Pearls
This is a place for short reminiscences, strung together to tell my story. I begin here with the ancestors who improbably came together to create a lineage that gave me a wonderful life. I’m grateful and still curious.
Johanna Wolf
How far back can you trace your ancestry? They say all blue-eyed people trace to one individual 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, in a single genetic twist. I don’t know if my namesake, Johanna, had blue eyes like me. This is the only picture of her that I’ve ever seen. I know she emigrated from Germany to New York and married August Reiss, a cigar-maker. They had—to my knowledge—four children including Celia, my grandmother.
Johanna Wolf / Nina Darnton and me in Berlin, 2009
I’m named for my great-grandmother, Johanna Wolf who was a singer in Berlin. At least that’s the story I’ve heard and like. I thought of her when I sat in the sun, sipping a capuccino at a sidewalk table in Berlin. I was with new friend who was performing with me in a holocaust concert about the women’s orchestra of Birkenau. She’d been a journalist in Berlin and was regaling me with the history of this wide thoroughfare, akin to our Broadway. I watched the traffic on this fabled boulevard, people on foot and in cars. I was sure Johanna walked this way. I thought if I could swim the river of time back to her day, I could see Johanna moving through the crowd. I could see her. Going about her daily routine, like me believing it’s forever. It’s stunning to think your ancestor trod this road, stepped on these stones. Would that I could be a god in the sky, watching the flow of humans. I wished I could will it, that leap into an earlier stream of time. Almost thought I could see the ghosts moving along the sidewalk. I thought of Tom Stoppard and believed I could. In his plays, the parts that made me cry were when the ghosts waltzed with the still-living characters. Inhabiting the same space at the same time, rhyming rhythm.
Rejected Suitor
The original article, 1912
REJECTED SUITOR SENDS WORD HE TOOK POISON screams the newspaper headline in an ancient clipping dated July 24, 1912, Mount Vernon NY.
My Grandma Celia entrusted me with it when I was a young woman, already a newspaper writer like my parents. She told me the tale of deceptive Dave who became my grandfather. He had claimed he owned the drugstore where he worked, that he was a pharmacist. She broke the engagement when she learned that was not true.
What a sense of theater my grandfather had—staging a dramatic suicide attempt, breathlessly recounted in the news article, with subhead TOOK ENOUGH TO KILL FOUR HORSES.
I love that my great-grandad, August said that if a man wanted to commit suicide, he did not see why he did not go about it right without frightening the life out of his daughter.
We come into this world with stories of the serendipities that created us, the accidents and the might-have-beens that we may never know. My existence might not have been had this melodramatic story ended differently.
“Miss Reiss is reported to have called at the hospital yesterday,” ends the newspaper story. She fell for it. Six years later, my father was born.
Chuck Plotkin
Chuck and me / With John Hall in the studio / With Larry Hoppen
I loved Chuck Plotkin. He was the first person that John and I met in the music business who could give us good songwriting advice. It was a relief. He understood what we were doing. I told him I’d scrub floors to work with him. I didn’t have to, but only learned decades later why our Asylum deal took so long.
I interviewed Chuck ten years ago in LA about his life and career—producing Orleans hits, then Bruce Springsteen’s and also Bob Dylan. I hope to publish the piece that resulted from a series of revealing, long afternoon conversations.
When we met, he had just been signed as head of Artists and Repertoire at Asylum Records; and he was in NY to meet the staff. Head of publicity, Karin Berg insisted he come down to Max’s Kansas City to see Orleans showcase. It was love at first sight. The band already had several good offers for its second record. But Asylum had allure: home of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, the Eagles. It was headed by the fabled, shrewd David Geffen. So we held out anxiously for Chuck.
We didn’t know that behind the scenes he had to fight to sign us. He had to quit.
“When I told David I wanted to sign Orleans, he said no. I persisted but he still said no. He said they’d already had a flop and he didn’t want them. I told him I knew why that record had failed and I could make a hit with them. He still said no.
“So I said, okay then I quit,” Chuck laughed. “You said I could do whatever I wanted to do.
“Then David said, ’I was just testing your resolve.’ And he let me sign the band.”
In fact, he did know exactly how to make hits with us. I am ever-grateful for the fates that brought us together.
Sofi
Left: Flyer for a 1996 poetry reading that featured both Sofi and me
John Hall and I wrote over a hundred songs and I’m proud of the work we did. But the best thing we ever did was to give birth to Sofi. She gives us extraordinary, ineffable joy—something other parents would recognize. She is a gifted linguist and translator, the poet in the family with an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. Her gifts emerged right from the start. It was an honor to read with her when she was still in high school.
Going to College in Stone Ridge
Top: Larry Berk / Bottom left: Ellen Robbins / Bottom right: With Jean Rose
Suny Ulster, the Ulster County Community College in Stone Ridge, New York is a bucolic drive from my home. It played an important role in my education in the first decade of 2000. I want to pay tribute to three remarkable people who gave that gift to me. Three who died tragically but made a difference with their lives. Larry Berk, Jean Rose and Ellen Robbins were my guides when I was an Artist-in-Residence at the college.
Ellen, head of the English and Philosophy departments, was my faculty advisor when I taught my songwriting class (HUM 222). She was gentle, kind and learned. Her freckled face beamed with intelligence. She was struck by lightning and died in 2006. An astonishing way to go, especially as she had always been afraid of lightning. She was only 53. I remember her ready smile. The ongoing poetry series is now named after her, The Ellen Robbins Poetry Forum.
I met Jean Rose when I reported for my first meeting as the appointed AIR. ”No one told you?” Larry had been gravely injured in a head-on collision the night before. She deftly took over my initiation and we worked closely together my whole time at the college. Jean was a beauty inside and out, who lit up a room and did everything deftly. Her young daughter Ashley was reason for being. She died in 2016 at 55 from a brain tumor.
Larry’s energy and erudition created enduring programs. Fittingly, the AIR is now named the Larry Berk Artist-in-Residence program. He became a good friend and an inspiration up until the end when he perished from ALS at ? It was speculated that the car crash precipitated the disease. He remained cheerful and philosophical and dear. He left a young family behind and that pained him. We all lost with his demise.
I’m blessed to have known them all.
Still the One
Billy Collins came to SUNY Ulster for an evening poetry reading in the Fall of 2005. He had been United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, was Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004-2006, and his books were best-sellers. This was a score for the college. So there was an elegant dinner in the Stone Ridge house of the President before the reading. I was excited to sit with Collins at dinner and chat. He turned out to be a big music fan and a pianist. He said that he couldn’t wait to tell his friends that he met me. He said that my song, Still the One, “Put a phrase into the language. Not many get to do that!”
Yes, Hallmark makes cards with the phrase and sometimes music, especially for Valentine’s Day. It makes me proud when people tell me it is Their Song. It turned out to be a useful phrase for selling something of continued value, and so there were ads that sustained me and sent my daughter to college. When she was in Portugal in 2008, she found this graffiti that really touched me. The phrase turns up sometimes in odd places like this refrigerator magnet for Les Miz. This use was not paid. It didn’t need to be, as you can’t copyright a title. But it tickles me that people know what it means, make the association. May the song continue to be heard.