I love yard sales but when the weather turns wet, some of us yard sailors go through a dry period that is refreshed only by the appearance of holiday bazaars in the middle of November.  When my British friends read about the U.S. and our stupid, interminable election brouhahas, or when they hear a quote from politician celebrities of little brains and even less empathy, I want to trot out the bazaars as evidence that some of us over here are still identifiably human and not part of a psycho cartoon family.

When I was a girl holiday bazaars were the provenance of older women in the church who made jelly and knitted things like toilet paper roll covers.  You can still get the jelly but the quality of items to be found at holiday bazaars nowadays far exceeds the Victorian beauties who sit on the toilet tank stuffed with the spare roll of TP.

I invited Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about everything, to take in a few bazaars with me.  She went down the list and nixed the ones she considered too commercial.

“I like the ones where the turquoise and white hand crocheted tea cozies are next to the fresh made brownies next to the bird houses made out of old license plates and half-rotted fences,” she said.

I, too, prefer the sales where there’s a St. Agnes Guild running the show, where the church ladies wear aprons and seem unflappable in their energy and good cheer. Every effort has been made to make you feel so welcome, you think you have just walked into Christmas dinner.  Unlike your own family, you don’t know ahead of time who the irritating people are, but at a bazaar you can walk away, so really it’s the best of all worlds.

The ones I walk away from are the vendors who go in for bludgeoning people with their sales pitch, who follow my eyes and try to sell me anything I look at.  If I touch something, to feel if the texture is as revolting as it looks, they are already whipping out their receipt book.

And then there are the chatty ones: “Hello how are you today these pendants were made from leaf fronds gathered under a full moon in the Palouse last summer let me show you on this county map the exact square mile of our camp-site and then I have the funniest story to tell you about my sister-in-law.”

A woman selling a scarf/shawl/evening wrap with a dozen ways to drape and tie, was still demonstrating its versatility as I waved $35 in front of her.

“You know, I am already buying this.  You can stop selling it to me.”

Ok, I am glad to have gotten all that out of my system.  Thank you for reading this far.

Here’s what I love about the bazaars, besides the St Agnes Guild ladies, and the way the word bazaar sounds like both brassiere and bizarre and allows for sophomoric humor when I’m in the mood for that, which I’m not just now because I can’t wait to get to the fudge:

1. Fudge –made on the stove-top not killed in the micro-wave.  I recommend getting to the bazaars first thing because the fudge goes quickly.

2. The Christmas cut-out cookies in garish food colors.  I would have starved for a week to have had purple food coloring when I was a kid.

3. Jam, honey, salsa, spiced nuts, jars of legumes and seasonings, ready to toss in a pot for soup; dip mixes.  I don’t buy the dip mixes because I think they are over-priced, but I usually spend some time sampling them on pretzel sticks while I muse about how I might make them myself.

4. The stuff the kids make: bags of marshmallows labeled “Snowman poop;” candy cane reindeer with pipe cleaner antlers and tiny googly eyes, handmade Christmas cards encrusted with Elmer’s glue and every other word mis-spelled.  I especially love the ones where the first three letters of “Merry” take up a third of the card and “Christmas” gets squashed into an inch on the right and “Happy New Year” runs down the edge, turns over and goes around the corner.  It’s like the finger technique of some of my piano students.

5. Knitted afghans, baby booties, mittens, caps, scarves; quilts, rice or lavender bags to heat or freeze, unusual cards made from plant rubbings or origami; planters, games, and furniture crafted in someone’s woodshop; enough hand crafted jewelry to decorate every Christmas tree in the city.

And now here’s the real point of this blog:  The Dibble House Holiday Craft Sale, hosted by Sue Gregor, who has more energy than a room full of pre-schoolers.  7301 Dibble Ave NW.  (Seattle, WA) Sat and Sun Nov 27-28 AND Dec 4-5, 10 AM-4 PM.

I am selling my watercolor cards.  My homemade framboise will be nesting with my friend Anne’s handmade chocolate truffles.  My friend, Mary, has made holiday aprons I can’t wait to see.  And you must see the hilariously irreverent Christmas cards created by the mysterious Hilaire Squelette.

On Sunday, Dec 5, walk into another world at the Sakya Monastery (108 NW 83^rd –just up the street from Fred Meyer if you appreciate the ironic and incongruent) annual sale of Himalayan handicrafts, 11-4.

A good reason to go to the Laurelhurst Holiday Art Sale (4554 NE 41st St) Fri, Dec 3, 1-8:30 PM and Sat, Dec 4 10- 3 PM is to meet Molly Hashimoto, my first painting teacher, and see her paintings, prints and Pomegranate holiday cards.

When you Christmas shop this year, think about buying handmade.  You don’t have to get me anything: just read my blog and save me some fudge.

How are we all doing?  When it gets like this, I can’t decide if I feel like watching Dr. Zhivago or Body Heat. In any case, I’ve had a quiet 20 hours without phone, TV or internet connection.  Since I got rid of TV cable a month ago–by choice—I rather expected to still be without it when this weather hit.  Since the internet has been restored to our neighborhood, I have learned I needn’t have worried that my inbox would fill to an unmanageable degree.

But being without phone service spooked me just a bit.  I am the last person on earth to not have a cell phone, but there it is: I don’t have a cell phone.  Last night, I put on my bibs and tucker and went across the street to my neighbors (not Gwen who knows something about just about everything, but David and Grace, the rat mafia people; see blog: Rodent Incident Report I) to borrow their cell phone and to whine about the cable being down.   A fierce wind whipped razor sharp bits of snow in my face.  This in itself was material to whine about.

If you don’t live, and have never lived, in Seattle, you probably have no idea what I am going on about.  You see, it snowed a few inches yesterday and they haven’t yet dug out Seattle’s three snow plows, rusting in the back of some city storage barn.  I don’t think they have even found the barn yet.

We are nuts here when it comes to snow.  At the sign of the first few flakes, people are already leaving work early and schools are canceled for the week.  In our defense, I will say that we have a lot of hills, hills; and driving on hills is not the same as driving on level streets.  Plus we none of us have gotten over the year of the snow when school children were still being delivered home by city buses at midnight of the day that no one took the weather report seriously.  And that was at least a decade ago.

The cats are getting on my last nerve.  They need to go outside because they don’t like their litter boxes any more than I do.  But they don’t want to walk in snow to get to the organic vegetable garden which is their grand litter box of choice.  It is completely outrageous that there would be snow outside the back door as well as the front.  Maybe they were mistaken: they need me to open the front door again.

It’s bad enough that they pester me during my waking hours.  But since they slept every second they weren’t bothering me yesterday, they were wide awake and prowling last night when I wanted to sleep.  When I finally fell asleep, I woke up because the bed felt oddly cold.  At three o’clock in the morning, I found a cat claw size hole in my hot water bottle, (Yes, yes, very funny: she doesn’t have a cell phone but she does have a HWB) and a big damp patch on the sliver of egg carton foam that the cats allow me to align myself on at night.

By the time I heated up a rice bag in the microwave and smoothed a towel over the damp spot, I was both thoroughly awake and cold.  Then the cats disappeared –probably because I was so vocal about the hot water bottle—and took their 110 degree bodies to the antipodes of the house so it took hours—or so it seemed –to warm up and get drowsy again.  When I got up I was greeted by their insistent protest against the starvation diet I impose on them.

As soon as I could manage it, I bundled up and went for a walk in the cemetery behind my house where no one ever complains.  Mine were the first footsteps, everyone was happy to see me, and no one wanted anything more than my presence.  When I walk in the snow, I like to sing a song by Randall Thompson set to a text by Elinor Wylie, one of the first songs I learned to sing when I started voice lessons as a teenager:

Let us walk in the white snow

In a soundless space

With footsteps quiet and slow

At a tranquil pace

Under veils of white lace.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:

Wherever we go

Silence will fall like dews

On white silence below.

We shall walk in the snow.

When I was growing up, my mother was a force majeure at the dinner table and nowhere was that more evident than at Thanksgiving.  She created a huge meal for the immediate family, supplemented by people pulled in from the highways and byways, members of the church, and occasionally, some of my father’s cousins.  She did the turkey-stuffing-mashed potatoes- gravy as well as green salad, fruit salad, and an assortment of vegetables–way more than anyone would want given that they had been taken out of their freezer bags, boiled to death and served without butter.  Since this was the 60’s, there was always a relish tray of canned black olives and sweet pickles, a roll of canned cranberry sauce, and a dish of butter.  We could have buttered the bland vegetables but we didn’t know that would help them.  Although she always allowed guests to bring pies, she had always baked several of her own: pumpkin, mincemeat, and apple.

Every important meal in our house featured crescent-shaped refrigerator rolls, which you will hear more about shortly; and celery almondine which I dis-liked as a child, except for the almonds, but which I came to love as an adult.   She sautéd the onions and almonds and kept them warm in an electric frying pan on the floor of her bedroom until she was ready to add the celery and finish the dish.

I always had to set the table.

“Elena, would you please set the table?  I’m in here trying to finish this dinner and the rolls are ruined and it’s the least you could do since you are younger than me and you kids could help out once in a while my goodness I do everything for you and you have it so easy and people will be coming in half an hour.”

The refrigerator rolls– which were never ruined– had been rising in a cool room since the day before and they smelled yeasty and sweet.  They were fabulous, always my favorite part of any meal.  My mother baked them in the hour before the meal began and they were warm when I bit into them.

More than once, they were served in the middle of a meal. The serving dishes had made a few go rounds, my mother stationed in the martyr’s chair closest to the kitchen, barely touching her bottom to the seat as she supervised first the serving, then the actual progress of food moving from plates to mouths.   She watched people’s mouths chewing her food and assessed their expressions.

“How is everything?”

“Oh, just wonderful, Mary!”

“Elena, what can I pass you?”

“Why are you being so polite to me all of a sudden?”

“Why is no one eating the beans?  Chuck, have some beans.”

“Mary, will you sit down.  I don’t have room on my plate.

The moment came when having exhausted her immediate supervisory duties, my mother scraped back her chair with a huge gasp before bellowing, “OH NO, I FORGOT THE ROLLS!” and ran to the kitchen, knocking over a bowl of something in the process.  Forks paused in mid-air.  Conversation stopped while we all listened (in mortification, speaking for myself) to her yank open the oven door, scream when she burned herself, run water, bump into the open silverware drawer,  and carry on a loud monologue of whatever she thought might fill the inexplicable –to her– lull in the conversation in the dining room.  She emerged a few minutes later, still talking loudly, with a cloth covered basket which she shoved at the guest seated to the right of the martyr’s chair.

“Here are the rolls, they aren’t the best but they’re still pretty good if I do say so, I’ve been working on them for two days, I left the burnt ones in the kitchen, Chuck and the kids can eat them later.”

My mother died three years ago today at the age of 89.  I still occasionally make her celery almondine.  And I think of her when I’m the one in the martyr’s chair.

Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.

Do you remember singing that song in grade school or in Girls Scouts?  Pigtailed little girls holding hands in a circle, ensconced in a swirl of harmonies.  I, for one, didn’t know what the hell the song was about.  I still don’t have a lot of long-time friends but now I understand why they are golden.

I had a tumultuous growing-up and I haven’t exchanged Christmas cards for forty years with anyone in the world.  My longest-known friend is a roommate from college.  I am convinced the only reason we remained friends over the years is because we didn’t live in the same city and though the contact was regular, it was also long distance.  Very few people were equipped to survive my early adulthood at close range.

At Whitman College Mary-Ellis had the energy and joie de vivre of a 5th grader at camp.  She was a magic elixir.  Her laugh that came from deep inside her was gurgling and infectious.  She could do a spot-on imitation of the Cowardly Lion singing “If I were King of the Forest,” and on rare occasions, would jump on a table and do Elvis.

We sang together with our guitars.  Mary-Ellis taught me the kinds of songs I would never have learned at Black Lake Bible Camp.  Songs like “I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas and you oughta see me do my stuff.”   I, for one, had no images for “ding-dong” and I’m certain neither of us had opinions about what his “stuff” was but we loved the song.

In our twenties, we saw a lot of each other.  We made a trip to Victoria together and explored Seattle where I live.  I spent months at a time with her when she worked at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco.  We explored the city by bus, two twenty-somethings in the 1970’s, not as characters from Armistead Maupin, but more like pig-tailed girl scouts.

I helped Mary-Ellis move from a boarding house in Pacific Heights to an apartment in the Marina district.  In those days when you left a residence you had to physically take your rented telephone back to the phone company.  At large in the city with an unattached telephone, I pretended to have an argument with my mother (an easy gig for me) over the phone while waiting at the bus stop.  Once on the bus, Mary –Ellis held the phone out the window to pedestrians, “It’s for you!”  Good clean fun.

Except for a cousin in Wisconsin, I no longer have any family connections.  When I did have family, we were like hillbillies defending our property with shotguns, receiving each other with suspicion, not welcome.  So I don’t take for granted the continuity of an old warm connection.

Mary-Ellis spent last weekend with me.  It was the biggest chunk of time we had spent together since I visited her in the Bay area in 1997.  I was so excited to have my old friend staying with me that in the morning, I wanted to wake her up and play with her like she was a Christmas present.  We smoked a few Mrs. Madrigals this weekend, but since Mary-Ellis has a position in society and I work with children, beyond that I will not elaborate.  It was good clean fun.

The first week after we all “fall back” is always hard for me even though I love the morning light because I get up early.  Just wait until we “spring forward.”  If I am still writing this blog (and I hope to be), you will never hear such ferocious whining as I will do in March when my early morning light gets—by an act of Congress—snatched from me for an extra month of darkness.  But beyond the light in the morning, I have trouble sleeping and am tired most of the week.

I once had a student, a boy of 5, whose father carried him into my house under protest the week we “fell back.”

He screamed, “But I don’t come for my lesson at night!”

I understand this so well.  It bothered me, too.  He was a “daylight student.”

I used to think that tampering with the clocks for no good reason – i.e. an act of Congress– twice a year would confuse the cats.  But they are like Arizona.  They don’t observe daylight and standard time changes.  They just whine at me earlier or later to serve them.  But cats are Zen about everything except the vacuum cleaner and other cats.

I used to run a spook house every year in October.  I have the perfect set-up for it.  There are two structures on my property: there’s the house I live in, built in 1936, and a little homesteader cabin built in 1880.

The cabin in the back was just asking to be made into a spook house.  When the previous owners painted the two structures preparatory to selling, they sprayed Prussian green paint right over the leaded glass windows in the old cabin.  That’s enough provocation to be haunted by earlier residents, many of whom are no doubt buried right next door in Crown Hill cemetery.  But what I discovered the first year we did the spook house was that mostly all you need is the dark.

We didn’t have any special effects.  We had mechanisms like the “ankle grabbers.”  These were usually kids who had gone through the spook house once and wanted to be behind the scenes.  I let them hide in corners until someone came along, then they could reach out and grab an ankle.  We made ten year old tough boys cry and earned the respect of some of the dads by means this simple.  We had the Dark.

Because I am fascinated with the unconscious, I think a lot about the dark, the subterranean depths.  We are afraid of what we can’t see because we think that to see something means we know what it is.  Yet we believe in all kinds of things we can’t see: the wind, love, evil, goodness.

We think that if we can’t see something, it isn’t there.  As long as we aren’t actively aware of jealous feelings, as an example, we feel quite righteous about saying we haven’t a jealous bone in our body.  But if there’s not a jealous bone is someone’s body, that person is dead.  Feeling jealousy is part of what it is to be human.  With other people, it’s their tenderness that’s in the dark.

The light can be just as obfuscating as the dark.  I get impatient with new age thinking that champions the light and with people who are eager to reach what they call enlightenment.  Superimposing eastern ideas over a western upbringing usually results in thinking as simplistically as those Christians who think there is an actual heaven located somewhere above the clouds.  Once someone “gets” to heaven or to enlightenment, it’s not like he or she is actually going to “be” there to enjoy it.  You’re gone at that point.  There’s no ego left. To my friends who want only light in their lives, I say good luck to you. When all you’ve got is light, you’re going to explode.  Being in the light is not like lying in the warmth of the sun at the beach.

The dark defines the light and the light the dark.  As long as we’re breathing we need both.  I am letting this thought help me through these next few weeks.

My Ukrainian wheat charm is about to fall off my car’s rear view mirror. On the day after the 2010 elections, even its precarious dangle is welcome. This charm has power to make stuck joints glide, to soothe pain and to turn a pessimist inside out. Here is how it came into my possession:

I did a watercolor workshop at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology at Cascade Head just north of Lincoln City a while back. It was three lovely days of quiet concentration in peaceful surroundings with interesting subjects to paint and an inspiring teacher, Molly Hashimoto. Every day after seven hours of peace and art, I went to a clean, but unimaginative hotel in Lincoln City and dwelt amongst the dogs, sand, salt water taffy, kites, screaming children and yelling parents. The contrast was just right.

But the weekend did not begin with such a balance. My back was bothering me the day I left Seattle. After driving for 6 hours, my pelvis managed to become rotated forward on the right side, and backward on the left. Then it locked itself into place. This is not unlike the current situation in Congress. Or maybe I should say that with some variation, this is always the situation in Congress. In any case, both with Congress and my pelvis, the pain is relentless.

My first morning in Lincoln City, I cried in frustration for 45 minutes before I decided that I couldn’t gut this out. I had to find a chiropractor. In the phone book I found a doctor a block from my hotel. I recognized the name from reconnoitering the town the day before. I hobbled up the street to see if his hours were posted. The ideal was for him to see me immediately. And that was essentially what happened.

But I anticipate myself. His office front looked as though he had gone out of business 20 years ago and had neglected to take down the sign. The office was dark when I got there. Since the door was unlocked, I walked in. A seedy, scruffy guy stood in the gloom, looking startled. My first thought was that the doctor let the construction workers from across the street come in to use the toilet. But no, he was the doctor. He had just arrived and hadn’t turned on the lights yet. He needed 45 minutes to get organized. I agreed to come back at 9:15.

After I left, I started to panic. I come from a long line of robust paranoids and my upbringing kicks in with full force at times, especially when I am traveling alone. I re-visited my first impression that the man in the office was a construction worker come to use the toilet. Or a smooth-talking thief. His appearance certainly didn’t inspire any more confidence than the faded, beat-up office front did. Conceivably, even a decent chiropractor who didn’t know my body could make things worse, as hard as that was to imagine. But I was in pain and desperate so I decided to chance it.

He was professional, thorough, and gentle. He did an exam, an ultra-sound, traction, and the adjustment; and only charged me $60. When I stood up, I was out of the sirening, stabbing pain. There were only varying degrees of inflammation and tenderness through-out the weekend, depending on how careful I was about what I threw myself into.

As I was driving out of town at the end of the workshop, I stopped by his office and gave him one of my watercolors as a thank you. We got to chatting and it turned out that he was born near my grandparents’ birthplace in the Ukraine. His mother made Ukrainian wheat charms, for sale at $10 a piece in the office. I bought one to commemorate my good fortune in finding her son.

The charm has hung off my car’s rear view mirror for years, a reminder of life’s surprises. It’s easy to get stuck thinking change has to happen in certain ways. If you are waiting for Congress–speaking of smooth-talking thieves– to make the changes you want, you need a charm like mine.

Here’s a poem I wrote January 22, 2009

Inauguration Day, 2009
Seattle

A dark, frigid January morning,
Our pilot lights barely flickering,
We’ve been cold with fear,
Frozen with shame,
For a long time.

We shivered our way thro the fog
To Starbucks, to neighbor’s homes,
To be with each other
And to join
The mass on the Mall.

We became Americans that day.
Patriots, some of us for the first time;
On a day
When we reached out our hands
To the world.

We are all alive on earth together.
We all fumble the oath.

Elena Louise Richmond,

Jan 22, 2009

I heard an all Bach concert yesterday.  Bach always feels like a date with the Divine.  I adore his music from start to finish.  I love listening to him, I love playing him, I love singing him.

More than any other composer, Bach’s music seems to me to be always going on.  It’s continually playing in other dimensions and other ages.  Performing him or listening to him involves a tiny opening where I breathe the air of timelessness.  His music condenses to a pure golden filament that musicians pull out of one world and thread back into another note by note.

So I ask you, does a Bach concert seem like the place to lean over to your husband and say, “Did you take the clothes out of the dryer before we left?” or “You have to pick the kids up tomorrow.”  And truly, nobody cares that you heard this partita at Tanglewood or that Penelope and Julians’s daughter played it for her honors recital. My God, you’re missing the presence of the divine right now. If you apprehended that, you wouldn’t be rustling your candy wrapper during the Preludium.

We need security checks at classical music concerts far more than we do at the airport. Leave everything that rattles or pings or plays Maple Leaf Rag on ring tone in a big plastic tub before you walk in.

There are only two venues where I feel safe from extraneous noises: performances of Wagner’s Ring and performances of Gilbert and Sullivan.  The audiences are absolutely fanatical. They would bludgeon you with their opera glasses before they’d miss a single motif or patter.  I, personally, have been shushed in both venues, so I know.

I had a French teacher in high school in the 60s who told us at least once a day, “The television has ruined your ability to listen and comprehend.”  I’ll carry that thought into this century and say that CDs have confused our ideas about what music is.  When you listen to a CD, you hear music being played or sung the same way every time, and often so enhanced, it comes out like an audible hair-do held in its unnatural shape with half a can of Product.

But music is alive.  There is no enhanced.  It’s not about perfect.  Music wants to breathe and to exhale differently every time.  And it wants to communicate.  When we get a chance to hear live music, we might want to keep our mouths shut because even with amateurs, even in “awful” performances, somewhere in there is bound to be something both magical and gloriously human.

You know what else is gloriously human?  The people behind the instruments.  Musicians are people who have spent tens of thousands of hours practicing and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lessons; and who never dreamed that we’d be mistaken for radios or CD players by members of our own race.

Here is where technological advances have not served our society:  we have become a nation of CD listeners, not a nation of music makers.  As a teacher I can tell you that joy is available in the very first attempt at actual music making.  Music is in our bodies and in our souls, not in a box.  When we make our tentative squeaks and plunks, we aren’t supposed to sound like perfected recordings or like our favorite performers.  We sound like us. We fall in love with our own sound and the resonances in our own bodies. Then we always have enough and there’s always more to have.

Jazz musicians have come to terms with this.  They are used to being treated like elevator or restaurant music so they face each other, not the audience.  They communicate with and enjoy each other.  They know they create their own joy.  If you listen to a set, pay attention, express some appreciation, and leave a tip, that’s an unexpected bonus for them.  The real losers are the ones that don’t listen at all or who never learn to make music in the first place.

So everyone, repeat after me: “Live music is not background music.”  Now go sign up for some lessons, join a choir or orchestra, hug a musician.  The laundry will always be there.  And don’t mess with the Divine.

You are about to read a tale told by an idiot.

I got an e-mail a week ago from Dr Micheal Scott who says he lives in a town in Wales.  He is coming to Seattle for a month to do some work for the EPA and will have his 16 year old daughter, Mary, with him.  She wants to take voice lessons and he sees that I am a voice teacher.

He has the English of someone from the Indian sub-continent and his grammar is almost non-existent.  Because I have lived and traveled overseas, because I know a lot of people who first language was not English, and because I know PHDs whose e-mail English is atrocious, I am prepared to overlook this riot of syntax on my computer screen.

Besides, this girl could come several times a week for lessons and I could use a few more students.  It would be a lucrative proposition and it might be a lot of fun.  One of those surprises that Life sometimes hands you.  I never used to be an optimist.  Coming to it late in life, I don’t always know how to work it.

Anyway, the correspondence begins and we iron out my fee and the days and times Mary would have her lessons.  He is planning to send her to my house in a cab because he will be working long hours at the EPA:

“i have negotiate with a cab company that will be driving her down to your  place go and come. So i want you to be taking her for 4 week. Get back to me with total cost. I wait to read from you shortly.”

I ask him several times where they are staying in Seattle,  the name of the cab company,  his contact at the EPA,  and I ask him to give Mary my e-mail address so she and I can get acquainted  before she comes.  His garbled response is loquacious and full of typos, but he is silent on all my questions.

Can ether be transmitted through the ethernet?  Because I am going along as though anesthetized.  I actually think that his responses are those of a busy doctor in Wales who is trying to wrap things up before he comes to Seattle for a month.

The screw squeaks as it tightens but I ignore the sound:  his plan is to send me a money order for $4500.  I am to cash the check, keep my fee, and wire the rest to this phantom cab company.  I am embarrassed to report that I say I would help in any way I can.

I start listening to my gut but it’s still only a leaky gut, not a full-out attack of indigestion.  I ask him why he isn’t doing this by credit card. He says he has a “financeir” in the states who will be covering all expenses and will send me instructions.  I ask why the EPA isn’t providing him with transportation and by the way what is his daughter’s e-mail address?  No response.  Really, when I write this down, I feel even stupider than when it was happening.

Finally I copy the entire correspondence and e-mail it to my neighbor Gwen, who knows something about just about everything.  Did she think I was getting into some mafia thing?  She tells me that this guy is probably sitting in his backyard with his shirt off, trying this on 30 other people at the same time.  That is the jolt I need.  I write back, telling him I am out.

He tries again, tacking back to his daughter.  His English is worse.  He is decompensating:

“Mary is my only daughter so i care for her i want you to help me handle her as you child too she really love singing  she want you to teach her how to use good voice, with a good teno

I pass this on to Gwen wondering if I will get an e-mail from Mary as played by some hairy guy sitting shirtless in his backyard.

Gwen writes back:  “Maybe you should ask him for his bank roting # so you can have his $ removed to you “in easy fashon” .  He maybee stop then.”

I know I should just stop engaging but I send one last e-mail telling him I have reported him.  I haven’t, but then he has no contract with the EPA either.  I’m lying down with a liar.

Here’s how the scam would go down:  Dr Micheal Scott tells me he is arriving on Nov 1 so he sends a phony money order on Oct 28, giving me one day to cash it and get the money wired to a cab company which will actually be him.  I have to put the cash into my account in order to wire the money.  By the time the money order is revealed to be fraudulent, the bank will have sent my personal funds to his “cab company.”

It’s been over forty-eight hours since I last heard from my scammer.  He maybee stop now.

Being a musician, I am used to stage mothers, spotlight whores, and microphone monsters, all stock characters at lessons, rehearsals, and performances.  Being a teacher who often runs the show, I exercise a certain amount of control over the egos that show up to strut and fret.  But here’s a tale of an ego so bloated that when it walked into a private party, it flattened the rest of us against the wall.

It was a hootenanny at my friend Davey’s house.  Everyone brought instruments, music, and song sheets; arriving mid-afternoon to sing the sun down.  It was a gorgeous fall day; there was a huge spread of food and many of my favorite people were present.  It was a luxury to not have to direct or accompany.  I sat in the corner and harmonized when we sang together. We entertained with solos and duets, we taught each other songs.  We videotaped us singing “Waltzing Matilda” to send to friends in Australia.

We were entering the third hour of music making when a guest arrived, a friend of another guest.  No one else knew her.  She carried a big music case which housed a Celtic harp.  We made introductions and she got herself settled.

Davey asked her to play something on her harp.

She advanced regally to the center of the room, set up her harp, serenely introduced her song and played.  It was lovely.

It took her five minutes to introduce the next song because she included a short history of the Celtic Harp.

Unfortunately someone then asked her why the harp’s strings were different colors.

Fifteen minutes later, she had given a lecture on music theory.

The same someone, clearly in a romantic trance, asked if she ever wrote for the harp.

“Why yes, of course, I do,” She made eye contact with half a dozen guests.  “Several of my compositions are on my second CD.”

“Would you play one of your songs?”

I looked at Davey.  Was this her idea?  Davey appeared stunned.

Harpzilla played one of her own compositions.  She mentioned again that she had recorded two CDs.

I looked around.  Everyone appeared stunned.

I said in a loud voice, “Rich, when are we going to hear from you?”

Rich didn’t respond quickly enough.  This was Harpzilla’s cue that the crowd wanted another song so she played another composition after a lengthy explanation which included the information that she had several CD’s in her car in case any of us wanted to buy one.

No one moved.  I couldn’t even detect any breathing.

After 45 minutes I walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom. I wandered over to the food table. I went out on the porch and planned my escape.

I sat down on the couch next to Crystal, who sings in my choir, The OK Chorale.  Harpzilla had finished a song and was starting in about her CDs again.   Crystal suddenly turned to me and said conversationally, if just a shade loudly, “We’ve made CD’s.”

I turned to her like this was an act we had rehearsed. “Yes, we have.”

“You have?” Harpzilla’s fingers froze on her strings

“Yes,” I said, “Five or six, I think.”

Davey piped up, “I have one right here.  Shall we put it on?”

“Which one is it?”

“Our latest, when we were on the Intiman stage!”

Now Harpzilla appeared stunned, but only briefly.  “I play for Hospice patients, you know, and it’s always devastating when they die,” she announced.

Another silence.  A resentful silence. Somebody sighed.  Nobody said anything.

I thought, “Well, after you get through with them, I’m not surprised they die; after all, you’ve sucked the life out of a party of thirty people in less than an hour.”

Davey’s joyful hootenanny dried up well before sunset.

This party actually took place ten years ago, but we still talk about; still enjoy our righteous indignation.  It’s a tale of what not to do at a party.  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I refer to the behavior of the one guest or that of the group who put up with her.