I invite you to read the 99 Girdles page of this web site.  It’s all new stuff!

For the past 4 months I have been working with a free-lance editor in town, Tom Orton.  With his excellent suggestions, I have found a *narrative arc,* re-organized the entire book and re-written much of it, including the beginning.  I will be re-submitting– with crossed fingers–to St Martin’s Press sometime this month.  I would love to hear your comments.

Remember back before Christmas when some of us were counting the days and longing for The Light like medieval villagers?  Then there was the onslaught of Christmas and New Year.  By now we are well on our way towards it being light earlier in the morning until Congress robs us of even that when in March daylight savings time plunges us morning people into another month of darkness.

The sun entered Capricorn at the Winter Solstice, Dec 21.  In astrology, Capricorn is associated with the Greek Titan Cronus who had a makeover in Italy and became the god Saturn.  Here’s a little terrifying mythology for you:

When Cronus and his brothers and sisters were born, their father, Uranus (sky god), was so unprepared to have children that he depressed them deep into their mother, Gaia (earth goddess).  Gaia got tired of her children being forced back inside of her so she colluded with Cronus at his birth to emasculate his own father and free his brothers and sisters.

Cronus became the Big Daddy.  When he and his wife Rhea began to have children, Cronus was fearful that what he had done to his own father would be done to him.  Evidently Rhea had a bit of the women’s liberation about her because there would be no stuffing children back into her.  Instead, Cronus ate them.  Rhea conspired with her youngest, Zeus, who overthrew and exiled his father.

Know any families like this?

Like anything else, astrology is deadly in the hands of fundamentalists, but it can be a wonderful language for playing with ideas and thinking about life.  I prefer to think of the astrological signs as symbolizing different kinds of human energies.

We all have Capricorn energies.  Our personalities all have rooms that accommodate the moodiness we sometimes associate with this month and with the fearful pessimism of Saturn.  When we enter those rooms we cope with fears of being usurped or oppressed by grabbing for control and by trying to be vigilant in a world so unsafe that fathers eat their own children.   When we get too invested in this self-protection we sometimes can’t afford to see all the ways the world is safe, and the ways that earth supports her own creations.  In an effort to keep things congruent, we end up eating our own creative children, sabotaging ourselves, if only to prove that our pessimistic view of life is correct.

The Saturnine Heathcliff in WutheringHeights is almost comical:

“What’s to do now, my lad?”

“Naught, naught.”

January is just one month and gloomy pessimism is just one of many feeling states.  After the mania of Christmas, our modern day Saturnalia, January sometimes seems empty and stark.  Yet outside, the still and muted world feels pregnant. There’s a gestation going on.  Out of the quiet, dark dis-satisfactions comes something new, something organic.  It’s a matter of trusting our own unconscious processes instead of trying to control what we’re conscious of.  This can get lost in the silliness of New Year’s resolutions.

In astrology, Capricorn is symbolized by the goat.  The cornucopia, the horn of plenty, is a goat’s horn.  Within emptiness is its own polarity, fullness.  The goat climbs slowly up the mountain, making sure the foot is secure before moving on.  Within cautiousness is its own polarity, trust.

January named after Janus, the two-faced head, is another image of polarity.  January is like a door that swings both ways.  We may be in a new year, but I think “closure” is a meaningless notion.  We can’t help but look back at the same time we look forward.  We continually return to the full experience of being alive.

Okay, we’re back.

I use the third person royally because I actually live alone, not counting the three cats to whom I pay rent.  However I am more introverted than not and I feel like I almost died of people this past week.  I ate lunches, dinners, and high teas such as I don’t believe ever existed in England until Americans discovered petit fours, called them British, and began making money by putting them on a plate.

The first time I was in England, in the 1970’s, a cup a tea was called for after a walk, a bath, a stint in the garden, after having gone up the road to the village shop to pick up the load of bread one had ordered the day before, or after two hours had gone by, whatever came first.  One could go out for a cream tea which was tea with scones, clotted cream, butter and jam; or tea and cake.  One can always get a decent piece of cake in England as long as there is a cake to cut.  Or one had tea, the meal, which was essentially what Americans might call a light supper.

Let me drop the royal third person and the literary second person and cut to America of the present day where persons of both sexes and all ages are democratically addressed as “you guys.”

This past week, I drank a lot of tea.

Anna and Julia and I went out for our 11^th annual Christmas tea.  Anna and Julia are sisters who took piano lessons from me for years while they were growing up.  One winter, I ran a contest: I would take out for hot chocolate whoever learned the most carols in their Christmas books by the 20^th of December.  Anna and Julia outstripped every other student by at least half a dozen carols.  I took them to Starbucks on Phinney Ridge.

They won the contest the following year.  I took them to what was then the Library Café in Crown Hill for high tea.

I discontinued the contest but the three of us continued our holiday tradition.  For the next two years we went to the Queen Mary teas rooms in the University District. Year five, I took them to Snohomish for high tea at Piccadilly Circus.  Year six, we visited the British Pantry in Redmond for what was probably the most bona fide of high teas because it was more of a light supper.

We were running out of new places to go when we found our home.  For the past 5 years, we have settled into the sofas around the fireplace at the Sorrento Hotel’s Hunts Club and luxuriated in the elegant surroundings while consuming the same menu (egg, chicken, and cuke sandwiches;  scones, tarts, chocolates, eclairs, a single blueberry and one strawberry ) and catching up on the year’s news.

This past fall, Anna was doing a semester abroad in Chile and Julia was in her first year at M.I.T.   I had thought we might be skyping our tea this year but we all made it.  None of us are currently eating meat, and Anna and I are off sugar so we didn’t get the usual outlay for three but the company was delicious as always.

The day after the Sorrento Hotel tea, Anna (Western/Fairhaven) was back at my house with four other young (liberal arts) college women: Neah (Gonzaga), Katie (Whitman), Lucy (Macalester) and Riley(Linfield).  These young women all took piano lessons from me at about the same time.  We have been getting together once or twice a year for tea and sugar since their last years in high school.  I served tea, orange bread, cranberry bread, fudge and other chocolates, nuts in shells, and veggies and dip which Anna brought.  Also they ate the last of the Tiddly Reindeers from my cousins in England.

When I am with these women, I love to sit back and listen to the gossip which I (uncharacteristically) keep to myself.  I would never do anything that might dry up my sources so I am not going to repeat anything juicy.

I hosted one other tea this year.   My friends, Chris and Dee, came on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.  Chris is a tenor in both my choirs, and a fabulous cook.  She was a Russian translator while in the army and is a CERT trainer now.  We were trying to think of a tagline for her since this is now the second blog of mine in which she has appeared, but I have decided she’s basically unclassifiable.

Her partner, Dee, has a magnet on the refrigerator which says:  I missed church because I was off practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.  That’s an apt tagline for Dee.  I only wish I could claim authorship.  But truly, both of them are unclassifiable.

Chris and Dee’s love for their three Chinook dogs (Starfire, Indigo, and Willow) cannot be quantified.   I shamelessly suck up to the dogs.  Starfire was my first important conquest and now I am oiling my way into Willow’s heart.  Indigo needs no oiling; more often than not, she needs to be fended off.

Last summer I did a painting of my friends’ Chinooks.  I was so excited with how it turned out, I told them about it in July.

“I have your Christmas present already!  So we have to stay friends until Christmas,” I said.

Chris flipped through her calendar, “So when can we cross you off?” she asked.

On the afternoon of the 24^th, Chris and Dee looked at the painting for a long time.

Chris looked up.  “We’re giving you an extension,” she said.

May we all receive extensions in the new year!

The Bffs

When I got to church last Sunday, the sanctuary was swarming with children in their bathrobes with beards made from toilet tank covers.  There was a six month old baby rolling around the floor in front of the altar.  The pastor’s study, doubling as the green room, was cluttered with props.  An eight year old angel in t-shirt and corduroy pants, flew importantly about, fussing with her wings and halo.

The Christmas pageant, what else?  I direct the choir at Broadview UCC church and play the piano twice a month.  I was on deck for the pageant.  My car had broken down the day before and I was in that calm but ignorant state of not yet knowing how much the repair job was going to cost.  In the meantime people were chauffeuring me.  I had hitched a ride with the prelude soloist who is also my voice student and an artist –Mary Oakland Designs—in several media.

I stepped over the baby and went to the piano.  The choir was to rehearse their small part in the service, an advent round sung from the four corners of the sanctuary, but the choir was nowhere to be seen.  Mary and I ran through “Ave Maria.”  By then it was twenty minutes until show time.  The choir gradually, sleepily appeared.

“Can I get the choir in their corners?  Let’s run through the round.”

The Access van arrived with Mary Ann and she was wheeled to the front where Jane, who has a relentless supply of energy, appeared with the angel costume that Mary Ann always enjoys wearing in the pageant. Chris, a tenor, materialized behind me to light the altar candles.

“Get back in your corner,” I yelled.

She laughed.  She laughed.  Chris was in the army once.  She’s been through boot camp so I guess I am small potatoes.  On the other hand, she told me once that she made it through boot camp by thinking of it as a joke.  I expect that’s how she manages me.

The choir eventually got itself organized, evidently not appreciating how critical to the entire 2010 Christmas season our 30 second round was.

“I want everyone to sing the first two lines together, then group one can continue on but group two goes back and starts over.  Then we’ll sing it as a round twice,” I said.

“Are you going to play it on the piano”

“I was in a different corner at the rehearsal.”

“Do you mean twice as a round after we go back to the beginning or twice altogether?”

“Just watch me, okay?  I will either cut you off or burst into tears, either way you stop singing.”

Five minutes to go.  Ave Maria takes longer.  People were still milling around, talking.

I would have liked to yell, “Sit down and shut up.  Mary has been working on this friggin’ Schubert for over a year and I want you to listen to her.”  But I only talk that way to the choir because they don’t take me seriously.

Mary did a beautiful job.  Towards the end, people listened.

Then Jane got up to give announcements. She mis-read something and effectively canceled my last choir rehearsal before Christmas Eve. Because I was lost in my fantasies that there was nothing expensive wrong with my car, it didn’t sink in until the choir was in the middle of its advent round.

I thought, “Oh crap, now I have to call everyone before Tuesday.”

When I thought we had sung the round roughly two times, I waved my arms to cut us off.  Chris blithely continued for a few ironic beats, soloing on the words, “watching, waiting.”

Of Chris I will say no more because I don’t want to jeopardize my invitation for crab cakes at her house on Boxing Day.

The pageant commenced.

Jane, the ubiquitous, appeared with a blue shawl over her shoulders looking 9 ½ months pregnant.  I stood up to get a better look.  “Wow,” I thought. “Nice pillow work.”

Mary and Joseph had their tussle with the innkeepers. I played the entr’acte music while the scene changed.

Jane re-appeared, flat as a super-model, holding the baby that had been rolling around in front of the altar when I first got to church.

A shepherd said his line, “And do you hear the music?”

Dead silence.  I scanned my script.  I saw the shepherd’s line but no instruction to play any music.

The next entrance was for the angel Gabriel who did not materialize.

I tried to think what song might match whatever the shepherds were supposed to hear.  All I could think of was “Drive My Car” because it was something I hoped to be doing the next day.

So the answer to the shepherd’s question was No.  No one heard the music.

The director hissed, “ANGEL!”

The angel finally stumbled out of the pastor’s study and bellowed, “Do not be afraid!”

The three wise people approached.  They were the heart of this wonderfully conceived pageant (written and directed by Marc Hoffman.)  The three wise people, Sally, Tom, and Charles, are the oldest members of the church.  Their memories of childhood Christmases had been transcribed and were read aloud earlier by the children –stories of Christmas trees with lit candles on them, the gift of a pink coat with a muff, 32 below zero weather for Christmas.   They sat in state with gold crowns on their heads and golden mantles around their shoulders until their cue to come forward.

Listening to the eldests’ memories being read by the youngest, I forgot about my car.  I felt securely present, linked between past and future.   This is the holiday of the winter solstice: a reminder that in the scheme of things our lives are a 30 second advent round.  We are all precious and we all go by so quickly.

Have a wonderful week, everyone! This is probably the last you will hear from me before the holiday.  Unless I need a ride somewhere.

I’ve had a pig at my table for two weeks.Actually a boar, not a pig.And only the head.A boar’s head.OK, it’s paper maché.I wanted one so the OK Chorale could process singing “The Boar’s Head Carol.”One of our altos, Gail, who teaches kindergarten at North Beach Elementary, volunteered her class to create a boar’s head.

I don’t know how she got it by the curriculum sheriff but it was processed (emphasis on first syllable) in time for our tech rehearsal: paper maché around a balloon with added snout, and covered in a mosaic of fabric with attached googly eyes. The paper maché boar’s head constituted our only piece of “tech” but it was useful to see how well it stood up to being processed (emphasis on second syllable).Because it kept rolling off its platter, the procession acolytes held it by its nose, making the fabric peel, one of the nostrils fall off and Gail fit to be tied, or trussed as the case may be.

The boar’s head came wee, wee, wee all the way home with me so I could get it ready for the dress rehearsal.I made a paper maché collar and attached it to its own platter.I re-wrapped the snout and re-attached the nostril.By then I was so fond of it, I gave it some cookies and left it on my table where I could enjoy it until its big night.

Its big night was last Friday when the Chorale outdid itself in a concert at the UCC church where we rehearse. I have great confidence that the Chorale can pull off a good concert but I wasn’t as certain they could walk down the aisle and sing at the same time.And I wasn’t certain I could organize it because part of what makes the Chorale so much fun is the fifth grade energy that emerges in rehearsals. Except that fifth graders spit and pull hair.Adults (usually) don’t:

“Where do you want the sopranos?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“How fast should we walk?”

“Slow.”

“What if we get to the front before we finish singing?”

“I don’t know.Just stand there and finish singing.”

“Won’t that look weird?”

“In what way?”

“Should we all just walk down the center?”

“Meaning what?”

“We could come down both sides and cross in the front.”

“Excuse me while I get a Tums.”

“It’s such a short program, do we need the procession? I don’t think the audience would be bored if we just sang.”

“Not the point.”

In case you have no idea what I am going on about, Queens College, Oxford has a tradition where they march a boar’s head into the dining room singing this 15^th century carol.It’s great fun to sing.The Chorale did it beautifully. Everyone in their Christmas finery, reindeer antlers, and elf feet, holding aloft a paper maché boar’s head with googly eyes and sunk in a pile of cookies, singing a venerable old English carol whose significance means nothing to us. After the concert we processed it to the social hall where there must have been 5000 cookies to frost, decorate and exchange. It was a fine evening.

I have become so fond of the boar’s head, I’ve been taking it in the car with me.I took is to my Second Sunday Poetry group and my Tuesday Morning Irregulars painting group, heaped with cookies from the exchange.I took it to my voice lesson.

It was with me when I saw my analyst.  That was interesting:  all those professionals and their clients trying to not look, and once having looked, trying to not re-act.  On the other hand, it wasn’t so unexpected.  Therapists have a lot of practice dispassionately observing odd behavior and clients in waiting rooms rarely look at anything except magazines and their own feet.

I took it with me, laden with treats when I went to meet its creators, Gail’s kindergarten class at North Beach Elementary.  Gail and I marched it around the classroom and sang the carol.  After seeing teacher and class, I understand where this paper maché boar’s head with the googly eyes gets its preternatural energy.

There’s still time. I wish I could volunteer the OK Chorale to process for you but we’ve knocked off for the season.  However I am willing to rent the boar’s head out for Christmas parties.  You may have to take a number.

Relaxing at home

Making friends

It’s been pouring rain here in Seattle for about a week.  Not the usual mild Seattle showers and mist, but a New York City kind of rain when you actually use an umbrella which a true Seattleite never does.  People think it rains all the time in Seattle- fine, you go ahead and think that if it means you won’t move here because our traffic is a much bigger problem than our weather- but it really doesn’t.  Except this week.

Last Thursday I came home at noon, wet and cold, to a garbled, semi-hysterical phone message from my friend Joan, the one with the theological chops.  This was alarming.  Joan never gets hysterical.  She has the BVM in her pocket, after all.  I caught the name Ileana—that’s her 20-something daughter—and the words “up a pole” and “24 hours.”

I called Joan at work where I elicited the crucial information I had not caught in the message.  Chica.  That’s Joan’s cat.  OK, Chica had been up a telephone pole for 24 hours and Ileana had been trying to call me.  Everyone in Joan’s office who had overheard the hysteria had assumed as I did, that Ileana was up a pole.

“I like that,” said Ileana.  “All my mother’s friends think it’s plausible that I would be sitting on top of a telephone pole for 24 hours in a rainstorm.”

Chica, the cat, was indeed perched atop a telephone pole and looked mad in every sense of the word.  Unfortunately the scene was familiar to me: the ladder, ten feet short, hitched up to the telephone pole. A broom with food tied to one end even though humans are the only animals who eat when they’re anxious.

My cat Winston scrambled up a telephone pole one hot 4^th of July; initially frightened half way up by a dog, the rest of the way by fireworks.  He sat there, puffed up to the size of a large raccoon.  A bunch of us stood at the base of the pole and talked baby-talk to him.  He attempted to descend head first, lost his grip and swung around til he was upright and hugging the pole.  He came lumbering down like Winnie-the -Pooh as though it had been his plan all along which I seriously doubt.  I love Winston, but he is a cat of little brain.  Something primal must have kicked in.

Unfortunately, the only thing primal going on with Chica after 24 hours was the fear.  Different weather, different cat, but still out of reach and crying fit to break your heart.

Ileana called City Light, the fire department, the vet, the emergency vet, animal control, pest control, and tree cutting services.  No one would officially help, of course, but one always hopes to catch someone who is maybe already in the neighborhood, maybe has cats and a sympathetic heart, maybe has a Sagittarian sun.  Nothing.

I called my neighbor, David, head of the Rat Mafia in our neighborhood.  David is good in an emergency.  He and his wife Grace, have removed more dead rats from my property and taken more live ones to humane executions than you need to know about.  Rats on my property are always an emergency.

“You know Joan, who house-sat for you that Christmas?  Her cat has been stuck on top a telephone pole for the last 24 hours being pelted with rain.  They say they need an extension ladder.  Do you think you could help?”

Five minutes later I heard David’s enormous pickup roar and saw it pull off the parking strip.  Ten minutes later he was back and my phone was ringing.

“Your neighbor, David,” Ileana said, “He’s our hero.”

“Chica’s down?”

“Yeah, he just climbed up the ladder and grabbed her.”

“He likes beer,” I said.  “And except for the beer, I think he’s gluten free.”

Chica spent the next 48 hours inside the box springs of Joan’s bed.  She was receiving guests when I was over there on Saturday but she’s got an opaque look in her eyes, like she’s closed the door to her mind—such as it is.

Cats no longer teach kittens to descend backwards because their mothers didn’t teach them.   As kittens, when they find themselves involved in long cylindrical phenomena like human legs, they dig in their needle-sharp little claws and hold on.  Put like that and when I think of the ways we human beings often behave, maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to talk about cats of little brain.

It’s Christmas time in Bartell Drugs, the only non-grocery store I will set foot in after Thanksgiving.  I know this because all the Russell Stover chocolates have been re-packaged in green and red colors and the motion sensor Santas accost me when I walk by them.

In addition, someone is whining a Christmas song through one of her nostrils.  If you read my blog, you know that I think whining –as an exercise—can help improve over-all tone; also I believe singing is a birthright.  I think everyone should sing.  But we all shouldn’t be making CDs and Bartells shouldn’t be playing them. Or failing that, at least not so loud.

Christmas brings out the wretched and the sublime when it comes to music.  In classical music I am particularly partial to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah.  Two songs I look forward to singing every year are Norman Della Joio’s “The Christ Child’s Lullaby,” and Brahms’ “Geistliches Wiegenleid.”

I like all the carols in the church hymnbook, minus the inclusive language, thank you very much, and most of the traditional secular songs like White Christmas and Winter Wonderland.  I have never gotten into the (apparently) funny but (obviously) tacky ones about Grandmas and reindeers but it’s fine with me if they are available for people who live in Ballard.

I have been a song collector for as long as I can remember.  I know hundreds of songs.  Maybe thousands, I’m not that great with numbers. Of all those songs, there are actually only three songs in the world that I actively despise, and two of them rear their heads at Christmas.

“The Christmas Song” sounds like a string of banalities a bunch of drunken guys strung together in a 1940’s Las Vegas lounge while they were in a sentimental phase of inebriation.  Seriously, how does a turkey and some mistletoe help to make a season bright?

They thought of the brilliant last line just before they passed out:  “Although it’s been said many times, many ways, merry Christmas to you.” That ranks right up there with “Well, it’s that time of year again.”  The English language would be richer if those two lackluster lines were never repeated again.  They need to make it into the congressional record because Congress is where language goes to die.

Anyway these same mothers’ children with their eyes aglow met again the next night in the same lounge.  This time they went into a stupid –as opposed to sentimental–drunk and started looking at each others’ red noses.  Then one of them said, “Reindeer. That’s a funny word.”  And through some soggy trail of associations they came up with the whole Rudolph concept.  And then unfortunately, they remembered it the next morning.

I don’t understand why these songs are so popular but then I don’t understand the attractions of Disneyland either.   On the other hand, I like “Santa Baby,” and it’s not exactly packed with redeeming sentiments.  But at least there’s no contrived sentimentality.

I loved “Angels We Have Heard on High” when I was a kid.  I loved the cascading Glorias.  Like so many things in my life, even the cascading Glorias improved when I got older.  (In case you are new to my blog, I love being middle-aged; even though my friend Nina, who has known me for 30 years and understands why I am the way I am, tells me that if I am middle-aged, I am currently planning to live to 112)  There’s a song called “Ding Dong Merrily on High” that has five cascading Glorias and it starts even higher than “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

As a kid, I loved “The First Noel,” too.  I loved the rising and dipping “Noels.”  I was rapturous when I heard the sopranos rise while the rest of the voices dipped.  Now as a (middle-aged) adult, I am orgasmic when I hear the tenors do their stealth climb inside the other parts.

I’ve always liked the reliably pagan “Deck the Hall.” Once a student and I found all the “Deck the Halls” in my collections—about sixteen of them in different books.  We did a tally of how many were called “Deck the Hall” and how many “Deck the Halls.”  More often than not, it’s the singular.  It’s an English carol.  They have those big houses, each with its Great Hall.  We Americans have apartment buildings with lots of halls, I guess, so there’s the confusion.  I find this quite interesting and I don’t drink.  Actually tallying up the titles was a lighthearted thing to do with a student who hadn’t practiced that week and was afraid I would be mad at him.

I do love it that Christmas-time gets people singing even if they occasionally whine my hated songs through one nostril. But you can’t go wrong with the Noels, Glorias and Fa la las, drunk or sober.



I started the OK Chorale as a University of Washington Experimental College class in 1992.  I remember the year because one rehearsal fell on Election night.  My best friend had instructions to call and let the phone ring twice when Bill Clinton went over the top of the Electoral College vote.

Back then, the class was called Part Singing.  Not the catchiest of titles.  Not the most elucidating either.

“Does it mean people sing only part of the time?”

“Does everyone sing in the same register?”

“Hey, can you teach me to yodel?”

When I changed the name to The OK Chorale five years later, attendance doubled.  The same people began coming back quarter after quarter.  I had a community choir, not a class.

I started the Chorale in part because I wanted to hear voices singing in harmony and I wanted to improve my alto and learn to sing tenor and bass.  I also wanted to sing different kinds of music than you generally hear with choirs.  There are plenty of church choirs with their limited repertoire, and plenty of big auditioned choirs that sing magnificent choral works and wring your life out of you the weeks of the performances.  But where could you go to sing “April is in my Mistress Face” and “Zombie Jamboree” all in the same quarter?  I set out to create a choir that I wanted to be part of.

We are a motley, fun-loving bunch.  We get together after a day’s work in the middle of the week. People come in tired and pre-occupied with their concerns.  They want to relax and enjoy themselves. They don’t want to be confronted with a tyrannical prima donna manquée and I don’t want to be one.

A lot of singers come to their first rehearsal with some species of this story to tell me:  “The nuns told me to mouth the words and I’ve been afraid to let anyone hear me ever since.”

OR “My father told me I sounded like a chicken so I stopped singing.”

OR “My sister wouldn’t sing with me because she said I was flat.”

Anyone who signs up for my class even after they were told to mouth the words because they sing like a flat chicken is someone who has the joy of singing pushing to come out.  I understand that it takes courage to let our voices sing.

Then there are the people who have had a lot of choir experience.  They approach me with lists of things they think I am not aware of.  They asked if I am going add dynamics.  They point out that the sopranos are holding their half notes for three counts.  I take their lists and say thank you.  Sometimes I give the most persistent “supervisors” a copy of the Seattle Times choral round-up which lists forty or so choirs in the area and say they might enjoy one of these groups more.

I do what I do by design, not because I am hopelessly incompetent.

I don’t have a sound or finished product in my head that I expect The Chorale to fulfill.  I want us to play together with what we’ve got.  I like to try different things and see what works.  I arrange a lot of the music we sing and the Chorale is my test group.  I match the music to them not the other way around.  It’s a joint creative effort.  That’s what keeps it alive.

I let the spotlight whores romp around and the shyer types stand in the background and just sing.  One tenor who sang with us for quite a while finally told me he wanted to be part of a choir, not a “troupe.”  I still miss him but I get it.  We are a troupe.  Continuing the medieval metaphor, we are like a conference of court jesters. We don’t have matching choir outfits and our sound is not sculpted.  There are plenty of other places to go for that.

The Chorale has given me more than I ever imagined it would back when I conceived of a Part Singing class.   My appreciation is inestimable:

They laugh at my jokes.   They laugh at my jokes!

They have been patient while I learned to direct.  I don’t think many of them realized this but, I learned on them.

They understood I was afflicted with the need to make everyone happy so they put up with my learning to arbitrate amongst the chorus of suggestions and advice: “I know there’s high Latin, low Latin, finger and toe Latin but when you get to excelsis, just sing ‘eggshell’.”

After all these years, I am still not very good at setting the tempo.  They smile, put up and we get on.

They give me harmony.  I get to hear voices singing in harmony.  I wasn’t raised with this.

If you live in the Seattle area and would like to hear the OK Chorale, we are singing a little concert on Friday, Dec 10, 7:30 PM at Broadview Community United Church of Christ.  The next evening, Sat, Dec 11, we sing at the Green Lake luminarias 5:30 to 6:00 at the aquatheater.  More details are on the web site: www.okchoraleseattle.com.

Maybe you’ll join us one quarter. As I say in my course description: Rehearsals are fun and no one gets hurt.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, says she admires the way I speak out without worrying about what others might think of me.  Actually, I’m not sure she said admire.  She might have just said she noticed.  As for me not worrying about what others might think of me, that’s entirely in the mind of the on-looker.

But I wish to say at once that I am not proud of what I am about to relate.  I could have handled it better.  But it wouldn’t have made as good a story.

Last Sunday, I was fresh off a successful batch of springerli cookies and ready to tackle the next holiday project.  I usually send my cousins in England a pound of See’s chocolates for Christmas, but it’s gotten to where the price of postage is twice the price of the candy, pardon me, the sweets.   I don’t want to go to Northgate or downtown to a See’s Candies.  We need one here in Greenwood.  Actually, no, we don’t.

In any case, I wanted to buy local –in every sense of the word–this year.  There was blue sky and feeble sunshine so I decided to walk to the QFC that used to be Art’s, and that some of us still refer to as Art’s, on Holman Road, to see what they were asking for a small box of Dilettante truffles.

I was in the seasonal aisle trying to sort through the Dilettante, Theo and Seattle Chocolate offerings when a woman and man strolled through and stopped about 5 yards away from me.  The woman proceeded to lean on her shopping cart and start a conversation on her Bluetooth at the volume, but not with the quality, that reaches the nosebleed section from the stage of the opera house.

“We’re here in Seattle visiting my brother,” she bellowed.  “We’re just in the QFC, picking up an anti-diarrheal for my sister-in-law.        .   . some kind of fungus, they think.   .  .  .  . suppository, yeah.  And my nephew needs $500 to pay his rent this month so we’re trying to help out with that.”

I turned around and caught the woman’s eye.  “Yes?” she inquired.

“Do you think you could not talk so loud?” I asked.

She stared at me, “Are you kidding?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

She advanced toward me, “Are you so unhappy with your life?”

I haven’t felt baited with such an offensive—in all its definitions– maneuver since my mother died three years ago.  My non-engagement skills are rusty.

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t concentrate.  I’m over here trying to pay attention to my own crap and I don’t want to have to listen to yours.”

Her husband crouched in the aisle pretending to look at a can of peanuts.  He looked up at his wife and supportively grunted, “Oh my god” in a small voice.

She came closer to me.  “Are you serious?

“Look,” I said, “No one wants to hear your private information being broadcast all over QFC.”

“Private?  Rent money?  How is that private?”

She left out the anti-diarrheal.  I was in over my head, so to speak.  I know from experience that no one wins an atavistic argument like this one.   I remembered that my mother was gone.  My skills seeped back.  I held up my hands in surrender.

“Truce!” I laughed.

“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood.   She lumbered past me.  “Your pants are stupid.”  Her husband followed her silently.

A fellow shopper with a package of Ghirardelli chocolate dangling from her hand, about to drop on the floor, watched the couple’s retreating backs.

“Nice,” she remarked.  Ambiguously, I thought.

I was nervous walking home.  This woman seemed capable of following me in her car for a mile and half just to heckle me.  But I made it home un-heckled and called Gwen to present her with a reason to not cultivate my habit of speaking my mind.

Gwen laughed, “The best part of that story is that she is visiting Seattle.  That means she’s leaving.  And I admire your bravery.”

It’s not about being brave.  I like to participate.  But it gets me into useless exchanges.  I get that from my mother.

It finally happened:  After ten years, my springerli is a success.  I was missing an ingredient, the same one apparently that my mother missed for, I don’t know, 45 years. There’s a deep psychological truth in there but I don’t know that I have the energy to go looking for it.  Maybe it will surface later.

Of all the cookies my mother baked at Christmas , the springerli were the most peculiar and maybe for that reason, one of my favorites.  Which is odd because they were barely edible; on the other hand, my whole childhood was hard to swallow so that and the springerli were all of a piece.  I liked them because I liked the licorice flavor of anise and it was fun to nibble the hard little squares, or to pelt them at my brother.  Either way.

A month before Christmas, the pale, unbaked rectangles with embedded flower impressions appeared on cookie sheets in the cold little room off the kitchen.  After a couple of days, my mother baked them into hard little building materials.  She stored them in Tupperware with a slice of apple to try to soften them up.  She put a few on the plates of cookies she gave away and on the ones she served guests in December.  In February, the remaining springerli were either thrown out or used for war games.

About ten years ago, I bought a springerli rolling pin.  In case you don’t know, these are the rolling pins with designs carved into the wood.  A kitchen utensil to be used for one purpose, once a year: to make little cookies that no one wants to eat either because they fracture the teeth or because a surprising number of people in the world don’t like the taste of black licorice.

I don’t know what possessed me because the frigging rolling pins cost about $25.  I might have hoped it would help me uncover some deep psychological truth about my childhood for less than I was paying for analysis.  When I bought the pin, I told myself that I had to use it every year until I die, to make it worth the expense.  So for ten years I turned out hard little building materials, thinking this was the way life was.

But a few years back my first painting teacher, Molly Hashimoto, (http://www.mollyhashimoto.com/)  brought some springerli to our last class before Christmas.  She apologized for them, saying she didn’t think anyone really liked springerli these days.  I bit into one and it was chewy.

“Oh my God, Molly, how do you get them to be chewy?”   We went through her process step by step but I found no clues.

However it was a revelation to me: I began trying to get my springerli to turn out chewy, like Molly’s:  I varied the flour, the cookie thickness, the baking time, the beating time, the number of eggs.   I looked at recipes on the Internet but they all used the same ingredients I was using.  My mother had three different recipes in her recipe box and I tried them all, then I tried kludging together one recipe from bits of all three.  My springerli could still black an eye at close range.

For a while, I quit trying.  Then this week, I hauled out the $25 rolling pin, which doesn’t seem all that expensive in today’s economy, and found my tear-stained recipe card.  I went on-line one more time to search for a clue to what I was doing wrong.  The first recipe I pulled up said to use two teaspoons baking powder.  I had never used baking powder.  I don’t believe I had ever seen it on a recipe for Springerli.  It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that I had never noticed. When I added 2 teaspoons baking powder to my mother’s recipe, I got chewy springerli.  That was the homely ingredient that I had overlooked all along.

By my count, there are at least three psychological insights in this blog, not necessarily deep.  Can you spot them all?  And then tell me your favorite Christmas cookie.