Autumn Leaves

RO: A few years back (in the days when I had time for such pursuits) I made a fall CD. Just a collection of music that either reminded me of autumn or back to school. Yes, there was a summer cd and a winter one as well - I said I had time.

Anyway it included songs like Van Morrison's Moondance, Frank Sinatra's Autumn in NY (his version of the Summer Wind made the summer playlist), Lou Reed's cover of September Song (not as mournful as Walter Huston's, but nice and edgy) and at least fifteen versions of the Autumn Leaves.

Everyone from Edith Piaf to Chet Baker to the Modern Jazz Quartet. I realized I had more versions of that song than anything else in my collection. More than Sleigh Ride and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, its two closest rivals. More than St. Louis Blues and Tenderly, my two dark horse candidates to supplant the titleholder.

So my question is what's on your playlist, ipod, turntable, cassette deck? What do you have more of than anything else and is there anything that you particularly like to hear at this time of year?

ROBERTA: I am so bad about keeping track of music. I still haven't managed to get my computer to sync music with my iphone so I can't listen while I'm walking. But I know what dominates my playlist, summer winter spring fall, Patsy Cline. I love her music and the film that Jessica Lange starred in as Patsy: Sweet Dreams. Ro, you'd never have time now to make a CD like that, but what a nice idea!

HALLIE: Oh, Roberta - my kids have forever tortured me about the thing I have for Patsy Cline... I fall, to piec-ezzz... I also love Patty Paige. I've always been a sucker for country, so Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash are on my playlist. Performers who are still alive: The Dixie Chicks - when I'm feeling pissy I particularly like to listen to "Goodbye Earl."

RO: Okay...we should start practicing Walking After Midnight for next year's something or other show because I definitely have the Patsy chip, too.

RHYS: I got an ipod Touch for my birthday last month and I've been having fun uploading stuff to it. Mostly classical music to keep me calm and relaxed when my flight is delayed, but also the soundtrack of Mamma Mia and my favorite Beatles songs that always manage to make me feel happy.

HANK: What is it about Patsy Cline and JRW? She's a special favorite of mine, too. (You want me TO forget (to forget) PRE-tend we NEVER met!) And Ro, I think Autumn in New York is just the same song as Moonlight in Vermont.

I made a "tape" (anyone, remember?) of song to "run" to (anyone? remember?) and I loved it--It included Jump, and then "Might as Well Jump" and then a song by the Cars (which one?), and then Born in the USA. And more power songs--White Rabbit. Running on Empty. Dancing Queen. I forget what else, but I loved it. A Walkman (anyone? remember?)eventually ate it.

Another day, I was blasting Carmina Burana on the walkman, and was ice skating to it, got overconfident, and splatted badly.

RO: You know how to ice skate? Dang it woman, is there anything you can't do? I used to go every Friday night to hang out with my pals but mostly remember drinking hot chocolate and hanging on to the railing.

HANK: If I had to choose? Ella Fitzgerald. Ella sings Cole Porter or Rogers and Hart. Any day.

RO: Tapes..yikes. I made what I called an anti-road rage tape for driving. I still have it. Mostly classical, some jazz. Impossible to curse out the guy who just cut you off when you're listening to Rampal/Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.Yes, I have Cardio CDs too. These days my cardio playlist starts with Lovely Day by Bill Winters.

And we wish you all a Lovely Day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYi7uEvEEmk&feature=related

Come back tomorrow when we announce the winners in the Jungle Red Hallopalooza drawing and later this week for visits by Liz Zelvin and the legendary Carolyn Hart!

On Lost Possible Selves

"The individual who has made him or herself vulnerable to acknowledged regret can be seen to adopt a courageous stance toward life: Despite acknowledging the risks of expecting anything from life, the happy and complex person maintains a heroic commitment to continue to do just that." Laura King and Joshua Hicks

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot

ROBERTA: For a new book idea, I've been doing some research on happiness. I came across an interesting article in the AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST about what the researchers call "lost possible selves," meaning unattainable ideas about what you might have been or done with your life. (Keep in mind that it's supposed to be a sign of maturity to grapple with this lost possible self!)

That article got me wondering about what I might have done if I hadn't become a psychologist and a writer. And I don't mean a rock star. Yes, singing like Bonnie Raitt or Patsy Cline would be a dream, but I have not one whit of talent to back it up.

Instead I was thinking about paths I might have gone down if I'd recognized them as possibilities before I hit my mid-fifties. Like maybe owning and running a bookstore such as Roxanne Coady's RJ Julia in my hometown. Or starting a small but lucrative publishing company. (I know, I know, neither of those paths is anything but rocky these days.) I'm good at running things. Could be I'm just bossy, but I can't seem to join an organization without ending up in charge of a lot. (Just a case of not getting my hand down fast enough?) I enjoy working in a group of smart, dedicated people like the Sisters in Crime board of directors and steering committee of the New England Crime Bake.

So how come I chose two fields that require long periods of solitude and introspection? Did I misfire in my twenties or just evolve in new ways? I think it's the latter. Or maybe simply procrastinating on the new book!

How about you guys? Any lost possible selves?

RO: If you're not going to be Patsy Cline, can I? Hmmm..I seem to wind up exactly where I'm supposed to be, even if I get there a little late - met my future husband and lost touch for years, so got married late, wrote my first book late, etc.

If there's one regret I'll admit to, deep down, I wish I had learned to play a musical instrument. Not that I have any fantasies about Carnegie Hall - btw -someone on the street in NYC asked me the classic question recently, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" (Practice?) The diet Red Bull nearly came out of my nose. But I'd love to be able to sit down at a piano and make music. I'm a bit jealous of people who can do that.

HALLIE: In 1968 I had a summer job lined up. I'd gone around New York getting internships for African graduate students and earned one for myself in Ghana's capital, Accra. My then boyfriend dropped me off at the airport and I made my way to the airline counter, hours early. Through a really dumb mix-up, I ended up temporarily misplacing my passport. By the time I found it, the check-in area had turned crowded and chaotic. When I finally reached the front of the line, the plane was full--a shady travel agent had overbooked it by about double. I was devastated. In tears at the prospect of returning to my parents apartment, tail between my legs. I tried calling my boyfriend to pick me up, but I would find out later he was already off with his not-so-ex-girlfriend.

I ended up spending the summer in Manhattan. I sublet an apartment on 118th Street and found a job working for the manager of Butler Hall, a Columbia-owned apartment/hotel. And I started dating a City University graduate student whom I'd dumped a few months earlier. By the fall we were engaged--we just celebrated our 39th anniversary.

I've often wondered who I'd be if I'd gotten on that plane.

RO: My god, what a great story!

Have you ever seen the movie Sliding Doors? Two parallel stories ...what happens to Gwyneth Paltrow if she makes the train or misses it....good, but not as romantic as Hallie's story.

HANK: Well, there's no way to follow Hallie's story. I always wonder about the choces we make, and the choices the universe seems to make for us. The road less travelled by, all that.

In high school, nerdy over-studious me was on the track to being valedictorian, getting into any college, etc. But in the summer before my senior year, I went to Germany to visit my Dad (my real father) who was in the foreign service there. Working at the embassy in Hamburg.

It was 1966, and I got all caught up in anti-war stuff. Music. Politics. The world got bigger. I stayed overseas through my first semester senior year, and when I got back to suburban Indianapolis, I fit in even less than before. I ignored college applications, figuring if I didn't get in becuase it was too late, I could go back to Europe where people "knew stuff." (Mom says that's what I told her.)

Mom and my step-father managed to force me into a very good college--where I sometimes even went to class. But when Kent State happened, I was done. I left, and went into politics, working in a political campaign as a press secretary. And my love of reporting, and journalism, and the news, was set.


It was those months in Germany--if I'd have stayed home, taken the road more travelled, lived up to "expectations," I never would have been a reporter. And certainly not a Jungle Red Writer.

(Hallie, what happened to the snake boyfriend?)

ON EARWORMS

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
******Percy Bysshe Shelley

HANK: I had an erudite and thoughtful idea for this week, I really did. All based on a Gail Caldwell column called Lingua Fracta. But then I read that RO's current favorite song is Walking After Midnight by Patsy Cline. A song I love, too. So I started humming it, and thinking about it. And that was days ago. And now it's in my way. I think they call them "earworms."

Now that you've heard that term, you can’t get it out of your head, right? And that’s exactly why I can’t listen to music when I write.

In the 60's I insisted I could not do my homework without listening to music. I had my little transistor radio, and I would put that plastic earpiece in, and bop around to Da Doo Ron Ron or I Get Around or It’s My Party. Dancing in the Street. Anything Beatles.

Today. I'm a TV reporter, have been for 30 years, and there’s not a moment of my workday when the television is not on. Sometimes three of them, all turned to different stations, all humming and buzzing in the background. And I ignore it, until my brain (is it the hypothalamus?) picks up on a word or phrase or sound that drags me to the remote to zap up the volume. Extraneous noise? Nope, it’s just the music of the news, and I’m used to it and embrace it.

But at home, writing, I cannot, cannot listen to music. It’s the earworm thing.

What’s an earworm? Let’s say you’re in the grocery, and that Muzak is on. Just in the background. And you have the misfortune to hear "It’s A Small World after All." Ahhhhh. That darn song is going to stick in your brain, humming over and over, forever. It’s an earworm.

How about Saturday in the Park by Chicago? (Saturday, in the park, I think it was the fourth of July…) Ah…stop. Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind… There’s a commercial for sour cream about "a dollop of daisy." Have you heard that? I heard it once, and sang it for about a week.

Hey, Macarena.

And so, I work in silence. If a song has words, they stick in my brain and play where my own words are supposed to be.
So can you manage music when you read or write?

JAN:
Not only can I NOT work with music on in the room, I can't work if the construction guys at my neighbor's house are blaring the radio as they install new garage doors. Really, the power tools don't bother me, but I've had to go next door and beg them to turn off the music.

I think it's called EASILY DISTRACTED. Or maybe -- Rather-be-listening-to-the-lyrics-than-writing-this-scene. But it's odd because I spent many years writing in a newsroom -- which is loud and chaotic. Of course, then I was on a tight deadline and there was a lot of peer pressure and editors on hand to help with the discipline.

I've never heard the term earworms, but its great. Perhaps its the pattern of melody that's the problem. Our brains want to keep track of the chorus - are ever-ready to chime in.

From watching too much baseball on NESN last year -- I had that god-awful Foxwoods jingle stuck in my head. The Wonder of It All -- and I HATED those commercials. When the kids were little we used to listen to Sesame Street tapes in the car and for years - it seemed-- I had PUT DOWN THE DUCKY and the MONSTER MASH worming their way though my ears.

I take two Pilates classes, in one, the music is wonderful, and I never think about it afterward, in the other, its one Euro-pop song after another. You can barely make out the lyrics for all the reverb, but these innane melodies get cemented into my head. Which leads me to another question for debate: does only the annoying music get stuck, or do we simply not mind if a good song continues to play and play and play?

HALLIE:
Earworms, ick. Sounds like earwigs, which I can easily imagine slithering into an ear. I wonder if you could turn them off by eating some really stinky cheese or listening to the Nixon tapes.

I don't get earworms so much as noseworms. Smells that haunt me. Fresh baked bread. Watermelon. Bar-b-que flavor potato chips. It usually haunts me until I'm driven into the kitchen to forage. This is a major disadvantage of working at home.

RO:
You guys are cracking me up. Sorry for having caused this but if you've got to have something stuck in your head, better to have Patsy Cline than the damn Foxwoods jingle. (Was it the playoffs last year? It drove me crazy..oh yeah, pop a cork, like those guys are all drinking champagne...)

I write longhand first, then put on computer. First time, I couldn't possibly listen to music, or anything. (Like my neighbor's children who don't know how lucky they are to still be alive.) Entering on computer, I'll sometimes have a game on in the background.

The good songs get stuck too. The Clash frequently take up residence in my little brain - "darlin' you got to let me know..." but more often it's the excruciating stuff. I had to stop taking my spin class because the instructor kept playing "My Humps" and it was unseemly for a grown woman to be walking around singing about her lovely lady lumps, which I found myself doing on Tuesday afternoons.

HANK:
Someone told me: if you get an earworm, the only cure is to sing Jingle Bell Rock. Okay, I know. It sounds weird. But it does seem to work.Do you have your personal earworms? Tell us—if you dare!