Nudity vs. nudism

The other day a Facebook friend posted that she liked to hang out in her jammies, since she works at home. As I read her comment, I realized that I was sitting here in the nude because I was too lazy to get up and take a shower. But then I confessed to myself that I actually like sitting here in the nude. That day it was nice and warm, I live alone, and it’s kind of freeing not to have any clothes on.

Wow, I thought, maybe I’m a perfect candidate for a nudist colony! But as I thought about that, I realized that I’d be a total flop as a nudist. First of all, I’ve always been extremely self-conscious about being seen by others when I’m naked. And second of all, I feel that my clothes are more than something to keep me warm or make me look nice—they’re a protection.

Thinking about that reminded me of a time many years ago, when I was still a kid, and my mother suddenly decided she’d like to try doing her housework in the nude. We lived way out in the country, so there wasn’t any chance of anyone spying on her through a window, and it was a hot summer day. So she took off her clothes and grabbed the vacuum cleaner. I wasn’t paying much attention, because I was out in the yard playing, but when I came back in later on, she had her clothes back on. “What happened, Ma?” “Well,” she said, “I thought it would be fun, but I just felt too exposed—really kind of vulnerable.” I had pictures of her ramming her fanny into the wall or snapping her boobs with the vacuum cleaner cord. “I don’t think I’ll try that again,” she said.

In the sixties I ran into quite a few people who loved running around naked. We were all hippies, of course, and a bunch of us took off for Mexico, where my friends continued to stay in the raw as much as possible. But it just wasn’t for me. I went to a picnic with them once and tried to get with it by stripping to my skin, but I felt so uncomfortable I finally had to put my clothes back on. Then there was the day I went to visit my friend Dennis, and he opened the door buck naked. I gulped. He laughed. OK, I thought, this just isn’t my thing.

Nevertheless, I do like to hang out in my own private apartment with nothing on sometimes (when it’s hot). But you can bet if the doorbell rings I’ll be scrambling for my T-shirt and shorts before I answer it. Although I have to chuckle when I think what the reaction would be if I flung the door open in the altogether with a big smile and said, “Hi!”

Is anything really lost to the past?

I think it may have started with the photos of old Rio. Someone posted a series of black and white photos from the 1890s to the 1970s, and I found myself looking at them with a dreamy kind of nostalgia, as if I’d been there and was missing it.

But of course I’d never been there. I was born in the USA and came to Rio for the first time in 1990. I think what I was longing for was a sense of tradition, something I’d actually had a taste of when I was involved as a percussionist in Rio’s famous Carnival for more than five years in the early 90s.

I soon discovered that what I’d been missing was a hands-on involvement in Brazilian musical culture. I stopped playing samba a number of years ago, and hadn’t really thought about it much—until now. So I found myself glued to YouTube for several days, watching videos of old-time samba players and wondering if all of that had been lost to me.

Then one evening I started watching what I thought was a video clip of my favorite samba singer, Paulinho da Viola, but which turned out to be a full-length documentary about him. In the film he repeated many times that there’s no reason for nostalgia or longing, because nothing is lost to the past—in fact, it isn’t really in the past at all. “If I take an old song and play it, then it’s now, it’s not in the past,” he said. In fact, the name of the documentary is “My Time is Now.”

With that thought in mind, I downloaded a bunch of sambas to my iPod and pulled out my dusty tamborim (small drum played with a stick) and tam-tam (a hand drum), and tried to play along with some of the tunes. I was amazed at how bad I sounded and how awkward I felt, but I knew it was just from neglect. I took Paulinho’s advice and brought something from my past that I thought was lost, into my present. And now there’s really nothing to stop me from improving it.

As I thought about this experience, I realized that I could apply it to other situations in my life as well. Can you think of a situation from your past that could be “rescued” by bringing it into the present?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-6SMDK-jCo

 

The ring

Today I was rummaging through my tiny jewelry box and found a little ring I’d nearly forgotten about. I’d dragged it back and forth between Brazil and the US many times without even being aware it.

It’s an ornate little silver ring with an oval-shaped blue stone in a raised setting. It’s quite a pretty ring, really, and as I looked at it—nearly black with tarnish—I wondered why I hadn’t worn it all these years.

Then I felt a little stab in my heart. And I remembered the day I got the ring. And then, at the same moment, I recalled an event many years before the ring, when I was playing piano in a trio at a fancy hotel in Boston. There were couples dancing on the floor, and I could hear a young woman, pretty and blonde, as she and her partner danced by me, saying to him: “Stop looking around. Look at me. Pay attention to me. Don’t look at the other women!” She seemed really distraught, but was obviously trying to control herself and “lay down the law” to the young man with her, who looked confused and slightly irritated.

I’d felt a stab in my heart that night, too.

Now I’ll tell you about the ring. I was in my fourth marriage, and not happy at all with myself, my husband, or my marriage. I felt overlooked, ignored, and worthless much of the time. I wanted so badly to have a good marriage, and I felt that this was my last chance after three previous failed attempts. In my desperation, I tried to force my husband to pay attention to me, just like the hapless blonde dancer. I made him go with me to an open jewelry stand in the train station and buy me an inexpensive ring. He went along reluctantly, his mind on other things. When we got to the stand, I couldn’t find any ring I really wanted—they didn’t have one with a green stone—so I settled. I settled for the little silver pinky ring with the blue stone, just as I’d settled for a marriage that wasn’t working and never would.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the pretty blond girl and her partner, or husband. I can’t imagine that it could have turned out well, and my heart goes out to both of them. Her for her neediness, him for feeling cornered.

I forgive myself for being so needy back then, and I forgive my ex-husband for not understanding. I didn’t understand then that everything I really wanted and needed was in my own thoughts, dreams, and feelings, and not in other people’s actions.

So I polished the little ring with the blue stone, and now I’m happily wearing it on my pinky finger.

The Newtown I knew

Those of you who have read my book, “Getting Down to Brass Tacks,” or the blog posts here about my childhood, know that I grew up in Newtown, CT, where the terrible shooting took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14.

I pray for the children, the teachers and the families of this tragedy, and that all those who survived will find peace again in this beautiful town. I hope and pray that Newtown will not carry a stigma forever because of this horrendous event.

My family moved to Newtown in 1947. It was a quiet, rural place then, and our house was set back from a dirt road and surrounded by woods and fields.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School didn’t exist in those days, and my sister and I went to the Hawley School until we later attended Newtown High School. I don’t remember why, but I did attend an old-fashioned school house in Sandy Hook for third grade.

Back in those days, Sandy Hook was considered the “poor” part of town. I haven’t been to Newtown in many years, so I can’t imagine what it’s like now, except that I’ve heard it’s much more upscale, with fancy restaurants and boutiques.

I have many wonderful memories of Newtown—the freedom of being able to wander alone in the woods, the feeling of safety everywhere. Sometimes my sister Bertie and I would walk all the way from our house to the center of town where the now-famous flagpole stood—a three-mile trek. I remember the soda fountain on Main Street right near that flagpole, and the two churches that faced each other—one Episcopal, the other Congregational, shown in the photo here. I remember riding in my mother’s old Plymouth down Castle Hill Road, seeing those churches in the distance, and always counting the seconds to when they would line up one behind the other, as we came down the hill. Funny the silly things you remember.

What I don’t remember was violence. Even a minor crime in Newtown was a rare event. It makes me realize just how much things have changed. But as awful as the crime was that took place in Newtown day before yesterday, along with all the other mass murders and increasing disturbances around the globe, I still pray and trust that some good will emerge—an increasing awareness of the need for change, for more brotherly love, and more concern for those who may be struggling with mental illness. Some say that love saves the day. The Bible says, “God is Love.” I believe that our expression of that universal Love truly will save the day.

Pop got mad at me

I can remember only once in my life when my father got mad at me. Maybe this is why I’ve never forgotten it. My mother, it seemed to me, was often angry or displeased about my behavior, but not Pop.

I’ve often thought of the incident, and puzzled over it. Why was he so mad? I was so surprised when he lost his temper that it startled me. I think I actually jumped. Pop—my champion, the one who seemed to understand my peculiar ways—was mad at me.

So what was it all about? Pop was a writer and an avid reader, and when my sister Bertie and I were kids, he liked to read to us at night when we went to bed. On this particular occasion, he was reading a book called “The Back of the North Wind,” written in by George MacDonald 1871. It was a very thick book, as I recall, with somewhat gloomy illustrations. It tells the story of a sweet little boy named Diamond who has numerous adventures riding on the back of the north wind. The north wind represents pain and death, supposedly leading to something good according to God’s will. The country of the north wind is without pain and death, and she brings Diamond there, but it’s only a shadow of the real country, which he can’t see until he dies, which he does at the end of the book.

Although Pop seemed fascinated by this tale, I found it boring and depressing. When he was only a chapter or two into it, I took the book one day and sneaked a peek at the ending, because I wanted to see what happened to Diamond right away instead of having to endure listening to Pop read a chapter every night.

Then I made the mistake of telling Pop what I had done. He was furious. He said, “You NEVER, EVER skip to the end of a book to find out what happened! EVER!” The veins in his forehead were popping and he slammed the book shut. After that he didn’t read it to us any more.

I wonder to this day what made him so mad. Was it really because I’d spoiled the story by skipping to the end? Or did it have something to do with his own somewhat insecure feelings about being a writer himself? Was he afraid that his own work was so boring (as my mother used to tell him it was) that people would want to skip to the end? Or had he just had a bad day? I guess I’ll never know. But one thing is for sure—I never skipped to the end of a book again to find out what happened.

Distractions. Really?

I was chatting on Skype with one of my oldest and dearest friends the other day. Stephanie Crawford is a jazz singer living in San Francisco, and even though we’ve often lived great distances apart, we always manage to stay in touch.

We rarely talk about things like other people, what we did today, what was the last movie we saw, what we ate for lunch and so on. No, we always get into the nuts and bolts of our lives—what’s going on with us in the most profound sense, and what things are changing, or not changing in our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Sometimes we talk about the past—about our musical careers (we used to work together when we both lived in New York), where they’re going, and how they’ve transformed over the many years we’ve known each other. During this recent chat, I found myself grumbling about how the many distractions in my life—marriages, kids, having to do various “day jobs” to support the kids, etc. —had kept me from devoting myself more fully to my musical career. Stephanie knows about this, because she has been following my life since 1981, when I first moved to New York and met her. But the distractions had been going on for a lot longer than that.

I went on to say that I admired her because she had never swerved from her dream to be a jazz singer. In the middle of my crabbing, Steph interrupted me and said: “Wait! Wait! I LOVE that you did all that stuff! I LOVE that you got married four times and had kids and did all those things you did. They just made your music RICHER, don’t you get it?” Well, that really shut me up. The word “GRATITUDE” seemed to pop up in front of me in billboard-sized letters.

I knew that Stephanie’s path had been anything but smooth, and that she had lost her way more than once, even though it seemed to me that her focus was so laser-like. But I’d never heard her complain it. She just kept changing herself and moving on. After that chat, I swear never complain again about the way my life has unfolded, you can be sure of that! Thanks, Steph.

I love trains!

I’m almost always a forward-thinking kind of person. I love all things new, especially technology. But there’s one “old” thing I absolutely adore: trains.

I say “old,” because even though trains still exist, things just aren’t the way they used to be, at least in the US. And here in Brazil you can forget about trains. They’re awful, and most people try to avoid using them.

Here I am, riding the train!

I have wonderful memories of train rides from the time I was just a tot. I loved the rhythmic sound of trains moving along the tracks, the changing views outside the windows, the sleeper berths for long trips, and especially the dining cars with real waiters, white tablecloths, china and silverware.

And I love freight trains, too. I often think how great it would be if all the big trucks on the highways would just go away and we could get back exclusively to freight trains. So much nicer for drivers, and kids could get back to counting the freight cars, one of my favorite pastimes years ago.

I longed to have an electric train when I was a kid. We couldn’t afford one, but my sister and I did have a windup metal train with tracks, which was a pretty good substitute. And when I was really little I had a tiny wooden train with rubber wheels and cars joined together with little metal hooks. And of course one of my favorite books was “The Little Engine that Could.”

Do you wish that trains would have a comeback, too?

Manhattan Samba

Here’s a little history of the samba band I co-founded in New York in 1990, written by Jeff Zeth. Not sure I’d describe myself as a “big American band leader,” though. 

You can see the whole story here:

http://brazilianmusicblog.blogspot.com.br/2012/08/manhattan-samba.html#comment-form

In the grand manner of Rio samba schools — though on a much smaller scale — Manhattan Samba is a band, a learning environment, and a social club all in one. Founder and director Ivo Araújo is known for bringing in people with virtually no musical experience and having them learn how to play traditional samba to be able to perform with the band within a short time. On the other hand, Ivo and Manhattan Samba (the two cannot be separated) have also collaborated with many established, professional musicians such as Paul Winder, Wyclef Jean, Gogol Bordello, Jimmy Cliff and Carlinhos Brown, and the band has been the inspiration for many other Brazilian music projects and baterias in New York City. Ivo has a knack for integrating samba rhythms seamlessly into the music of his collaborators; at the same time, the band’s own shows throb with energy and passion in a way that no other samba show in New York City does.

Ivo started Manhattan Samba in 1990 with pianist, composer, and big American band leader Amy Duncan at a time when there was very little live Brazilian carnaval music in New York. “Manhattan Samba was the first big group, together with Empire Loisaida, long gone,” he says.  He’d already been in the U.S. for ten years, playing as a percussionist for American jazz bands and directing his own Brazilian music projects; Ivo’s first Casa Grande e Senzala band after Kilombo dos Palmares once opened for Tito Puente. At first, he didn’t think many New Yorkers would be interested in learning batucada.  But after seeing him perform live, Amy urged him to gather students. “She encouraged me to play and teach.” Their first batucada show at S.O.B.’s was an instant success. Ivo showed up to play with 35 people — most bands playing there at the time had no more than six — and “for the first time I blasted S.O.B.’s.”  The group was so loud that a subway train conductor came up from the nearby #1 train station to investigate. “What kind of band was that?” he said.  For fifteen years after that, until around 2005, the band closed the weekly Saturday night samba show at the club, with a late-night act that the Village Voice called “the best way to wind up a Saturday night club crawl”.

Now in 2012, Manhattan Samba (known in Portuguese as the “União da Ilha de Manhattan”) remains the longest running Rio traditional-style carnaval band in New York, with a long list of successful live projects and an even longer list of current and former band members who were inspired to begin their own Brazilian music projects. Members have gone on to teach samba in high schools, start their own bands, create documentary films, and get advanced degrees in music. Every year, the band’s signature red and white can be seen in some of the great parades of New York City, including the Halloween Parade and the Gay Pride Parade, and the band still sometimes makes appearances at S.O.B.’s, thrilling audiences with late-night batucada that always brings the house down.

Brazilian music fans sometimes wonder why the school wears red and white, when the colors of the Brazilian flag are green, yellow, blue and white.  It’s because of Ivo’s connection with União da Ilha do Governador, the samba school in Rio with which Ivo has the closest connection.  Their colors are red, white and blue.  ”It shows respect for União, which is my original samba school, together with Portela.”  Portela’s influence is seen in the image of the eagle holding a drum; the eagle was once part of that group’s symbolism.

Ivan Sanderson

Ivan Sanderson was my father’s best friend when I was a kid. He was a famous naturalist, author, and UFO aficionado. A native Scot, he was tall, elegant, and handsome, with slicked-back ebony hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was married to a beautiful Ethiopian woman named Alma, who often had a miniature monkey — a marmoset — sitting on her shoulder, attached to a chain pinned to her blouse.

My sister Bertie and I thought the two of them were, as we might have put it then (back in the 1950s), the “living end.”

Ivan had written more than twenty books, one of them a novel called “Mystery Schooner,” and what was even more fantastic, a book about UFOs called “Uninvited Visitors.” Nobody wrote, or even talked about UFOs in those days, as far as we knew, but our Pop’s best friend had written a book about them! This sparked a life-long interest in the phenomenon for me and Bertie.

Another of Ivan’s curious interests was finding people who had the same name as his. He spent a good deal of time on this hobby and claimed to have found and corresponded with at least 17 of them, none of them related to him. He also told us that he should have been born a twin because he had some multiple organs, including three kidneys and a double brain. Now that I think of it, he did have quite a big head.

Ivan and Alma had an apartment in Manhattan and a large animal farm in New Jersey where they kept a motley assortment of animals that included leopards, donkeys, goats, elephants and wild birds that Ivan not only studied but drew sketches of to use in some of the books he wrote. Bertie and I loved to visit Ivan and Alma’s New York apartment. It was dark and cozy and filled with strange, exotic, wondrous things. There were African drums and tropical fish and odd, stripey animals in cages. And there were always several of Alma’s little marmosets jumping around.

From time to time when he and Alma were traveling, Ivan would have us “animal sit” for him at our house. One time he left a small, leopard-like animal called a genet with us in a small cage, and another time a coral snake in a jar. Bertie and I were the envy of our schoolmates, and if we’d had such a thing as “show and tell” in those days, I’m sure we would have nagged Ma to death to let us take those critters to school with us.

In 1955, there was a fire at the Sanderson’s wild animal farm and all the animals were destroyed. My father believed that Ivan and Alma never really recovered from the shock. They both suffered from various serious illnesses over the years until they both finally died of cancer, Alma in 1972 and Ivan the following year. I will never forget them. They were a beacon of light in the sometimes dark world of my childhood.

Le Penseur

A few days ago a friend said to me, “You’re a thinker.”

Well, of course I had to go think about that for a while.

Hmmm, I concluded, yes, I guess I really am a thinker. Then I thought some more: Gee, I wonder it that’s a good thing or a bad thing. After thinking that over for quite some time, I thought: Well, I guess it depends on what I’m thinking, right?

Looking back to my high school days, I remembered that I was always thinking — and talking — about myself. When I was talking with a friend, I could hardly for them to finish their silly chit-chat so I could talk about myself. I didn’t care about gossip or hearing about their boyfriend’s habits. No, I wanted to get serious. I wanted to talk about the way I thought and felt about things, about how I’d figured out certain things and wondered about other things, and . . . and . . . and . . .

I was a real analysis freak. I used to go for walks in the woods and just think and think and think. I even had a “thinking rock” near our house where I used to sit for hours on end just trying to understand what was what and why.

And this tendency didn’t end with high school either. I just kept right on with the self-analysis, often writing long, involved diaries that I would always end up throwing away.

But then I reached a point in my life where I started to wonder what good all this thinking, all this analyzing and dissecting was really doing. I thought: but I have to think. It’s not possible not to think, no matter what the meditation gurus say. There’s always something going on in my mind.

So I decided to do some thought sorting. I figured at least I had a choice about what to think and what not to think. I knew there was a difference between productive thinking and ruminating, obsessing, or just plain chewing my cud. I also knew that I’d probably be a lot better off thinking of things that were creative or at least positive in some way, instead of rehashing how Aunt Tilly (or whoever) had bruised my delicate little psyche when I was a kid (or whatever).

After I started making smarter choices about how to spend my thought-time, I really started feeling much happier and freer.

OK, so I think I’ve got it now. We are what we think. That’s right: contrary to popular belief, we’re not what we eat, we’re what we think.

What do YOU think?