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.