Category Archives: social commentary

No!

December 4, 2015Deep Thoughts, greeting, human behavior, psychology, Questions, relationships, social behavior, social commentary, sociology, Uncategorizedruth ann scanzillo

That last post sent readers running for the hills.

NO. I am not a “home-wrecker.” Please, read more carefully? And, thoroughly?

Thoughts, musings, borne of need, when expressed, can be alarming. But, the reality is: I spend most of my time at home, in solitude. I write, just like you do, many of you. I think. I make dinner. I make music. That is all.

Oh; and, I don’t even live in your neighborhood. Even though mine is a quaint old farmhouse, with oak flooring and French doors, most of your ilk would call my street a low class slum. So, don’t expect me to come skulking around yours; I’m miles away.

It’s my passionately held belief that honesty and candor, in written word, serve others. They provoke thought – even discussion. And, such dialogue always leads to greater insight, which can improve the quality of life for all. For many, resolve may increase; for others – cathartic change. Regardless: everybody benefits. And, the originator of the discussion fades into the ether, to go about her own business, just as she did the day before.

So, get dressed; go out; start your Christmas or Hanukkah shopping. I’ll be here, minding the paradigms.

Much love, in sincerity,

littlebarefeetblog.com

Turkey.

November 24, 2015classical music, classical musicians, contemplative essays, nostalgia, performance, social commentary, UncategorizedAmerican holidays, dinner, family, holidays, holidays alone, homecooked meals, professional musicians, Thanksgivingruth ann scanzillo

Musicians have a slightly different take on the holidays.

We are the not so silent, persistently present color in everybody else’s landscape. We are the string quartet for the Good Friday service, Christmas Eve Midnight Mass, Lenten Sundays; the background Sousa marches for Fireworks on the Bay on the 4th of July, the marching music in the Memorial Day Parade, the Labor Day Telethon; the New Year’s Eve party band. We are the ubiquitous celebrants. And, then we go home.

Don’t get me wrong. We love making music; we wouldn’t be there, if we didn’t. And, the 200 bucks we put in our pocket, if we plan it just right, will buy groceries for two, solid weeks.

But, there’s one holiday, every year, that puts us all to the test. On this day, we can’t hide behind a music stand. We can’t wear the right costume. We can’t play the right song. We have to face the sum total of our lives.

Yeah. It’s the feast in November. Every year, we scramble to do one of two things: 1.) Did we clean off the diningroom table? 2.) Did we reserve a seat at the local buffet?

I’ve been riding my merry go round for five decades. I think it’s harder when musicians actually have wonderful memories of this holiday. I’m one of them.

Our grandmother spent her adolescence as second maid to a wealthy Jewish family in the Poconos. She learned how to create a feast, alright – Pennsylvania Dutch-style. Stuffed turkey, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, peas, corn, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes. Home made gravy. Rutabega. Wilted lettuce, with bacon drippings (that, from the Danes). Apple pie. Cherry pie. Elderberry pie.

The oak table was massive, and round, but had a leaf to make it elliptical. And, we cousins with the aunts and uncles, proletariats all, we knew how to squeeze over 20 people into that room, plus a card table in the sewing room for the teens.

The same would be true of Christmas, adding the cousins from Parma. And, for that, the card tables would spread into the livingroom – a linen tablecloth, for each.

But, the Thanksgiving feast was the first and, without all the presents to open in the morning, this one was all about the food. We’d eat until our stomachs were distended, and all stay the day, too, making turkey sandwiches later with fresh lettuce and Miracle Whip.

I loved all my cousins. Each one was more distinct than the next. Mouths full of teeth, all stops out belly laughs. We were all full of ourselves, and we knew how to sell that fact. The boys were natural comics; the girls, ready audience. And, everybody had their story to tell. I don’t remember anybody listening to mine, but I soaked up everything coming at me. And, as each one got married, there’d be a curiously quiet spouse to add to the mix, usually twinkling with amusement at the whole lot of us.

Not sure when it was that I missed the boat. It was probably somewhere between the competitive marching band and mom’s death, followed by the divorce, and the private students, and then Carolyn Dillon’s retirement from fifth grade in the building where I taught music to the children all day. I inherited her after school drama club, and reveled in producing a fully staged, fully costumed, fully underscored musical together with as many as 60 kids and one parent every year thereafter for a decade. To an outsider, this was a fully realized life; to me, it was just what I did.

What I didn’t do was have a child. What I didn’t do was raise a family. What I didn’t do was convince any member of the one I already had that attending my concerts and other live performances would enrich their lives and cement a lasting relationship with me. I guess, like my mother before me who ended up always doing all the housework alone, I assumed they would all just naturally see the value in participating in my life. Lord knew, at the end of my day, preparing a complete meal for anybody but myself was out of the question.

Actually, I did prepare Thanksgiving meal one year. The year mum died. I made dinner for 18 of my family members, all by myself. The 25 lb. turkey; the long grain rice stuffing with dates and mushrooms and walnuts; the sweet potatoes with raisins and pineapple; the squash, in butter, with pepper. The peas, in basil. The tossed salad, with everything. And, baked Gala apples, with drizzled Brie, for everybody. I was never invited by the family after that, until the year my nephew was sick and they needed somebody to sit with the other children. The span of years between those meals was an embarrassing sixteen.

That feeling, somewhere between the heart and the thymus, that I get whenever I think about Thanksgiving now is also embarrassing. It’s an ache, similar to the one I used to feel after a break up with a boyfriend. That a fully fledged, reasonably attractive, post menopausal woman who still had all her teeth should have this feeling approaching the day when, ironically, every American is urged to take stock of all blessings and be thankful, is hard to admit. But, I feel lonely. And, I don’t enjoy any part of that realization. Not one bit.

Funny. Had I raised a family like most everyone else, there would be grandchildren to hold and cuddle this week. There would be lives to laud and honor, details of accomplishments, and travel itineraries, and photos, and mementos. I might be the matriarch at the head of my own table. I might be the one.

But, I wouldn’t have become a cellist and pianist, or even this amateur writer. I wouldn’t have developed the ability, at any given moment, to make – using my hands – something rapturously beautiful out of simple sound. Nor would I have had the energy to teach thousands of children and train several. I would not have brought to the table my gifts, because they would have lain fallow in the service of another purpose.

And, so, on Thursday of this week, the windows and doors will be flung open. The autumn sun will stream in. And, I will clean my house. I will have the whole, entire day, uninterrupted by expectation. Maybe even play somebody else’s music on the CD player, and sing along.

We are all born to something. Eat your turkey. Don’t you worry about me; I’m an artist. I’ll be just as thankful as anybody else.

littlebarefeetblog.com

“No – ! You’re Fine!”

April 19, 2015scenes, social commentary, sociologyBenjamin Moore, buzz phrases, buzz words, house painting, Italian American wives, Lowe's, politically correct, single women, sociology, the 1990s, the service industry, the single life, Valsparruth ann scanzillo

[CYNIC ALERT]

It was time for the match game.

Benjamin Moore had migrated to the remote outskirts, where people live who have lawn ornaments on the porch and keep dead cars in their yards. After fifteen years staring at #886 and #815, I had lost all desire to drive 47 minutes just for two gallons of #008. So, Yo, Ho-Ho, it was off to Lowe’s she goes, for the Valspar equivalent of The Best Paint Ever Made in 1993.

Those couple years in the art department had, apparently, stuck; with surprising speed and accuracy, I almost found it. “Pink Kiss?” or, “Apricot Pit?” They were open til 8; where was the attendant?

One register light, lit. One sack boy, willing to page Paint.

Oh, but there she was.

A shorter, if wider, woman, long hair, younger. Body pressed against the left end of the counter, facing north. Glasses, and a cell phone, and the bearing of one who would get her way without a peep.

I made my beeline – for the right side of the counter. And, pressed my slightly taller, slightly less voluminous body against the counter in tandem. And, probably said something out loud to myself and nobody in particular, within earshot of the woman on the left end who waited much more quietly, keeping her body especially still.

Red Queen vs. White Queen.

But, this wasn’t Wonderland.

Then, the White Rabbit. Zooming out of Aisle 5, heading straight for the counter – and, the woman on the left end. “Can I help you?” he said – to HER.

Decades of fighting my own battles, of winning some and losing many, bearing the weight of all the crap you’ve already read about for the past five months. Ye Gods; I could have just about had a baby in that much time about 30 years ago.

“NOPE!”

“I’ll be the bully here. I’m the one who called for the page.”

Yes. That was my voice.

And, then, inevitably, the ensuing guilt – of the same number of decades, for all the reasons you’ve, yeah you know.

Turning to the woman on the left end, I tore into my persuasive prattle. The part about being in a hurry. The next part, something about …but, she was already prepared.

And, she said it. Shaking her head.

“No ! – You’re fine!”

She wasn’t in a hurry. She had tomorrow off. She had all day to paint. Yeah, well. I had hired a guy. Not strong enough to take a ladder, or lift the…..

But, get this straight.

I am not “fine.”

I am never all that. I’m a tiresome, oppressive load. A chronic melancholic. A self-obsessed compulsive with a preference for immediate gratification. One who longs for an ideal totally unreachable in our dimension. A hopeless romantic caught in the throes of gritty realism. No. Fine, I am not.

Now, she’d said it with the effortless inflection of one who likely did so every day, to at least two people, perhaps a shit load of abrupt customers at Wal-Mart. Well-rehearsed, she’d long since forgotten how it made her really feel to say it. Rather, she spoke the words with the conviction of one who had gradually, obliviously, become familiar with herself as a conforming little slut to political acceptability. No matter that the people to whom she ascribed the phrase were largely unforgiving, self-serving, adult brats; more importantly, she had polished the appropriate response to sinless perfection.

With deft efficiency, the paint attendant cheerily provided me the computer-matched gallons in place of “Pink Kiss” and, smiling, turned his red-eared back, and walked. He was done.

But, I wasn’t.

That poor creature stood patiently while I took her back to the year my long since ex-husband had first painted the walls of my house which we shared for that blip on the screen we called our marriage. How, color blind, he’d brought home #815 instead of #813, and joyfully presented me with a living room completely covered in aqua. Not ash blue. Aqua. “It’ll fade”, Lena, mum’s Italian dressmaking client, said when she’d come to pick up her niece from piano lessons. Lena knew something I didn’t. She knew that wall paint would fade – in seventeen years. And, she wasn’t about to tell me I’d be waiting that long. Enough just to have faith and accept, like a good Catholic wife.

I don’t know how many minutes passed at that counter, me babbling, she listening, me and my self-conscious drive toward the embodiment of a pathetic apology and she just letting it all play itself out, she with her day off all day to paint. She, the self-actualized single girl, one hundred per cent self accepting, just riding it all out and looking forward to her blue rooms that she would produce all by herself in the house that would become her spouse. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that part. Best that she just have faith, and accept, when the time came. And, it would, soon enough.

Meantime, by some act of Providence, I looked down at the counter. There sat my two gallons of computer-replicated #008, and my bag of dry plaster, just waiting, rolling their lids at me. I looked up. She looked back. OH? Wait! I’m done here! I’ve been done. It’s my turn to take my stuff and go now, to the sack boy in the lit register.

The White Rabbit was sly. He’d gotten me what I wanted, and left me with it, just to see what I’d do. Nice move, that. He’d been in this scene before.

“So, which do you prefer”, I laughed, embarrassed. “Passive aggression, or in your face, put it all out there?”

She looked at me and smiled, nodding. “I think I’d wait for “Nice.”

This made me crow. And, I did. I threw back my head, and indulged a deep one, right from the belly. “Nice”, indeed !! Yeah. I’d never been nice, either, I told her.

But, she probably had. Like being politically correct, she’d attended enough self-help seminars to know that “nice” and “kind” were the only two attributes that made people truly like you. She held the secret. That was why she could stand at the counter, and wait, and laugh while the rest of the world agitated their way through the scenes they were so compelled to create. To her, this was nothing short of the purest of Sunday evening entertainment.

And, so it was that she took what I said with a grain of philosophy. For a fleet moment, I saw her as genuinely nice, perhaps always nice, born sweet, a joy to everyone who knew her.

And, her paint was ready. I looked to the right, to the other woman who had gradually crept into the frame, waiting her turn with net neutrality, just tired, wanting to get whatever and get home. OMG. I tried a funny face. Charm was the device of the devil, and it worked every time. Only convincing the charmer, grand relief for everybody else in the room. Time to let the rude, remedially grown up bully babe gather her things and return to her fraught little existence.

I scurried away, glad to leave them both with a “nice”, tight punchline. Success. I had what I needed, I’d gotten there first, and now it was everybody else’s turn to tie up whatever remained of the value of the moment. My damage was long done. And, I’d accomplished it being neither nice nor fine. Like sand paper, coursely grained, just enough to make rougher edges smoothe, I’d just been a little bit real. In the end, after a good, sound spanking, God would bless us all. I had the faith to accept that much.

littlebarefeetblog.com