365 Memories

I am not a makeup maven. I've never worn foundation, except the professional "pancake" kind for those handful of times I have performed on stage (a lifetime ago!). For everyday, it just feels like a slow toxic suffocation of crud in my pores. Ditto the blush. No fuss, no muss. Definitely no mascara; the wand is a serious hazard. The most I could cope with: eyeliner, some shimmery nude color on lids, and lipstick. The lipstick used to be bright red. At some point, I realized that my olive skin tone is hard to match to the right shade, though—all the reds I like when I see them in stick form end up making my skin or my teeth look yellow. Now, I opt for more tawny and brown shades, when I bother. I remember, though, a time when I loved to browse the cosmetics aisles and look at lipsticks and read the exotic, trumped up names of the colors. I would laugh at the outrageousness . Of all the hundreds of names I've read, and the dozens of tubes I've owned, I remember the ...

As a daughter who enjoys a deeply bonded relationship with her father, a memory springs to mind now, on the eve of my wedding anniversary; a memory concerning a tradition I imagine might be perfunctory for some, but that for me was anything but: the father-daughter dance. I remember, in the months leading up to the wedding, agonizing over what song we should dance to. Whose idea was it, finally, to choose a song by Alan Jackson? By default, I assume it was my idea, but I can't remember the notion actually coming to me; it's possible he made the suggestion. Really, it seems just as appropriate (emotionally, if maybe not technically accurate) to say that we found the song together, both of us owning the idea equally. My father had been a fan of Alan Jackson since way back. I remember being college age when I first borrowed his album, Don't Rock the Jukebox , and heard Jackson's accented voice and his clever lyrics, humorous and soulful, for the first time. I appreciated h...

During the 1989-1990 academic year, I was in college and at the end of another mismatched relationship: this guy being the jealous, possessive type, which did not suit me in the least. At this point, we'd broken up—his fault and my own; neither of us was blameless—and things were still a bit raw and messy. As is the case for so many of us in these moments, music was the cure. Songs were the balm used to soothe, the bubbly champagne-like celebration of freedom, and the arrows we conveniently slung at each other when we'd used up all of our own words. I remember the progression of our relationship in music, starting with "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes and ending with "Train in Vain" by the Clash. These songs were much older than our short-lived romance, but they fit. As for contemporary albums, in 1989, Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever hit the charts. I remember that a girlfriend from high school was staying with me at the time of the al...

It's mid-May and gray today. Unseasonably cool temperatures. Hard to recall days of sunshine and nothing doing, but that's really all I'm fit for in my wishful-thinking mode. So what I remember is this: Warm sand between my toes, finally. Fifteen years old, the thaw of my first real Michigan winter; snow and icicles gone, rain and mud gone, and the sun working its late-spring magic on my sour, pale-skin self. My school at the time was situated between two lakes, adjacent to State Park property. In the spring, shanties for ice fishing gave way to calm blue water, gentle waves carrying sparks of light. Between or after classes, I would head with friends to a two-story, yellow-painted structure by a small patch of beach—the boat launch location for summer camp students. Throughout the year, we'd head there to talk or not talk, to smoke or not smoke, to sulk or to smile as our mercurial moods demanded, and very often to listen to music. We listened to a lot of classic rock ...

The first time I heard someone singing opera in live performance was not in a theater as you might expect. In the 1980s I was living with my parents in Los Angeles, but they did not take me to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for opera. No, the first time I heard the passion of, specifically, Italian opera was while eating a plate of pasta at a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica called Verdi: ristorante di musica. Verdi opened twenty-six years ago, in 1983, and it quickly became one of my family's favorite places. We were regulars and got to know the manager, a man probably close to seven feet tall, who was a singer himself, I believe, or had been—I remember thinking it interesting that his first and last names were really both first names: Chuck Frank. (How do I remember that?) The food was fabulous. I ordered classic Italian standbys such as angel hair pasta pomodoro (the pasta was fresh and deliciously eggy, the tomatoes pleasantly acidic and sweet), sometimes veal s...

I don't consider myself a phobic person. I have never been afraid of heights (though I have blogged about a recent fear of flying, here ); in fact, I have been skydiving and loved the experience. I am not fearful of things like speaking in public or needles or spiders. I am not afraid to take creative risks or to make mistakes. I am not, strictly speaking, afraid of the dark. However, on this last item, I have to confess: it depends on what is meant by "dark." For most of my life, I thought I knew what darkness was—I don't mean metaphoric darkness; I'm talking about the lack of light at midnight. But I was raised primarily in large cities—New York, Chicago, L.A.—and in a city like this, the darkness is never complete. There is always a light-leak from someplace. You get ready for bed, turn off the lights, and at most it takes your eyes a few seconds to adjust before you see outlines of objects emerging from shadow. If you have a window in your bedroom, then you sl...

Until I began to approach the middle school years, I didn't really listen to the radio. I listened to albums (yes, vinyl), on a turntable that was very juvenile in style but got the job done. Mostly I listened to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and to this day I can sing almost all the songs, even the more obscure ones, from their classic Broadway musicals. The radio was on in the car sometimes, but one of my parents set the dial or else I spun aimlessly through the stations, scanning for anything that sounded good despite not really knowing the songs. But, even in the car, the radio took second place to conversation or our own singing. All this changed sometime when I was around eleven, definitely by the time I turned twelve. In fact, I think it might've been some girls at a week-long (two-week?) sleepover camp for the horsey set who turned me on to the "coolness" of radio, the necessity for knowing the most recent hits. They, plus friends at school, were my introduction t...

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...

Sometimes our memories are visual, sometimes auditory. One of my earliest musical memories is when I had my first turntable—it was white and blue, I think, and definitely crafted for children—and I recall one of the first records I owned: Free to Be . . . You and Me . (Yes, I am seriously dating myself here: not only with the title of the album, but with the fact that music was still mainly vinyl when I was young!) The album was first released in late 1972, but I was older than three when I first heard the songs. We were living in Chicago, on Commonwealth, so I must have been around eight years old. And it was exactly the time in my life when I needed to hear the messages in this socially progressive collection of stories and songs. Now, when I think back on it, I am amazed at what Marlo Thomas and her "friends" (the likes of Alan Alda, for example, and Rosey Grier the pro football player and needlepoint crafter!) accomplished, and what an impact they made on a whole generati...

It was only last night, but already it rates among my most powerful memories—one I know will reverberate down time's lonely corridors, enduring where the daily slush of logistical life (thankfully) does not. Yesterday contained plenty of logistical craziness, but by 8:00 PM I was seated in the last row of the dress circle at Carnegie Hall next to my father, looking down on a stage empty but for a single piano, a bench, and a collection of microphones wired for the live recording of Keith Jarrett's solo improvisational performance. I have always loved these charged moments of anticipation before a performance, and I expected this concert to be something special—that much more so because the tickets came through a friend of a very dear friend in California, a last-minute opportunity to be seized, and because a love of Keith Jarrett was transmitted to me by my father, and this was a great way to thank him for bringing awareness of this man's music into my life. But this is all...