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Cast of Characters

Mid-January, Rain - January 13, 2012
Almost Midwinter - December 14, 2011
Saturday, Noonish, Sunny - November 05, 2011
October, White - October 31, 2011
October, 2011 - October 04, 2011


March 17, 2004

2:43 p.m.

The Lone Star Tour

The Transportation Security Administration passed a decree last year that musicians are to be allowed to carry their guitars onto a plane in addition to their regular carryon bags. We've heard some horror stories about gate personnel not giving a damn about the TSA's decision. With connecting flights each way, we had four planes to worry about, as it's never certain whether the flight staff will let us take them on or make us gate-check them. We had two full size guitars, one travel guitar and a mandolin with us, having checked the bass and keyboard already. When I learned we were flying Delta I told Chris about how they'd almost killed my mother and then refused to even refund her ticket price until she found a pro bono lawyer to act on her behalf � and even then, the money didn't come in until just before she died, many months later. So I have an internal boycott against Delta. It wasn't alleviated when a seeming parade of officials kept coming up to us at the curbside check, warning us we'd have to check all our instruments. "You can't carry those on the plane!" "But we've done it before." "You'll have to check them at the gate!" "If you don't mind, we'd like to carry them to the gate and ask." "They won't let you bring them on the plane! There's no room in the overhead bins!" "I beg to differ with you," (I actually said this, in the nicest, most innocent voice I could muster) "We've always been able to fly with them so far." Then ANOTHER guy would come up and tell us the same thing, then the FIRST guy would come back and make sure the second guy had talked to us. I wanted to say, "Out of my way, you bastards! I've got a machine gun in this case!" Instead we walked to the gate quietly.

Thank goodness we had the TSA letter; we showed it, and phone calls were made, and ultimately they let us on in an early boarding group so we'd have room to stow them � and the plane wasn't even very full at all.

We had to use the letter on all four flights, as it turned out, and I'll bet none of the employees had seen it or knew about it, except flying back out of Austin, because, well, everybody in Austin carries a guitar at some point.

It's just a little harrowing.

We stayed with friends we met last year, who host a house concert for us. Jonnie and Calvin live in this marvellous, whimsical house they built up from a little bungalow, and give tours to the public once a month. They're both artists and designers and carpenters, and I love them dearly. When I met them last year, Calvin reminded me a little bit of Will; some similarities in the features and body type.

The first night, Chris and Carol stayed at her brother's house in town. It was sort of an obligation visit, and happily I wasn't obligated. So Jonnie converted a little gallery room in the front of the house into a bedroom, fixing up a futon on the floor and lots of pillows, and a vase of flowers. There was a little gas heater by the bed so in case it got chilly I had a little hot spot all my own. She found me a book of poetry by Neruda, and placed it on the side table. It was a perfect nest.

We ate at a great Thai place, then came back and talked a lot, lolling around on the floor in the Bali Room, the large space upstairs where the concert is held. I can hardly describe this house or know what its influences are � but this upper storey is like a huge A-frame with sort of bamboo-treated walls up to the pinnacle, a little loft on the front side with a ladder going up, and a little stage under it and french doors leading out to an outside balcony, red cross beams, and on the back side, another stairway with rope bannisters going up to their bedroom, at the very top of the house. It's all rattan and red and gold trim and a bit of lime green and lots of pillows everywhere and a big Chinese gong, and side rooms and candles. There's no real furniture per se, so it's all modular and adaptable to any purpose.

They asked me what all had happened in the last year, and of course a lot of it was about Will and I think I hadn't really told them the story yet, so I encapsulated that and it was okay. Finally we went to bed, and I had an intensely sexual dream about Calvin which, though it did not exactly involve sex, was intensely sexual, in addition to which it was intensely sexual. Did I mention? Nothing like being in a house where you're having sexy dreams about your friend's partner. In the dream he more or less rejected me, saying we should just stop and think, and I felt horrible and finally said that maybe I'd come on to him because he reminded me of Will.

********

The second night we played a church gig in Houston. I think after playing at Unity of Washington, DC recently, we're always looking to recapture that incredible power and joy. We play a lot of churches really, and if it's a service of course we're hearing the sermon and everything else, and some of them are, I'm sorry, but just so white, and the DC Unity being pretty much a black congregation, they just rocked.

(I used to go hear a gospel choir at the University of Connecticut called the Voices of Freedom, and I'd just bawl through the whole concert because of the intense, wide open joy and unbridled feeling. Not all the members of the choir were really good singers, but anyone could solo and they all did it with feeling, if not great skill. A few women in the audience would call out to them, saying, "Sing, girl!" "Sing it now!" and you could tell they were doing it ALL for the glory o' God.)

The DC gig was like that. It was just cool, even for someone not exactly of the faith like me who shows up at these things with a big old Artemis pendant around her neck. The minister there was this fabulous woman who did a lot of affirmations and referred to the father/mother God, quoted from spiritual texts other than the Bible, and really connected with people. None of it sounded rote. By comparison the Houston Unity was pretty conservative and didn't take a lot of risks.

Afterwards we were pushing our CDs, and a guy came up and was talking to me about mine, and I noticed after a minute that he was cute. I had a brief conversation with a cute guy in Houston, TX. That was my whole exciting flirtatious life on this tour. That night I had another dream, where I was in a math class with this guy, and it was one of those school dreams where you haven't been in class for weeks and you have no idea what's going on, and you should have just stayed away because you're going to be called on for an answer you don't have. But this guy wanted to sit by me, so I stayed, and I told him, "I don't think I'll come to any more classes this term. Even if I fail all of them, I'll still graduate!" (Apparently I had a perfect GPA up til then.) I'd moved onto other areas in my life and didn't want to learn any more math. There was a moment where I almost asked him if he'd like to get together later, but then I decided to just wait and see what happened.

Then I was eating a HUGE sloppy apple danish. It was so good, I knew I was being a pig but I couldn't help it, I just wanted the whole thing.

Meanwhile, through the entire dream I was trying to work out the homework equation on the blackboard and couldn't do it. The numbers were all Texas highway numbers with fractions, and every time I looked at them, they changed.

Then I was driving, driving�

********

Houston is one huge strip mall. Our host, Calvin, designed a playscape last year at one of the larger malls, and we went to see it on our way back to Austin to stay with them again. It's fabulous. It's designed like a castle, with slides and funny fishbowl windows and things to jump on. We went all through it, even though it was made for people half our size. There is also a Venetian-style double-decker carousel at this mall, and we rode it as well. Jonnie had told us about this, and about the horse that turns into a serpent, so that's the one I rode. It's called the Dentzel Hippocampus, named after the designer, and later Calvin showed me a book on carousel creatures and I found about half a dozen varieties of horse/fish.

On our way back to Austin I finally, after years of keeping an eye out, found some mistletoe that was growing low enough to pick off the tree. My bandmates gave me a leg up and I pulled off several little branches. I don't know why I've wanted mistletoe except that it doesn't grow here, and you have to buy little unsatisfying sprigs of it at Christmas time. What a racket. I put them in a vase at the house and we had it as a green bouquet. Jonnie said it was very poisonous so I made sure to wash my hands.

That night we had the house concert in the Bali Room; it was packed, it was amazing, we made a ton of money. We also coerced Jonnie's dad into telling one of his gypsy stories � we'd heard about this and couldn't wait to see it. This is something he used to do for his daughters when they were little. He had travelled with gypsies earlier in his life, to study their customs and their music and stories. But he never could pick up the language, so he made one up, kind of a Romanian-Polish gibberish, and he'd tell a little fable in English, then act it out again in the fake language with lots more gestures and miming so they'd know where he was in the story. He's maybe in his late seventies and had never done this in front of strangers before. But we pleaded and he said he would, and it was just precious. He personified everybody's favorite dad. Later he said he was surprised that he hadn't been nervous.

********

Calvin made an excellent ginger limeade with mint from the backyard and mango, and in a bizarre twist of fate, Chris drank some and got something stuck in his throat. It could have been a mint stem, or some other thing that had been in the bunch when it was picked; but it lodged just beyond or near his larynx, and he couldn't get it to go down. This was at intermission, so there was no time to do anything about it. I suggested he eat some bread, but that didn't help. So he sang with the foreign object poking him inside.

Other than that, the night was magical.

********

That night I dreamt I saw a ghost. I was staying in a room where there was a little loft space/reading nook to my left, and I'd been told that some people had seen this old lady ghost there sometimes. I looked up from what I was doing, and noticed that the rocking chair in the loft was going back and forth very slightly. I realized that I had been scared for a few minutes and this must be why. I looked again and there she was in the chair � an old woman with her back to me, but her hair was dyed dark or she had a wig. She got up and came down the stairs. I spoke to her and she vanished. I walked over to where she'd been, even though I was afraid it might be cold or creepy. Then I woke up.

********

We had the next day off, so I'd made arrangements to hang out with my friend Red (from Austin, recently in Kansas, now back in Austin), who had some new songs to play for me. As the morning progressed I started having visits from Montezuma � yep, you know what I mean. I'd stop her in the middle of a story and dash downstairs. At first I thought it was an isolated incident� but it became apparent that I'd caught something or eaten something slightly disagreeable. After a while Calvin offered to heat up a hot water bottle for me, and one of those microwavable sort of beanbag things that you can use for muscle aches and so forth. He tucked me into bed and arranged my warm spots and sat with me for a few minutes, saying to breathe and relax and go inside and see if there was something that was crying out to be noticed and looked at. I felt very vulnerable, not to mention rather unwell. Part of me wanted to say, "I dreamed I tried to get you to touch me, but you wouldn't and later I said you reminded me of Will." But I didn't, thinking that would be a horrible thing to reveal. So I just closed my eyes and breathed, and soon Chris called him out to the other room so he left me to my thoughts, which now were very sad. Red visited with Jonnie for a while, and then with Carol, to learn one of her songs.

We had planned a big dinner � I didn't end up helping make it, but C&C made this incredible cilantro pesto salmon, and we invited Alan, our photographer from the last album shoot, this gay guy whom I loved immediately when I met him last year because he told me this story about how he was in Ohio once and fixed up on a blind date by some friends, and they all went out to a bar and for some reason he started talking in this really exaggerated Texas accent, maybe trying to impress this guy, and though he knew his friends thought he was really weird and he'd get caught sooner or later, he couldn't stop doing it because he was drinking and it seemed like a good idea at the time, so he ended up adopting this whole hail-feller-well-met persona with this totally cowboy hick accent, and then he could never see the guy again because he'd have to explain that that wasn't him. Anyway I laughed my ass off when he told me about this because I'd done a similar thing when I was ten years old, pretending I had an English twin and rushing in and out and changing clothes each time, so we bonded over that. Alan is a doll and is just now starting to come into his artistic own, after a stifling relationship of six years. So I emerged a little while before dinner, feeling somewhat better and hungry, but still very sad and withdrawn and fragile for some reason. The kitchen was bustling and everything was underway so I went out into the living room and listened to music from their big speakers mounted near the ceiling, and wrote a poem on my palm:

Any room can be a crash
living room
makeshift bed
hippie house
Bjork from the ceiling
I am sitting apart

having been sick
and emerging too late
from saying goodbye to my friend
to help with dinner

(so I said I'd clean up
and only got, "You'd better")

Now a little outcast
and knit with skeins of thought
I sit with my pearl of sorrow
and the realization
that

I generally emerge too late
from goodbyes

to take part in the cooking

but sit instead at table
watching the lover go
the soft tick of parting like a clock
that backs the ebb and flow
of dinner conversation.

I couldn't eat much but it was fabulous. Then we had a chocolate taste-off; Carol had bought three chocolate bars, the good kind but all different, and we had a blind taste test and evaluation of them. After that, Calvin brought out his 45 collection and we took off our shoes and danced in the living room, using all the masks and props and funky instruments in the house, to Eric Burden and the Animals, Rolling Stones, Peggy Lee, and that guy who said, "I am the god of hellfire!" I found a long red wig, and appeared dancing in that, and Chris said, "Hey, I dated you in high school!" Later HE put on the wig, with a policeman's cap, and he and Calvin did a rockin' love duet. We sang backup and played tambourine and percussion.

This finally cheered me up. I guess sometimes you just have to bring the house down.

********

They had two dogs, one of which they were going to put down before we got there, but Jonnie didn't have the heart yet to do it because she'd been so busy, she felt she hadn't had enough time with him. Trooper was a one-woman dog; he tolerated Calvin but didn't love him, and NO ONE else in the world could pet him without getting bitten. Still, Jonnie loved him dearly and had been through maybe 16 years of life with him at her side. His back legs weren't really working any more, he was rather blind and rather deaf, and they thought he also had cancer somewhere. They decided to put him down the next day after we left for our North Austin house concert. They buried him in the front garden, with much weeping and celebration. After he died, Calvin said, he put his hand in Trooper's mouth and kissed his face, because he'd never been able to do that in life without getting bitten. We said that now Jonnie has to do her own biting.

My stomach was still off-and-on funky, so I obtained some Chinese herbs that come as little pellets in small vials, and smell like boullion paste. You take the whole vial, or two. "Each time." It doesn't say how many times a day to take them. I have no idea whether they've helped, but I have enjoyed imagining my insides getting all balanced and harmonized. Later I also got some Rolaids.

Meanwhile, the thing in Chris's throat was still there, irritating him and preventing him from sleeping. He'd stopped in at the local hospital on Friday but it would have taken several hours to get the ENT in, give him anaesthetic, scope his throat and esophagus, bring him out of the anaesthetic and get him home. So he opted not to go through with it. By Saturday he was coughing a lot and had cold symptoms. We arrived in North Austin as the rain turned to a London fog. We rearranged the set a little so he wouldn't have to sing so much. The concert was pretty good, though acoustically not very live so we didn't feel very in command of the room. Before and after, I hid in the side room because it was so noisy and chaotic outside, my stomach was still burning a little, and I couldn't take the atmosphere. The best part was that Jonnie and Calvin came after their ordeal with Trooper; they said they really needed the music then, God bless 'em.

On the way back we stopped at the emergency room again to see what might be done about Chris. Eventually I took the rental car back and Carol waited with him; it wasn't far, so they said they'd just take a cab back to the house. He was there about three hours without result, and when finally he was lying on the gurney sucking a lozenge, he felt the thing move a little farther down. Since everything was still taking so long, he finally decided to leave. It was after 2am by then. He came back for another night of almost no sleep, though they'd given him a scrip for Ambien which he was holding off filling.

Sunday morning we had a church service in Austin (where I recognized the bathroom as the place where, last year, Carol had gone running down the hall shouting, "Emergency!" when the faucet came off and a geyser of water was rushing out of the sink), then drove to San Antonio to play at a yoga studio. Our plan was to stay in S.A. for two nights and then fly back Tuesday. So we said our goodbyes to J&C, with the open possibility of coming back if Chris needed to see the doctor on Monday.

It was a long ass day, Sunday was. I did the driving to S.A. and we played to a small group at the yoga place. They made some just gorgeous yogi tea from scratch there, which we kept drinking. Chris by now could hardly sing, he was sneezing frequently, his eyes were watering and he coughed a lot. Some folks from a venue we wanted to impress were coming, so it was a bit of a drag.

We had dinner with our host (who knew me from when I used to play at the University of Connecticut back in the early 90's � strange serendipity) and a couple of their friends, and finally Chris decided we should go back to Austin so his medical options would be open the next day. I secretly rejoiced, because I really wanted to go back and stay with them some more and be in their lovely company � not to mention do a little more shopping on Congress Street. So that's what we did. Chris got his scrip filled on the way there. He'd never taken Ambien before, but I have, and my sister always tells me to take ONLY a half tablet, as they're strong. Now Chris is a man of appetite. If it feels or tastes good he'll do it without regard to consequence. (We've had a few pot-smoking incidents of this type, where he basically turns into an asshole who thinks he's really smart but then proceeds to embarrass the hell out of us.) So he took an Ambien, and we were all talking in the living room where they were sleeping, and after a little while we heard him softly snoring, lying on his back on the rug. Then his snoring got louder and then it was louder than our talking, and we were all laughing and talking about him but he was SOUND asleep. We thought we should get him into bed then, and I patted his face and spoke to him, and he said something utterly unintelligible back to me. We were peeing our pants laughing by now, and had to go and get Calvin to help us coax him to bed. Chris is not a small man; none of us could have dragged him. So Calvin came in, and I shook Chris a little and said, "C'mon Chris, you have to go to bed now!" And he opened his eyes suddenly and said, "Mmmgnhh are we already?" which sent us back into paroxysms of laughter. "No, no, I can do it, I can do it!" he said, just like a six year old. He struggled to his feet and raised his arms like a drunken Superman. We got him at least kneeling on the bedding, then we all went to do our other things; I came back a couple of minutes later and he was still sitting in the same position, staring at one of the bookcases, looking fascinated. I told him he had to lie down and go to sleep, and he murmured, "This is fun!" So I went and told Carol she had to go deal with him or he'd stay up stoned all night.

Needless to say, he had a posturepedic night. Carol slept upstairs in the Bali Room loft because the snoring was just untenable.

********

I dreamt of the subway again. I have all this stuff, all these things, my pack and my sweater and jacket and my purse and scarf, and I can't seem to pick them all up at once or get them on, and the train is coming and I don't have a token yet. I put a bill into the token machine, but instead of a token, I got a slip saying my bill was a Japanese counterfeit and wouldn't be accepted as real money.

********

So Monday was a found day in Austin; I went window shopping, Jonnie showed us the little bungalow she bought last year and has been renovating; we went to a movie together, and ate at the fabulous Thai place again. Then we bought a jigsaw puzzle and set it up on the kitchen table. Good therapy for all. By then I realized that Carol was so annoying me that I couldn�t wait to get away from her. I love them both, but you can't just hear two people talking every day and not long for other voices. I love Jonnie's and Calvin's voices; she has such a sweet drawl, and he has such good deadpan comic delivery. It was a relief to have them there to shake up the aural monotony. Carol has some speech habits that bother me with repitition (like consistently saying "een" instead of "ing" at the ends of words, like she's in third grade� "tempacher" instead of "temperature�" "put-ticular" instead of "particular"). Also, no matter how we sit at a table in relation to each other, she will ALWAYS cross her legs and kick me with her foot. Why does this happen? And my instruments aren't safe around her. She knocks my guitar case over, she doesn't pay attention to where things are and they drop or hit something. She's not just clumsy and unmindful, she's impressively so. Anyway, after a certain amount of this I'm ready for a break so that I don't snap at her and hurt her feelings. Monday I had a little time to myself in the shops, and I found a few more little things for Rose's birthday later this month.

I dreamt nothing remarkable that night.

********

Our connection from Cincinnati was cancelled due to yesterday's storm in Hartford, so we were rerouted through Atlanta. Aside from arriving a bit later, it all went fine and we continued to flash our TSA letter. In the Austin airport, an official looking guy with a uniform and a walkie talkie came up to Carol and she got that sinking feeling about the guitars again, and he said, "I saw you at Jonnie and Calvin's! You were great!"

So ended the Lone Star tour. The interloping object in Chris's throat seems to be slowly dissolving; Carol and I have both come down with colds. We have two days off including today, and then a big fat local gig. I can't express how good it is to be home.


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