of what we do, and where our stress points are.

Let's say, for example, that everybody says, "Oh, you need to have your foot x-rayed." And how, exactly, does one do that? Does one look up "radiology" in the phone book? Does one walk into an emergency room for something that is not an emergency? What?

So I called my physician, but of course he has no x-ray equipment (which I knew) and he's not in today anyway and nobody else is free today to see me so they suggest I call my insurance customer service provider for in-network providers with x-ray equipment. Oh, that was after a 15-minute wait to speak to the receptionist (which, admittedly, is quite rare at this office). Anyway, the call to my insurance provider required several voice-activated menus and another 15 minutes of waiting. I spoke to a representative and explained my situation and got a couple of numbers, presumably of radiologists.

The first number did not answer. Not even a machine. The second number was that of a heart-scan specialist at the local hospital which has nothing to do with what I need. She, however, was able to give me the number of the actual radiology department. But the radiology department it turns out doesn't just take patients off the street, they require a doctor's referral. So I could go back to square one and call my doctor back and just arrange for the next available appointment whenever that might fall, but instead of calling my doctor back I called the orthopedist's office where I had my elbow-bursitis treated which I thought of calling in the first place but do you really just call a medical specialist like that and say "x-ray my foot"? I thought you had to be referred to a specialist by your primary doctor, because of how insurance works. Of course there are no available appointments anyway at the local branch of the orthopedics practice for at least this week, but if I go to a suburban location I can see an orthopedist tomorrow morning and that's what I will do. It may wind up costing me a bit extra to have gone this route, of going directly to a specialist.

So now I will actually be seeing an orthopedist in about 24 hours time. And even that is just to see if the orthopedist recommends that I have the x-ray done and that will probably involve yet another appointment at yet another place. Did I mention that driving is a little uncomfortable for me at the moment? 'Cause, you know, I have a swollen and sore right foot.

If I don't see a doctor, there is the risk that rest and time and such will not really be enough here and that there might be long-term problems that could be avoided if I see a doctor. I doubt this -- I am, after all, getting better each day. But even making these arrangements has been what is for me a form of hell (I know not everybody is so stressed out by this rigamarole, but I am). How does anybody who is actually sick or in immediate pain manage this?

Everybody I spoke with was perky and sweet and friendly. This is Minnesota. Everybody did their absolute best to take their time with me and try to figure out what I needed to do. This was the right course to follow, all told. But is it any wonder that many of us avoid doing this?

Blurring the Line Between Animal and Vegetable
It does kind of look like an eggplant, doesn't it?

A Morris Dance Exercise
I injured my foot pretty badly dancing in the parade at the Renaissance Festival yesterday (it slipped or turned and my hopping weight fell on it and down I went). As a result, in a sort of subconscious way, I find myself wondering how anybody could possibly want to dance since my body at the moment is telling me to just sit still and not move perhaps ever again. It's like watching people eat when you have a stomach virus; you wonder why anybody would ever want to put food in their mouths. To combat this, I want to write a little bit about the exercise we did to start off the Morris Intensive week at Pinewoods last July. I don't write this for the purpose of suggesting an exercise for anybody to do, but to examine a little bit about what it can mean to dance with other people. The class leaders had one goal in mind here, and I took away something else.

I'm also writing about this because a few weeks ago I ran into a Morris dancer from another local team who had been reading my accounts of this program and she said that she had expected me to be writing more about the actual exercises we performed in class rather than the more emotive responses I had been describing. So this is in large part a response to that, which I've been meaning to write up.

Remember that this was the very first thing we did, before we all knew each other as dancers, at least collectively. In looking back at this, I can see how very key this was in starting us off, in terms of how I felt about things.

For the exercise, we faced outward in a circle, so we couldn't see each other. The class musician started up a tune and we were instructed to start dancing -- whatever Morris steps the music told us to dance, in no particular tradition although we all drew on traditions we knew best. It's key here that the class members have enough experience to do this -- it's not a beginner's exercise. After a while we turned to face in, while still dancing, and coalesced into groups of four, ostensibly getting together with others who were dancing similarly, but that wasn't terribly key. At this point, without talking, we danced with each other in our groups until we were doing the same stepping sequence -- adding things at the end of the musical phrases, perhaps, but working to dance together, to feel the dance together, to match each other.

From here we were asked to come up with a word to describe what characterized the stepping sequence we had developed, and then to dance some more to work on emphasizing that word in the dance. Then each group danced for the rest of the class, who had to guess the word based on the dancing.

The next day (after some intervening exercises) we divided into the same groups and were given one of the other group's words and we had to modify the style of the stepping sequence we had come up with the previous day so that it conveyed this other adjective.

What the instructors wanted to encourage was the idea of a Morris "style" independent of the particular steps/tradition, as well as working together to achieve and communicate this. And this was all well and good, but some other things were happening for me here.

For one thing: This was the best way I can think of to start from minute one dancing with the other participants. No wonder that by the end of the week I started to feel as if these folks were on a team with me. I also don't have much experience in my life of communicating without words, of getting to know other people through the dance alone. This felt wonderful. I suppose to some extent we were sussing each other out, but not in a hot-dogging competitive way (well, not beyond the feeling that we absolutely had to keep up, in my case with the younger dancers). We were learning how we danced, how we danced with each other. This was great fun, with give and take and continuous uninterrupted word-free dancing.

There is often a problem at Morris practices of most teams where the temptation to talk through a dance when teaching it starts to cut too much into actual dancing. This may be necessary -- it's certainly a common style of teaching. But at the core you just want to dance, to jump in and feel it. Which, practically, you can only do if there is a critical mass of dancers who already knows the style and dance. But here we had an exercise which let you just dance, without all that talking through.

This was a nice start.

I hope that my describing this exercise gives some idea of what, exactly, we did at an "Advanced Morris dance" class, and maybe why it turned on all the Morris switches in my brain. But mostly I hope that by remembering that exercise and what it felt like I can forget that just at the moment I can barely walk.

Sweet Thames Flow Softly
It's my last day in London. I'm taking an Internet break between Covent Garden and my second trip today to the National Gallery. When a museum is free and central you can drop by and return, which is quite civilized. I approached the museum this morning as I often approach a large flea market: I walked quickly through, to assess what was there and to get my bearings, stopping now and then and planning to return later at a slower pace. Unfortunately later will not encompass enough time, but -- oh, how can I put this? I know! There will always be an England.

I think I'm still reeling from this morning's experience of standing a few inches away from Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". It wasn't a refrigerator magnet, or a note card, or an umbrella's print. No, it was a painting.

I arrived here a week ago, and went out the first night with my hosts Peter and Miko who meet up at a different pub each week with their Goth friends. First we had delicious Pan-Asian food. I was so tired, and paying so little attention, that I didn't even realize that we were in the East End, an area of London that escaped my neighborhood-by-neighborhood exploration during my ten-day trip here in 1984. My research at the time indicated there wasn't really much to see there, and it was dangerous to boot. Now it is not only the hip neighborhood, but it is fast becoming too gentrified for the hip. I was back there a few night's later for dinner with some friends of mine at a super-hip Swedish restaurant where I ate reindeer sausage with untrammeled glee.

I had a fine time at the pub, mostly talking to some Australians.

Then it was off to Yorkshire for the weekend, about which I have written. The singing in Yorkshire already seems a long time and a different trip ago.

Since returning to London, I have filled my time:

- Monday I again joined Peter and Miko, this time for a dinner at a Mexican restaurant to celebrate the birthday of the husband of a close friend of Miko's.

- Tuesday was shopping day, as previously reported.

- Tuesday night was Swedish dinner with friends in the East End.

- Wednesday I slept in -- I think I had been building up to that, but it seems a waste of London time to do so. Then I went to the National Portrait Gallery in the afternoon, an adventure that deserves its own account in reminiscence when I return.

- Wednesday night I was able to snag a ticket to a production of La Cage Aux Folles starring Torchwood's John Barrowman. Although I could offer various criticisms, I won't because on the whole this turned out to be an easy sweet pleasure of little intellectual engagement.

- On Wednesday, between the Portrait Gallery and the theater, I stood in Trafalgar Square (which is between those two things) and let it overwhelm me, that here I was at Lord Nelson's statue looking at the Thames in the distance with St. Martin in the Fields behind me and evidence of London's past all around. I cried at it all, but don't ask me why -- the response "Because here I am in LONDON" probably wouldn't be a satisfactory answer for you, I'm guessing, and yet it's all the answer there is.

- And now it's Thursday. This morning, after a cup of coffee at "The Crypt" of St Martin in the Fields, I spent some time at the National Gallery. Then I walked the streets around Covent Garden, stopping for a fine Italian meal. I spent a fair amount of time at the bookstore of the Transport Museum -- I've been to the museum, but I needed time with the expensive coffee-table books about the history of the London Underground. Each time I come I get a better sense of the city, and these books hold more interest. I plan to return to the National Gallery in a few minutes.

- Tonight I end the trip as I began it: Joining Peter and Miko and their Thursday night companions. This trip I didn't set out on my own in the evenings, as I've done in the past.

That's my three days in London. Between all that I described here was an awful lot of walking.

Tomorrow I fly home. This weekend, if I have the energy, I'll be joining MTM to dance at the Renaissance Festival. And cleaning my apartment for a guest who will be staying with me next weekend for our shapenote convention. Because next week I have to do the shopping and cooking and other preparations for that convention.

But that's next week. For now I'll be enjoying my remaining London hours.

Shopping Day in London Town
Yesterday I stood in front of Selfridge's on Oxford street and looked up at the absurdly ornate 1909 facade, the pinnacle of Imperialism and Empire made manifest through -- a department store! The entryway continues this theme where a life-size bronze Nouveau statue of a 30-foot giantess greets you with hauteur.

I was able to find a replacement for my extra-large all-bristle handled Mason Pearson hairbrush on the fourth floor (in the Mason-Pearson brush display). The elderly sales clerk was very kindly and concerned that I know just how much this cost in dollars, and I assured him I did and that I had made a special trip just for this purchase. I walked off with the best hairbrush ever in my messenger bag and I was a happy man.

I went to look at the shoes, of which there were many manufactured by prestigious designers. I tell you, if I were the sort of person who was able to spend five or six hundred dollars per pair on my shoes I would be a very happy man. I would also own several styles of dress shoes and boots in purple and green suede, so perhaps it is for the best that I am restrained from those impulses. I went to look at shoes (at Selfridge's and at John Lewis and at some smaller emporiums) because the sales clerk at the store in Minneapolis where I used to buy my Havana Joes (no longer distributed in the US) suggested they might still be available in England. Alas, this notion was chimerical.

After lunch at the Fish! restaurant at the Borough market beneath the London Bridge (I really got around) I went to Sloane Square so I could walk down King's Road to Tabio, my favorite sock store in the world. But first I stopped at Peter Jones, where on a previous trip I had found fancy dress socks in the colors of my Morris team (vivid yellow with thin green accent stripes). This time I found gloves, having noted at Selfridge's that the men's gloves here are thinner and more flexible than those I find in the US -- like gentlemen's gloves in the age of livery. But at Selfridge's the gloves, like all things, require a second mortgage. At Peter Jones the gloves were the cost of gloves (as opposed to the cost of a plane ticket). But here's the fancy part: I found white cotton mens dress gloves! I told the cashier that it's very difficult to find these in the US. He said that it's pretty difficult in England as well. They were remarkably inexpensive. Later my friend Chris asked me what I would wear them for and I realized that the answer is I have absolutely no idea.

Then I restocked on Japanese socks at Tabio, purchasing enough socks to last me until my next trip to London I hope.

I ended the afternoon with a walk up Charing Cross Road, where the scores of used bookstores of legend have been so greatly reduced in number that there remain only three or four. But these -- plus the regular bookstores -- kept me occupied for a couple of hours. I came close to purchasing only one book (a 1930s anthology of whimsical writings called something like "the nonsibus"), but any book I purchase will likely need to be carried in my luggage so that keeps me from acquiring much. Sometimes.

Since I am spending no weekends here there will be no flea markets this time, but that just means I'll have to come back soon. Maybe next month.

Shapenote in Yorkshire
Here I am in England, having spent last weekend at the UK Sacred Harp convention in Marsden. No, I keep explaining to people, singing shapenote from the Sacred Harp is not a British tradition. No, shapenote in the US is not an archaic remnant of an older British tradition, and I am not returning to the root of the roots. Going to England to sing shapenote is like going to Japan to play Bluegrass.

But the where and the how and the why are not my concern here. They are the wrong questions. What matters is that there are shapenote enthusiasts in England, a variety of them, with differing interests and concerns. Many of them have been my friends for nearly a decade now. Many more are becoming my friends with each trip I make to sing with them (this is my fourth). For whatever this singing offers me, when I sit in a hollow square and look around and sing out, I find this in abundance here far afield. Plus I get the best excuse ever to come to England, and I get an experience unlike that of a stereotypical tourist.

I attended my first UK Sacred Harp convention in 2000, when I was making a lark of a trip to England during a work Sabbatical on frequent-flier miles that by complete coincidence happened to fall at the same time as the convention. Based on various reports that had come across the ocean, I expected a sort of choral or even academic approach to this music, like that of some of the groups in the Northeast US who had explored this music from that angle. And while it's true that I found a style of singing that was more choral than I have found in the southern US, what I mostly found was a group of people who welcomed me like family and who love singing this music and who treated me like an honored guest.

Now, in 2009, the singing in England has changed somewhat. Many of the Brits have spent time in the US, singing this music with its traditional practitioners. They sing out. They sing confidently. They will, on occasion, look you in the eye and communicate with you as you sing. Also they enunciate their consonants. They join you at the pub. They feed you dinner, and tea and cakes at teatime. Any US singer would feel right at home in the singing, and deeply embraced by the singers.

Oh, and plus this year the singing took place among the beautiful sheep-drenched hills of Yorkshire, in an old town of winding streets and historic buildings with a good pub and a coffee shop with good coffee (I was told this is a recent phenomenon, the coffee). I stayed in a bed and breakfast in Elland outside of Huddlesfield, in what had been a coach house in the 19th century, in a comfortable bed in a room with an ensuite shower and a view out my window of tottering brick buildings and glorious countryside beyond.

In short, I did a lot of singing and talked with a lot of people and ate a lot of food and I did all this in a foreign land in a beautiful area and it was a fine, fine time.

Photos from Omaha
Jim managed to sneak a couple of pictures while I wasn't looking so I share them with us all to show some nice moments of my trip to Omaha for the wedding of my young friend Kaitlin.

This was taken at what was technically the rehearsal dinner on Friday evening -- it was a buffet in a backyard rather than a sitdown formal meal, which I think worked very well for mingling and meeting. The bride and her swing-dancing friends went from the party to the regular swing dance in Omaha, but before they left the bridesmaid/musician Annette and I started singing some swing music and then we started to dance to the accompaniment of our own voices. I've known Annette since she was quite young (that is, even younger than now). She's wearing a bridesmaid dress from a previous wedding. The picture is a little blurred, but I think that makes it look arty and I think Annette looks beautiful here. I like this picture very much.

[Click twice to enlarge]

On Saturday morning Jim and Denise and I went to the Omaha Farmer's market, where a great little Cajun band was playing. I started doing a few dance steps off to the side, and when the group finished they asked me to please keep dancing. When they started up again, Denise was certainly game to join me (big surprise). I'm impressed at what you can take from a phone these days. [Again, click to enlarge...]

Finally here's a picture of the bridal couple, stolen from the bride's Facebook. Apparently this is the moment when the bride realized she had birdseed stuck in her cleavage. It was a beautiful dress, although in this picture you can't see the elegant drape of the skirt. Kaitlin is quite tall, magnificently tall with a proud carriage, and this dress is so right for her.

The weather was lovely and the wedding was very pleasant and I did a bunch of silly dancing with the bride's geek friends, in my role as crazy uncle Steven. Fortunately there are no pictures of that.

So Much Wasted Time
Since returning from Morris Intensive I've been enjoying attending MTM practice and learning a bunch of different Morris dance styles and traditions. But there really are a lot of different things to be taking in, with not a lot of drill, and I keep thinking that this would go such much better and deeper if there weren't a full week between practices. I mean, at this point in my life I have to write down everything I'm doing at work on Friday afternoon so I'll remember where I was on Monday morning. Right now I'm in the mindset where I'd love to be dancing several times a week. So I got to thinking about how skilled we all would have been, how much we would have in the way of basic dance moves, if they had used gym class time in junior high and high school to teach Morris dancing. That would be 40 minutes of work five days a week.

Even a small bit of think-through exposes some gargantuan problems with this idea, though. First of all, the school system would completely kill the joy and leave the entire enterprise tainted. But even more importantly, Morris dance does not really exist in isolation. It is not about learning a specific skill set, it's about performing a role in a community. It's about having an identity as a member of a team. An imposed and required session of gym class would not make a team. No, this would be neither fun nor good.

But once I started thinking along these lines, of how much we could have learned in terms of physical skills in the context of a daily gym class, I found myself getting pointlessly angry. Gym class is one of those things for me that completely left my mind and consciousness the minute I walked away (not just on graduation, but every single day), so it's not as if this is a lingering lifetime resentment. No, this resentment is new. And the resentment is: What an astonishing and horrific waste of time and opportunity gym class was. My gosh, nearly five hours a week every single week was completely stolen from a period of our lives that wasn't all that rich in time to begin with.

I don't have the horror stories of humiliation and ostracism that many others have told about gym class. I even have some very happy memories of standing in the back of the volleyball court with my friend Russell where we tried to come up with ideas for Busby Berkeley dance routines that used the paraphernalia of the gymnasium (chorines dressed in giant jock straps!). I had no drill-sargent gym teachers trying to make a man out of me; I mostly remember nice guys who just wanted to play sports. This may sound odd in retrospect, but as far as I can recall my gym teachers treated me as I remember most of my teachers treating me: with a sort of respect and deference. Seriously. I didn't enjoy their games and they didn't push it. I showed up and participated minimally and that was our compromise. So no wonder I don't remember great resentment at the time.

But now, thinking back? What on earth was that all about? What an absolute and complete and inexcusable fricking waste of time that all was.

Could I possibly be the only one who thinks so?

For Kimuchi
Look Kim: The intersection of your passion and mine.

My Life as a Morris Double Agent
Early Saturday morning I donned my new black sneakers and borrowed MTM Renfest Kit and I adjusted my landlord's old baldrics and I affixed my landlord's old pouch to my belt and I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and there I was, in complete disguise as a member of the other Morris team. I felt as strangely dissociated as I did the very first time I put on my police uniform to march with the Minneapolis Police Band -- as if the person looking back at me in the mirror was not me at all. But I also felt as proud as I did the very first Mayday I donned Braggarts kit to begin my life as a Morris dancer. That day was akin to my bar mitzvah: "Today I am a Morris dancer".

Various members of MTM had the same response to my disguise, when they saw me later. They would see me from a distance, in my new faux-Renaissance beret and full MTM kit, and as I came close enough to discern they would do a double-take. This was most satisfying. I felt like a true sneak.

Except for the opening Abram's and the processional in the parade, I didn't dance in the morning -- there were more than plenty of actual members of MTM and these were performances, mostly of dances we hadn't run at any of the practices I'd attended. Besides, I'm not particularly comfortable performing dances I don't know well, and I don't think there's a single MTM dance I'd say I know well. But as they started to notice that I hadn't danced the members of MTM went out of their way to see how they could include me -- asking me what dances I'd want to do, assuring me that it's just fine to mess up a little bit for the RenFest audience. So in the afternoon I danced a lot.

I tried very hard to dance across from Temple or Derek whenever possible. It's a very difficult thing to coach somebody through a dance they either don't know or hardly know while they are in the midst of dancing it -- most dancers start shouting things at you that don't help you in the slightest. But Temple, for example, during a Fieldtown Forester, will say at just the right moment in the dance: "Let your hanky float down" which is exactly the sort of instruction you need that will suddenly bring the feel of the dance into focus. Derek is particularly brilliant at telling you what your next step is in a figure at just the right time using just the right words. I was a little bit embarrassed to be out there in public not quite getting the beginnings of my figures right, but I did find my way into most of the dances soon enough and I certainly had a wonderful time.

Dancing on the Braggarts, for the most part, does not prepare you at all for dancing in with any other team in any other tradition in any other style. On the other hand, dancing with the Braggarts as training for dancing with another team is like training for a race with weights. Once I learned to dance low and even and once I started to get the feel for single steps (the Braggarts have none) I was amazed at how you can finish a dance without having reached the edge of exhaustion.

It was a great sadness that I was unable to return to dance on Sunday, and it is an even greater sadness that I'll be traveling for the next three weekends. Given my experience on Saturday, I would so for sure be out there both days every weekend this year. Let's hope I'm still feeling like this next year.

The Collected Morris Writings of Squire Steven
From the time I started to dance the Morris, I have been documenting my experiences and thoughts. This is an annotated index of links to my Morris writings.

( It's all behind a cut tag, of course. )

Soon to be in England
Three weeks from now I should be finding myself in Marsden, Huddersfield in Yorkshire in the UK. There I'll be attending the UK Shapenote Singing Convention.

It is generally a great pleasure of mine to anticipate and plan and savor the preparations for big trips like these. I spent thirteen months dreaming of Australia, before going there for the first time a few years back. In 1984 I made my first trip to England, and it was a big one; I spent 11 months doing research and taking notes and making plans. I realized I'd taken this a bit too far when about a month before my departure I found that I could, from memory, draw a map of London -- both before and after the building of Charing Cross Road in the 19th century. Yeah, I know.

But lately life overtakes me a bit more, and I find these trips are upon me before I've had much of a chance to imagine and anticipate. Technically I've been planning this trip for nearly two years, since I learned from my Brit shapenote friends Judy and Chris that this year's convention would be in their area, in Yorkshire. I've been to England three times previous specifically to sing with my friends there -- one memorable time I was pretty much there for the weekend only. But my overseas companions have come here to the US many more times than I've gone over there, and the tradition is that when somebody comes to your singing you owe them payback. Poor me, alas, to have such an obligation to go to England.

I'm pretty short on vacation days with my current job, so I've been hoarding vacation days and even putting money aside for this trip for a long time. It was going to be a big vacation, maybe two weeks or longer. But my somewhat last minute decision to attend Morris Intensive at Pinewoods took away one week of vacation days plus a good bit of my vacation fund. I have no regrets whatsover about that decision, but it does mean that this trip will be only about a week long.

I arrive in London on Thursday September 9 where I'll be staying with

pir (waves to Peter) but only briefly since I leave for Yorkshire the next day for the weekend of singing. I may stay on an extra day or two in Yorkshire before returning to London, as I've never been to that area of England, But then I fly out of London to head home the next Friday so this will be pretty whirlwind. My only real plans for London are to do some very specific shopping: I need a new Mason Pearson hairbrush in a size and style that's not available here, I desperately need new Havana Joe cap-toed boots which are no longer distributed in this country, and I want to make my way to the London branch of the Japanese sock store Tabio because they sell the most durable most vivid yellow sports socks, which I require for my Morris kit. Other than that? Who knows? This is my sad attempt to play things by ear -- I've left, oh, nearly an entire day unplanned!

I wrote my friend Judy yesterday to let her know I was coming and to ask about hotels near the singing convention. Almost immediately she wrote back, having made reservations for me at what looks like a fine and reasonable hotel and she has arranged transportation from London for me (it's otherwise three trains and over three hours) and she has invited me to her home for a social event or two. Talk about being made to feel welcome!

So now I have just over two weeks to fall into reveries about this upcoming trip. My friend Bob Walser may even be in Yorkshire while I'm there, so I have to check on that. I need a new suitcase. Since my last visit to London I've purchased a couple of books about London landmarks and architecture so maybe I'll plan a nice little walking tour -- oh wait, I guess I've just filled in my free day. Ooops.

Yes, the fun begins!

Minneapolis Tornado on YouTube
I've put these links on Facebook, but they're worth putting here as well.

Yesterday afternoon a tornado -- or possibly a tornado -- touched down in my neighborhood. I'm fine, my street is fine, my residence is fine, and while lots of people can't say the same about their property there do not appear to have been any injuries. But in this modern age, everything gets documented and sometimes that's cool.

So, for example, somebody downtown managed to take this photo, which was online within minutes. In this photo the funnel is just south and east of where I live and moving north and west.

funnel in my city

Today somebody put up the following on YouTube. It is a video of the damage eight blocks south of where I live.

This next video was taken only three blocks west of where I live. The person who put it up wrote: "security camera footage from my work, you can see the tornado spin up, drop a tree on the van in the upper right and then empty the little pond."

As my friend Charles Wells points out: "Notice that at 40 seconds the wind was blowing left to right and at 1:10 it was blowing right to left. That's a whirlwind."

It was all very dramatic. I've been buried in my office all day so I don't know how things are going in the cleanup and electricity restoration, but they were moving pretty quickly yesterday on all counts.

There's often a tendency to talk about how you "just missed" something awful. As in "If I were one foot over I would have gone over the side of the road." To which I always think, "And if you were one foot over in the other direction you'd have no story at all here." In other words, as a rule I find "just-missed disasters" to be of little interest as stories. But sometimes we really do just miss a disaster. Most residents of the Twin Cities could easily have been on that bridge that fell. And in this case -- well, as I say, that first video is pretty much my neighborhood. We are probably all lucky that nobody seems to have been hurt.

The Facebook Bridge to Improbability
Interlocking connections and improbable networks have always ruled my life. More than one friend has said that "Six Degrees of Separation" becomes "Three Degrees of Separation" if I am somewhere in the nexus. Or maybe two degrees. Even so, there is usually some logical reason for the connection, something to do with the Brown Band or Morris dancing or whatever subworld I have passed through in my journey through this earthly plane.

Then along comes Facebook, which throws up random and inexplicable connections.

I have recently upped my involvement with Facebook, which means that I'm starting to send friend requests to people I know. As part of this process, I looked over my college friend Joel's friends list in search of fellow Brown connections. Joel is the sort who would be up-to-date about this sort of thing. And there, buried among some Brown Band folks I haven't seen or thought about in thirty years, was Michael, the father of Emma, who is one of the young Morris dancers I met the other week. Michael is a contra dance musician and Morris dancer in NYC, where Joel lives; the reason I recognized him immediately is that he is on the friends list of many of my new Morris connections (and I recognized the last name).

But -- but -- Joel has no ties to any folkie world I know of. And you know, it's not as if New York City is a small town. So remind me again -- how many people live in the world? This was a little bit head-spinning for me.

So I wrote Joel. It turns out his mother and Michael's mother were friends back in Joel's Brooklyn childhood, through some PTA and politics connections. Oh, and Michael went to Joel's high school (John Dewey), although I think a little bit after Joel. And then a generation later it transpired that Michael's other daughter went to elementary school with Joel's now-teenaged daughter, and the girls were close friends back then. It's not that Joel and Michael are particularly close, but as Joel put it: "Michael is the only non-family member that I'm still in touch with from the Johnson administration." All of these are reasonable New York City connections, although the reconnection as adults through their daughters' school starts falling into the realm of coincidence.

About ten years ago (I suppose at the re-connection) Joel learned of Michael's involvement with Morris dance and asked if he knew me, but he did not. My connections to east coast Morris were minimal until, oh, just two weeks ago.

As I say, I found this head-spinning. And there's also the viewpoint shift. My unearthed connection to Joel is through somebody from his daughters' cohort. But, um, I know Joel's daughters best as little girls, and the most time I spent with them was when I visited the family at their summer home on Block Island 9 years ago. I know the girls have grown up a bit, but suddenly I have to think of Emma as being the age of these lovely little girls, as opposed to somebody I'm on a Morris team with, whose dancing skill I admire. I don't think I like this.

Oh wait -- this gets weirder. I know Joel's mother; I've known her since Joel and I were in college. So, technically, my Facebook line of connection here is through Emma's grandmother. Head. Spin.

I think Facebook is dangerous.