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.
Remembering Michael McClure and Larry Berk
Larry Berk and Michael McClure
Michael McClure—poet, playwright, songwriter—was one of the original Beats who went on to inspire Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, become a counterculture figure, and win many awards. But his biggest fame may have come from the free-speech controversy that his 1965 play, The Beard, provoked.
The play tells a story of Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow that culminates in a sex act. Police shut it down for obscenity in San Francisco, so it moved to Los Angeles, where the cast was arrested after each performance for 14 nights in a row. It was later successful in New York, London, and Paris, championed for its role in U.S. censorship and free speech battles.
When Michael came to town to appear in the visiting poet program at SUNY Ulster in 2004, I was his driver. The morning session for students went well and I returned him to the Holiday Inn where the college had housed him. An evening appearance for the public was set for 8 PM. I left a little late from my house and was speeding on Route 28 when I got pulled over by police. There were no cell phones—no way to communicate as I sat waiting for the ticket. It seemed to take forever, my anxiety growing with my chagrin. Finally, slowly, I made my way to find Michael waiting in the hotel lobby.
I was in tears. There was no way to contact the college. Our cohort would be waiting on the stage with a full-house audience, but any phones were in closed offices. It was already 8 PM, showtime. I was driving a stick-shift Subaru wagon as swiftly as I dared. Terrified, sure of the worry I was causing.
Michael was my champion. As soon as we arrived, he ran up to the microphone and shouted, “It was the cops! They gave Johanna a ticket!”
There was surprised laughter and our friends looked startled. Turned out, no one had missed us yet—even Larry Berk, honcho of the event, was unperturbed. But it was a dramatic beginning for the reading that night.
The next day we had a sunny, relaxed lunch in Kingston with Larry and Sarah Berk. I see the case for my little Minolta on the table, my first camera post-film. I love this shot in time. I feel warmed by the smiles these long-gone menshes gave me that day.
One Gentle Morning
John Hall, me, Sharon Alexander, and Tom Pacheco
Pacheco and Alexander
Tom Pacheco and Sharon Alexander were our close friends in Manhattan in the mid-1960s. They lived in a comfortable apartment, conveniently located above the Care Wha? on MacDougal Street with a front-window view of the scene below. John and I often visited them from our East Village home across town.
Sharon had grown up with a health-food mother so ahead of her time that Sharon never saw white bread or sugary foods, until she went to school. As a result, she had an enormous cupboard full of every kind of candy or snack on the market. It was impressive. She also has a beautiful voice and is as lovely within as without.
Tom was, and is, a brilliant songwriter. John produced an album of his songs, sung by the duo. It holds up and you can find it on YouTube: Pacheco and Alexander.
When John and I got married in September of 1969, Tom wrote a song for us. We heard it for the first time during the wedding ceremony, an unforgettable gift. Tom’s guitar playing was the music as we entered the Quaker Meeting House where I had grown up. This photo was taken the day before, in my family’s Levittown home. I was surprised by it 57 years later. The cat is a mystery that none of my siblings recognize, so it must have been Sharon’s cat—traveled down from New York? Interesting how our eyes are focused in different directions: Tom’s and my blue eyes smiling in the same direction, John looking at the photographer (whom I believe to be the genius Jack Rosen), Sharon making a funny face, cat disgruntled in her lap. Humans in high spirits.
Only recorded in memory:
One gentle morning
’Neath the skies of September
We gathered together in friendship
’Twas the time for the joining of two gentle people
In a meeting house full of good feeling
And the whole world smiled all around
’Twas a time to remember
John and Johanna, go forth from this day
May the light of your love light the way
A Lesson
Caption
As a child, there was no happier moment than sitting on the front steps of our Maryland home with a book of fairytales and a dish of vanilla ice cream with the chocolate sauce my mother made. Sometimes the chocolate was hard and crunchy, sometimes smooth and textured. This was bliss.
Every week my mother took us to the library, where I would take out the maximum number of books allowed. Five? Six? And I devoured the fairytales along with the ice cream. Dreaming about the mysterious world, learning about life and love.
A stack of books, worn leather covers of green, blue or brown, and heavy pages redolent of time. Black and white illustrations of princesses and castles, dragons and forests. This was wealth beyond imagining.
One day, my books had disappeared. I thought I had lost them somehow. I lived in fear of consequences. What would happen? A Sword of Damocles over me.
Then, in a casual conversation, my mother mentioned that she had returned the library books. The relief that washed over me was visible. The doom lifted. My father saw me and understood.
“Oh, honey,” he said. “Money isn’t important. Only people are important.”
A lesson I never forgot. Seventy years later, I am grateful.