On her afternoon talk show some years ago, Oprah Winfrey shared a list of eight powerful women she thought we should all know— as if we might encounter any of them at the grocery store or on the bus. I remember one of them got my attention—Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps better known to some of you as Nancy McNally from the The West Wing, or as Gloria in Nurse Jackie. She told Oprah that woman should be bolder; that we should argue as much as our male counterparts, and that we shouldn’t try so hard to avoid conflict. We should speak up and out, she said. Boldly.
We should, and we do. At least two of us—the only two women ever nominated to be president by a major party—ran for President of the United States by doing so. They lost. Of course they lost. As post-election analyses continue to dissect the results with historians and pundits presenting their conclusions about why America overwhelmingly chose to elect Trump again, the fact remains that the United States is still bedeviled by misogyny. If you don’t want to go that far, you’ll maybe look up and see that there’s only one crack in the ultimate glass ceiling.
Gender has always played a role in presidential politics, and the 2024 campaign was no exception. During the last one hundred odd days of it, we heard many of the same old story lines from the same old playbook that, according to Kristina Wilfore, co-founder #shepersisted “undermine voter behavior toward women,”
Gendered disinformation is the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and images against women political leaders, journalists, and female public figures. Following story lines that draw on misogyny, and gendered stereotypes, the goal of these attacks is to frame female politicians and government officials as inherently untrustworthy, unintelligent, unlikable, or uncontrollable – too emotional to hold office or participate in democratic politics.
Vice President Harris chose to downplay her gender, her eyes fixed on a new era where it would be irrelevant in America. She rarely spoke about it or the historic nature of her candidacy as potentially the first Black woman to be elected president. Instead, she talked about the cost of groceries and prescription drugs and issues that should have galvanized the Democratic party—affordable housing, protecting reproductive rights, bringing an end to gun violence, and strengthening the middle class. But it didn’t work, and too many Democrats chose to stay home on November 5th. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies chose to talk a whole lot about the Vice President’s gender, to exploit it, with some of his allies branding her a “DEI candidate,” “a childless cat lady,” “crazy,” “dumb as a rock.” One of them even likened her to a prostitute at a Madison Square Rally in the final stretch of the campaign.
She rose above it all. Was that a mistake? Maybe. Maybe she should have confronted him directly about his misogynistic remarks. Maybe during her one debate with him, she should have challenged him passionately on his overt sexism and his plans to put women back in their place, where he will protect us “whether we like it or not.” Maybe the more apathetic voters in those all-important swing states would have been more motivated to vote if they had seen Harris campaign harder on breaking the glass ceiling. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.
Sure. Women turned out for Harris. She won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but her opponent won an even wider margin with women who did not go to college. And, in 2024 there were more of them who voted. Add his gains with men in every age group, there was just no way for Harris to make up that ground, no path to victory. In a nutshell, Trump won the working and middle classes, and Kamala Harris won over college-educated people who are financially better-off. Why? Maybe the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office is too much for the United States.
Maybe not. Maybe misogyny wasn’t the deciding factor in Trump’s victory, but for many women it certainly feels like the “same old tired playbook”helped him win. It will take some time to retire that particular playbook. The fight will take time, as Kamala Harris reminded us in her concession speech, but “That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”
It will take outrageous acts—lots of them.
An Outrageous Act
The week before Barack Obama won his second term, I met Gloria Steinem in Phoenix. Following her remarks at a YWCA luncheon, she described a deal she has been making for years at the end of organizing events. To sustain momentum, she promised organizers that if, in the next 24 hours, they would do just one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, that she would do the same. She told us it could be anything. Anything we wanted it to be. She also said that only we would know what it should be—pick it up yourself, run for office, suggest that everyone in the office say out loud how much they make thereby allowing everyone to know who is being discriminated against.
In return, Steinem guaranteed two outcomes. First, she guaranteed that after just one day, the world would be a better place, and secondly that we would have a good time. Never again would we wake up wondering if we would do an outrageous thing; rather, we would wake up and consider which outrageous thing we might do today, tomorrow, and the next day.
I’m not sure I did anything that even felt remotely bold or outrageous until I was in my forties. The principal of a small high school in Phoenix at the time, I was struggling to turn it around while dealing with the devastating impact of a new Arizona law, Proposition 300. It required me to inform 38 of my bright immigrant students that they would no longer be able to take state-funded college courses, because they were in the country without documentation. They had been brought to the US as infants by parents in pursuit of a better life for them, but without Social Security Numbers or visas, the American Dream would remain achingly elusive.
The irony wasn’t lost on me as an immigrant from Northern Ireland, being asked to segregate children at school—school which should be the sacred space in any country – placing those who could prove citizenship in college classes and denying those who could not prove residency and could certainly not afford to pay their own way. Over 90% of my students lived below the American poverty level. The law was unfair. It felt un-American and anti-immigrant. To be specific, it felt anti-Mexican immigrant. My white Northern European skin seemed much more acceptable. Who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day? Because nobody told me what to do or what not to do about my students, I decided to reach out to the local media and anyone who would listen. By my own standards, this was outrageous. Bold, I even asked for money. The kindness of strangers helped raised over $100,000 to pay for tuition. The world was a little better, the way Gloria Steinem would one day tell me it would be, and the story made it to the New York Times, “A Principal Sees Injustice and Picks a Fight with It.”
Of all people, Anna Deavere Smith read the New York Times on a morning in March 2008 during a trip to Phoenix. Later that day, during Spring parent-teacher conferences, Nancy from the West Wing arrived at my office. Initially star-struck, I wasn’t sure what to say to one of Oprah’s phenomenal women. But as she explained what she was doing in Phoenix, we fell into an easy conversation that covered a lot of ground—from Northern Ireland to Arizona. She was in town to interview, along with me, an array of politicians, community activists, lawyers, and incarcerated women, for her one-woman play, “The Arizona Project,” commissioned to honor the 2006 naming of Arizona State University’s law school for retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—the first U.S. law school to be named for a woman. We talked about our respective childhoods, and Anna recalled that when she was a girl, her grandfather had told her that
. . . if you say a word enough, it becomes you.
Walking in Other People’s Words
Inspired, Anna Deavere Smith traveled around the United States, interviewing people touched by some of our most harrowing social and racial tensions, recording her conversations with them, and shaping them into collections of monologues which she presents, verbatim, on stage. Using the real words of real people, Anna Deavere Smith breathes in – and out – America. It was surreal, sitting in my office talking to an acclaimed actress. She had “people” who set up the camera in my office and left us to chat about justice and education and my beloved Seamus Heaney.
A fan of Heaney, she admired the picture of him hanging on my office wall. I made a copy of it for her, and now that he’s gone, I like knowing his picture hangs in our respective living rooms.
Worlds apart but connected all the same.
When our conversation ended, and the camera and tape recorder packed away, Anna Deavere Smith told her assistant to be sure to get a picture of the shoes. My shoes. They weren’t my favorites. They were uncomfortable. Beige, high-heeled and professional, chosen that morning I suppose in an effort to look a bit bolder at work, to be perceived as strong— a part of my armor.
Changing shoes between each of her monologues, Anna Deavere Smith walked for miles in our words, in our world. Boldly, she crisscrossed Arizona and America and showed us ourselves—how interconnected we are—prison system employees, incarcerated women, female lawyers, immigration activists and others including Justice O’Connor who was in the audience, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Mayor of Phoenix, and the principal I was at the time. We were looking in the mirror, and much of what we saw was bleak. At the same time, with a brand new President elected the night before, there was hope in the air.
It’s time to get back at it, to look in the mirror, to take a walk in the shoes of other people—people with whom we vehemently disagree, people who appear to want something very different from the same place all Americans call home. This is not the time to retreat or to recriminate. It’s a time for boldness, and I can think of no better voice to remind us than that of Seamus Heaney:
… make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
Scrolling through social media earlier, I spotted an update that on this day 40 years ago, Bob Dylan played at Slane Castle in Ireland. I was there. I don’t remember all the details — it’s been 40 years — but I remember UB40 and Santana and Van Morrison played too and that Bono joined Dylan on “Blowing in the Wind” and improvised the lyrics. Seriously. Nostalgic and forgetting who went with me, I updated my Facebook status with this information adding that I still have my ticket stub which prompted a friend to comment “My god – you still have your ticket stub??? How much stuff did you move to Mexico with you??”
I’m not sure how to quantify the amount of stuff I brought with me, but I can tell you it includes all my favorite books, one of which is my stub book crammed with set-lists and concert tickets.
Book-wrapt
Having said that, my collection of books is smaller than ever, pared down when I knew I would be moving to Mexico over four years ago. I remember sitting on my living room floor in Phoenix, asking every single book, “Are you important enough to move to a new country with me?” with a follow-up question to myself, “How many books do I really need?” What is the magic number? I suppose I need enough to feel “book-wrapt,” a term coined by Reid Byers, author of The Private Library: Being a More Or Less Compendious Disquisition on the History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom to describe the way a well-stocked personal library should make us feel:
“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend … It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.“
So how many?
Byers maintains that 500 books ensures that a room will “begin to feel like a library.” On the other hand, the library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam although “very highly valued, it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.” I’m not sure how my book collection measures up. I’m not even sure I would even call it a library, but it definitely feels like part of whatever home means. I love my books. I love how they look, and the stories behind how they came to be permanent fixtures in my life.
A minute or two spent scanning the contents of a bookshelf – mine or yours – can tell a lot about the owner’s personality, pastimes, and passions. The more interesting books have tell-tale signs of wear —dog-eared pages and marginalia – chunks of underlined text, doodles, scribbles, exclamation points, question marks, even profanities from a reader giving the author a piece of her mind. Some also might have Dewey Decimal numbers on the spine because they may belong to a library …
Marginalia matters. If not for marking up a book, we wouldn’t know that when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa, some of the inmates circulated a Shakespeare book 1975 and 1978. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from Julius Caesar that reads, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’
To this day, I read with pen in hand. Making my marks in a book makes it mine. I can revisit those margins whenever I choose, go back to my side of a conversation with the author and pause to remember that earlier version of myself, younger, curious, and perhaps more naive. One day someone may land on something I highlighted in a book and wonder WTF I was thinking.
Books allow us to be solitary and sociable at the same time. As an introvert-extrovert (at least that what I think I am), this appeals to me.
Book Arranging
Loving books is one thing, but it wasn’t until I began packing them in boxes that I took an interest in the physical space they had occupied in my bookcase. Incongruously, a paperback copy of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native had, for sixteen years, leaned up against a second-hand copy of What to Expect when You’re Expecting passed along to me when I was expecting. Maybe I kept it, thinking I might expect another baby one day and wanted to remember what to expect. For almost a decade, a copy of The Good Friday Peace Agreement (signed for me one morning In Arizona by the late Irish Taoiseach John Bruton) was sandwiched unceremoniously between Bob Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home vinyl record (carried with me from Belfast to New York in 1987), and a large illustrated Beowulf. Maybe the move to Mexico would bring some order.
Almost a century ago, Hugh Walpole would have agreed:
I believe it then to be quite simply true that books have their own very personal feeling about their place on the shelves. They like to be close to suitable companions, and I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my Jane Eyre. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning’s uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticized Jane will understand why this would never do.
Hugh Walpole, These Diversions: Reading, 1926
When it comes to arranging books on shelves, I need someone with a critical eye and zero tolerance for those books she knows I haven’t read. By ‘someone,’ I mean my mother, who brings a take-no-prisoners to this kind of task. If it hasn’t been worn in a year, or if she suspects that it’s hanging in my closet for “sentimental reasons,” (like she knit it for me or bought it for me in 1987), then it must be placed in the big black trash bag which will then go to a charitable organization or a consignment store. I have often thought about hiring a professional to organize my closet, but I’m afraid of the prospect of being one of “those people” on a reality program on The Learning Channel. I can see myself clearly, mortified in my own front yard by the contents of my closet spread out on the grass and then judged in the glare of a camera crew, by a TV audience and an energetic host as I ask each item if it gives me joy. The answer will determine if it is placed in a box labelled Keep, Toss or Donate.
Before my husband died, I had bought his favorite cologne and kept it in a drawer, unopened, for over 7 years. I never got to give it to him and I never figured out what to do with it. For all I know, the person who bought my house may have found it in the back of a drawer in the bathroom. Just one of those things.
For some reason this takes me to Field of Dreams. If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember Alicia as the wife of Burt Lancaster’s Doc “Moonlight” Graham. We find out about her in that beautiful scene in a bar in Chisholm, Minnesota, where James Earl Jones finds out from an old-timer that
… she moved to South Carolina after Doc passed. She passed a couple years later. She always wore blue. The shopkeepers in town would stock blue hats because they knew if Doc walked by, he’d buy one. When they cleaned out his office, they found boxes of blue hats that he never got around to give her. I’ll bet you didn’t know that …
Field of Dreams
Cleaning up your Bookshelves
While the literati are not coming to party at my house, I can still relate to Bella, friend of Independent columnist, John Walsh, — “your collection of books can say terrible things about you.” Unlike Bella, however, I’m unlikely to be rubbing shoulders with celebrities in the publishing world any time soon, so I’m not sure why the absence – or inclusion – of certain books on my shelves matters. For instance, there’s a blue hardcover 1984. Not the one by George Orwell – rather, it is my diary from the same year, bringing to mind Willy Russell’s Rita, brilliantly played by Julie Waters, as she shouts from the train window to Michael Caine’s Professor Frank Bryant, a line from The Importance of Being Earnest, a play I was delighted to find for just two bucks, along with 20 other brilliant comedies in a first edition Cavalcade of Comedy at the 1996 VNSA booksale in Phoenix.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train”
I think it was the remake of The Great Gatsby that initially caused me to reassess the order of my books. I had re-read it during my Post-Mastectomy Period (PMP), so Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby calling people “old sport” and all those lavish parties were still fresh in my head when the new movie came out. Over Happy Hour one Friday, my best friend and I performed our post-mortem on the film which led to a discussion of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I found myself admitting that I have never read anything by Ernest Hemingway. Never. I suppose to make me feel better, she told me she hated Charles Dickens. And then we both confessed that we hate Moby Dick. The floodgates opened. I detest Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I know. It feels almost criminal to say out loud that the longest running musical of all time leaves me cold, and downright treasonous to also admit that I think James Joyce is over-celebrated.
I have never finished his Ulysees, nor am I sure I ever really started it at its start, given the many beginnings within its pages. Of Joyce’s “Dubliners” I only like “The Dead,” a superb short story. Were it not for Brodie’s Notes, which I imagine are equivalent to the American Cliffs Notes, I don’t imagine I could have answered a single question about E.M. Forster’s Room with a View or Howards End. I don’t like Virginia Woolf either. I might even be a little afraid of her. I think the same might be true for George Eliot, who, until I was in college, I assumed was male. Then there’s Jane Austen. Emma wore me out, and I didn’t pick up Pride and Prejudice until my PMP (see above). Even then, in the lingering haze from three days of Dilaudid coursing through my system, I just couldn’t understand what was so great about Mr. Darcy. And, I have remained oblivious to what has been coined The Darcy Effect. There must be something wrong with me.
Since I’m telling the truth about my books as they sit there looking at me, still waiting to be properly arranged, I wonder, guiltily, if any of the fifth graders I taught over thirty years ago remember that Spring morning when I announced the next class novel, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. I passed out the books and then began reading aloud, because I was the best reader in the class and it’s important for kids to hear good reading. We soldiered through the first few pages, me reading with as much expression as I could muster, but we all knew the time wasn’t right. Remembering I was in charge, I quietly told them to close their books and put them back on the shelf for another day (which never came that year). From my bag, I pulled out my high school English textbook and read to them instead Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper” hoping that the last startling sentence would teach them all they needed to know about the tragedy of war. None of the parents complained that I had strayed from the curriculum and abandoned an American classic for an Irish short story, but then they probably never found out, their children probably telling them “Nothing!” when asked what they did at school that day.
For her first official book report, my daughter read Under the Hawthorne Tree, a book I recall with fondness from my childhood, the story of three children trying to survive the Irish Famine. My daughter had spied it in my bookcase, part of The Belfast Telegraph’s Children’s Collection my mother had saved for her. Knowing it would resonate with her sense of justice, I grabbed the opportunity to tell her about The Great Famine, knowing she was unlikely to learn much if anything about it in an Arizona classroom. Somewhat ironically, a headline in the Belfast Telegraph, Children Turn Away From Books in Favour of Reading Electronically, made me appreciate all the more, that my daughter was and continues to read books made of paper. Thinking of Belfast and all that continues to simmer just below the surface, I wonder why nobody thought to require To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE O level English in the 1980s. Although set in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, many of us in Northern Ireland could have learned a thing or two about fairness and goodness – and about humanity – from Atticus Finch, at a time when our we needed it so much. Instead we trudged through Richard Church’s autobiography, Over the Bridge. And it was torture.
With all of this off my chest, I feel better about the books I have brought to Mexico. There’s my Choice of Poets textbook, my collections of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, the little blue book of Irish Short Stories, out-of-print Belfast Reviews, and old Rolling Stone and Life magazines. Still, I wish Independent columnist John Walsh was here to help the way he did when called upon to edit his friend Bella’s library:
I had to re-jig it, alphabetize it, eliminate the once-trendy, excise the cheesy and ill-advised, and bring together all the books that had been lying for years in bedroom, lavabo and kitchen and behind the sofa. My function was like that of Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables, until no trace of Paulo Coelho remained.
When the literati come to party, it’s time to clean up your bookshelves – John Walsh
My Ideal Bookshelf
Walsh points out that a proper bookcase, one in a mature middle-class household, should contain only books. Reference books do not belong there; rather, their place is close to a desk, and poetry needs its own section. Now we’re on to something. Knowing that you can only eat the elephant one bite at a time, and inspired by My Ideal Bookshelf, I have arranged some of my bookshelves with a nod to the women who have helped me find my way in the world with good humor and a sense of home, and some Bob Dylan for good measure:
The Sshh … I’m reading coffee cup just happened to be sitting there when my daughter rendered, by hand, these drawings for my 50th birthday, over a decade ago.
There is of course a place in my bookspace for Seamus Heaney. Naturally. The Irish cottage was a gift to my father over 60 years ago from a Professor Coyle’s wife who lived in a house named “One Acre” on the Belfast Road. She had decided, well into her sixties which was considered ‘a big age’ back home in those days, that she would learn to drive. As a favor, my father taught her—he taught practically everyone I knew to drive. To thank him, and knowing it would appeal to his love of things found in nature, Mrs. Coyle painted the little cottage on an angular remnant of a spruce tree, the bark serving as an approximation of a thatched roof with smoke streaming from a turf fire. He passed it along to me some years ago, and it has been at home with my Heaney books ever since.
With a flourish to end his day of transforming Bella’s library into a thing of beauty, John Walsh placed on her coffee table, “with a bookmark at page 397” a copy of Seamus Heaney’s Stepping Stones, a collection of conversations with my favorite poet.
By coincidence the same book is at home with me in Mexico. On my coffee-table …
I wonder what we’ll have to say to each other today.
Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
~ Patti Smith
How do I begin to pack the stuff of the past twelve months in a box and tie it up with a big red bow? Just begin. Pluck out a memory and wrap it up. Move on to the next – in my own time.
Shortly after Ken died, I discovered on Christine Ohlman’s beautiful record, “The Deep End,” a song that was then too much for me to listen to, too beautiful, too true – “The Gone of You.” I had forgotten about it until it showed up on my playlist this weekend and stopped me in my tracks, like Steve Earle’s “Fearless Heart” or Lou Reed’s reminder that “there’s a bit of a magic in everything and some loss to even things out.”
I’ve had a chance to thank Steve Earle in person for the songs that have lifted me up and set me down – gently – over the years, this last in particular. I tell myself, hoping it’s true, that wherever they are, Ken has made a point of thanking Lou Reed for the same. Last night I visited Christine Ohlman’s website and sent her a note, just to thank her for putting in words and music, the heart and soul that truth-telling always reveals.
Lest I be misunderstood, The Deep End is not a sad record. It just tells the truth, and in it, like Dave Marsh I also found find:
. . . so many ‘wow’ moments. Ohlman turns out the best blue-eyed soul of her career…’The Gone of You’ fully exhibits how much grief a blues-drenched heart can bear. The whole history of soul music can be heard here, reflected in a passionate life–or two.
Knowing she had wowed Dave Marsh and knowing more about the demands of her schedule, I was surprised to hear back from her, and so quickly. In a lovely note, she wrote to tell me she understood, that things will get easier, that on New Year’s Day it will be a decade since she lost her partner, that Lou Reed was a friend, and that she just worked with Steve Earle in November. Such details confirm for me, that we really are connected, aren’t we? All of us. We just need to figure out the geography and how best to cross the borders between us.
I asked her if I could post here the lyrics to the song that has crept inside a corner of my heart. “The Gone of You” appears below just the way Christine shared it with me this morning. A litany of truths, it says close to what I’ve wanted to say when the right words have eluded me, when I don’t know how to respond to the people who love me when they ask – or when they don’t – how I’m doing. Mostly, I’m doing fine. Mostly.
I miss the taste of you, the feel of you
The heart and the soul and the real of you
I miss the thought of you, the mind of you
The dark and the light and the sight of you
I miss the skin of you, the near of you
The lips and the hands, the not-here of you
I miss the touch of you, oh, how I long for you
I miss the eyes, and the wise, and the gone of you
I want you right now, wantcha right now wantcha right now
I miss the salt of you, the sweet of you
The coming home every night of the week of you
I miss the scars from you, the times I wept for you
The wrongs, and the rights, the secrets-kept of you
I miss the part of me that was a part of you
The wish, and the kiss, the morning star of you
The make-love of you, the true of you
I miss the all-the-way-my-heart-through of you
I’m out here on my own in the big, wild world
It’s a beautiful place sometimes
I keep my eye on the sparrow and my mind open wide
But I just can’t keep from cryin
I miss the gone of you, the gone of you, the gone of you……
right now….
But back at the beginning of 2014, I wasn’t interested in telling the whole truth, and certainly not out loud. Nor was I making any New Year’s resolutions because doing so is too much like planning. Still, I resolved, albeit loosely, to live this year a bit more like the way I used to, ready to jump in to the deep end, to take a chance, to remind myself of the girl I used to be at twenty, the one with the world at her feet, before America and Arizona, before marriage and the mortgage, power-suits and politics, motherhood and menopause, breast cancer and the blogosphere. And, before being a widow and worrying about whether it would be alright if I just cut my own groove.
I made a point of telling my dearest friends – and they are indeed dear to me – that 2014 would be my version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” year, except mine would have a glorious soundtrack. It would probably be more along the lines of a distract, deny—which I’m sure is what the experts would say—and, with a nod to Roxy Music—dance-away-kind-of-year. There would be minimal healthy eating and less exercise. There would be fabulous music, long drives into the night and far away from the desert heat, daily reminders of fabulous friendships maintained from afar, and, by God, there would be laughter.
All this was well and good, except when it wasn’t. It wasn’t on those first anniversaries throughout the year when Ken wasn’t here for his birthday or mine, or milestone moments like Sophie’s driving test. My mother would call to remind me ever so gently and in the parlance of home that I have ‘been through the mill,’ and I am vulnerable; my friend, Rhonda, would sigh with empathy and tell me to be kind to myself; my sensible and stoic daughter would caution me with a superbly adolescent eye-roll not to allow people to walk over me (neither unscrupulous plumbers and auto-mechanics nor ostensibly interested interesting men who are only, let’s face it, in my life “because dad isn’t“) and Amanda – in it for the long haul as best friends are – would tell me to just live, to play it out, because if she gave me specific advice, I would be sure to ignore it. And, anyway, Ken would be watching over me. Whether or not he would approve, he would understand.
I suppose since it’s the most wonderful time of the year for telling the truth, I should also mention that Amanda, in her more comic moments, has mentioned that she would not have been at all surprised to receive an early morning call with a request to bail me out of jail, not for doing anything “bad,” but maybe for making a point about something unfair in the world.
The year’s not over . . .
Christmas gift from Amanda
It has been a full year, much of it spent with those lovely friends who have not been as subtle as they think, watching over me and ready to intervene before or immediately after I have made a spectacular error in judgment. I am much loved, and I know how lucky I am to have these souls in my life. I have spent time re-shaping and re-arranging the home where two of us used to be three, and I have taken stock. Repeatedly. I worry now far less about things that ten years ago would have kept me up at night.
After twenty years of managing schools and people in them, and sometimes — I’m ashamed to admit— spending more time with other people’s children than my own, I returned to teaching college students. Financially, it’s a step backwards, and even though the kind of money I used to make would be very useful, I am just not ready to return to what often amounts to a whole lot of “adminstrivia” and not a lot about kids and whether they are learning.
For now, the classroom is where I am supposed to be, as safe and sacred a space as it was when I walked in to a Belfast secondary school as a twenty-one year old teacher, hoping to make her mark. The only thing different – maybe – is that I have acquired what Ken used to tell me I needed: “some hard bark” – but only some.
So here is my year in music, without the details about the deep end . . .
1. It begins with looking for something new to listen to. My colleague and Philly friend, Ian (named for Janis Ian and Ian Anderson) introduced me to WXPN 88.5 Public Radio from the University of Pennsylvania. The first song i heard there was “Distant Light.” Apropos then that my new year in music begins with Dr. Dog who stopped in Phoenix for a sold-out show at The Crescent Ballroom. I had never been there, but loved all I’d heard about it. It reminded me of the kinds of places I used to go in Belfast a million years ago – where you could eat, drink, and be merry.
But following the distant light
And I know if I keep walking, I’ll never touch it, but as long as I move it’ll shine down on me.
2. Next was The War on Drugs, again at The Crescent Ballroom. I had asked my brother, Keith, to recommend some music, and in one of our marathon Facebook chats, he told me I should check out The War on Drugs. We have impeccable timing on such things, because War showed up the next month in Phoenix. Naturally, I went. Instant fan.
What you should check out is The War On Drugs, particularly if you’re in the hammock – here’s a great track, the opener from their latest album. Imagine ‘New Year’s Day’ by U2 or ‘Glittering Prize’ by Simple Minds, only written and perhaps sung by Bruce Springsteen or a young Dylan. Great road music. It is as Dustin Hoffmann observed of the nighttime Las Vegas skyline in Rain Man, ‘very twinkly… very sparkly’.
3. Joan Osborne, MIM Music Theater, Scottsdale, Arizona, May 20 2014
Joan Osborne was the featured vocalist for The Chieftains at Scottsdale Center for the Arts when I first saw her back when Sophie was in pre-school. I remember she strode on stage in a black suit and belted out a Billie Holiday song. It was the kind of singular performance that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up. Sophie was with us, just four years old, and interested only in clapping her hands and dancing in the aisles to boisterous fiddle playing courtesy of Natalie McMaster and The Chieftains. I just wanted to hear more of Joan Osborne, so when she announced a stop at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Scottsdale, a stellar venue with only 299 seats, amazing acoustics, and a good chance of a meet-and-greet afterwards, I bought two tickets, one for me and one for Ian as a birthday present. He wanted to hear “St. Theresa.” I wanted to hear something from her post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead days. She obliged on both.
Joan Osborne is so much more than “One of Us” (although she resembled some of us as she sauntered on stage with her cup of hot tea and fabulous red shoes). Accompanied by the outrageously talented Jack Ptreuzelli on guitar, Keith Cotton on piano, and occasionally the drum-track from an app on her iPhone and a tambourine, she purred and sashayed, and at times, she just blew the damn roof off. It was an electric performance, and other than meeting her afterwards, the highlight for me was her rendition of the Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” which gave me a minute or two to be with Ken again. By the water . . .
Goin’ to plant a weeping willow
On the banks green edge it will grow grow grow
Sing a lullaby beside the water
Lovers come and go – the river roll roll roll
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul.
It wasn’t until after hearing him perform “Fearless Heart” unplugged last May, without The Dukes, that I remembered the song as a much-played favorite from “Guitar Town,” perhaps the last vinyl album I bought from Good Vibrations record shop in Belfast.
You can either get through life or you can live it. And if you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need – an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.
Steve Earle doesn’t know that “Fearless Heart” has helped me put one foot in front of the other some days. It’s become a kind of mantra that I whisper before jumping into the deep end, which might actually be where I belong. I know that many of his songs resonate every bit as much if not more with his legions of fans. I’m sure he knows that too, but I still wanted to tell him, and I didn’t even care that I kept everyone else waiting. I also wanted to talk to him about Bap Kennedy and Belfast and Seamus Heaney. “Did you study at Queens?” he asked. “Were you a literature major? Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Damn. ” Well, he had me at Heaney. Of course he did. And then there was the posing with a note to Bap Kennedy whose record Earle produced and who will be performing at the gig for Terri Hooley tomorrow night at the Limelight in Belfast. It really is a small world after all.
At the MIM with Steve Earle, Shawn Colvin, and Amanda
5. James Taylor US Airways Center, Phoenix, Arizona, June 10, 2014
The last time I saw James Taylor was in the summer of 1984 at Saratoga Springs. With Randy Newman. He was terrific, but I haven’t listened to him much in recent years. He’s become like that sweater in the back of the closet – I never wear it but know it’s there for when I want to just curl up by the fire and wallow in what ails me. So when my friend Suzy offered me a free ticket to a James Taylor concert, I wasn’t sure I would like it, but I like Suzy, so I went. US Airways Center (although it might be called something else by now) is a big venue which somehow doesn’t seem right for songs about Carolina in my mind. JT pleased the crowd, and were you to check, I bet you’d find he did every single song on his “Greatest Hits” album. I wanted to hear only one, and knew when he plugged in his guitar that he was still “a cement mixer for you baby, a churning urn of burning funk.” It was 1984 again, and I was gone to Saratoga in my mind.
6. Rodney Crowell, MIM Music Theater, Scottsdale, Arizona June 18, 2014
Driving home from Morro Bay on the first Father’s Day weekend since Ken died, a Rodney Crowell song popped up on the playlist. Sophie and I just looked at each other. “Wow, mom. It’s like Dad’s talking to us in that song.” (We’re both convinced that Ken speaks to us through songs we hear in the car). In this case, “Closer to Heaven,” Crowell lists all his pet peeves – hummus, nosy neighbors, chirpy news anchors, politicians, buzz words like “awesome” and “dude” – while making sure anyone listening knows he is closer to heaven than he’s ever been, that he loves his family and is much loved by them.
Rodney Crowell is a story-teller, a memoirist, a poet by any stretch, even though he is not quick to assume the role, telling Rolling Stone:
Poets, I think, are born . . . you can’t teach it. It’s genetic – the circumstances of how you were raised… and there’s probably some Irish in your blood lines,” he smiles.
I remembered he was performing in Phoenix but didn’t realize it was the next night. Sophie called Rhonda who somehow scored the last two tickets to the sold-out show.
Afterwards, I thanked Rodney Crowell for that song, and for “Earthbound,” in which he writes about how people like “Tom Waits, Aretha Franklin, Mary Karr, Walter Cronkite, Seamus Heaney, Ringo Starr, the Dalai Lama and Charlie Brown make me wanna stick around.” Another Seamus Heaney fan, he told me about walking through Stephen’s Green in Dublin with our poet.
Oh, to have overheard that conversation . . .
7. Steely Dan, Comerica Theater, Phoenix, Arizona, July 15, 2014
The Jamalot Forever Tour seemed appropriate for me this year, and this was an impeccably tight show with both Fagen and Becker in great form. Walter Becker, wry old card, as Keith calls him, turned “Hey Nineteen” into almost ten minutes of boozy craic about what might happen when you find inside an old shoebox, a stash of “the best chiba-chiba that money can buy” and then, boom, the Cuervo Gold. Now I know the video’s a little shaky, but we were dancing and it was recorded on my phone. So just close your eyes. You may as well be in your bedroom in 1980, playing your new Goucho LP. As my brother says, “the groove is damned tight.”
One of the best things about Lyle Lovett’s big band is that it includes the phenomenal Francine Reed, who has soul to spare. Like Mavis Staples. When I first moved to Arizona, Francine Reed performed regularly in clubs like Chuys. Hearing her belt out Wild Women Don’t Get The Blues I want to tell Lyle Lovett that the large band – and the entire room – belongs to Francine.
I can’t help it. I have loved Tom Petty for over 35 years, and I’m convinced that had he met me when I was younger and could hold a tune, Tomcat would have snagged me to be one of his “heartbreakers.” Ken liked Tom as well and always took me to see him when he played in Phoenix. He always made sure we had plenty of Tom on the playlist for our road-trips to California, and earlier this Spring, I’m sure he was looking down at me and laughing when the Hypnotic Eye tour dates were announced with not one show planned for Phoenix, I know he knew that I would convince Amanda to drive to San Diego to see the opening gig – something I would not have been able to convince him to do. A mere five hours away, a road trip to San Diego would require no planning. We only needed tickets, gasoline, a place to stay, at least three outfits, and an assurance to each other that we would be back to Phoenix the morning after to see our girls off to school – my daughter’s first as a high school Senior, and her little girl’s very first as a pre-schooler.
Mission accomplished and worth all of the inconvenience that comes to people who are notoriously bad at planning. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Soar screamed the review from a San Diego newspaper the next day. That’s all I need to say.
10. The Hold Steady, Crescent Ballroom, Phoenix, Arizona, August 4, 2014
Once upon a time, I read magazines made of paper and held together with staples and glue. That’s where I learned about upcoming artists and bought their new LPs before anyone else and where I found out who would be playing at Slane Castle next. I remembered reading about The Hold Steady in one such publication and that Bruce Springsteen really liked “First Night.” I forgot about them over the years, but for $22, I figured it was worth checking them out when they came to the Crescent. Even Keith agreed:
“Well, the Hold Steady ARE Bruce Springsteen! Apparently they’ve ditched their piano player though. Not sure how I feel about that. “Boys and Girls in America,” is superb. ‘Stuck Between Stations’ is pure post-punk Bruce. Great stuff. Oh, and I like the signage for The Crescent Ballroom – very Asylum-era Tom Waits, that is. Jesus, go!”
So I bought tickets, not stopping to think that this was the day after the Tom Petty concert. Still, true to our word, and in spite of the fact that Amanda’s car battery died in the parking lot during the concert, and a very nice hipster helped us out but only after the entire parking lot had emptied out, we made it back to Arizona just in time for Starbucks to open, so we could see our little girls off to school, coffee in hand and “beer” still stamped on our hands.
The Hold Steady setlist
11. The Felice Brothers and Spirit Family Reunion, The Rhythm Room, September 28, 2014
This was a special night not just because I love the Felice Brothers, and had been looking forward to seeing them in such a great venue, but because I had just found out that after two weeks of bleeding and a biopsy, all was well.
With the Felice Brothers at the Rhythm Room
The results were negative, the cancer had not – and, by all accounts has not – progressed. Turns out, I was more taken by Spirit Family Reunion.
Dusty acoustic guitars, wailing fiddles and weeping accordions, with a woozy-yet-skintight rhythm section– and topped off with burr-edged vocals that sound like they’ve been soaked in a Mason jar for generations — it’s the type of music that blurs the line between past and present so thoroughly, and so deftly, that time feels irrelevant.”
–Paste Magazine: Best of What’s Next
With Amanda and Suzy
12. John Fogerty, The Arizona State Fair, October 18, 2014
I love a State Fair. My first was upstate New York a million years ago, where I sampled Niagara Wine Coolers and too many roller-coaster rides (or vice versa). I love the midway, I love cotton candy and cracking wise with crafty carneys hoping they will just give me a cuddly toy for Sophie (they always do). I love the concerts too – general admission for the price of a fair ticket. It still seems wrong that Dire Straits performed at the State Fairground in 1992, but not during the Fair. It was surreal to walk through the empty fairground to the coliseum hearing, in my mind, the arrangement of Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Carouse Waltz at the beginning of Knopfler’s “Tunnel of Love,”
And now I’m searching through these carousels and the carnival arcades,
Searching everywhere from steeplechase to palisades
In any shooting gallery where promises are made
To rock away, rock away, from Cullercoats and Whitley bay out to rock away
Partial setlist from a weary sound guy
Fair to say, is it not, that a State Fair is as American as a John Fogerty concert. Ken and I saw him before, in the Fall of 2005 when he performed with John Mellencamp at the then-Desert Sky Pavilion. We always had a “thang” for CCR especially the ten-minute version of “Heard it through the Grapevine.” For years, in fact, Ken wanted to challenge Alex Trebec who told a Jeopardy contestant she was wrong about who released the record in 1967. Ken, you were wrong, my love – indeed it was Gladys Knight and her Pips.
At the 2005 concert, I remember being stunned by some in the crowd booing him for remarks he made about whatever war we were and are still fighting, and before singing “Deja Vu (All Over Again).” How can anybody boo John Fogerty, in his blue flannel shirt? A Vietnam veteran?. Come on now.
But in ninety minutes, this September, as the review says, John Fogerty belted out a song for everyone there. He didn’t talk much between songs, but that was because of the curfew. So he kept things moving, and he was bloody marvelous.
If you could have harnessed the energy from the crowd as it erupted with the opening chords of “Proud Mary,” you could have supplied enough electricity to power the State Fair for its entire run.
And now for something completely different and absolutely over-the-top fabulous (which could also apply to the lads who accompanied me to the Erasure concert). Fabulous.
When, half-way through the set, Andy Bell strutted on stage in a tight and tiny pair of sparkly hot pants, I was immediately transported to a Friday night long ago in some thumping night club between Antrim and Belfast, complete with silver sequins, synthesized sound, strobe lighting, and glitter.
I know I saw Tom kick off the tour in San Diego, but I have never been to the Red Rocks, and I have always wanted to go. And Rhonda had never seen Tom Petty, so it was really more out of consideration for her. Now, I don’t know how it was for Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers, looking out at thousands of adoring fans between those red rocks, but it was magical for me. As the sign says, there is no better place to see the stars . . .
15. Stevie Wonder, MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas, November 29, 2014
In the middle of October, my brother posted to his Facebook wall a Youtube video of Stevie Wonder performing “Big Brother (Natural Wonder)” with a comment that it was apt, even though it was recorded over forty years ago. One thing led to another the way it does on Facebook, and when Keith told me that Stevie Wonder is one of those legendary performers (along with Bob Seger) that he would love to see in concert, I first rubbed in the fact that I have already purchased my ticket for Mr. Seger’s return to Phoenix in February.
I have been proudly flying the flag for the amazing Mr Wonder ever since I bought his 1986/7 album ‘Characters’ from Ronnie Millar’s Pop-in Records.
And then, on a whim, I consulted Bandsintown to find out that Mr. Wonder was about to begin the Songs in the Key of Life tour to celebrate almost forty years of that record which I first heard on the radio when I was 13 years old. There was no concert scheduled for Phoenix, but he would be playing the weekend after Thanksgiving at the MGM in Las Vegas, only a five hour drive up the road. Now, Las Vegas has never appealed to me, and after all there had been enough bright lights at the Erasure concert to last for a while, but this was Stevie Wonder. In concert.An entirely different proposition.
With Rhonda before the show
Coincidence and the universe conspired, and Rhonda and I were on the road again. Such a night. Three hours of joyful noise at the MGM Grand:
. . . and at the close, when it seemed Stevie Wonder had given every ounce of his genius, he dove into the song that brings the party for all time. “Superstition” closed it out, and the song that once rocked “Sesame Street” gave a burst of funk and love on the Strip.
I know I could download it, but it’s just not the same as asking a weary sound guy for the setlist . . .
16. John Prine, Celebrity Theater, December 4, 2014
John Prine might be my favorite living singer-songwriter. I first heard of him in the 1980s when my friend, Ruth, and I went to the Errigle Inn on Tuesday nights to hear Kenny McDowell and Jim Armstrong do their acoustic set.
One of the roadies, Eric, told me at the beginning that I might be able to meet John Prine after the show, just to check with him. Sure enough, Eric saved a couple of guitar picks for me, and when the roadies had packed it up and were ready to go, he ushered Rhonda and me backstage. I can’t explain here how special it was, but just know that it was. What a gift to give John Prine a hug and thank him for the songs that have taken up permanent residence in my heart over the past thirty odd years, many of which he performed, “Sam Stone,” “Angel From Montgomery,” “Souvenirs,” “Hello in There,” and “Six O’Clock News.”
With a legend – John Prine. Celebrity Theater
Like Rodney Crowell, he is my kind of story-teller, unafraid and quick-witted, the kind who can break his own heart and yours and crack wise. Seamlessly.
I always wanted to grow up to be an old person. Well, voilà.
My brother loves John Prine too and shared a lovely story with me about his little boy, Tom, who recently asked him to play The Sins Of Memphisto. Not that it’s a strange request, but you should know that Tom is just seven years old:
Dad, put on that song about lookin’ at the babies and the factories.’ I was well impressed with that request when he first made it, I can tell you. I was so shocked that I genuinely couldn’t think of the song he was talking about!
In 2003, my best friend gave me the best present for Christmas – an external hard drive with more music on it than you could listen to in a lifetime, courtesy of her husband who allegedly is the one with the technological savvy in their household. Anyway, he and my brother are the same age, with similar tastes in music, and he had turned me on to Ryan Adams, “Gold” back then. He and Amanda have seen Ryan Adams several times, but somehow I always missed the opportunity. Not this year. It was very cool that the three of us saw him perform together.
With Amanda and Todd before the show at ASU Gammage
When the lights dropped low and that barking, staccato chord that opens up “Gimme Something Good” rang out, Ryan Adams let everyone know he was in the room. There’s no better entrance song than that, worth every ounce of its Grammy nomination, and that ripping guitar tone like Adams’ own admission that this evening would be one to remember.
And, in the “Seriously?” category, each of us is convinced that the three guys next to me thought they were at a Bryan Adams concert. They left half-way through, seemingly flummoxed by Ryan Adams being a little too sleepy on “When the Stars Go Blue.” I kid you not.
Not really a concert, but this was my first show in Las Vegas and part of what would be a very special weekend – Sophie’s seventeenth birthday. Just the two of us, we drove to Las Vegas, tuned into the Classic Vinyl radio station the entire way, so it would feel as though Ken were behind the wheel. As a back-up, she brought a CD of what she calls “legit dad rock.”
Amanda has been telling me to go see the Cirque du Soleil Beatles Love show for years – she and Todd have been twice – but I just never got around to it. That, and to be honest, I’ve never been a big Beatles fan. I know. Don’t judge. I have a new-found respect for the Fab Four. It was a visual feast, the songs showered down from the ceiling, sometimes as the Beatles would say, “it’s all too much, ” but we loved it. That’s all that matters.
. . . an extravagant mashup of history and hallucinations, studded with dazzling special effects, hot dance moves, and tantalizing gestures
Until last Christmas, it had been many years since I had, as my mother would say, “darkened a church door.” But following Ken’s death and knowing neither of my parents really knew what to do to make it all better while here and far away from home last year, I took them to a Christmas Eve carol service at First Church in Phoenix. There, I was undone by two things – the hospitality of the people and the magical glow we created in the sanctuary during “Silent Night” as we turned to light each other’s candles. It is a beautiful ritual, and connects us all again.
20. No more concerts in 2014, except the benefit for Terri Hooley at the Limelight in Belfast. Geography gets in the way again with Ormeau Avenue being a bit far from the desert southwest, so I can’t go, but I bought a ticket, and I am there in spirit knowing that it is to benefit Terri Hooley who is in the hospital awaiting bypass surgery.
Here’s the thing – this gig at the Limelight is not just about Terri. It’s about Belfast, a place that gets it right more often than you might think. It’s about punk rock, it’s about loving music, it’s about buying records from Good Vibes, a smoke-filled shop just down the street from the most bombed hotel in Europe, and it’s about every musician who ever played – and ever will – in Northern Ireland. It’s reminiscent of what Joe Strummer once said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
The chance – for everybody – to live for one glorious burning moment.
Maybe 2014 has been a bit like that for me, knowing now what I thought I knew before – that yes, life really is short and it is for the living. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to scorch this earth doing what I love to do, whether singing along with whatever’s playing on the radio, high-maintenance ordering like Meg Ryan’s Sally when I go to a new restaurant with Amanda, baring my soul right here, baking bread, teaching somebody something, rearranging furniture, driving all through the night because the road is right there in front of me, going to concerts and waiting for the roadies to take the stage, to tear it down and pack it up again, waiting to say thank you to these artists whose music never fails to lift me up and set me down again.
And now that my “Distract, Deny, and Dance Away” year is almost over, it is a whole lot easier to say aloud what Christine says in The Gone of You:
I’m out here on my own in the big, wild world
It’s a beautiful place sometimes
I keep my eye on the sparrow and my mind open wide
But I just can’t keep from cryin’
Today is one of those ‘sometimes.’ It really is a beautiful place, here with our beautiful girl. Unlike me, Sophie couldn’t care less about attending concerts, even though she has already seen more bands than some of my friends. Rather than leave her with a babysitter, Ken and I just took her with us. Writhing in my arms or sleeping or playing whatever video game I bought to keep her occupied while Ken and I rocked out to Bob Seger or Springsteen or U2 or my Tom Petty. One day, I think she’ll be impressed with her ticket stub collection. But not quite yet.
And unlike me, my Sophie does not emote, as she explains better than I can:
I am almost inaudible, mom; whereas, you are almost breaking the sound barrier.
For her seventeenth birthday, I knew not to surprise her with a party or too much noise or anything that would draw too much attention to her. I wanted to mark the day with something quieter than Las Vegas, something that would stay with her always.
If anyone would know – still – what to say to a girl on her seventeenth birthday, it would be Janis Ian. I first saw her perform “At Seventeen,” in July, 1983, at the RDS in Dublin. I was twenty years old and in college, with no notion of what I would do with my life, other than trade in Ireland for America. She, along with Peter Frampton, played warm-up for Chris de Burgh. I know. That makes no sense.
I saw her perform it thirty years later at the Rhythm Room, where she will be again in February 2015. I was then fifty years old, six months after a cancer diagnosis that had placed a question mark in the middle of my life and eight months before Ken’s death placed a period on it.
Sophie wasn’t with me – the Rhythm Room is a “21 and over only” kind of place, but I may as well have been seventeen myself, sitting there with a stiff gin and tonic, unsure about what tomorrow would bring but sure that I would show up for it, even if it meant jumping in the deep end. Again.
So thank you for that, Janis Ian, and thank you to everyone who had anything to do with the “wow” moments this year.
Retrieving the dry-clean only blouse from the dryer, I’m reminded of the day I found it in an unlikely little boutique in Guadalajara. I had been looking for one just like it for about 40. This has a lot to do with Nora Ephron.
Some years ago, I went to see Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the Ephron sisters’ stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. It’s about five women I’d never met but I already knew them. You probably do too. Like them, I can peer into my closet and hang on the clothes, shoes ,and handbags bulging from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially my boots and my coats. While not all of them came along to Mexico, they are all still “with me.”
There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by a man who probably had it in him to be great, were it not for the misogyny that made him a small and unapologetic asshole who finally got what he deserved. While being fired isn’t the best way to start a day, it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him.
There are the boots of patchwork leather my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. Or Linda Ronstadt. Or the late Christine McVie—pre-Fleetwood Mac— when she was still with Chicken Shack. There are the boots I wore the first time we took Sophie to see the snow and make angels in it; the classic Frye boots that I couldn’t pass up because they were both on sale and at a consignment store; the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots that have been re-soled twice and that I couldn’t remove at the end of a long day without my husband helping me. I read somewhere that Madonna had a pair of those. Madonna also had people. And, there are several pairs of black boots that vary only in length. There is no rationale for any of the boots, given the narrow window of opportunity for boot-wearing in Phoenix where I lived for over 30 years, bathed in relentless sunshine.
Nor can I explain the coats, most of them bought in Belfast and carried back to one of the hottest places in North America, presumably to wear as a statement about how the heat can’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf and coat, and maybe a turtleneck underneath. I even had a pair of leather fake fur-lined gloves. To be fair, these were purchased in anticipation of a winter work trip to Santa Fe with my best friend, where we shivered so hard, we had to buy woolly hats at The Gap. She also had to buy a back-up pair of boots, cheap and purple because #Prince. In our hats and gloves, we were perfectly accessorized to walk to the theater to see a new movie. Featuring lots of turtlenecks and body-shaming lines, Love Actually hasn’t aged well. Even Richard Curtis has acknowledged that his film is ‘out of date’ – too white and heteronormative. Still, I watch it every Christmas the way I watch The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving.
My favorite coat is my Christmas coat. I bought it at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast and subsequently wore it for 20 Christmas mornings when I posed against the backdrop of a holiday tree created from pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue. I love that coat. In it, I feel like I’m related to Santa.
Along with the boots, and a Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag— found on Ebay and which remained closed in the closet because the brass clasp was broken— are burgundy loafers, complete with pennies stuffed in the slot. I bought them in 1989, maybe because they reminded me of the brogues I used to wear for Irish dancing, or maybe because I was influenced by the collegiate style of an American girl on her first day of fifth grade outfitted in khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.
Today, I am over 60, still with nothing to wear to a gig, having already flung on the bed seven skirts that just aren’t “Americana” enough. I should be wearing something more Gillian Welch but unless I add badass boots, I could be dangerously closer to Nellie Olson in Little House on the Prairie.
Rushing to get ready, I find myself remembering Meryl Streep‘s married character in that scene where she’s wondering what to wear to a clandestine New York city rendezvous with Robert de Niro’s character (and married to someone else), in one of my favorite movies, Falling in Love. I watch it every year, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. You’ll have to watch to understand why.
In the end, something blue wins – doesn’t it always? Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse, the one I found on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Meryl Streep might feel when she decided on it for her secret date with Robert de Niro.
I may not remember what you said to me, but I will never forget how your words made me feel or what I was wearing when you said them to me. I’ll remember what you were wearing too.
Watching Love, Loss, and What I Wore I laughed and sighed, and even cried a little as I recognized my mother, my daughter, most of the women I know —including most of all the women I’ve been – in the stories that flew from the stage that night. There were tales of highly sought-after and completely impractical designer handbags which increase in size and price, the older we get; the various layers of “slimming” apparel– in various shades of black; high heels and high drama: bunions and ballet flats. Flats. My best friend’s podiatrist once suggested shoes from The Walking Company as opposed to a shot of Cortisone for pain. In retaliation, she switched podiatrists and lied, saying that, of course she had been wearing the custom orthotic so could she just have the shot. Please. Shoes from The Walking Company were not – and will most likely never be happening for my friend, a petite woman who “needs” the height. She is something of an innovator who once had what we both agreed was a million dollar idea to accommodate concert-goers under 5″5″. Expand-a-fan has yet to make it big. Mark Cuban has funded lesser inventions on Shark Tank.
Within the sparkling Ephron dialogue on stage, there were also glimpses of all those things that, at some point, seemed so essential in a wardrobe as well as all those unessential and unforgivable things we may have said to other women. Including our daughters. “Are you going to go out in that?” “What did you do to your hair?”
In spite of the laughter that rippled through the audience that night, there was a yearning. Something was missing. Nora Ephron herself. It made me sad to feel her absence. No longer here to go back and forth with us through the phases we know, I miss her. From shoulder pads and big hair, to pant-suits and Brazilian blow-outs, and then, invariably and for comfort’s sake, to Eileen Fisher, which feels a bit like The End, or as one of the women mused last night – “When you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, ‘I give up.’ You might as well . . .
It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us – a cancer she had kept private from a world that already knew many of the intimate details about the backs of her elbows, her aging neck, her dry skin, her small breasts about which she wrote in A Few Words About Breasts, the contents of her purse, and hair color – her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance but the youth culture in general. Quick and daring and witty, she regaled us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer.
When I imagine her and the way I think she was, Ephron is striding across a set not unlike The Strand Bookstore in the East Village where almost all her books sold out the morning after her death. She is suggesting a direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I imagine her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner which she resurrected and rewrote with her sister, Delia, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Ryan and Hanks. Between the words of the Ephron sisters and the pair’s natural chemistry, Hollywood had a recipe for success in the romantic comedy genre.
Although a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Ephron was also a romantic. It would have been poetic had she been handed a happy ending like the kind she invented in her fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” But that ending would not have been real, and Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.
Her contribution to the movies is a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are a massive part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated from Northern Ireland to the United States about the same time as Harry met Sally.
I know it’s not the most famous part of the movie, but there’s one scene that never fails to make me laugh and snap me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up occasionally to remind me how little time there is to become myself. Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. Tearfully, she confides in Harry that she is destined to be left on the shelf, a spinster, alone at forty. At the time, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut that I remember being convinced would work with fine and naturally curly hair. It didn’t. As a side note, I carried in my wallet, for about a decade, a page from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s numerous haircuts. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless by my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Turin Shroud, and asked them to please give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found the unflappable Topher who still makes time for my hair every time I return to Phoenix, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times.
And I’m gonna be 40 . . . someday
Once upon a time, 40 was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, yes, for Eileen Fisher. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, and my fifties, I’m wondering what’s next. I’ve also accepted a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor. I don’t have sensible hair, and sometimes I give too much away. Others are more painful. I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier that it’s not worth waiting for mean girls to redeem themselves.
Being over 60 is a bit like going to Home Depot. It’s just too big, and when I’m there, I have to ask for help. And, nobody in Home Depot cares what I’m wearing.
I’m worried of course that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do. Not necessarily those Bucket List things, but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. It’s gratifying and essential to knowwho loves me and who loves me not.
To be scrupulously honest, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process as “a thing” and the way it sneaks up on me. One minute, I’m reading the tiny print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the airport or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years.
Several months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix . Of course we didn’t know that this would be the last concert he ever attended, and I remember a fleeting moment of something like melancholy as we caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and, center-stage, Stevie mesmerizing everyong just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie. 76 and still spinning in black. Rock on gold dust woman.
Black is the envy of all the other colors, right? Navy blue, brown, and gray have all taken turns at declaring themselves “the new black.” The truth is black isn’t even black. The little black dress is not the same color as the wardrobe-staple-black-blazer that I want to wear with black pants on a fat day. (Yes, I’m body shaming, but … my body, my shame.) The blacks don’t match. One is a dark-greyish black, the other a bluish-purplish black. I love black, but unless you are Stevie Nicks in an air-conditioned theater, it is not the color for a summer in Phoenix – where Stevie lives.
Phoenix is too damned hot. Along with the boiling but brief hot flashes that come free with the drugs that are supposed to keep breast cancer at bay, black would be unbearable. A 110 degree summer day also makes any form of physical exercise unappealing. When I lived there, I barely walked the length of myself after the thermometer reached 100 degrees. This could also have been be attributed to a flat-out fatigue – the only ‘f’ word that has ever offended me and which was my constant companion during years of breast cancer treatment. Maybe it was the Tamoxifen that made me write things down when my once stellar powers of recall started showing signs of weakness. I used to scoff at makers of lists. No more. Another of life’s ironies. Along with aging comes the forgetting of names, the names of people I see every single day, names I might forget on days that might be the most important of those people’s lives.
I have digressed, and may as well proceed on this tangent. If you know me, you know that along with my irrational fear of car-washes and drowning (although not at the same time), is the even greater fear of becoming a hoarder whose secret life will be the subject of an A&E documentary. No, it’s not time to call in the camera crew, but I may be a future contender given my chronic aversion to throwing things away. The house in Mexico is still home to an unpacked box full of things that matter. To me . . .
Since before my only child started school – almost thirty years ago – I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of those organized professional organizers on TV, who would have me place everything on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it really is time to tame the paper tiger.
Full of good intentions, I began “organizing” one day. For about an hour and with no real sense of urgency, I made folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs. I threw away greeting cards made not by her but by some stranger at Hallmark. I even filled a box with paperbacks to donate to a local bookstore. I kept all the hardcovers.
Flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something my daughter had written when she was very little.
I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. It’s a sharp decline to 50. I wonder what Nora Ephron would make of my little girl’s “mountain of life.”
We know what she thought of 60 and beyond …
“I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.
The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realised.
There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But the truth is that je regrette beaucoup. Why do people say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday. Even if you’re in great shape, you can’t chop an onion the way you used to and you can’t ride a bicycle several miles without becoming a candidate for traction. If you work, you’re surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday soon they’re going to get it.”
And that’s all I have to say about that. Except thank you, Nora.
Steve Earle doesn’t know that “Fearless Heart” has helped me put one foot in front of the other some days. It’s become a kind of mantra that I whisper before jumping into the deep end, which might actually be where I belong. I know that many of his songs resonate every bit as much if not more with his legions of fans. I’m sure he knows that too, but I still wanted to tell him, and I didn’t even care that I kept everyone else waiting. I also wanted to talk to him about 
Afterwards, I thanked Rodney Crowell for that song, and for “
Once upon a time, I read magazines made of paper and held together with staples and glue. That’s where I learned about upcoming artists and bought their new LPs before anyone else and where I found out who would be playing at 
And now for something completely different and absolutely over-the-top fabulous (which could also apply to the lads who accompanied me to the Erasure concert). Fabulous. 
I know I saw Tom kick off the tour in San Diego, but I have never been to the Red Rocks, and I have always wanted to go. And Rhonda had never seen Tom Petty, so it was really more out of consideration for her. Now, I don’t know how it was for Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers, looking out at thousands of adoring fans between those red rocks, but it was magical for me. As the sign says, there is no better place to see the stars . . .
Retrieving the dry-clean only blouse from the dryer, I’m reminded of the day I found it in an unlikely little boutique in Guadalajara. I had been looking for one just like it for about 40. This has a lot to do with Nora Ephron.
Or Linda Ronstadt. Or the late Christine McVie—pre-Fleetwood Mac— when she was still with Chicken Shack. There are the boots I wore the first time we took Sophie
In the end, something blue wins – doesn’t it always? Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse, the one I found on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Meryl Streep might feel when she decided on it for her secret date with Robert de Niro.
My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years.
