I was going through old files on my computer, and stumbled across this. I had forgotten all about it. It’s one of only a couple recordings my dad and I made together (Dad on sax, me on vocals). I don’t know why we waited until after he had been diagnosed with dementia to sit down and record some music together. We had performed together with his band, The Red Hot Smoothies, a couple times, but we never took it seriously. I guess we always figured there’d be time for that in the future. Plus, as much as I do love it, I’m kind of shy when it comes to singing in front of people. And I looked up to my dad and I think I was always just a little bit afraid that my talent wouldn’t be quite good enough to merit performing with him. That was all me, not him. I know he would have been thrilled if I’d asked earlier. Regrets, y’all. Anyway, blame it on my youth. (be patient, it takes a couple seconds to start)
Thanks so much for reading my ridiculous thoughts! If you’d like to see my ridiculous thoughts translated into art, visit my website, or follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Know a caregiver, or someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone who knows someone else who’s a caregiver? Or heck, do you know a person? Well, you should tell them about my book, Fractured Memories: Because Demented People Need Love, Too. Part memoir and part coffee table art book, I recount my family’s heartbreaking and hilarious journey through my father’s dementia. Available to purchase here (this is my favorite way if you live in the U.S.), here or here if you’d rather get the eBook than a print copy, and here (especially if you want a hard cover copy).
Well, it’s official. This weekend I turned 28 plus 20 minus 10 years old. And what a weekend it turned out to be – full of good music, good booze, and good friends. The only thing missing was that no one invented a cake made out of bourbon for me. Get on that for next year, people, okay?
Part of what made the weekend so great was that my dad’s long time guitar player for his jazz band (the Red Hot Smoothies) asked me to sing for a concert he was giving as part of a program called Nursing Homes Swing. It’s a really great program that brings local jazz musicians into nursing homes to perform for the residents, and my dad’s facility takes part. My mom usually brings him up to the room where they perform so he can enjoy watching and listening to his old buddies play. On Friday, the guitar player, Tom Harbeck, along with Bob Bowen on bass (who also used to perform regularly with my dad’s band) and Keith Hoodock on sax and clarinet, was scheduled to play at my dad’s place, and the organizer asked if he could include a vocalist. So Tom reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in coming up for the gig.
Now, I’ve only performed jazz a handful of times – actually, less than a handful. The first time, I was 16 and sang two songs with Hod O’Brien accompanying me, and traded fours with Stephanie Nakasian (both were friends of my dad, and Stephanie actually gave me vocal lessons for a year in high school). The second and third times were after college when I sang for the first dances of friends (with my dad’s band). The fourth time was about 6 years ago when friends Sandy Davis Camp and Larry Camp invited me to sing a song during one of their concerts. So all told, I’ve performed 5 jazz tunes over the course of about 22 years with some truly phenomenal artists who took good care of me. Gulp.
When Tom first contacted me, I immediately said yes. Then I went home and had a panic attack. In part, it was just fear because I do it so rarely, but mostly it was the thought of looking into the audience and seeing my dad zoning out and not having any idea it was me. The thought of not getting that proud papa look killed me. But I knew that Tom, who is a highly underrated (or at least not as well known as he should be given his skill level), and Bob, who is also not nearly well enough known, would take good care of me. And after talking it over with my mom and with S, I decided I would rather regret doing something than not doing it, and my dad probably won’t be around that much longer, so this opportunity is unlikely to present itself again. So I proceeded to relearn the words to a few songs and practice with the irealPro app that Tom introduced me to and determined that I would just not look at my dad during any of the tunes I was performing so that I wouldn’t start crying in front of everyone.
Overall, it went well with the exception of two things: First, when it came time for me to come back in on the bridge of Girl from Ipanema, I’m pretty sure I ended up singing either in the key of K or the key of 13. And then I felt my heart stop. Thank god Tom and Bob are so talented that they were able to save me and cover what had to be a very painful thing to listen to. For your own protection so your ears don’t start bleeding, and for my own vanity, I have deleted video footage of that song. Also, the endings were a little rough since we hadn’t rehearsed at all in advance, but again, the guys are so good they compensated easily. Here’s how it went for the first couple tunes (minus the one I botched so badly):
The second thing that was a little rough was that another singer, Blee Moffett, who’s a friend, came to listen, and we asked him to come up and sing a tune himself. He politely declined and we politely badgered him until he agreed. He headed up and started singing What a Wonderful World. Great tune, no problem, right? Yes…if that hadn’t been the tune that he had sung for the father daughter dance at my wedding (which Tom and Bob had both played for, too). And yes…if that hadn’t been the only song during the whole concert that my dad started singing along to. Remember how I was trying not to cry? Let the water works begin. Luckily, I had time during the next tune to get myself together before singing again, though I had to ignore my dad, who was staring at me during the entirety of that next tune. I’m hoping that means he understood the connection to the song on some level, and maybe even his connection to me, too. Here’s the end of Blee’s tune (my husband was filming and didn’t catch the first part) where you can kind of see Dad singing along:
After I got myself back together, I did three more tunes and managed not to totally butcher them:
All in all, totally terrifying and totally fun, and I’m so grateful that Tom was generous enough to include me. As I told him, it was not just a gig, but a gift.
I mentioned a few posts ago that my dad has dementia. Yeah, we should really talk about that, shouldn’t we? For this post, I just want to help you get to know him. We’ll talk more about dementia later. Let me start by saying that my dad was The. Best. Dad. Ever. No, really. You can tell me all the stories you want about how awesome your dad is, but you will never convince me that yours is even close to as great as mine. I mean it. Quit talking all that craziness. Don’t mess with me. I’ll take you down. My dad is so awesome, that when he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia at the age of 65, he started saying to people who asked how he was doing, “Not bad for a demented guy.” Beat that. And when we moved him into a dementia care facility, he climbed the six foot iron fence that enclosed the backyard walkway just to see if he could. How awesome is that? Okay, admittedly, it wasn’t awesome at the time, but several years later and now that he can’t do it anymore, it’s freakin’ hilarious! He also learned the code on the door keypad several times and got out. He even figured out a code that the staff didn’t know worked. Granted, he couldn’t figure out how to put on matching shoes, but he turned into a damn code breaker! We should have sent him back into the military. World peace would have resulted. Sorry about not doing that, y’all. 20/20 hindsight and all that crap.
My dad grew up mostly in Cleveland and Cape Cod, and went to Wake Forest University where he was a political science major (almost as practical as majoring in art). Then he got drafted and went to Vietnam where he became a 1st lieutenant (the dementia care facility, OLOP, does a monthly newsletter and wrote in it that Dad was THE first lieutenant) in military intelligence (a term he always said was an oxymoron). When he got back, he became a stockbroker, then decided to move to Chicago and get his MDiv, where he met my mom. They decided to get married so that they wouldn’t ever have to break up the cats they’d gotten. Thoughtful, no? My mom wore a dark red dress that she’d made, and my dad wore a searsucker jacket, paisley shirt, striped tie, and bell bottoms. Mom talked him out of his combat boots for the special occasion.
Being dirty dirty hippies, they decided to move to Berkeley, where they had me and where I quickly wrapped him around my little finger. I can’t blame him, my little finger was exceptionally cute. I looked like a little Inuit baby. When I came out, I do have to wonder if my dad wasn’t a bit concerned that I was so much darker than him or my mom, but eventually as I grew up I started to look exactly like him – to the point that I dressed as him for Halloween one year. In CA, my dad worked in several alcohol and drug abuse programs while my mom got her MDiv. When I was 6, they got fed up with the earthquakes, droughts, and lack of seasons and lightning bugs (a life without lightning bugs is a life not worth living), and they moved to Charlottesville, VA and lived in and renovated a home that had been a sorority house. It was right in the delightful fraternity row part of town, which, when they visited was quiet and charming because it was in the middle of summer and the students were gone. Then the students came back, and as we drove through our neighborhood, little six-year-old me observed in awe, “The girls are having a party! The boys are having a party! Everyone’s having a party!” Yep, nothing gets past Captain Obvious over here.
At 40, my dad decided he wanted to go back to what he truly loved, which was jazz. So he started playing the sax and clarinet again, and began messing around with other musician friends, calling themselves The Windbreakers. At the end of a set, they’d turn away from the audience, bend over, and honk their horns. Classy. Eventually he started a band called The Red Hot Smoothies, and played gigs for 20 something years.
At about the time that I became interested in the fraternity boys walking through the neighborhood, we moved out to the GFW (God Forsaken Wilderness). Unknowingly, we purchased ancestral land. The main reason for purchasing it was that my dad was a train fanatic. That really doesn’t accurately describe his obsession, though. When I was little, we used to go around the country in a VW camper chasing and photographing trains and camping near the tracks. We had scanners in every room of the house so we’d know when a train was coming and could run to the porch to wave. The wall in their bedroom was built at an angle so that their bed faced out toward the tracks, and there was a light switch by the headboard that my dad (an insomniac) could turn on at night to light up the tracks when a train came through. They named the 23 acres, High Green, because that’s the term for the signal the engineers get that it’s safe to proceed. Of course, the authorities thought it was code for “the new people must be growing marijuana” and would send helicopters circling overhead to check our woods. Their architect’s last name was Train, and their house bore a striking resemblance to a train station. There were model trains and train whistles displayed in the built-in shelves. Every night after dinner, we’d walk the train tracks, practicing our balancing skills (I would have been great as a gymnast on the balance beam – feel free to call me Nadia) and talking about our days. We put coins on the track for the trains to flatten as they passed and then we’d have to hunt them down. He had records and made recordings of just train noises. Are you getting the picture? Train buff, nut, loon. You got it.
He also had a radio show called “Nick @ Nine: Monday morning jazz to make you feel good.” A consummate showman and the life of a party, his show was pretty popular. I got to guest host several times and had a blast.
All of that is great, but what set him apart from the rest of the world were two things: 1) he was HILARIOUS. He loved a dirty joke. He reveled in the absurd. Silliness was a thing of beauty. He could have been a Muppet, and 2) he made you feel special. When he was talking with you about anything even vaguely serious, he was all ears. Insightful, caring, helpful, you just knew that what you had to say was important, whether you were a peer or a kid. There aren’t a lot of people in the world who are good listeners. But my dad knew that there was something inside just about everybody worthy of love, and he looked for it and helped you see it in yourself. Such a gift.
Okay, that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a video of the two of us when I was little by the train tracks:
