Partly this is because I do not like the shorter days.
And partly this is because I do not like being reminded that everything dies in the end.
I do however like being reminded of how amazing mother nature is — creating a system of fully recyclable and compostable solar collectors in the form of LEAVES!
I wrote the first version of “Under My Umbrella” while camping in North Truro on Cape Cod.
Then my friend Molly Ruggles wrote a new bridge section — which is the version she and I and our friend Carole Bundy recorded (in the player above).
You can click here to read — or re-read depending upon how long you’ve been following my blog — a short post from 9/10/24 which features the earlier (pre-Molly) version of this song.
And here is a link to the Molly, Will & Carole version in case you might be willing to play/like/share it on your favorite music streaming platform.
We recorded it with me, Carole and Molly singing plus Molly playing Doug Hammer’s Schimmel grand piano in his studio north of Boston, MA.
Thank you to Doug for his excellent engineering and music production skills.
Thank you to Molly for writing a new bridge and also a bunch of lovely harmonies for all of us to sing.
Photo by Rada Ruggles
Thank you to Molly for playing piano AND for designing our graphics.
Thank you to the gifted and generous photographers at Pixabay.
And thank YOU for reading and listening to another of my blog posts!
I remain very grateful for our wonderful WordPress community.
This summer and fall I’ve been riding the train (actually the train + bus due to ongoing track repairs in Massachusetts to fix a sinkhole situation) a lot from Boston to Ithaca, NY — where a bunch of my family members (sisters, niece, grandniece, nephews, mother, and cousins galore) live.
This has given me plenty of time to gaze at passing scenery, and I have seen some extraordinary cloud formations.
At dusk they are often illuminated by the last rays of sun coming over the horizon, which makes them even more magical.
I love that “Both Sides Now” leaves the listener with no concrete answers.
Ms. Mitchell writes, “I really don’t know clouds (or love… or life…) at all.”
And I also love Ms. Mitchell’s description of falling in love — “Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels — the dizzy dancing way you feel — when every fairy tale comes real — I’ve looked at love that way.”
It immediately reminds me of my own history with that feeling — and how intoxicating and exhilarating it was…
One of my favorite bloggers is Dan Kennedy, who has worked at many different media organizations in the Boston area and is now a professor at Northeastern University.
He writes about what is happening in — and to — the media here in the USA.
My boss Diane Wortis and I created (and then produced annually for five years) a day-long conference called “Arts & The Media” which allowed us to call everyone who had anything to do with arts coverage in the Greater Boston area and invite them to participate on a panel.
This included folks from our big papers (including The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The Boston Phoenix) — to folks at radio and TV stations, to folks who worked for smaller local papers and magazines.
Our conferences started happening as Mitt Romney’s private investment company Bain Capital was buying up a bunch of local daily and weekly newspapers in the greater Boston area and consolidating them into one company — which meant that the staff at all of these formerly independent papers was being slashed and lots of generic (non-town-specific) content was starting to be written which could be printed in many different papers within this new chain.
I bore witness firsthand to the degradation of media coverage as a result of large-scale, corporate consolidation.
And twenty five years later, that trend of media consolidation has only worsened.
All of this is to explain why I write near the end of this song — “May our press remain vital, always truth pursuing…”
Reading our local papers and nurturing relationships (via hundreds of hand-written thank you cards) with local arts writers and arts editors for over a decade helped me to understand how crucial the Fourth Estate is to a functioning democracy with healthy checks and balances.
Dan writes in his blog about what is going poorly (media consolidation continues, ad revenues drop…) and also where there are glimmers of hope via new models of local journalism.
And sometimes he weighs in on journalistic best practices.
He steered me to a speech Marty Baron gave at Brandeis University a few years ago which touched upon the fascinating topic of objectivity.
Mr. Baron used to be the editor of The Boston Globe and then became the editor of The Washington Post.
Here’s the heart of what Marty had to say:
“Objectivity is not neutrality.
It is not on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand journalism.
It is not false balance or both-sidesism.
It is not giving equal weight to opposing arguments when the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction.
It does not suggest that we as journalists should engage in meticulous, thorough research only to surrender to cowardice by failing to report the facts we’ve worked so hard to discover…
The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible.
It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.
We don’t start with the answers.
We go seeking them, first with the already formidable challenge of asking the right questions and finally with the arduous task of verification.”
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Graphic by Stephen C. Fischer
May our media in the USA stop kowtowing and collapsing… and realize that they are just as vulnerable as the rest of us to arrests in the middle of the night, arrests while we are walking from campus to our apartment, arrests while we are in a courthouse following all the rules about how to become a US citizen, arrests while we are picking vegetables, arrests while we are doing our laundry in the middle of the night.
If you might be kind enough to stream it —and maybe even “like” it and add it to one of your playlists if you are so moved — that would be very helpful to feed positive data into the various algorithms which decide whose music gets played and how often…
Dorothy Fields was an extremely successful lyricist and librettist in a very male-dominated entertainment industry.
She was friends with — and sometimes collaborated with — all of the songwriters in the Golden Era of Popular Song including Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and the list (of male songwriters) goes on and on…
She had hits from the 1920s to the 1970s — and did not get discouraged (as many of her male colleagues did) when rock-n-roll began to displace her songs from the hit parade.
Instead she started working with a much younger composer, Cy Coleman, and had one of her biggest hits — the musical Sweet Charity — when she was 62 years old.
I, as a late-blooming songwriter, find her to be very inspirational.
I have chosen freesia for this post because I imagine she would have enjoyed their delicious fragrance ‚ and because they always seem very elegant to me.
According to her biographers, she was always very well-dressed (one grandparent was a tailor…) with separate closets for hats, shoes, active wear, evening wear, etc.
One of my favorite perennials is the Bleeding Heart.
Their flowers are like origami.
How does Mother Nature manage to create such an extraordinary variety of shapes and colors out of a such a limited selection of amino acids (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) in plant — as well as our own — DNA?
And how do the plant cells unfold in such complicated and exquisite patterns?
Today’s Throwback Thursday heads back to a November 9, 2013 blog post about how people who sing with other people — especially in choirs when they are encouraged to breath together during certain sections of the music — can end up aligning their heart beats.
If I needed any more reminders to “carpe diem” and seize the day, there they are!
I just learned from Wikipedia (after I went to Google and checked the correct spelling of this Latin phrase) that “carpe diem” is more accurately translated as “enjoy the day” or “pluck/harvest the day.”
I like these more accurate translations MUCH better than the traditional one.
I associate the verb “seize” with military campaigns, kidnappings and my European ancestors confiscating almost all of what is now South, Central and North America from the folks who were once living here.
“Enjoy,” “pluck,” and “harvest,” however, all feel less violent and more sustainable to me than “seize.”
And I did, in fact, pluck two allium flowers from next to our driveway — which were part of double stems from two different bulbs — to enjoy inside.
I think allium are part of the garlic/onion/leek family — so I suppose I might even be able to dig up and eat some of the bulbs if things get dire in the future…
But for now I will remain very grateful that no animals (rabbits, squirrels, rats, skunks, etc.) have dug them up for food so that I can enjoy their springtime extravagance.
I love combining the idea of a karmic wheel with the idea of us all (or many of us…) being asleep at the wheel — which is, of course, an extremely dangerous situation both for the person who is driving and also for all the other beings who are on or near the road on which this drowsy person is driving!
Because I have set up my daily life to be walkable, bikeable and/or busable (as dictated by the weather), I almost never drive a car.
Every time I am able to walk or bike from point A to point B (such as from home to Music Together classes or from home to Trader Joe’s), I am happy that I am not adding to the ever-more-precarious imbalance of greenhouse gasses in our planet’s atmosphere.
But I do ride to gigs at retirement communities in either a hybrid car or a regular gasoline-burning car — depending upon which accompanist I am working with on that day — which can leave me feeling like I am part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I remain aware that advertising agencies, the companies who hire them to inspire/hypnotize us into buying lots of things, and our various media who feed those messages (hundreds per day!) to us have created a completely misleading narrative about how to find happiness and meaning in our lives.
And now we are living in a period of reckoning — both politically and environmentally — for all of the untruths and PSYOPs to which we have been exposed.
Here’s a fascinating example of how maddeningly f–ked up things have become here in the 21st century.
Apple, a company which prides — and markets — itself on protecting its users’ privacy recently settled a lawsuit which alleged that it, in fact, was recording its users’ conversations and sharing them with advertisers.
What???!!!
I do not have an iPhone or iWatch, but I do own several Apple laptops (going back twenty years), a couple of iPods (also going back many years), and I continue to love Apple’s GarageBand musical composition program.
What a disappointment…
Here’s an AP article/explanation from 1/2/25 by tech writer Michael Liedtke:
“Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices.
The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn’t seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, ‘Hey, Siri.’ Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted.
The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple’s long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers — a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve ‘a fundamental human right.’
The proposed settlement filed in an Oakland, California federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade.
Apple isn’t acknowledging any wrongdoing in the settlement, which still must be approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. Lawyers in the case have proposed scheduling a Feb. 14 court hearing in Oakland to review the terms.”
I just checked online and learned from BloombergLaw.com that on 2/20/25, “A federal judge gave his preliminary approval to a $95 million settlement that would end a five-year class action over alleged privacy violations by Apple Inc.‘s Siri virtual assistant.”
It truly makes one wonder how one can trust any company whatsoever…
And it confirms what my brother-in-law Andrew had started noticing many summers ago when we were camping on Cape Cod — that conversations we were having within earshot of his iPhone were triggering uncannily specific ads (directly related to what we had been discussing) on his Facebook feed.
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
Graphic design by Stephen C. Fischer
G-d only knows what our individual — and shared — karmic reckonings will be in the hours, days, weeks, months and years ahead…
Thank you to Doug Hammer for playing so elegantly and engineering/mixing so patiently on this song.
Our current political climate here in the USA continues to be extraordinarily challenging, but we did get some promising political news from our neighbor to the north recently…
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I strive on a daily basis to find a balance between engagement — giving tiny amounts of money to political races around the country, sending postcards to potential voters in those races, writing to my elected officials, reading the news, etc. — and disengagement so that I can cultivate a little bit of optimism, hope, love and respect (which seem to be in short supply these days… at least in certain corridors of power.
Returning to my earliest blog posts has become part of the latter — soul nurturing — strategy.
I love being reminded of events which I have forgotten about — and also being reminded of how my life has unfolded/changed/evolved during the past decade.
Today’s blog post is made possible by our copyright laws.
Cole Porter’s terrific song “Let’s Do It” entered the public domain last year.
So my friends Carole Bundy, Molly Ruggles and I can now share a very fun version which includes some updated lyrics (by Molly and Carole) as well as an entirely new section of the song — written in the style of Cole Porter — by Molly.
Molly created the first draft of this song for a performance with her friend Kate Stringer at Club Cafe in Boston during which I sang some harmony.
Then — after Kate moved to London — the song evolved a bit when Molly, Carole and I added it to our repertoire.
Adding new sections to pre-existing songs is one of Molly’s many creative super powers.
But it can create copyright challenges — unless one is able to get permission from whomever owns the rights to the song.
But now, because “Let’s Do It” (which was first published in 1928) has entered the public domain, we are allowed to take creative liberties with it.
Molly, me and Carole in Maine
“Let’s Do It” was one of several hit songs from Cole Porter’s first big Broadway success — a show called PARIS.
He had been writing songs for a couple of decades — starting in Peru, Indiana (where he grew up the only surviving child in a very wealthy family) and continuing in Massachusetts (where he was valedictorian of his class at a prep school, Worcester Academy) and in Connecticut (where he attended Yale).
According to Wikipedia, he wrote hundreds of songs at Yale — two of which continue to be sung at football games.
He also wrote the songs for four entire musicals which were performed in New Haven and also on tour at college clubs during vacation breaks.
After he graduated from Yale, Mr.Porter pretended to study law at Harvard (to satisfy his very wealthy grandfather, who was paying for his education) while actually studying music and writing songs — and rooming with future a Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who was then an avid law student.
Cambridge borders East Arlington (where I live), and I love walking through Harvard Law School — which happens to be next to Harvard’s music department — and thinking about Mr. Porter treading the same streets a hundred years ago.
Although he lived an extravagant life, the second half of it was filled with chronic pain due to a horseback riding accident on Long Island.
This accident (the horse he was riding fell and rolled on top of him) left him with multiple leg fractures which never healed well…
Molly, Carole and I leading a service at the UU Church in Milton, MA
He endured many corrective surgeries over the following decades and eventually had the lower part of one of his legs amputated.
Argh!
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Although some of his earlier songs had been interpolated into other shows, Mr. Porter did not have his own hit show until he was 36 years old.
But — in the midst of much revelry and travel — he could be a very disciplined person.
He continued working on music during his 20s and early 30s while simultaneously leading a life of extraordinary luxury — renting historic palazzos in Venice during the summer and hiring entire ballet companies to entertain at his parties.
He even wrote a jazz-inflected music score for a ballet production in Paris which pre-dates George Gershwin’s much more famous Rhapsody In Blue.
Carole, Molly and I are not living lives of extraordinary luxury, but we ARE acutely aware of how fortunate/privileged we are to be able to devote time and energy to making music during this very challenging — and at time horrifying — time on planet earth.
A deep breath of gratitude in.
And a deep breath of gratitude out.
Thank you to Cole Porter for writing “Let’s Do It.”
Thank you to our copyright laws for allowing creative material to go into the public domain after a certain number of years.
And a special THANK YOU to everyone who has been streaming, liking, and playlisting our “Molly, Will & Carole” music!
We’re up to 2500 total streams on Spotify and 6500 total streams on Pandora (which are the only two music-listening platforms I currently keep tabs on…)
I have recently learned that streaming activity on the very first day of a song’s release strongly influences the future algorithmic behavior of that song on that platform — ie: whether a song is recommended to other potential listeners.
So if you might be willing to click here to stream “Let’s Do It” on the platform of your choice — and maybe even “like” it and add it to a playlist — we would be very grateful.
I will end with one final THANK YOU to you for reading and listening to yet another one of my blog posts!
I have chosen today’s glorious photos of iris because they are another one of my favorite flowers — especially the old-fashioned varieties.
We have a bunch of iris which grow alongside our driveway.
The purple ones have an aroma which — to my nose — smells exactly like grape soda.
Yum!
I am guessing it will be another week or two before our iris start blooming here in the Boston area… and I am waiting patiently for their aromatic arrival.
amusicalifeonplanetearth 