Damage control

TheStar Charlie Sheen invites you to walk in TO for bipolar awareness Ayayayayay. In light of recent revelations about Catherine Zeta-Jones and her "admission" of bipolar disorder (and by the way, who "admits" to having Parkinson's or MS or any other disease?), this story of Charlie Sheen's proposed "walk for the cure (for bipolar disorder)" is especially creepy. What is Sheen trying to do here? By all accounts, he has gone completely crazy, although the bipolar label may not be enough to encompass his narcissistic, antisocial rants and florid delusions of grandeur. He will take advantage of anything and everything to draw attention to himself, even to a disease he claims not to have ("Bi-WINNING!"). And this after making malicious fun of the supposed whining and weakness of real sufferers. One sees the influence of his handlers saying, look, Charlie, dissing the mentally ill makes you look bad. Do something about it. Meanwhile, I've seen some stuff about Zeta-Jones that disturbs me. A colleague calls her "brave", a word that always crops up when someone "admits" to mental illness (but again, never for any other disease condition). Another source" said she has been in "rehab", with the implication her illness is akin to snorting cocaine or other self-destructive, self-imposed damage. These folks do have one thing right: nobody seems to have a clue about this disease, and even though the stigma is supposed to be breaking down, just calling it stigmatized re-stigmatizes it. ("It's not that you're a social pariah. Oh, no. Not that.") The "brave" label reminds me of the backhanded compliment, "You're brave to wear a dress like that." According to the response it's getting, Zeta-Jones's "admission" is just another personal revelation her fans can sink their teeth into. Meantime, Sheen gets away with saying he isn't bipolar, but still supports the "cause" to show what a swell, sane guy he is (thus helping those poor unfortunate souls who don't have the chance to rant incoherently in front of thousands of paying customers). So who's really crazy here: the performers, or the fans who pay to watch their favorite stars fall to pieces?

Searching for Rich Correll

I can remember a time when I wouldn't
touch a computer,
afraid it would give me one of those searing visible cracks I always get on car doors. (No one else seems to get these, kinda like people whose watches stop for no reason.)

Then I touched one, though I know not when. There was no internet then, just a Tandy computer I lovingly called Jessica, a daisy wheel printer, and a fax machine. I don't remember my first foray into the internet, or even what it was called then. The Information Highway, I think, and if you tried to use it, some techie guy would brand you a "newbie".

For a long time I was afraid of it and was sure I'd never use it and that it would be daunting and impossible to use and I would feel bloody stupid if I even tried. My kids were printing stuff out on long rolls that you tore off like chunks of toilet paper, with a sort of perforated border with holes in it on the sides. They printed out arcane secret information about the X Files and stuff like that. It was interesting, yes, but intimidating, something for the young.

I don't remember when I found out what a download was, probably last week sometime. I was thrown into the water and swam badly, still swim badly for the most part, but here I am with, drum roll please, not only a web site (which is mostly an ad for my novels) but a blog.

Then, the other day something very strange happened. One second I hated the idea of social networking, knew nothing about it and felt like it was all written in a foreign language, like Armenian or something, then the next second I was "on" Facebook.

I still don't really know how to use it, because there are no instructions. You're just supposed to know. Once more I have that queasy feeling I got to the party late, too late to ever catch up. But I didn't do it to "network". I did it to find one person.

This person, rare as an exotic deer or a species no one has ever seen before, is so elusive I can't find an updated image of him. These pictures are from his child star days, when he had an ongoing role on Leave it to Beaver. There would appear to be no reliable information for contacting him, just a few wretchedly inappropriate mailing addresses, though the Lord only knows I've tried.

The two-and-a-half people who follow this blog might know that I kvetch a lot about the fact that I've written a novel about Harold Lloyd, the silent film genius, and so far can't get anyone in Canada interested in publishing it. People all over the place are telling me to self-publish, and I don't see how that would work if you had to book your own tours, readings, etc., do all your own distribution and promotion, get it in all the stores and on the net, pay for your own ads, etc. etc. and not go bankrupt.

I thought when you published your book, you made money. Silly me. But there's a book crisis going on, and no one knows quite where they stand. This means everyone's suddenly an expert telling everyone else what they should do. But paper books are  becoming obsolete, which means that the retail chains will eventually close (and let's not think about those small independent stores that have tried to survive a plague of almost Biblical proportions). Most if not all of the publishing industry will exist online. But when you're between systems, it's disorienting. Writers have to scramble, create their own books, or just endure the slammed doors that eventually lead to a bad case of clinical depression.

SOOOOOO,  to get to the actual point of all this, I'm searching for Rich Correll, the Hollywood polymath who co-invented the character/global phenomenon Hannah Montana and who has been directing hit Disney programs (the kind Caitlin slavishly watches) for years. He has done, and is doing, tons of other stuff in the industry as well, but that's not the real reason I'm looking.

I want to find Rich Correll because he was like a second son to Harold Lloyd: he knew Harold Lloyd, he loved Harold Lloyd, and he just strikes me as someone who might actually be willing to help me realize this labour of the heart, or at least to understand why I did it, and why it means so agonizingly much to me.

Or not. Maybe it'll just be the usual best of luck with this I've heard every other time I've made a "contact", which as far as I am concerned means about as much as a Facebook "friend".  Hard to say. Maybe he's too busy suing the Disney Corporation for $5 million (and imagine suing Mickey Mouse! This is both quixotic and admirable.) I don't know. I just feel at this point like I need to talk to someone who loves Harold Lloyd as much as I do.

It's funny to be in this position now. Everyone seems to be saying, "Accept less." Or even "give it up, it'll never happen". I know I can do this, I know I will do this, but I'm lost in a labyrinth. For this reason, to try to find Rich Correll whom I've been tracking like a bloodhound for months, I joined Facebook and found myself, once again, a stranger in a strange land.


As usual, as with everything I have ever done, I feel like a complete outsider. Some of my "friends" have over 1,000 names on their list, when I have more like nine or ten. It's high school all over again. I sort of blunder around and put up photos, not knowing what else to do. There's a place where you can say "what's on your mind", but judging from the comments, it looks like little snippets of whimsy, not requests for help or advice. Everyone is so cheerful, all day long, all the time. No one has a family crisis or an illness or a reversal of any kind. It's all good! Great things happen to the Facebook gang, non-stop, things so enviable you might  be tempted to wonder if reality isn't being bent just a little, mainly so you'll feel  a whole lot worse about your own life.

I guess I haven't learned Facebook etiquette, its invisible set of rules. When I post comments that are serious, especially about my work, I am usually made to feel like an opportunist who should just shut up and go away. Which I'm supposed to. And which I can't. Not this time.

Over the years I've seen Rich Correll all over the place. I am certain I saw him on Leave it to Beaver, but I was seven or eight years old then and didn't have much appreciation for these things. TV shows just popped out of the screen fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But every time there was a documentary on movies it seems he'd show up, and since I did not ever see them in chronological order he would get older, then younger, then middle-aged in the strangest way.


He figured large in the brilliant Kevin Brownlow documentary The Third Genius, a rich dense Christmas pudding of a film just chock-a-block with archival interviews, people who knew Harold "when". This was one of those times he mysteriously got younger, and the reminiscences flowed so easily it was probably one of those things where you could just turn the camera on.

Rich Correll also appeared on the bonus disc in the superb Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection DVD set. At one point, after all the reminiscences, suddenly there was pure magic, more magic than Harold ever pulled off in his entire life as a master conjurer.  He brought out a battered old suitcase full of treasures: Harold Lloyd's makeup kit, full of artifacts going back to the early 1900s. Old gloves (Harold needed a prosthetic glove because half his right hand had been blown off in an accident), tubes of greasepaint, a mirror with his name lettered on it. And pairs and pairs of horn-rimmed glasses. Harold Lloyd's glasses. Though Harold referred to his alter ego as the Glass Character, these were empty frames with no glass in them.


This is why I want to talk to Rich Correll. Harold Lloyd bequeathed this battered old case of magic to him. He has it in his possession. If Harold's spirit is anywhere, it's there, and Rich Correll holds it in his hands.

POST TO THE POST. Since the time I wrote this, a few years ago in fact, I did talk to Rich Correll. Just briefly, a couple of times on the phone. He phoned me from Los Angeles, in fact, and it seemed like an absolute miracle. He expressed enthusiasm about my project and wanted to see more than the samples I had sent him (ages ago, assuming they'd never get to him). I sent him the entire manuscript, realized he'd never be able to get through all those pages, and then told him to wait for the book. After it was published in 2014, I arranged to have my publisher send him a copy, but I never heard back, and eventually had to stop sending emails that were never answered.

Did he read it and not like it, not have time for it, never receive his copy, or what? I will never know, because as with everything else in my life, I went only so far, but no farther. It never came to completion. There's nothing more I can do. 

I often feel devastatingly alone in all this, and in a way, yes, I guess it's true, I AM alone in all this.  A voice howling in the wilderness, just foolish enough, I suppose, to keep on howling. My sense of failure knows no bounds. Do I regret my great Harold adventure? In some ways, yes, I do. There are a million other ways you can break your heart that are less efficient, but every bit as effective.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Record labels from the lunar surface

Way Down Yonder in The Cornfield by The Brilliant Quartet (1891)

I discovered another version of this rather awful song, very close to the one I remember from my wayward youth, but I just couldn't post it, I couldn't. This one has the same flavor, with the advantage that you can't understand the words.

Flintstone records

You know those ol' guys (though I guess maybe some of them are girls, and I guess maybe some of them are me) who go on and on about the good ol' days when album covers were really album covers, an art form, like Tommy and Sergeant Pepper and Led Zeppelin all that, and not reduced down into teeny squares something like a postage stamp?

This isn't really about that, but close. I think these recordings came in brown paper sleeves or something. I saw one once: it was called A Cornfield Medley, by the Haydn Quartet (nothing to do with the composer: this was a male barbershop-type group who did "minstrel" songs. These songs also had a really evil name, like an animal with a mask and striped tail, but it's so bad I can't say it.)

This old record, barely audible for all the surface racket, was blatantly racist, but fascinating. It only lasted about a minute and a half. I'm not sure if the label on it was this primitive, but the record itself seemed to be made out of slate from the Cretaceous period. It was heavy, man. Heavy. The grooves were wide apart and it was only recorded on one side, because it literally had not occurred to anyone up to this point to record on both sides.

The only alternative to these slabs of slate were cylinders. Cylinders were made of wax and very delicate, unlike the Flintstone discs that were sturdy (unless you dropped them), if barely audible. There was always a loud announcement of the song title and artist at the beginning of the cylinder, because there was no way to mark the information on them.

But these! These things! Paper labels wouldn't stick to them because glue was made out of old horsehides, so someone got the idea of etching the title information right into the slate or slag or whatever they were made of (my sources say hard rubber, but it's hard to believe it wasn't igneous rock).

I wish I had one of them in my hands right now so I could weigh it in my hands and smell it and play it on my gramophone (which I don't have) and enter that spooky time machine. Lots of collectors have put their prized recordings on YouTube, which is something, so I'll look for them. I've found the Cornfield Medley on two other sites, but for some reason most of the horrible language has been taken out.

Edison phonograph cylinders (1888): Handel - Israel in Egypt

(I seem to have lost the ability to format these posts, so they're all running together into one blob/blog. I hope to straighten it out soon.) These used to scare the shit out of me - I mean, old recordings. I don't know why, because they also fascinated me. Even now, sleuthing around on the net, I want to push the date as far back as I can. The 1880s is pretty far. But not the farthest. In the 1870s, a man named Lambert created something called the "talking clock", which wasn't much except a sound experiment. He recorded his voice saying, "One o'clock. . . two o'clock. . . ", etc. Not very exciting, and there are weird sounds that no one can interpret. It's recorded on an iron cylinder, a medium no one else wanted to try. Oh, and: a guy found a piece of black paper a few years ago with little etchings on it, fed it into his computer, and it sang, "O claire de la lune. . . ", just one line of it. It's of historic value, of course, but it'll never make the Top 40. Apparently it's from 1860 or 1840 or the war of 1812 or something. Frankly, I think it's a hoax, like that guy that claimed to have a recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz (which, by the way, referred to that other meaning of "minute" - small - and NEVER played in a minute like Liberace did.) It was the same technology, after all, pieces of black paper with soot on them. Good thing the maid didn't see them. Then things went to wax, which didn't sound much better. The cylinders distorted and even melted in the heat, and shattered when they dried out. Only a few survive, transcribed to modern sound to save playing them to death. (Though I think you can probably read them with a laser by now.) There is a whole site on these eerie Crystal Palace recordings, supposedly the first recorded music in history. I was happy to catch up with these excerpts here. A legend has grown up around them. Supposedly there were four thousand voices gathered to sing Handel's Israel in Egypt. (The Crystal Palace site says it was only 3,000: a thousand people missed practice and were told they couldn't participate.) That's kind of hard for me to believe: for one thing, I don't think this Crystal Palace would accommodate thousands of singers unless it had the dimensions of a football field. For another, with all those decibels I think the recordings would have been a little more distinct than this. But it's ghostly and a little ghastly to listen to this dim wavering voice from the past. It keeps wafting in and out, but at times it's strong enough that you can hear distinct Handelian chords and harmonies. Then it just sort of wafts back into the distant past. Still scares the shit out of me.

Of vinegar and things

Yesterday I went in to Vancouver so I could go to Dressew and look at fabric. Last time we were over at my son’s place, Erica was on the floor furiously coloring pieces of paper, then gluing them together. She finally wrapped it around herself and asked me to tape it in the back. It was a costume she was making for herself. She is so great at design, and not yet 6 years old! So I thought it might be a good birthday present (May 18, same day as my Dad) to buy some colorful and easy-to-handle fabric that she can cut and tape (or Velcro). Dressew is a vast emporium of fabric and notions that draws people from out of province. Some of it was outrageously expensive, $25 a meter, but I did find some great remnants for $2 and some glittery fabric for less than $5 a meter. I got a lot of different things for under $25. This is what's so great about that place, but I noticed the yarn stock had been drastically cut. I do wonder if stocking all that yarn was a bit of an experiment. The stuff that was left wasn't too practical to use. There are all sorts of costume accessories out now, which is strange because it's nowhere near Halloween (and Mardi Gras has passed). Do they cater to the trans-bi-queer-masquerade community, I wonder? Bill and I took the train home together, which is always pleasant. The 4 seats face each other, and a middle-aged couple sat across from us. They were maybe in their mid-40s. He had a shaved head. Both were maybe 30 or 40 lbs. overweight. At once it became obvious they were a "couple", though I initially thought from his gushy manner that the man was gay. (Forgive my stereotyping, but that’s what I thought. I wondered if it was one-o’-dem Liza Minnelli type-a things.) We had to put up with this all the way home as they made out, held hands, smooched and snuggled. They each had a full backpack with them, which made me wonder if they were running away. I remembered a similar couple on our European trip, and Bill muttered, "Second marriage." It does make you wonder what the backstory is. To cope with all their murmurings, I started reading things to Bill out of the Georgia Straight, a newspaper which used to be underground but is now overground, except for the eight-page full-color spread for hiring hookers in the back. There's a new movie called Hanna starring a young actress called Saoirse Ronan (whom I saw in The Lovely Bones - she was good). We had a contest to see who could pronounce her name (though I think it's something like "Shuh-res"). Then I saw one of the Straight’s inimitable restaurant reviews for a pizza place where they cook the pizzas for "about 90 seconds" at 900 degrees F. They described vinegar this way: "velvety, barrel-aged 12-year-old Reggio Emilia San Giacomo balsamic vinegar", prompting Bill to say, "I prefer the white stuff." Then I said, "Shall I read Savage Love to you?" He said "probably not", so I read only bits of it. Most of these people seemed to fall between the gender cracks (if you will excuse the expression). Dan Savage referred to "one of those guys who are into transwomen and/or born-male-trans-genderqueers-who-live-as-female-but-aren't-quite-passable", a handle nearly as long and confusing as the vinegar (and how can vinegar be "velvety", anyway?). I sat there for a while trying to figure out the meaning of "passable". Does it mean he/she can "pass" in the old racial sense, or does it mean the person is a real bow-wow? There’s no use pretending. I can’t keep up.

Beniamino Gigli - E lucevan le stelle 1938

Beniamino Gigli - E lucevan le stelle 1938

Okay then. So, singers. We've been talking about, thinking about singers, some unusual singers from the past, and some strangely beautiful contemporary singers who seem to grasp and pull the distant past back into the present moment. But this is even more immediate. Gigli. I don't have Gigli recordings, though perhaps I should. When you hear him, you know where Domingo and Pav and the gang get all their tricks (and also from Mario Lanza, the most underrated tenor of all). But no one else could express the exposed, terrifying vulnerability of the human soul in quite this way. This is my favorite tenor aria, and he sings the hell out of it. The haunting stare from the portrait and the slightly broken translation only enhance the performance. Exceptionally beautiful voices make me cry: I once sobbed my way through an astonishing concert by Renee Fleming, Michael Maniaci's unexpectedly vibrant male soprano recently made me burst into tears, and this - oh, this - this Gigli! When I discovered and played it, I was reduced to rubble. The great singers are instruments that express human pain as nothing else can. Yes, joy - rapture - all these things too, but it's the pain we really need them to express, because we can't - can't even find a word for it, though if we try to escape it, we leave an arm or a leg behind.

A moment in time

Michael Maniaci, Male Soprano Voice

Radu Marian, Handel "Lascia Ch'io Pianga"

Philippe Jaroussky "Lascia ch'io pianga" Rinaldo

High attitude

Whew. How can it be Monday already? Anyway, I don't think I've ever had as much trouble as I did with yesterday's post, and it had nothing to do with the content. Every time I try to cut n' paste, I either lose my formatting or end up with little tiny type, so finally I had to throw in the towel and leave it the way it was.

My exploration of the castrati, emasculated superstar singers of the 18th century, was fascinating beyond words. Way led on to way, as it always does, and I discovered several contemporary artists who described themselves as "male sopranos".

This is a whole 'nother thing than "countertenor", a technique I have always described as "bargain-counter tenor" for its strident tone, which can be nasal and downright irritating. These guys, however they do it, sing in soprano range with eerie beauty. It's not true that they "sing like women", for if you listen closely a male sensibility underlies the vocal pyrotechnics.

The first one I stumbled on was Michael Maniaci. On hearing him sing, I began to cry in about one second. I was blown back: this was artistry. Never mind that his voice sounds neither male nor female, and is impossible to compare to anyone else's (creating, at least on first listening, a strange disorientation). It isn't so much the voice as the delivery. He feels this, feels it in his soul, and he knows how to get it across.

Maniaci had to deal with a lot of abuse in his youth. He never quite went through puberty: at least, his larynx didn't, remaining pretty close to that of a boy's. Add to that a partial facial paralysis (which should have made serious singing impossible: just study the faces of opera singers and see how engaged all the muscles of the face are), and you have a recipe for teasing and ostracism. The man doesn't even have an Adam's apple, but he does have a good set of operatic lungs.

Did the castrati sound like this? Perhaps. In descriptions of castrati from the era, which may well have been overblown by fans, agents, etc., they were endowed with huge voices that could soar unnaturally high, hold notes seemingly forever, and brilliantly accomplish trills and arpeggios and all that sopranic singy-singy stuff (perhaps because their tiny thin vocal cords were flexible enough to get around it all).

I also stumbled upon Phillipe Jaroussky, whom some critics prefer over Maniaci for his authentic baroque sound, less operatic and generous of spirit but more ethereal and pure. But for real harum-scarum stuff, just give a listen to Radu Marian, a man who isn't a even man in the usual sense. Like Maniaci, he never fully went through puberty, resulting in the voice of a highly-trained, musically brilliant 15-year-old girl.

God, these guys! Marian is married, apparently. I guess we all wonder about "other" things, about sexual capability and stuff like that, as if it's any of our business. Which it isn't. I kept finding references to the awesome sexual capacity of castrati, which seemed pretty impossible to me, unless they meant highly-developed technique in bestowing pleasure upon females. Which is an entirely different thing from conventional "potency". There's more than one way to skin a cat, or please a lover.

I'll be posting some actual recordings here if I can get them, including Radu Marian and Philippe Jaroussky singing the same aria in two different keys. I guarantee you their voices will raise chills, and sound a little disturbing. However they do it, these men boldly sing where no man has sung before.

Gilded and gelded: giving your all for art

Of all the weirdnesses I’ve produced on this blog, this may be the weirdest. I don’t know what got me onto this, and it was not even a new topic, but it was the first time I’d explored it to this depth.

There was a time, and thank God it’s over, and a place, now more enlightened, when little boys who sang well were altered so that their voices would never change. Sounds innocent enough, until you realize that this was the kind of alteration farmers did to bulls to fatten them up and render them docile.

Yes. These little boys, usually on the verge of puberty, were subjected to the most barbaric procedure imagineable, all in the name of “art” (or, more likely, commerce). There was money to be made in transforming your innocent little choirboy son into . . . a castrato.

An awful word, isn’t it – though it does sound a bit like Capistrano, where the swallows come back to. Awful because this took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in Italy and other parts of Europe, when surgery involved a belt of whiskey and (if you were lucky) a sharpened knife. (Actually, the instrument, still in existence as a Medieval-looking artifact, resembles the jaws of a shark or a bizarre pair of scissors. Even I have limits here, and won't include a photo.)

The child probably wouldn’t get the whiskey because it wasn’t good for him. After the surgery, once he could walk again, he would be subjected (again, without his consent: “please, Daddy, may I have my testicles removed so I can be a great singer?”) to many hours a day of rigorous vocal practice.

From what I can gather from my usual ghoulish research, the boy would retain his small childlike vocal cords, but grow in stature and lung capacity so that giant gusts of air would be forced through tiny little reeds. Same principle as an oboe, really: and oboeists tend to go crazy and have strokes later in life from all that forced air.

This wasn't the only physical peculiarity of the castrato, who was quite literally emasculated, a eunuch with a permanently arrested sexual identity. The burst of testosterone responsible for beard growth, broadening of shoulders, deepening voice, and all the other yummy things that happen to men at puberty (excuse me, I forgot myself) just didn't happen. Joints didn't fuse and harden, with grotesque consequences: arms and legs grew unnaturally long, as did the ribs, resulting in a barrel chest. Good for singing, bad for looks.

The castrato's body was kind of like a fat woman's, with broad hips and enlarged breasts. Combined with long spindly limbs and a soft, rounded, beardless face, they must have looked Halloweenish, but the funny thing is, women loved them. Loved the androgynous look, and swooned when their operatic she-males sent their voices soaring into the stratosphere.

I try to imagine it in my mind, but it's not easy. A gorgeous soprano sound, stoked and pumped up by huge lungs, the volume sufficient to shatter glass. And then there was that legendary ability castrati like Farinelli had to sustain a note for a full minute. Like slowly letting the air out of a very large balloon.

We'll never really know what this freak voice sounded like, but we have an approximation. Just listen to Alessandro Moreschi, if you can stand it. He looks soft-featured, round-faced, almost childish, though in his photo he is well into middle age. All the portraits of famous castrati that I found look the same, as if they’re all genetically related. Some of them look more like multiples, hatched out of the same egg.

Actually, they are related, not just by vocal brilliance but by mutilation. Moreschi is called the “last” castrato because he was the only one whose voice was ever recorded. His singing gives you a tantalyzing taste of what audiences seemed to crave a few hundred years ago. The impression I get here is a voice desperately trying to be tenor. The “attack”, the interpretation, the way he puts the song out there, all have a masculine sensibility, like a tenor’s (and believe me, being a tenor isn’t just about singing).

Then, suddenly and without warning, it swoops into the stratosphere, throbbing for just one instant with beauty and glittering with overtones that somehow come through even on the most primitive recording equipment.

We do have countertenors today who can sing a kind of mezzo-soprano. But their voices tend to have a “hooty” quality, a falsetto which is, let’s face it, false: a man’s voice forced up through the nose into the various vibrating cavities of the sinuses. It's a little like Curly of the Three Stooges (and I have nothing against Curly - I think he was a genius - but that wasn't his real voice. He had a normal male register which he seldom used on the screen.)

Moreschi sings in a “true” voice, which, while technically weak, mannered and likely ridden to death by too much performing (like a race horse being forced to run on shattered tendons) is capable of an awful kind of beauty. Awful, because a man who isn’t a man can’t live in any way except through his music. Conventional intimacy would be impossible, and he’d appear and sound freakish.

Castrati were celebrated and petted like lap dogs, even rumored to be great lovers (which was not very likely), but were never considered normal men. This is a tortured sound, reminiscent of bound feet in gorgeously-embroidered Chinese slippers. Mutilated into beauty. I know I should, but I just can’t turn away.

Strauss gets his groove on: the Great Waltz (1938)

A long, strange trip

This falls under the category of why the hell am I doing this. You fall down the rabbit hole of a past you didn't even enjoy very much, and it's dreamlike and strange and every once in a while you hear a street name like Grand Avenue and a synapse fires with a sizzling SNAP.

I did find out a bit about Bob Sass, my first boy friend in Chatham. Nobody else approved of him because he was glum and a serious musician. At the time he was playing French horn, but when I finally tracked him down on a meticulous site called Chatham Music Archive, he was listed as playing "flugel horn, French horn, trombone, saxophone, etc.", in a high school rock band. I particularly like that "etc." part.

There were gazillions of little bands in Chatham in 1968 (apparently: I was surprised at how many). Among the very few names that jumped out at me were Sylvia Tyson (a high school friend of my sister's who was then known as Sylvia Fricker) and Paul Shaffer, who quickly moved on to greener pastures.

But this Bob, this first boy friend who made me lie down on the grass with him which I didn't really want to do, was in this band, Cold Sweat, led by one Leroy Hurst (from Windsor, formerly with Little Leroy and the Citations). Aside from Leroy, Bob seemed to do everything else.

Then came a heartbreaking story which may or may not be true: for after all, bands are volatile and break up, and high school bands from 1968 are known to blow apart in an explosion of bongs and beer cans. "Bruce Robertson took over on vocals for the last 3 or four months. In September of 1968 the groups (sic) van hit a steer on the highway near Lucan on the way home from a gig in Wingham. Bruce Robertson was killed and three other members of the band were hospitalized. The band never re-formed."

Well, I just don't know. Because it has an aura of Spinal Tap about it. Of the drummers exploding or something. Or kind of like The Rutles, which I think is funnier. But then again, maybe it did happen and I am being insensitive.

At least it wasn't Bob.

Just one more, because I loved him

This is what it looked like. . .

Hard to caption these, though many of them seem to come from the mists of antiquity.

What strikes me is how different my view of them is now that I'm an adult. I remember thinking our house was plain and ugly because it looked nothing like the flat-roofed, space-age designs of the '60s. You were supposed to have a new house, not one of these. The house is still there, but has been converted into a doctor's office, which means the inside must be entirely ripped out. When we first moved in I was three. Walking through the empty house, I wondered how we were ever going to live without furniture.

Rocky, yes. . . I've already written about this sturdy little cow-pony, who had more character than breeding. I still love telling Rocky stories. This is probably the time I put him out in the back yard with Willie and the cherry tree, and he broke loose and galloped all the way back to the stable.

Willie, well. . . he was a beautiful but temperamental dachschund my Dad was conned into buying by a breeder. He was already seven years old and turned out to be an ineffectual breeding stud with a lousy temperament, the worst pet imagineable. My Dad was a complete idiot.

The Sunday-go-to-church one, well, this is pure Leave it to Beaver, isn't it? Like something from Hilldale (or wasn't that Donna Reed? My brother and I, trying to make her human, called her Donna Peed.)

Which is what?

So which is what? Which one of these honkin' old brick buildings is McKeough School, where I attended from 1959 to 1964 (though it seemed like 20 times that long)?

I won't give you any hints, but I'll help you match the photo to the description. One of them is the Kent County Penitentiary. One is the Armoury in Tecumseh Park. One is a Baptist church with the inexplicable title of Duchess of Wellington. One of them is a munitions factory or something, and one is Park Street United, the church where my minister was thrown into jail for sexual improprieties (look it up: his name was Rev. Russell Horsburgh). And one is McKeough School. Oh-oh, that's six!

Since I am sure the suspense is killing you, I'll tell you. The first one is McKeough School, which operated, incredibly, until 2001. I remember looking up the web site in the '90s, and wondering why the whole thing hadn't fallen down. To me, it looks like a set for Jane Eyre or something, where they have to break the ice in the washbasins.