Month: September 2014

I’m guessing. What’s amazing about this picture is that it’s a Polaroid. It’s pretty incredible that it survived at all given how it’s been stored and smashed around over the years. I have a vague memory of scanning and uploading this picture before, so forgive the duplication if I did.

The dog is Brandy, our first pet. My heart clenched seeing her in this shot, proving that love, for pets, never dies.

Interesting juxtaposition, no? The American Stock Exchange, which is now the New York Stock Exchange, unless this is something else with a similar name.

I wasn’t quick enough to get the hug that followed the run-up below, but there were a lot of hugs on Tuesday night, our first rehearsal of the new season. It’s good to be back. Choir singers all over the world are in a good mood these days, as they get back to rehearsing. In many ways it’s the best part. Here’s a great Robert Shaw quote about rehearsals.

“The wonderful thing about the amateur chorus,” the conductor Robert Shaw once said, “is that nobody can buy its attendance at rehearsals, or the sweat, eyestrain and fatigue that go along with the glow; and nobody but the most purposive and creative of music minds—from Bach in both directions—can invite and sustain its devotion.”

While researching my book, I was looking into the Mendelssohn Glee Club, and all-male group that was founded in 1866 and is still singing today. I was going through their early membership lists just to see who popped up, and I found some hand-written notes about how on April 15, 1912, Frederic K. Seward, a Glee Club member who’d been on board the Titanic, still managed to make it to rehearsal a week later! Not only was that no surprise to me, I could see how he might have needed that rehearsal more than ever.

Along the same lines, I found a poem presented to Frank Damrosch (a conductor and singing teacher) from his students. It described the cold, unfriendly world outside, and the hall in the basement where they held their classes, with gas jets that were often leaking, and pillars that blocked their view, but, “Those hours shaped again and again, Your life, your very soul, In ways you’d not comprehend … You took the blue from out the skies, And sparkles from the stars, And bound them, In Heaven’s grandest harmonies.” Imagine having that effect on a bunch of people.

One more! From Ralph Vaughan Williams. “If we want to find the groundwork of our English culture we must look below the surface … to the village choral societies whose members trudge miles through rain and snow to work steadily for a concert or competition in some ghastly parish room with a cracked piano and a smelly oil lamp where one week there is no tenor because at best there are only two, and one has a cold and the other being the village doctor is always called out at the critical moment; and there they sit setting their teeth so as to wrench the heart out of this mysterious piece of music which they are starting to learn …”

For some reason I didn’t even try to go to the Memorial Plaza. I just assumed it would be closed to everyone except the family and friends of the people who died on 9/11. But maybe it wasn’t? After a lovely service for peace at St. Paul’s Chapel I walked around.

This year I was drawn to signs. After taking this guy’s picture I said “thank you,” and he said, “thank you, sister.” Nobody has ever called me sister before. Not even my brothers.

The truthers were out in force. In the beginning people would shout at them. Now, everyone ignores them. It was the quietest demonstration ever.

In answer to the question on the lower right: I did know, actually. When I moved Echo out of our offices downtown the year before 9/11, a friend who worked in building 7 offered to store our many boxes of paperwork there. We lost it all, but in terms of loss that day it was nothing. I was glad really. I’m the opposite of a hoarder. I’m a parer-downer.

Sigh. What’s a 9/11 anniversary without some asshole spewing hate? Oh, but notice the Mennonites in the background? They were all over the place singing. More pictures of them below. Because I love the singing Mennonites. They are all about peace and love. (I think!)

Uh-oh. Two girls are not looking at their conductor! I’m sure he understood. There was so much going on, so much to look at.

Hello, Mr. State Trooper. They were watching something going on in a blocked off area in front of them.

Here are lots of people watching the blocked off area. This is the building I mentioned in the post before this one by the way, where I used to work in the 1980s.

The blocked off area. I couldn’t see what people were looking at. The backs of a bunch of cameramen filming something further in the distance?

More Mennonite singers. To sing us out of this post. Thank you, singers.

They tested the Tribute in Light last night, which was good. Because we might not be able to see it tonight due to the weather.

I just flashed back to the 1980’s, when I worked near the Towers. Every day I’d come up out of the subway and walk through the WTC lobby. I was so young. And clueless. That always stands out for me when I remember my youth. Kids today are so much more sophisticated, and directed. I was pretty much stumbling through my life when I was in my early 20s. Now kids in their 20s are millionaire entrepreneurs and developing some of the most talked about shows on tv. Go kids go! We are all enjoying the fruits of your labors.

Pretty, but sad lights. Like many others, I wish they were lit all year round, but perhaps the people living nearby don’t feel the same. Plus, the cost.