Long Island Goddesses

My cousin Bruce and I went out to visit our cousin Linda out on Long Island, Lindenhurst to be exact. When I was a young girl,I thought that they named the town after my beautiful black haired cousin. I idolized Linda, who was two years older than me. Our moms were housewives, and we did a lot of visiting in the summer, especially. I would go out to that house with my mother and my sister in tow, to visit Aunt Betty, Uncle Davy, Kevin and the twins. It was prototypical 50s and 60s suburbia, created by the GI Bill, a lot of fast building on hastily converted farmland. We lived in a "development" out near Riverhead, while my cousins lived in the more civilized South Shore. We spent days at the beaches, clamming at low tide and running down sand dunes. On our way to and from the beaches, bare feet still dragging sand, sitting on the back seat of the giant old black Buick my Uncle Red gave to my mother when he and Aunt Ann moved to 33rd and 3rd and didn't need a car any more, eating sandwiches with lettuce and tuna and sand and laughing at everything, we would pass the Pilgrim State mental hospital, the home of many a late nite ghost story.
My cousins Susan and Linda were twins. Susan was the quiet one, and Linda was the Alpha twin, smoking first, dancing first, kissing boys first, going out to the scrub pine to drink beer first. Linda put on makeup and teased her hair. Linda argued with her parents,while Susan tried to stay out of trouble. Kevin blissfully avoided all this teenager stuff by being sporty.
Nowadays, Susan is married, with the same guy since highschool. Her oldest daughter just had a girl, so she is a grandmother. Kevin was a year younger than me, three years younger than his sisters, and was good at math, so he became a stock broker, living the good life until a crash crashed him. We lived in a working class paradise. Vincent, Kevin's best friend, and soap box car racer, the kid across the street, became the town constable of one of the tonier beach towns on the South Fork. Linda married three guys in succession, working in real estate and at a biological testing lab along the way
I went to college far far far away, and became a singer and songwriter and a drunk, far away from the Suffolk County of my girl scout childhood.
My mother and Aunt Betty are both gone, ghosts in this Celtic drama, (we are for better or worse, an Irish American family, mostly) lost to cigarettes, and in my mother's case a measure of booze, and prescription drugs. Mom lived to 50, Aunt Betty live longer than any of her siblings to the ripe old age of 55. Their brother Jim, who had moved out to Long Island, after marrying my mother's best friend Mary, from beauty school in Brooklyn, won the award for dying youngest at 38, and Claire Ann and Kitty died at 51 and 43 respectively...

Alone, again, naturally

I've got a lot of time on my hands now.  It's an oddly luxurious feeling.  I don't have a job, and have a hearing coming up in order to reinstate me as a new york city teacher.  somehow, tho' i feel that the divine hand of god was there to give me this time and space to myself.  i don't know if i've used it wisely.  i've written a lot, done a film treatment, done some blogging, promoted my band with facebook, developed crushes on (and gotten over) two people.  I've sung with 4, no five bands, and still haven't recorded anything. , which will be a strong way of maintaining my independence indefinately.   I should go on the road to film with Shari.  , now that we've skipped over spring and have bungie jumped right into summer...My son is in his own world, and I don't see him for days at a time. I have empty nest syndrome, with not  quite an empty nest.  Maybe I should just move, while he's not looking, and put everything into storage. That would be nice., so that I could go on the road.. 

Tuesday nites at the Sapphire Lounge

I don't live in NYC because of the glamour or hipness. I've got enough internal hipness to last me through a few lifetimes in Hershey PA, or Cleveland Ohio. The reason I live in NY is so that I can sing with great musicians. They are here, like diamonds in South Africa. They're not easy to find, but they are here..I'm working with Roger Bartlett,who spent his youth working with Jimmy Buffett. Now Buffett makes $60,000 per show at the White House, and Roger is scrambling after a divorce left him stunned. I get to sing with Jimmy Satten, who was the guitarist for Mary Wells, my favorite Motown Diva. He can play "2 Lovers" even when noone else knows the tunes. I get to sing with Roderick Kohn who's trying to pick up the pieces after the death of his band leader, Buddy Miles, and a bike accident which left him with about 3 unbroken ribs. I think we music makers are a little like whalers in the North Sea,, who have no life insurance, little property and a daily brush with death. I stopped drinking and carrying on 20 years ago, so I only have to deal with the aftermath of the high life, the bad liver, and bogus music contracts. Anyway, the one beautiful thing that I do get to do is to sing with all these wonderful people on Tuesday nites, when we record the show for local cable. My cousin Pete, who was in the original Beatlemania and I do a piece called Channeling John Lennon, where we summon the spirit of our dearly departed Celtic brother bard, and ask for suggestions and opinions. In the last channeling sessions, we found that he needed Yoko Ono to heal the wounds of his life, and to inspire him. We found that he thinks Larry Summers is a lousy financial advisor, and that Barack Obama needs Paul Krugman on his staff.. We found that being dead isn't completely without problems, he still works on his art. (or was I channeling my mother?) Anyway, we'ere at the Sapphire Lounge every Tuesday nite at 8pm 249 Eldridge Street..right off E. Houston, where my great great grandmother grew up...