San Francisco Women

The summer seems to have flown and I have barely written.  I continue to lead my weekend life as if I were on vacation. There’ve been lots of visitors and my adventures have been many. At one of those weekend adventures – the Cindy Sherman exhibit at SF MOMA – I lost my camera.  That does put a crimp because I a picture really adds to the tale. I’ll just have to cut and paste someone else’s. 

Let’s talk about Cindy Sherman, the rage of NYC when her exhibit first appeared earlier in the year.  She photographs only herself, in various personas, dressed in different costumes through many different eras –from historical times through the fifties and onward. She’s about my age and her photos comment on the stereotypes that women might fall into.  The message has been the same as it was in her twenties.- Women lead lives of quiet desperation, perhaps. I certainly was plenty depressed after viewing the exhibit.

I and my two other friends all thought it was time for Cindy to get over it. Forty years of the whine is enough.  It is a young person’s lament when they are discovering who they are.  Sure, I went through my period of wanting to be a bombshell and then, I grew up.  There are other women who perhaps still live in some sad faux reality (I’ll try to copy Sherman as the Beverly Hills dame– or should I include a pix of my one-time school mate Ann (Davies) Romney?) but as I regard my female peers, they are self realized for the most part and on this side of miraculous.  I also wondered if Cindy were gay and had not yet reconciled issues with her own sexuality.  

I much preferred a screening of “connected – the film” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLjcuDDTUTo&list=UU5nHqW7f_1xo82eqnY1xDjw&feature=player_embeddedwith%20  with the director Tiffany Shlain. Ms. Shlain is the techie who created the “Webby Awards” and is considered by Time magazine to be one of the top ten women in media who represent the future.  She very much believes in the technology’s ability to create a fully realized inter-connected world.     This film, which began as such, took a slightly different turn, when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer.  Shlain’s “Connected” realized not only the internet’s connectivity, but also that of the heart and relationship.  (SIDE NOTE: Father Leonard Shlain was a reknown  physician and surgeon, who wrote much about art and physics, and interestingly, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess . His thesis was that women once ruled the earth, but when the written word came along, men became the alpha dogs.) 

Shlain fielded questions after the film, which was sponsored by “ewip” exceptional women in publishing.  http://www.ewip.org/  I am thinking of getting involved in their March conference.  Many fascinating women were there – all much younger – Moira and I were one of a few 60 year olds - really connected to media and the business world. I asked Tiffany if she were aware of the intelligence of the heart (heartmath). I thought that would give some new insight.  

 This further sparked a conversation with Mary Vincent, who is much involved in the green movement. Just back from Bhutan and investigating their humane world, Vincent, a “thought leader of sustainable development”,  began with  green star solution, http://www.greenstarsolution.com/, which further spawned “gratitude gourmet .http://www.gratitudegourmet.com/blog.html.  Amazing.  All these cutting edge women and I get a glimpse of it all in ‘my city by the Bay.” Lucky me!

Work, Shows The Giants

My friends from the land of teaching  and beyond - 

      I hope your teaching year is getting off to a grand start. I was trying to assess with Deborah Tobola if my new job was better, less stressful than teaching at the joint??? That's a crap shoot. It is a state job. The pay is 2/3rd of my teaching salary, and the learning curve continues to grow. As soon as I get one thing under my belt, it seems they add something new to the mix. Or there's another training that alerts me to how little I know this job. When there's a 200+ page manual of regulations by which you must 'cite' the facilities for their deficiencies (Talk about political correctness) And it's written in Legalese, there's a lot to learn. 

    Since I take a lap top and printer into the field, there's a lot of computer finickiness around which one has to tiptoe. And language must be precise, reports must be submitted in an ultra specific format.  The department reorganized first of July and caseloads changed.  Oakland picked up 700 Senior facilities form another office, and although one Analyst, who had done senior work before said it was a snap, OY VEY!  There are always medication issues.  A lot of auditing of medical records, daily delivery of those medicines, actually looking at med labels, numbers, dates, dosages, making sure everyone has a prescription, and that it has not expired. Talk about tedium. 

     It is always changing, challenging. I put in lots of overtime without getting paid (I know I did that at Fremont - sometimes at the joint)  Most times if I want to get out of the office and into the field - always the preference - overtime is a must to prepare for going into the field.  Consequently, I leave at 7 am and often don't get home until 7 pm.

   But I've found an outdoor pool in a pocket of Brisbane, four miles from my house, that is generally sunny when I get home and I can get in some outdoor laps. (yay!)  Weekends have so many possibilities and seems lots of people are passing through. A girlfriend I had not seen since 8th grade, a family and school friend, came through 2 weeks ago and yet another Daytonian arrives here next week.  

My brother called at 4 pm yesterday and after ten minutes of chitchat said he was in SF. I thought he was kidding - That is often one of his ploys. But no, he was going to the Giants game, did I want to go?  Sure!  as long as it's not football, I'm down.  So I found my way on public transit to AT&T park (on the waterfront - I thought it was in some SF 'Wrigley Field' kind of area. Three hours of one on one time with my brother hasn't happened since my sister passed away, and I was so incoherent at the time -  So, the Giants are easy to find, the stadium is gorgeous and we had great seats. My bro said the sailboats in the Bay wait for when the homerun gets knocked out of the stadium and land in their boat!. Damn, can those guys hit the ball far! And I understood the exhilaration of watching a sporting event with 41,000 other people. Usually I prefer the 100+ cabaret venues - like my Tuesday night encounter with 85 year old musical singer Barbara Cook, but it was fun. My bro was very aware how add I was in terms of following the plays, and I said it would be like when he gets dragged off to a theatrical performance with me. . . .Don't think my brother has cared about any of my singing since I lived in SF 40 years ago.  Oh well, We all have our passions. (And I also saw on stage "War Horse' which was stunning, and a heart felt one man show "Humor Abuse. " That was a memoir of a son learning to be a clown, growing up in the Pickle Family Circus, working as the second banana to his father's leading clown. It was marvelous and at 37 the guy still does back flips!

  So that's my lengthy run down.  Think I'll copy, paste and blog it.  Come visit me in SF.  I am a city girl!   xo Delilah

Gay Pride 2012

            I found that $20 from several weeks ago, as I was cleaning out my mail basket. Gee, I found everything I needed plus that $20.  I marvel that when I was a college student in Boulder, my grocery expenses were $20 for the week. Probably my mother sent me $100 for the month.  Michael and Birdie and Sam and I would recycle empty coke bottles so we could go have a chewy steak on a Sunday night up on the Boulder Hill, or perhaps a hamburger, fries and  beer at the Sink.  Which goes to say that $20 seems to be equivalent to $5 back in 1970 terms, unless of course you frequent the dollar store, or SF’s Daiso, where everything and anything goes for $1.50.  (That place is better than Ross! And I will happily escort you there on your next SF excursion.)

             It is the Fourth. The sun shines beautifully in Colma. (Which was sadly non-existent for my grandson’s five day visit over the previous weekend.)  Soon I will venture into the gaiety of this holiday, San Francisco style.  I keep hoping the clear weather will prevail, so I can watch fireworks on this side of the Bay. Oakland is always clearer and warmer.

            I want to speak about the Pride Parade, 2012, San Francisco.  In 1973, perhaps ’74, I marched with my gal friends in the Gay Parade in NYC, which was four or five years after Stonewall. In the 1969 era gays who marched wore sunglasses and quite possibly suits (!).  Later we marched because it was the right thing to do.  We were proud. We wanted to make a statement. It was a bit scary, but it was good.

            Saturday I ventured over to the Mission where ‘Dykes on Bikes’ had their late afternoon precursor to Sunday’s events. I missed the opening, where there must’ve been a lot of motorcycles, and I joined the demonstration midway through. It was reminiscent – though more open – of that seventy’s era.  I walked behind two young, very lovely gals, bare breasted, who had taped their nips with gold tape in an X design.  Oh for the days my boobs stood so erect!  Many women on the side rose signs above their heads which read, “Flash your tits”. There were a lot of women in this parade. But it was nothing in comparison to the main event during Sunday’s parade.

 During the 2012 parade, there were women everywhere. One editorial ventured that all the young teenage girls had come out in their rainbow voile tutus, just because. Yes, seemed there were more women than men, but maybe that was because all the guys were in the streets. I could hardly get near the parade to see anything.  I watched a lot of it on local PBS station later that night – after the Gay Pride awards, which also had local TV coverage for two hours.  This event’s turnout definitely eclipsed St. Paddy’s Day in SF, and in San Francisco, that is going a long way.  The St. Paddy’s Parade didn’t seem to have that corporate buy in, which was much more a Union event this year. - So what? Irish people don’t buy as much as gays these days?  Chase had a float. Macy’s passed out fans that read ‘Pride and Joy”. Chipotle sponsored another float.  Virgin Air even! (And that’s going a long way in a gay parade) Let’s be in style. Glitter and be gay.

I am glad that there is that kind of recognition of the gay community. And in another way, it made me sick – because of the pandering for the dollar, which is so endemic in our culture.  I wonder if those young teenagers are aware?

In SF I encountered a few – not a lot, but a few, naked fellows, who sported nothing but a cock ring.  I would add that this past week, I was on the SF embarcadero and encountered half a dozen fellows, bicyclists, in the same birthday suit plus cock ring attire, (Is the cock ring work like a jock strap when you are on a bike?) who were resting and sunning themselves in similar garb. No police were there to harass them, just another – obviously straight – cyclist who cried out with a lot of aggravation, “For God sakes, save that for someplace else, won’t you?”  My daughter and granddaughter were sorry to have missed it.

Life in San Francisco is so whimsical, in some ways. The color of the houses, the mix of all the peoples. A lightheartedness prevails, but it is still one of the most expensive places to live in the USA and one that is driven by economics, technologically driven these days.   In the end of course we must look to our hearts and discount the packaging around it.  Long live love. And if it’s only sex, may it be safe!

The Cemetery Crawl

This blogging business is something that needs weekly attention.  My adventures are so varied from one week to the next. And I need to be studying my French lyrics for my Bastille Day gigs and Gay Pride is calling.  Ah alas, tis hard to be so diverse in one’s talents! And to live in a place that has so much going on all the time.  I s’pose every city has as much happening; it all depends on what your interests are.

So last week I went on a cemetery crawl. 

 On some other sunny weekend I had biked to the Colma Historical Museum, where I picked up my new bumper sticker “It’s great to be alive in Colma”  (1500 above ground – and I’m one of the few not employed by the cemeteries - 1.5 million below)  I also got clarification on all those bodies that were ‘disinterred’ from their San Francisco graves, then’reinterred’ in Colma.  The process began in 1900, when the city declared no more burials would take place in San Francisco. The property was too valuable! Colma was chosen because of transportation access, and the train stopped at all the cemetery sites.  In 1914 when the first eviction notices were sent, many bodies were dumped into mass graves because families could not afford the $10 to have the remains relocated. There was much controversy with the church because of disturbing of the souls. 

 The final leg of it happened in the late thirties when 90,000 bodies were taken from Laurel Hill and Calvary Cemeteries. These were Catholic cemeteries and all of the exhuming required the presence of a priest and a health inspector. Also bodies had to be reinterred the same day they were disinterred. Yeow. Too much information???

Although Wyatt Earp and his exotic dancer wife – a stunning Jewess, Josephine, whose breasts peeking through the opaque wrapper reminded me of Isadora Duncan – are buried right across the street in the Salem Memorial, (How perfect for my Daytonian friends, where Salem Avenue was home to Beth Israel Temple and Temple Israel, and I had plenty of friends there) I chose to crawl around “Pet’s Rest”.  Yes, finally we’re getting to the meat of things.

Pet’s Rest, as you can tell from the sign, began in 1947.  And people are so much more sentimental about their pets than their families!  The Tobins had a plot where five furry family friends were laid to rest. Near the back of the cemetery there was a mausoleum of sorts – Cinder blocks with pet ashes and a tile with the pet’s vitals on it.  

One animal was 5 months old.  And another was in reverence for  my Tehachapi dog Shanna.  Pictures of the creatures made their way on to tombstones. . . . I wondered if my sister would’ve had Meeghee interred in such a place???  Too late to answer that one.

This one is for Danahy!

Just about the right time frame of Shanna too!

Behind Pet’s Rest is another cemetery with a lot of the Eastern Orthodox crosses. As I make my daily walk down El Camino Real to Bart,  I see plenty of these.  The top cross was for Pontius Pilate and the INRI inscription,  middle cross was to support the weight of the body and the lower cross is a ‘foot support’ Did Jesus get one of these??  Part of the slant at the bottom has to do with if you were righteous you would ascend to Heaven and if not, you would drop into Hell. I am a little vague on this.  But I include a pix because it is new to me, although it dates from 6th century!  

Golden Gate's 75th

These are photos from Jerry Downs from last weekend's Golden Gate extravaganza.(Go to http://www.jerrydownsphoto.com/#home.) I missed it -  I was having too much family drama at the time, which culminated in my car being broken into and purse stolen. Oh well. the grace of age is that we roll through things so much more easily.  . . .  I've been reading so much about this portal opening from the Big Solar Eclipse May 20 through the transiting of Venus in June.  I am observing a lot of chaos in my own life. Hmmmm.

I always thought it impossible to capture that ephemeral moment of fireworks exploding, but this might be it. This photographer, who lives in Larkspur and also spent 30 years in Boulder, has an incredible free book online, Aptly titled "The Present" with great happy insights of life.  Look it over. It has made my Sunday so much happier.

Golden Gate 75th

Jean Paul De Gaultier

In all of my adventures this year, other than to walk past the LA-like edifice (designed by Herzon & de Meuron WOW look at some of their places!)  during an afternoon in Golden Gate Park, I had yet to visit the de Young Museum.  They were holding an event open to the public Friday night – 75 year anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge – and I decided to go.   I never got around to the gallery where all the pics of the Bridge were.  There was the San Francisco Society Jazz Orchestra playing lots of my kind of music, in the central lobby, and ongoing multiple screens recounted that Golden Gate time back in 1937. Packed to the gills, people were costumed -  retro, Jean Paul Gaultier, and some casual comme moi. 

I perused the upstairs galleries, some rather interesting American art – particularly the Hudson River School.  This Church painting “Rainy Season in the Tropics” (Psychedelic to me!)  Then down the stairs to the “fashion World of Jean Paul de Gaultier.  I always knew Madonna’s costumes with the cone breasts were bizarre, but never researched where all that came from.  (French lyrics were always more intriguing.)  HOWEVER,  if you have the chance, this exhibit is fascinating.  30 animated mannequins, including one of Gaultier himself talking on and on, other mannequins, seemingly asleep, that suddenly open their eyes, raise their eyebrows, or wink at you.  Like the holograms in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  All sorts of incredible costumes, beaded, feathered, in the boudoir, out of the boudoir.  That craze where every woman began to wear athletic shoes with their skirts to downtown Manhattan jobs.  I never knew he was responsible.  There were so many videos in the exhibition – Gaultier is so connected to our techno culture. What humor he has. Should you be in the Bay, do not miss it. 

FInally, you can check out the you tube with the mannequins hoo woo spooky----

http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/fashion-world-jean-paul-gaultier-sidewalk-catwalk

  Well, San Francisco still is the land of the hippies.  There’s a lot of us older ones, and some younger ones have joined the fray too.  And yes, we were all there at the 25^th New Living Expo at the SF Concourse Exhibition Center.  Down off of Vermont Avenue – Gee sounds like Hollywood and LACC to me – this part of SF, once industrial no doubt, is now buzzing with art galleries, SF Academy of Art and this Exhibition Center.  So the tix at the door were $20, BUT if you brought 4 cans of food to donate to the homeless shelter you got in for free! (Or $4, depending on how you looked at it.) 

This was my first indication that “If you’regoing to San Francisco/ Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”  (Actually, seems that the Taper occasionally did this same thing to fill the seats. I liked it back then; I like it now. )  Further, you know this is an older hippie event when people under 20 get in for free.  The clientele was varied, but the speakers were for the most part on my radar for a New Age event. – Gregg Braden, John Gray, Lynn Andrews, plus 5,280 massage therapists, one of whom did some lovely cranial sacral work on my brain and energy system for a 10 minute blitz.  Free yoga tent – tomorrow I’ll wear some loose slacks – If I can find any! A meditation room, although the overall noise level was overwhelming.  The convention space is cavernous and speaker’s tents had forty feet above them for the sound to reverberate.

But how lovely to refresh in this way.  I had thought I would try to catch Mikael Barishnykov in a new production -  maybe next week- but to replenish with hope for the world, hope for my children, hope for the grandkids.  Yeah, this beats theatre hands down.

So what did I learn?? Some ayurvedic methods for clearing energy points, clearing the energy before it manifests into illness.  Then, I listened to John Gray who has moved from “Women are from Venus,” mode into talking to his audience about how ADD kids can get help with 300 mg of grape seed extract and 500mg of vitamin C. This apparently is popular in Europe for many boys. Don’t think I didn’t call my daughter and discuss it immediately. Also Lithium Oxalite is a natural anti-depressant, without the side effects.

I listened to a most intelligent Gregg Braden on a panel regarding 2012, which really changed my attitude about him. Articulate, thoughtful and from the heart – and that is the gist of all the new/old age stuff – and yes, I would love to run off 12/21/12 to Machu Picchu for this moment of the equinox and convergence when the Sun Earth Venus align.   Braden said that as a scientist, (he apparently worked as a defense engineer before he was new age) and a geologist, all of this end of age is a geologic age coming to an end. Earth has done it countless times, not just ending this 5,125 year cycle,  and what is important is how we react to it. In other words, embrace mother earth, don’t panic. We will survive.  He also said that the other indigenous cultures, that he had studied,  look at this as just another part of living on earth and making peace. This I liked.  

And then I listened to Laura Eiesenhower for 90 minutes.  Great Grandfather Dwight’s warning about the ‘military industrial complex’ was apparently a lot more loaded than the rest of us might suspect.  She subscribes to a David Ickes’ theory, which is pretty spooky, reptilian, but possible in my world, anyway. Her message in the end was to live from your heart, be true and hold faith in that reality.  We are infinite,divine beings, and that will prevail.

      I liked my day so much, I stopped in at the dollar store for another $4 of non perishables, so I could return tomorrow.  I intend for my life to be joyfullll.  That's why all those people smile back!

101 the road home

I imagine there are other highways in the country that are equally verdant, or dramatic, with majestic points of interest that catch your breath, but as I have lived two-thirds of my life in California, the 101, which travels north and south in the state, forever holds me in its grasp. Granted it is not totally coastal like Highway 1, nor super sonic fast like the interior 5, but it has the perfect combination of 1’s drama and 5’s rate of speed to make it my favorite. And it travels through the places where parts of my heart still live. With my family, with my friends, with my old life and moving into my new life.

I traveled the route from Santa Clarita through Santa Maria, past San Luis Obispo, north through Monterey and into San Francisco only a few days ago. And it is interesting to see how full the circle has come.

I began my California stay at the age of 25. I had moved from NYC to Fairfax, a sleepy little town in Marin, north of San Francisco, to stay with my sister. After three years in the Big Apple, most of my acting friends had traveled west – Every actor knew, and still does, that any money to be made was in LA. I, however, was not quite ready to make the LA leap, so I traveled further north with the safety net of my sister Joyce and brother Paul. I sang with bands, started to get my sea legs in terms of being a performer, and eventually did make my way south to LA. There I met the father of my girls and moved into the next 30 years of my life.

When my marriage dissolved twenty years ago, I continued to hang on to that life. As a child who lost her father at 5, my issues have always been of being abandoned. I have held close to the family I created. My girls are so very dear. Their father and I have quite a decent friendship – in spite of his short sightedness so long ago. But ever so slowly – I have had only one real affair in all that time – I have extricated myself from that person I was and that life.

It seemed so apparent as I drove the 101 North, back to my new home in San Francisco. I left the brown, baking desert of Santa Clarita, where my older daughter now lives with her husband and three children. I detested the heat and lack of vegetation when Steve first moved our family there in 1985, and that has not changed. Nicole luxuriates in the heat, but for me, the desolation, automotive isolation and overkill of soccer moms, box stores, Chuckie Cheese and consumption is everything I wish to leave behind. It is a blessing to no longer wish for so many things.

I took the 126 through the citrus groves of Santa Paula, where the cooler breezes blow, and the hills begin to turn green. This all used to be groves and groves, now it is a reminder of a California that once was. It meanders into Ventura, where the 101 reconnects. Eight years ago my Ventura move was one of my baby steps away from my girls. I taught in Oxnard for a year and a half then. Only 50 minutes from Santa Clarita, I could visit the girls easily; my grandson Eddy could come for the weekend to enjoy the beach, or pool in my massive and hideous complex. Now, I can drive through knowing where to post my mail at the main post office, hit the Starbucks, or even make a quick oceanside break to smell the sea. A few teacher friends remain. There are memories of how difficult that first teaching year was, my sister visiting with her puppy Meeghee, my solo trip to Costa Rica, when I swam with the dolphins. And the news that Nicole was pregnant with her second baby.

The stretch from Ventura to Santa Barbara is breath-taking as it skirts the coast. The late March and early April rains have made the hills so green, and the skies are California blue. The surf appears to be rolling in with the afternoon surfers, agile minute sea creatures from here. If I were closer I would know how turbulent the seas were. Atop the freeway, it is a memory from some Walt Disney film, with Hayley Mills no doubt. Santa Barbara has new memories of Michael and Fred, oldest of friends and newest. My sis had lived here briefly a few years back.

I drive on reflecting on the trip with Nicole. I should have cut my stay. A good performer always knows it is better to leave them wanting more, but I cling to my family, even when things are not going so well. I think of my mom, when she would visit me. Always she wanted to buy me things, to clean up my kitchen, to help make things better for me. Many of those things I had no interest in.

I clean Nicole’s kitchen because it is too dirty for me. I cook the meals because I want her kids to have something besides pizza or subway. I ride in her car and take tissues to wipe away the grime in the console between the seats, or sticky leftover candy. All the same things my mother did when she came to visit me. She wasn’t comfortable. I am not comfortable. I do not like the way her husband treats her, just as my mother resented the way my husband treated me. I try to be level and use some guidance with her children, just as Link did with me. How the circle comes round. One day when her own daughter is grown and with children she might remember.

I look in the mirror and am sad. My daughter is sad too, angry things are not better for her, but trying to make the best of things. It is she who must come to visit me now. The kids can come separately perhaps too. No one really needs my judgment, and it is so difficult not to judge. I miss my girls. I miss my grandkids. I miss my family life. And the sadness.

Further north I travel into Santa Maria. Many memories of Lilah there, a student at the acting conservatory. Some road trips with Steve, to catch one of her acting performances, getting filled in on his musical life in the LA studios, years after us, enjoying his creativity, baritone zaniness and analysis of the world. I miss that male adult friendship. And it is so easy to miss Lilah because she is so very much me, 34 flavors and then some. But she is 25 and in love.

And into San Luis I roll, a place where there were so many shows to perform in, a new turn at my cabaret life, decent money for a spell when I worked at the prison. Several really special friends and a recreated life, of only six years, that I have now left behind. The several wonderful summers I spent with my grandson, the wonderful chaotic years I had with my sister Joyce, her passing on. I ache for that loss, the sis I thought I would grow old with – surely I would’ve never left had she not died - my notoriety, my musicians, my small amount of being established as a singer and actor.

I move through Monterey with lovely 12 foot cardboard people populating the green farmlands. And I know, my life is no longer what it was. I relish the adventure and excitement of this new city and my pared down life. But the past is the past. I hope and pray that new friends, new music, new performances will continue. Of course they will. But the past still reaches for me. I am forever an abandoned child who must move on.

I will remember to wear a sprig of jasmine in my hair tomorrow. The smell of it carried me through this day.

Keith Jarrett

He bowed deeply, arms hung loosely in front of him, like one of those acrobatic toys, a clown with a tinman hat who flips around the high bars, when you squeeze the two sides of the ladder. Then he raised himself up, pressed his hands - knuckle to knuckle - at his heart, and humbly gave obeisance to his audience. Hands then moved into a Buddhist’s prayer, fingers pointing straight up toward the Heavens. Keith Jarrett had been acknowledging his audience like this all night. Now all of us were onto – truly- his eighth encore of the evening. I was embarrassed for him. I wondered if he were too. Was the adulation just too much?

I commented to my seatmate in the stratosphere of the balcony. He was a stunning French fellow, late twenties. Had I been in my late twenties, I might have attempted speaking a bit of French with him, but his near perfect English and beauty kept my early sixties self guarded. Monsieur Francais teaches philosophy en francais at a French high school in San Francisco, and said he had seen him at least four or five times, had sixty of Jarrett’s 200 recordings. Msr Fr.’s girlfriend had left him behind two years ago to get a masters from Eastman (!) but in classical piano. Her dream is to play for the opera. And that I suspect is even more rarified that vying for a seat in the string section of a minor orchestra.

Msr. thought that after twenty years of such accolades, Keith was probably accustomed to the praise, and that eight encores was more than the usual two or three. The audience in Berkeley was not about to let him go. I felt when Keith had left the stage the first time, he was wisely leaving us wanting more. This is the professional advice I was always given. And surely his synapses might tire at some point after two hours.

At one point in the performance, he stood by his piano, tapping those magic fingers and quipped, “What to play?? When you don’t have a repertoire, well . . .” So, many of the encores came from a recent ‘standards’ album. I could hear some of my old musician attitudes. “Well, when you can’t be original, pull out one from the fake book. See if they’ll recognize it with a lot of 32^nd notes.”

And Jarrett can pull out the 32^nd and 64^th notes. (Surely, they are the envy of Chick Corea.) I can recognize his genius with all the zephyr speed, arms extended as if he’s about to take off into flight. Cross hand playing, audibly moaning grunts, singing syllables, standing up, then dipping down to his instrument, in a quiet moment, as if his head might go to sleep on his keyboard.

And then he will disappear into the melancholy beauty of a ballad. A meditation slow, mournful, deep. And those of us who don’t appreciate 64^th notes are mesmerized by this soulful exposition and expose of Mr. Jarrett. This is the moment when those of us who don’t understand mixolydian from phyrigian scales are devotes for life.

During the first recognizable strains of his eighth and final encore, there was an audible sigh from his audience. Mr. Francais said Jarrett was notorious for stopping his show to chaste a cough, or shame the person who forgot to turn off his cell phone. Keith was in a good mood that night– he let us sigh as he transported us ‘Over the Rainbow.’

What a privilege for me to hear undoubtedly the jazz genius of my generation.