Across the Water

Across the Water: Here’s a song I wrote many years ago with Peter Fessler. I’ve spent a couple of decades flying back and forth from the USA to Europe. It’s never easy, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Nantucket Sound

The summer of 1976 will be long and warm and full of surprises. My work is cut out for me. I stash my big crate of music next to the piano and start playing songs that I like and songs that I hate, thumbing my way through fake books, trying to find tunes that are […]

The View from Here

A Piano Girl classic: A German castle on a lake, a determined June bride, an angry man in a wheelchair, an injured musician—sometimes the view from the piano seems like a Impressionist painting. Beautiful, but only when seen from a distance.

Life from the Other Side of the Steinway

It’s not always a Steinway. Sometimes it’s an ugly-looking, beautiful-sounding white Bösendorfer concert grand or a Yamaha conservatory grand with a high-gloss mirrored surface, so polished that I can see the mood of the evening staring back at me. Sometimes the instrument I play barely qualifies as a piano. Sometimes it’s an Army-surplus spinet made by a firm that is a subsidiary of a toy company. Sometimes it’s a beat-up upright piano with four broken strings—and when I press a key I can hear several distinct tones fluttering together and laughing at me with their out-of-tuneness. Sometimes it really is the perfect Steinway Model B, a seven-foot grand with a sound warm enough to make me stay at the piano forever, just listening. I play. I make music. I am the tall blond woman in the strapless cocktail dress, and I sit in the corner and play the piano.

An American in Paris

Whenever I visit Paris, I want to fall in love. I want to be enchanted. I want magic and romance and art. I crave the silvery slanted light that seeps over the horizon in late morning and hangs on to the edges of the city until sunset. If I’m not actually in the Eifel Tower I want to be staring at it from a distance, watching, in the early evening, as it sparkles like the world’s largest bottle of champagne.

I know Parisian food can be overpriced, French fashion can be overated, and snootiness often underscores daily life. I know politics in France leave much to be desired; racism and the nationalistic tendencies of some citizens pull on the already frayed sleeves of others. I know these things, but still I cannot look away from the golden patina of the city itself. The city glows. We walk through Paris in our somber black clothes, as if we’re trying to absorb a bit of the city’s smoldering blush. If only.

I’ve been to Paris seven times. Here are some jumbled notes from those visits :

The Apricot Tree

We’re in Villefranche sur Saône, France, a bit north of Lyon, searching for the home of Jean Auray, the award-winning luthier who has agreed to build John’s new double bass. Any good musician will tell you that a quality instrument is the extension of an artist’s soul, and John is looking to expand his soulfulness. Throughout his career he has dreamed of finding a bass that’s comfortable to play, with a warm, clear, punchy sound and consistent tone across its entire range.

Purple Blue Hibiscus

I’m trying to get a flight to Cat Cay, a private island in the Bahamas. Don Brockett has booked me to play there for two weeks. Don, his wife Leslie, and the other performers are flying into Miami on a private jet from Pittsburgh. There is no airstrip on Cat Cay, so Don and his entourage will be picked up by one of the island yachts and transported over to the island. Because I’m coming from Haiti I’ll have to take a commercial seaplane over to Cat. I’ve never flown on a seaplane before, and I’m a little nervous about it.

Stopping Traffic: Valentine’s Day at Schloss Lerbach

It’s Valentine’s Day, another one of those holidays made popular by greeting-card companies. I’m driving to my lunchtime piano job at Schlosshotel Lerbach and thinking about Hallmark Cards. My sister, Randy, has a bad reaction to any Hallmark store. There’s something about the smell of the paper that causes her to have intestinal cramps. She’ll pick out a card, and before she even pays for it, she’ll have to race to the nearest ladies’ room, not always an easy jaunt in an American mega-mall. I have a similar reaction to the smell of auto-supply stores, but I think that’s fairly common among women.

All I Want for Christmas

 1966: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania On Christmas morning I sit with my brother and sister on the top step of a long staircase leading down to the living room. Cloaked in fuzzy red pajamas, we squash our little rinkies together on a narrow swath of Williamsburg blue shag carpeting, agonizing over whether or not Santa has shown […]

Mister President (from Waltz of the Asparagus People)

Excuse me, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I maneuver across a crowded subway platform and step onto a slow-moving escalator. Perched in the middle, I avoid the sticky rubber handrails, and travel—head down, antennae up—until I emerge from the stuffy underground and step into the national-park spaciousness of Grand Central Station. I gaze at the terminal’s star-spattered ceiling, shuffle around a clump of camera-toting tourists, and scoot outside into the June morning.