"Souvenir"

Souvenir is currently playing through June 10 at the ACT Theatre in Seattle. Patti Cohenour’s portrayal of real-life Florence Foster Jenkins, pictured on her album cover above, is laugh-out-loud funny, though the play’s central themes are of serious interest to artists. Ms. Jenkins, known as Flo to her long-time accompanist and friend, Cosme McMoon, was aria challenged but gave recitals to paying audiences consisting originally of her wealthy friends. The concert proceeds went to charity and her popularity grew, resulting in the production of the album and larger crowds, culminating in an overflow audience of 2,000 at Carnegie Hall in 1944. She died a few months later.

Cosme, portrayed by Mark Anders, narrates the play and struggles with the issues of the market value, popularity and ultimate worth of art. The music he writes is ignored while the truly terrible singing of Flo is acclaimed. He wonders at her confidence: does she hear something different in her head than what comes out of her lips, does she know how she sounds and capitalizes on it, is she the ultimate trickster or mad naïf?

As an author, I attend many writers’ conferences, and I always love to hear other authors tell their personal stories. Often, you hear an underlying shadow of self-criticism of their work. Large doses of courage are required to send you heart and soul out into a critical and rejecting world. Writers agonize: am I good enough, should I keep trying? Apparently, Flo didn’t agonize. She had no talent, but she did her thing and was successful anyway. I can think of several extremely popular writers who I believe fit into the same category.

Joe Adcock says in his Seattle Post-Intelligence review that laughing at Jenkins is like laughing at the disabled, but I disagree. The disabled don’t choose their situation; Florence Foster Jenkins chose, for whatever reasons, to perform. When we choose to perform, we invite the reaction of our audience.

Go see the play; I highly recommend it. Or you can listen to samples of Flo’s singing on Amazon. And you can read excerpts and reviews of my books on my Web site, www.linda-wallace.com, or at my publisher’s site, Wings ePress. I bravely invite your reaction. Even if it’s laughter.

Street Festival

The Cambodians threw a party yesterday, the 5th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. I’m not Cambodian, but I felt welcome.

It was a small event for a street festival--only one block--but the fairgoers more than made up with enthusiasm for any lack in size. I only spent a few hours there late in the afternoon, but the party was an all-day affair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and included music, dance, contests and food.

I made it to the festival in time to see the banana-eating contest, just the very end of the male round but early enough to cheer for all of the female contestants. The audience was whooping it up when I arrived; they clearly thought this was hilarious entertainment.

The stage was backed by a large painting of Ankgor Wat in shades of purple, pink and orange with a banner of blue and red stripes behind the painting. Together, the two made a creative facsimile of the Cambodian flag, the only flag that incorporates a building in its design. I got that bit of information from the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial site. I vaguely knew there was a Cambodian museum in White Center, but I’ve never been there even though I’ve lived in this community for 17 years. Shame on me. I will definitely visit the museum and memorial soon.

Next came three rounds of hacky sack competition to see who could keep the footbag in the air with the greatest number of consecutive kicks. Then the winners of each round competed against each other. That worked great for one little boy who survived the elimination round with only 5 kicks because everyone in his group was a dud. I sort of lost track, but I think the grand champion, who received an elaborate trophy, won with around 50 kicks, a combined score from the elimination and final rounds.

The MC for both events, banana eating and hacky sack, was great. He explained rules and kept up a running commentary in both the Cambodian language, Khmer, and English. When he was counting the hacky sack kicks, though, he mostly used the Cambodian language. I ought to know how to count in Khmer by now, but I can’t remember beyond "one," phonetically something like "moo-uhy."

The entertainment for the last hour or so I spent at the festival was music. The MC pushed a very large pink pig--for 2007, the year of the pig--out onto the pavement to preside over the dance floor. A lovely dancer invited my husband and me to join in, but we declined, not having the flexible wrists and fingers required for the elaborate hand movements. A couple of different bands and several singers performed--all very interesting but way too loud for my middle-aged ears.

To put some distance between me and the musicians, I checked out the vendors and decided to sample papaya salad, something I’ve wanted to try ever since I saw "The Scent of Green Papaya." It was delicious: long shreds of green papaya mixed with tomatoes, peanuts and a hot and spicy dressing; however, there was a mystery ingredient--crab leg shells. No crab that I could detect, just bits of shell and one small leg with no crab in it. I don’t know if the shell was there to provide flavor for the dressing similar to the way you can boil shrimp shells to enrich seafood stock or if I was just unlucky to get only shell and no crab. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the salad in spite of having to pick through it carefully to avoid crunching down on rock-hard shell fragments.

It was really a great festival. I had more fun than I have at lots of larger, more elaborate street fairs. I’m already looking forward to the 6th Annual White Center Cambodian New Year Street Festival. Maybe it will be 2 blocks long next year.

Lullaby

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a front-page story Monday that proved to be an antidote to all of the other apocalyptic headlines in that issue which I’d resolutely refused to read: "5 shot at Kent restaurant," "L.A. vows crackdown on its entrenched gangs;" "Kaczynski, victims clash over Unabomber papers;" "Iran flouts sanctions as new missile tests are conducted;" "Sudan government bombing Darfur villages, rebels say;" and "Any way the war ends, country’s forecast bleak." Well, actually I skimmed them, but the story I chose to read in full was "Composer collecting and dishing out lullabies" by P-I reporter Carol Smith, photo by Joshua Trujillo.

The composer is Masguda Shamsutdinova, a formally trained musician and professor of ethnomusicology from eastern Russia, who moved to the U.S. with her family four years ago to allow two sons to attend the University of Washington. Neither Shamsutdinova nor her husband could speak English then, so she ended up working in Harborview Medical Center’s main kitchen as a dishwasher. Now she is spearheading a project to collect international lullabies which will eventually be used by the Sleep Disorders Center in a study to see if they can be used to calm patients. The clanging of the steel kettles and sinks inspired her.

I am awed by stories of starting over. I cannot see myself moving to Russia, learning the language and succeeding in finding work to support myself and my family. Yet immigrants to the U.S. do it all the time, true heroes in my eyes.

I have a neighbor who moved here from Vietnam with her family not many years ago. I met her at one of our community block parties. Shortly after the potluck, she called and asked if she could come to my house two days a week for an hour of English practice. She was searching for a job and thought her language skills were holding her back. Having just completed a stint of Boy Scout leadership, I’d decided to just say no to any new requests for volunteering for awhile, but I admired her determination to improve, so I said yes. It turned out that I benefited far more from our English lessons than she did. I now treasure her friendship and the insights I’ve gained into a culture different than my own. I even plan to base a character on my friend’s struggles with a new language in the next book I write. You can read excerpts from my two previously published novels on my Web site www.linda-wallace.com.

So, did she find her dream job? Yes, she’s delighted to now be employed by Boeing as an administrative assistant. It took persistence, though. First, she signed on as an accounting assistant at a health services firm. She then applied for and was interviewed for something like a half a dozen positions at Boeing before she was hired. I’m so proud of her. I love success stories.

Tune in a Bucket

I can’t sing. Or at least I can’t sing well, but I like to try to fit my approximately three-note range into songs. At church I lustily belt out all the hymns. The poor worshipers who sit in front of me don’t make that mistake twice. Lately, I’ve been flattering myself that my voice may have improved somewhat from all the church practice. I briefly considered taking a tape recorder along to see how melodiously and closely I’ve come to hitting the notes but decided I might not ever be brave enough to sing in public again after listening to the results. Better to believe you sound better than to prove decisively it’s not true. Especially now when the Christmas carol season approaches.

My sister has a great voice. She taught elementary school music for years in Missouri and loved it. She’s one of the few people I know who actually made a living at a job she enjoyed. She’s also always on call to provide the music for weddings and funerals, and she enlivens summer tours of her historic hometown with folk songs from the Civil War. I’ve always been jealous. Why couldn’t the genes have been spread around a little better? To compensate, I learned to play the flute, self-taught, thanks to children’s band books my sister provided. Naturally, that method of instruction did not produce a great flautist, but I can play well enough (when I practice) to make music, which was my goal.

Not long ago, I complimented a young woman on a beautiful solo she’d sung at church. After bestowing kudos, I confided how I despaired of my own voice.

"I’m a terrible singer," I told her. "I sound like a frog."

"I love terrible singers," she replied.

She said she’d like to teach a class for people with horrible voices. That sounded like a great idea to me. I’ve often fantasized about taking lessons from a voice coach who would transform me into a singer of operatic rhapsodies.

I’m still waiting for her class, but in the meantime, I discovered "How to Sing in the Shower," a workshop taught by Cathleen Wilder at the Dusty Strings studio in Fremont, according to The Seattle Times. Wilder is a former opera singer who teaches a non-judgmental class on "reclaiming our birthright to sing." She instructs students in the basics from breathing techniques to the parts of the body that produce sound. The newspaper article mentions "resonating chambers." That struck a chord (no pun intended, of course) with me. I think I locate those chambers when I practice yoga to my beloved, ancient Misty Carey Yoga to Go tapes. When I chant "sat nam" (spelling?) with the instructor, I feel the sound resonate through my chest and head.

Wilder believes we need more singing in America. She’s quoted as saying that right now America is losing out on a lot of joy. She even claims we’d all sound good if we practiced more. Her motto is, "Your voice is beautiful, no matter how it sounds." Obviously, she has never sat in front of me in church.