Thursday is the new Friday

Work is a workweek work is a blind slide that startsonmondaystopsonfriday if i'm lucky, life is a workweek, life is life, life is a big fast car flying down a one lane blacktop, flying, swooshing, sighing by like a thing you did but don't clearly recall, like a memory you haven't had yet, just yet, life is the car, destiny is the road, work is the engine, money is the fuel

At night not every night, some evening, not every evening there is a thing, a pause, a RECALIBRATION a stutter, a skip in time, a break a THEFT...

The email is abandoned, the duty lost, the phone as if ripped from the socket on the wall in a horror film, the life, the way, the assumed thing is torn from existence

A nylon bag, black, obscure, ignored in the corner of the day.

A box, vinyl clad, dusty, harsh in its promise.

The box plugged in, the bag unzipped, a stand, an instrument, a guitar!

Plugged in, placed in the stand, stand, the last. Stand.

And then:

Music, possibly. Tentative, shy, people are leaving the building, I pick up, I hold, I pick, the pick...

Open the book, flip pages back, forward, deliberating, act of choosing and then...music, really.

The hand searches, the hand strums, with pick or sans pick. A familiar scale, an intimate riff, the warm up, the approach. And then a little voice. Shy, tentative, air crawling gently over chords, vocals, voice ashamed of itself, voice and then voice with guitar. Song. Songs! Familiar songs from the place, the home, the nest, the book. Singing more rightfully now with the guitar, a song, another song, another and another and now let's play the harmonica too. Simple and there.

Music filling up, life making way, music coming in, music occurring. It's Tuesday, let's work it, it's Wednesday, let's practice it, it's 10pm, we can stop now. It's ok, we can stop, its midnight, we can pause. I can stop today, even though its not today anymore.

Pack it up now. Carefully, each harmonica in it's little case, the rack folded and stowed, the picks and capo in the little knit bag, the tuner and the bag and the rack and the encased harmonicas in the zipper bag on the outside of the case, the guitar in the case, the cable in the other zipper bag, the amp turned off, the guitar in the bag in the office, the light's turned off, the door closed, the brain turned off, the subway ride home, alone, reading to distract, distract productively, without my guitar and without my amp, they are parked and undeployed in my office, ready for any thing, ready for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Thursday.

I'll be at:

The Lounge at Dixon Place
With Randy Hudson joining me on guitar.

161 Chrystie Street

7pm until 10, more or less

Three more Thursdays - 2/4, 2/11, 2/25

No hat, but I may pass the cover

Sonny's sub recipe, first recollection

Recipe for Sonny's sub, to the best of my recollection:
This works best with a time travel device that takes you to 1975 or so.

- 1 Hero roll, white flour based, custom made to order at the IGA bakery on Mt. Vernon Road
- 3 slices cappicola hot ham from DiPaolo distributors, Columbus, OH
- 3 slices hard salami from DiPaolo distributors, Columbus, OH
- A leaf or two of sliced iceberg lettuce
- A ring of thinly sliced onion
- A small ladle or two of equal parts shaken oil and vinegar plus Sonny's secret spice mixture
- 3 or 4 oz coarsely grated low-moisture mozzarella cheese from DiPaolo distributors, Columbus, OH

Slice the hero roll lengthwise. Sprinkle the grated mozzarella on BOTH SIDES of the sliced roll, bake it in pizza oven at 325 degrees until mozzarella gets a bit brown on the peaks. Slip it out of the oven and quickly spread out the cappicola and salami over the molten cheese, dress with iceberg lettuce and onion and then hit it with a generous wash of the oil and vinegar dressing. Pop the top on that sucker, slice it into two halves and eat it before it cools.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

In a moment of lazy nostalgia in NYC around 1990 in the East Village, I went into an Italian pizza shop that had subs. I asked the guy, "Make me your regular sub, but can you toast the cheese on it and then put the meat and everything else on cold?" The cook behind the counter said, "Oh yeah, I know about that way."

I went back about five more times over the next few months and each time the cook saw me he just nodded and started making the sandwich. Deep.

What's my motivation?

photo by Alison Davy

As an adoptee, family for me has long been a concept that I’ve felt I could rise above. If a child can be efficiently moved from one set of parents to another, then why all the fuss about where one came from, nationality or even the nature of one’s self? For many years it all seemed so simple.

South is a hummable response to my journey of searching for - and meeting - my birth mother. What started as something like intellectual curiosity tumbled for me like a log rolling down a hill, picked up momentum and ultimately became a personal odyssey. The dramas were small on the outside, but I found myself questioning my most basic assumptions of family and birthright. The emotions that I felt over the course of a year of phone calls, navigation between two clans and actually meeting a person who was eerily familiar in spite of being a total stranger screamed more or less into my ear to be shared, but how? I’d become acquainted with the standard search and reunion texts of Springer, Winfrey and Dr. Phil, but they all felt a bit vulgar… in a bad way. And so, a musical!

The whole trip for me was undeniably nautical; it felt lawless and far from terra firma. It was also a journey back in time, so it had to be a period piece. Since I’d met a number of unusual and helpful people along the way it would be a road trip. And because I’d always hoped – ultimately in vain – that my biological parents would be itinerant Cuban gymnasts, I went with Latin flavors of music, which I’ve always loved. I wanted to hit every permutation of family connection and abandonment: people leave, are taken, torn from one another, welcomed, feted, sold and freed and in the end we find our true families where we may. I hope that South reflects the curiosity, hope, hilarity, shock, acceptance and joy that may happen on a voyage such as this one. I also hope to have made some songs worth singing along the way.