So Seldom

I am fighting to keep my fingers from racing on the keys to a Shostakovich piano concerto...the only problem with having piano music playing in the background as I work. I just installed a lovely aol/cbs radio menu on my computer and now have a young woman named Mitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven. She is clutching her head on the album cover, looking every bit as horrible as I feel at the moment. The so seldom refers to the fact that I so seldom have writer's block, yet today I Have. I cannot seem to match any one of the thousands of nursery rhymes I know to the news stories of the moment, and I must have some and SOON. Nancy....and all the rest of the poetry group expect me to. (I am staying home the three weeks Nancy is gone to write and save up taxi scrip.) I even spent the greater part of the afternoon and evening listening to Dave Frishberg, hoping he would inspire me, as he usually does, but even that didn't help. Goodness, he is just up in Portland.....I would love to go up and see him play, which is about all he does these days, according to everything I read. He has written sort of a beginning of an autobiog. Maybe I could go up and help him finish it. What fun that would be. God....he is younger than I.....everyone is younger than I am, or else they are dead. I often wonder if I saw Dave in NYC, when he was just being a piano player....he played at Nicks and knew Condon and all the others I knew....did I just not notice him? Strange, as all the names in his memoirs ring a bell....Condon and Muggsy and Pee Wee and all the old Dixieland crowd. But I think he got there after I had left....he is great on piano, almost as good as my dear old James P.Johnson, my favorite of the whole crowd....well, Big Sid Catlett and little Ernie Caseras were my favorite people, but James P. was the best on piano. Ernie was sort of like my darling John Hartford, in that he could play almost anything with a reed, while John could play anything with strings. Of course they usually stuck Ernie with playing something no one else could play...or was playing that evening. He was such a sweet, kind little guy, and a lot better looking than most of the doggy looking musicians in NYC. Golly, I wouldn't tower over him today, I've lost three inches in height. I wonder why Dave Frishberg didn't get as well-known and popular as Randy Newman, they wrote similar songs, although Dave's are funnier. I adore "Peel Me a Grape" and "Van Lingo Mungo." I'm thinking of stealing the idea of "VLM" only with a different group. I have to get busy and come up with womething.

Now I'm nattering again, as I did to K....making less and less sense. Boy I would love to know what happened to him. We used to have such a connection and I have the feeling that he is gone, which I have never had before. Then I always knew he would turn up. Perhaps he is dead. Sad. Well, Peggo......have another dish of ice cream, wipe the tear from the eye and THINK. If I could just find a line in one of the news stories that sounded like a nursery rhyme, but they are all so damned stodgy that it is hard to make fun of them.

I have been most annoyed with Twitter. Every miserable person who signs in to 'follow' me is just there to sell something. I wish I could find someone from the old 'drinkers with writing problems' group....or those crazy nuts who used to meet in the Mission years ago and do silly things like handing out cookies shaped like bombs and say "bombs NOT food." Gosh, what was the name of that group.....they were such fun. I'll have to look in my files and find some of the crazy letters we used to paste pictures on and send out....stuffing envelopes at our meetings in local coffee houses. I've lost all my silly, outrageous friends and I miss them. I haven't talked to Connie in Chicago in ages.....I miss that old gang of artists from the Oak Park Art Co-op and the shows we did. I will never forget doing my silly chicken thing, reading "Time, time, time, time/ On a dime Gertrude Stein...etc." while 'playing' all the un-matched, water filled glasses everyone had brought in....and Gerry grabbing my hand as I came 'off-stage' and saying "Jeeze, Peg, you've got more guts than anyone I've ever seen!" I guess I was good, as one of the gals fell off her chair laughing. "Das Badde Art Showé" was a smashing success. I so wanted to buy Frank Cuda's "Night Over Miami beach," with its twinkling lights all around, and one in the eye of the flamingo flying overhead. He chickened out on his performance though, what was it to be??? Well, the kids in the Pell thing at UC/SF wanted me to go to one of the comedy clubs and tell some of my stories I told them.....odd that I should suddenly develop a comic trait and get rid of the stage fright at such an advanced age. Perhaps I should have been like Carol's Oak Park friend, who left home, husband and kids and became a comedian. Of course, Carol and John and I went to see her here, and she wasn't really very funny. Now that sounds like a shaggy dog story to me, so I think I am getting punchy......no more thinking or writing tonight. Good lord, it is 1:30am and I was up at 10am....Sylvia butted me, as she was out of food again. She is just eating too much....I can't keep up with her. And, I have to be up early again tomorrow.......Ah, well........