In a second story flat on Frederick Street beside the railroad tracks and a stones throw from a Denny's in Portland, this album played in the kitchen while I wrote papers for college courses on my typewriter. It would be a year before I'd own my first Mac. Taking a break, I'd eat pinches of popcorn covered with brewer's yeast and tamari sauce. I'd drink copious cups of cheap caffeinated brews.
During these popcorn and caffeine breaks, I'd turn from away from the table, and typewriter, and look out the leaky window that faced west. During the day you could watch planes land and launch from Portland's International Jet Port and occasional flying raccoons (seagulls) scavenging food from dumpster at Denny's and eat their finds on the neighbors roof. At night when I turned, it was usually when the street lights came on or when a train stormed by rattling the windows. Listening to this album, which might be classified now as Trance or Psychedelic or World or IndiPop (#12 on British Charts in '83), I thought it as meditation music. Muse music, if you will.
Yet whenever a train rambled by at night and I happened to have this album on, the trains would suddenly become a source of an internal game I played during my breaks. Basically as it rolled by I'd see if any of the train cars had their doors left open. If it did, I'd imagine that was an invitation to go traveling. Where was the train going? Where would I get off? How far could I take myself across country by simply playing this game from one rail yard to the next? Perhaps, I'd find a place I liked and stop and work there awhile, like I'd done with Ron on Pinion in sailing from Maine to St. Croix. This would be my solo odyssey across the US. Maybe I could write my own version of Travel's with Charlie and find a travel happy pet? In St. Croix I'd found a kitten in the rainforest. He earned his keep on the boat by eating cockroaches that snuck aboard in groceries no matter how many times we check the bags at the docks.
Sheila Chandra is the vocalist for this album and many of the instruments used are native to India not England. This was the one and only album Monsoon made as a band*. Chandra had a solo career and later did vocals for the soundtrack for one of the Lord of the Rings films. Her otherworldly phrasing, tone and choices lead the listener to far away places and on fantastical meditative journeys.
My major had changed from Pre-Nursing to English during the year I bought the album. I started thinking of traveling to the UK and farther a field. I had two roommates, Meg a student at what was then called Portland School of Art, and Nan who was studying psychology at USM. Nan and I became chosen sisters then and remain so today. My acting teacher, Peter Frankham, would become a mentor and friend. He was starting the Maine Actor's Studio in Portland. Before that he'd founded Make a Circus in SF with Peter Coyote, among others. His family in England were "travelers." His mum and aunt were the first in their family to stop moving, to put down stakes. A year and half later, August '84, he'd be living in squat in South Kensington (I know a contradiction in terms, but it was the '80s, Thatcher's England, and many things were upside down). This time working towards collecting like-minded people to start yet another theater company. He invited me to come stay with the group (8 or so folks) and use it as a base for more travel and work.
When I stayed in London, Peter's roommates said, "You must stay, as the sun has been out since you arrived!" August in London can be like August in SF, to steal from Twain, "the coldest winter I've ever spent, was my summer in San Fransisco." I was happy to be the squats' sunny rabbit's foot. London. August. 1984. Large quantities of people were carrying packets or rolls of tin foil with them. Why? Heroin was easing the pain of a poor economy and social unrest. Strike after strike, year round. Cigarettes at parties were commonly laced with hashish, which meant trying not to get a contact high in cramped soirees near Hyde Park was damn near impossible. We ate out some, Indian mostly. The music being played in these tiny shops included the tabla, swarmandel, cabasa, timbali, sitar, tambora and various stringed guitars. Monsoon would enter my brain while we were eating our curry and I realized how far I was from my typewriter on Frederick Street.
I did take a few day trips. A pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon and Coventry. The latter to see the gigantic Lady Godiva sculpture, not knowing that there were many such monuments of her scattered around the UK. Trains and busses carrying me through towns when poems, sonnets, plays, and entire masterpieces were created was a bit over whelming and hard to take in with my guide books, maps, notebook and traveling watercolor set for me at the age of 22. I made money at a dance studio, the Pineapple Dance Studio in Coventry Gardens in London. Not sure how I got the gig, but worked under the table.
Peter and I took the ferry to Paris, and we walked the streets for 24 hours, except when we fell asleep on a park bench in the Tuileries under the famous stand of manicured trees, only to be woken by some cranky Paris cops. Peter showed me "his" Paris, like everyone who has ever lived in a world class city shows your their city. Shakespeare and Company, stories of Sylvia Beach and Marcel Marceau with whom Peter had trained in his mime and Commedia Dell'arte days. We saw the business stoops being swept by their owners with twig brooms and buckets of water. We saw prostitutes meeting johns. We ate mostly bread, cheese, chocolate and red wine (which we carried with us, ate in parks and no one cared--just like I'd do decades later on playgrounds in Amsterdam, only sans the vino). We had a long debate about whether legalized prostitution was better or worse for all involved. We finally found our way by train back to coast to catch a ferry. I'd have to check my journals, for it was either Boulogne or Dieppe, a walled seaside port either way, where we waited for the ferry. Much to our astonishment there was Roman vs Gaul competition happening in a festival that took over the old city! I felt like I'd stepped into the land of Asterix and Obelix. Yes, a magical and mystical journey, and continued as we sipped calvados. Peter jokingly proposed to me. It was my first experience with the apple brandy, a proposal, and my last year of drinking (I'd started a decade earlier, but that is another story). He said that if we could travel 24 hours with about as many dollars in our pockets, sleep soundly on park benches and only have one rough patch (really a thoughtful political debate), we were fated for each other. I agreed, but as same spirited friends not more than that!
{Another time: story on friend in Notting Hill and Roma Aunt and her "lodger" in Tunbridge Wells}
My final week in London, we waited on line, twice, to get tickets to Dario Fo's one man performance of something like The History of the World or Man (?). I'm writing this all from head to keyboard, and don't want to open the rabbit hole that are my boxes of journals. Google is no help. Can't find a winning combination to find the exact name/date: Dario Fo. London. Notting Hill. 1984. One man show. Nada, zilch, goose egg.
The real take aways were two fold:
1) His one man performance of the history of us as "Beings" rivals that of Lily Tomlin (who I saw perform Search for Intelligent Life in SF) and beyond anything Robin Williams capture on film in Being Human (and he bought boxes of books with my help from Green Apple to prepare for that role). Fo was a true silent magician. No gesture, posture, grimace or popped eye movement was wasted. The audience experienced him starting as a rock and traveling through time and space to London in '84. Every emotion was touched. Magical Mystery Tour, for sure.
2) The first day we were on que (British term for line) the show sold out. The next day Dario Fo again walked past the ticket line on his way into the theater. He turned around and saw that we were back, trying again to see him, (for non-theater or literary folks - he was banned in the US at the time, I was leaving soon, and he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature a decade +-later), and he stopped.
Dario Fo, "You two were here yesterday, did you not get in?"
Peter, with his big Romani eyes and impish grin, "No, we didn't, so we're back!"
Dario Fo, "Well, today you shall!" And he brought us to the front of the line.
The power of patience and mediation is greatly under valued in our society. That is why Buddhism, yoga, and meditative sports like kayaking, sailing, diving, snorkeling and, oh yes, the Big Kahuna, swimming are so important in my life. Running used to be. Started as a girl. But as a crone, my bones are too brittle to carry me. Perhaps I can change that with weights.
Finding music in the imports section of a record story on Congress Street carried me through writing and rewriting reams of papers to achieve my BA and kept me balanced. As did my runs with Nan, including the above mentioned album. Peter would find Thatcher's UK too depressed to rally support for a new Theater. He'd moved to Brooklyn to start again, he had a hard time staying in place. But he liked to build things wherever he went. When I began the Radcliffe Publishing Course, in the summer of '87, they told the students that there would be a job fair at the New Yorker and we'd be expected to find our own housing in NYC. Peter wrote to me saying he was moving to California and I could have his room in Brooklyn. Not quiet a squat in South Kensington, but rather a room in a Browstone in Boerum Hill with 6 others sharing the house. I took it.
Well, I've gone over my self-allotted writing time. Hope you enjoyed the today's jumble.
* When I first heard Madonna's album, Ray of Light, I wondered if she'd found this album in record store in London ~similar sounds in many places, so a possible influence.
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