This Is Not A Post About Chicago

It all started with a beautiful man.  But don't most things start that way?  An attractive person can change your world.  I grew up on 1980's movies where it's usually a male character who falls in love at first sight with a female character and then spends the rest of the movie pursuing her and having thoughts about nothing but her.  Movies like "Valley Girl" when Randy the punk spotted beautiful valley girl, Julie, on the beach and then crashed the preppie party to meet her. Well, I'm not about to crash any parties, but after seeing Robert Lamm of Chicago on their "Live at Tanglewood" concert video from 1970,  I have been consumed by all things Chicago. 

THE video! "Beginnings" from "Chicago - Live at Tanglewood"

A few months ago in August, I flipped my TV channel remote on the Chicago episode of AXS Channel's "Rock Legends" series. I remembered that my former stepfather gave me his "Chicago IX -  Greatest Hits" album on vinyl when I was a teenager.   This was in the 1980's, and until I'd heard this album, I had no idea that Chicago had a full brass section and a singer with a deep voice.  I was only familiar with their videos showing Peter Cetera as their lead singer, a blonde-haired tenor who sang ballads. It was a pleasant surprise to discover this earlier version of Chicago, and I listened to my "Chicago IX" album regularly.  I was told the singer with the deep voice on my album was Terry Kath who died in the 1970's in a gun accident.  My favorite songs on the album were "Make Me Smile," "Call on Me," "Beginnings," and "Feeling Stronger Everyday." 

My new Chicago bracelet set that I asked an Etsy artist to make for me featuring my favorite Chicago song 

After the AXS episode refreshed my memory of how much I loved those songs, I decided to look on YouTube for Chicago videos. I searched for "Beginnings" and stumbled upon the Tanglewood concert.  At first, I assumed the long-haired man getting ready to sing at the microphone was the deceased Terry Kath.  Basically, I just assumed this because I knew he wasn't Peter Cetera.   But right away, I heard him say, "Terry," while looking to his side and gesturing with his hand, so I said to myself, "Oh. This isn't Terry Kath. BUT THEN WHO IS THIS HANDSOME GUY??!!"  I Googled and found out it was Robert Lamm and that he is still alive and STILL good-looking at age seventy-eight. 

Soon I was watching every single Chicago video and documentary I could find.  Not just to see 1970's Robert Lamm but because Chicago's musicianship speaks to me. Even though I consider myself primarily a novelist, at the core of my heart, I am a musician.  When I was five years old, I begged my parents to let me take piano lessons.  They put me off until I was six because they didn't want to waste money on a piano only to have me change my mind.  I didn't change my mind, and I took lessons until I was sixteen. Then, when I was eighteen, I enrolled at Boston's Berklee College of Music.  Watching live Chicago videos during the Terry Kath years of 1970 through 1977 is like being at Berklee again.  Every night I enjoy sitting with a half glass of Chardonnay or a half bottle of Guinness beer with my headphones on and plugged into YouTube.  I am behind in my podcasts and in editing the 2nd draft of my newest novel because I keep watching and listening to Chicago in the 1970's, and it feels so good.

Pin from my Pinterest Board dedicated solely to Chicago's Robert Lamm

One day last month, I was really angry.  Just from the usual, everyday life's frustrations. So at night, I put the entire "Live at Tanglewood" concert into my headphones yet again. Terry Kath's amazing and busy guitar playing and Danny Seraphine's wild, forceful, drumming helped get everything out of me.  It was cathartic and exactly what I needed.  I was able to sleep peacefully that night.

So why do I keep on watching and listening to Chicago? I believe it is because obsessions allow us to distract our minds from the everyday things that are troubling us. Things like the fact that I have only $10 left in my checking account.  Or when I think about how if I carry my mug of tea down the stairs, I may trip and fall and die like Ivana Trump did while carrying her mug of coffee.  Or if something like that doesn't happen to me, and I live another forty years, is the planet going to be half submerged under water by then?  These days, when I have anxious thoughts, I immediately switch them, and instead, I plug into Chicago.

I know that eventually my fascination with Chicago will dim, but I don't want it to yet because I'm having too much fun. I'm excited I'll get to see Chicago play live when they tour the East Coast in April 2023.  But what would be even better is if one night, Robert Lamm could magically step out of that "Chicago - Live at Tanglewood" YouTube video from out of my laptop the same way Jeff Daniels stepped off the movie theater screen in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo!"  If that happened, I could remain in a dream fantasy world forever. Surely, this would be the perfect cure for my anxiety.  If only!

My ticket confirmation to see Chicago.  Robert Lamm is in the middle in white pants.

The Poem I Wrote As A Love Letter To My Vocal Cords

 

My Dad singing with his cover band "Beach Road" in the 1970's

In April 2016, I wrote a blog entry entitled, "Finally - Dad. (Part 1)."  I said that it was very difficult to write about my dad who died when I was fifteen but that eventually I would write more entries about him.  So here we are, six years later, with Part 2. In Part 1, I wrote about my dad's love of Walt Whitman's poetry and said that he wrote his own version of Whitman's collection of poems, "Leaves of Grass,"  by changing the words and setting the poems to music. Here in Part 2, I would like to share a poem that I wrote years ago, "Lifedream," and the story behind it. 

Even though my dad was a talented songwriter, his true love was singing.  His favorite singer was Teddy Pendergrass whose albums he often played at family gatherings, exclaiming, "Listen how Teddy sings this note! Nobody can sing like Teddy!" This prompted teasing from my aunt who told him, "You talk about him like he's your friend! 'Hey Teddy, let's go outside and play ball!'" My dad loved Pendergrass, but he judged other singers very harshly, and I could never understand why.  They all sounded good to me, and I figured that since they were on TV, they had to be good!  I never had the courage to actually sing in front of my dad.  Instead, I blared albums on my record player and sang along with my favorite singers at the time, Donna Summer and Diana Ross, behind the closed door of my bedroom.  I'll never forget the thrill I had on a car ride with my mom on the way to applepicking when she mentioned that my dad told her he had heard me singing in my room, and if I studied, I had the potential of becoming a really good singer.  My dad didn't throw singing compliments around lightly, so the joy I felt at that moment was monumental.  I immediately enrolled in singing lessons and continued them even after he died.  I knew singing was the closest I could be to him, and it was a way to make him proud of me. When I turned eighteen, I moved to Boston to study singing and songwriting at Berklee College of Music. I needed to know what truly made a singer good or bad.  Otherwise, I feared I'd become one of those singers that my dad would have hated!

College life and living in the dorms were not kind to my voice.  The stuffiness of the dorm rooms exacerbated my allergies, and the beer drinking and late nights roaming the halls screaming and being silly made my voice hoarse.  At one point, I was limited to a three-note range.  My voice teacher recommended an ear, nose and throat specialist to examine my vocal cords.  The diagnosis wasn't good. I had the beginnings of vocal nodules, simply called "nodes," which are benign growths on the vocal cords that develop when people abuse their voices.  The struggle to heal my voice was difficult and depressing. I stopped drinking beer and staying up late.  I stopped singing and screaming in the hallways.   But I kept on writing.  The following poem, "Lifedream," is a metaphorical poem I wrote to my vocal cords, expressing my sadness and disappointment and my fear that my voice would never come back:

"Lifedream"

I will shelter you like a thin sheet of ice./Put you in a tiny box./Preserve you till I'm ready.  

No, I'd never give you up./Never give up skating.

But you and I don't think alike./Never meant to hurt you./And up until the end of time,/I'll never give up skating. 

But maybe I can't save the ice./My body crushed and crumbling through./If I can't live my life on ice,/I'll never love you true.

I will shelter you and hold you tight./Together we will move.

If I fall through this sheet of ice,/My life's dream I will lose.

Slowly, my vocal range came back.  In fact, my voice teacher told me she had never seen anyone overcome vocal damage to the extent that I was able to with no outside medical treatment. But I still felt I would never be able to sing as well as my dad would have wanted me to.  Anytime I had a late night or was run down, my sensitivity to hoarseness acted up.  My voice teacher also told me that my speaking voice was harsh and very different from my singing voice.  She said you must speak the same way that you sing but that trying to speak in a way that wasn't natural to me might change my personality. I didn't want to do that, and eventually, I just decided that if I couldn't sing as well as my dad, there was no use in singing at all.  It all turned out okay though because I'm happy now writing novels.  Plus, it's been beautiful to rediscover my poem and to remember those days when singing was so meaningful to me.

Written, Created, Directed, Produced, and Acted by Women

Marie Reuther as Julie in "Kamikaze"

These days, when I need to relax and take time out from writing my novel, I like to stream TV series.  I'm enjoying this but am hoping my novel won't take ten years to finish like "Catcher in the Rye" did for J.D. Salinger.  Then again, if my novel could turn out even one tenth as good as "Catcher in the Rye,"  I'll take it!  As much as I love Holden Caulfield, lately I find myself drawn more towards stories that have female lead characters and scripts written by women.  I find that when women create female characters and write situations and dialogue for them, they portray women a lot closer to how we really are.  I've noticed that female writers are more comfortable with writing their female leads as antiheroes.  This is refreshing, as opposed to being inundated with idealized versions of women or women depicted as martyrs or victims.  It is more like real life.  The below three series are a few of my most recent favorites.  They may not sit well with everyone, but I believe they are truthful to the female experience and portray women as imperfect human beings with life lessons to learn.  

Kamikaze on HBO Max  Favorite Line: "Do what you want."  

At first, I was hesitant to watch "Kamikaze" because of the depressing premise:  An eighteen-year-old girl named Julie gets a text from her dad telling her that his plane is crashing and advising her to "do what you want."  Also on that airplane is her mother and twenty-two-year-old brother, her only sibling.  After the crash, she is so distraught she doesn't get out of bed for three days.  When she does get out of bed, she has one goal which is to die too so she can be with them.  She decides to fly on a different commercial flight every day until one of the flights crashes.  But after a close call, the relieved man sitting next to her tells her that based on statistics, a person would have to fly every single day for twenty-nine years to die in a plane crash.  So she abandons that plan and decides to focus on having fun instead. She continues to live her life recklessly and still has a death wish because she hasn't changed her mind about wanting to die and rejoin her family.  She travels to different countries, setting her eyes on particular guys she wants to have sex with.  She breaks some hearts but who can judge her when she has just endured the unfathomable grief of losing her entire family?  I lost my father as a teenager so I imagine I felt one third of the type of pain she feels, and I also remember some months of not fearing death and of living recklessly.  Spoiler Alert:  At the end of the series, Julie discovers she is pregnant.  She doesn't know which guy out of a possible four is the father, but she ends her death wish, and I believe this is because when her baby is born, she will regain a part of her precious family back.  Julie is portrayed as a daring young woman who decides to take charge of her life.  Even though her choices are destructive, she still has the courage to follow her own path.  The women who created and wrote for this series were not afraid to portray Julie as a female antihero.  

Gypsy on Netflix  Favorite Line: "Nothing's certain, except for whatever's happening right here.  In this moment."

Jean Holloway is a psychotherapist who lives a cushy life with her husband and nine-year-old daughter in the suburbs.  Like Julie in "Kamikaze," she is also living recklessly, but it is not due to having suffered a life-changing loss. Instead, it is because she is depressed at the fact that her lifestyle is not true to her authentic self.  As a young woman, Jean shunned committment but reluctantly settled down because she feared living life alone.  Her mother put this fear into her head.  As a therapist, Jean sets out to help her patients but continually veers off the track as she becomes fascinated by and envious of the people who her patients describe as being toxic in their lives.  Her patients seek therapy to break obsessions with these people, but in turn, Jean becomes obsessed by her patients' descriptions of them because she believes these toxic people are living the types of exciting lives that she wants to live.  She is bored and needs an escape.  She goes on a quest to befriend these people by finding them and introducing herself as Diane Hart, a journalist. Jean is leading a secret, dual life, using an identity she feels is closer to the free spirited woman she used to be.  

Naomi Watts as Jean in "Gypsy"

Blythe Danner as Nancy (Jean's mom) in "Gypsy"

Jean forms new relationships and friendships as Diane Hart, and learns her new friends' secrets by asking her patients questions about them during their therapy sessions with her.  One patient get frustrated, telling Jean he doesn't want to delve deeper into understanding his toxic ex-girlfriend.  Instead, he is trying to get over her.  Jean manipulates her patients and guides them to make changes in their lives that suit her new connections with the people she has met as Diane Hart.  But not everything Jean does is malicious.  She also sets out to do good.  For one of her patients who is a mom struggling in her relationship with her grown daughter, she rewrites a letter that was given to her from the patient's daughter. Jean thinks the letter is too cold so she changes it, mimicking the daughter's handwriting, writing a warmer letter.  When the mom reads the new letter rewritten by Jean, she is comforted and leaves the therapy session happy. Jean also consistently shows love and respect for her own daughter who is misunderstood at school.   My favorite part of this series is Jean's relationship with her own mother, played brilliantly by Gwyneth Paltrow's mom, Blythe Danner.  Jean and her mom have a very strained relationship.  Her mom knows that Jean is manipulative and is destroying other people's lives.  But she is also the only person who knows her secrets and the only one who understands her.  Although we have trouble liking Jean by the end of the series, seeing her mother's unconditional love for her is heartwarming.  "Gypsy" portrays a real and flawed woman who doesn't murder anyone but has a long way to go in working on herself.  I think this is true to life.  Women are usually portrayed on TV and in movies as having had to endure some type of trauma to make them act maliciously, yet Jean has a loving family behind her and has had no trauma. She is just a human who hurts. She's not a victim, and she's not a martyr.  She's a realistic and damaged woman.

Fleabag on Amazon Prime   Favorite Line: "You already know what you're going to do." 

"Fleabag" is not only created and written by a woman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but Waller-Bridge also stars in it. "Fleabag" is a comedy, but also sad, as the female lead (only referred to as "Fleabag") is a young woman who feels responsible for the death of her best friend, Boo, who walked into moving traffic to try to get injured so she could get the attention of her philadering boyfriend, but she dies accidentally instead.  Fleabag feels responsible because she turns out to be the one who the boyfriend was unfaithful with, yet Boo didn't know it was Fleabag who slept with him. Fleabag misses Boo terribly, as she was the only person she felt close to because Fleabag is unable to form any other lasting relationships, as she just compulsively sleeps with men as an addiction.  Even though she's sad and lonely and often clashes with her self-absorbed sister, callous stepmother, and emotionally-absent father, Fleabag finds something funny in every situation.  Her sense of humor is her saving grace.  Fleabag also has an eye-opening scene with actress, Kristin Scott Thomas, who co-stars in one episode as a career woman who wants to impart some wisdom about the female experience, and she does so to Fleabag when they go out for a drink together.  She says that women are born in pain.  They have menstrual periods, endure childbirth and sore boobs, and because of this, women have the pain within themselves.  But men, on the other hand, have to create their own pain, and they seek it by finding wars to fight and crises to worry about.  Men have to create their own guilt whereas women are excellent at carrying their guilt all by themselves without ever having to create it or to go out and seek it.  

When Fleabag finally finds love, the man she falls for is a priest.  This is something we can all relate to, as my great-grandfather was a priest who left the priesthood to marry my great-grandmother.  Of course, I'm just kidding when I say that this is relatable to all people (although it is true what I said about my great-grandparents, so it IS relatable to me), but I do believe every woman can find something to relate to when watching TV series where women do the writing because when we women create female characters and stories about women, we are writing for us.

Andrew Scott as The Priest and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag in "Fleabag"