My Life in 6 Songs: Part IV- The Sound of Music

Friends and Sisters

Last week my sister and I drove over the mountains from her home near San Francisco to Las Vegas. It was a long, and grueling, and also very pretty trip. I got the first speeding ticket I have ever gotten in my life when we were streaking along in the Nevada desert night after having to stop for 1) a jackknifed big rig on the 2-lane Sonora Pass 2) multiple construction sites, and just trying to GET THERE. It was late. I was going too fast. There are burros on that road. 'Nuf said.

The reason for the trip was to reconnect with my childhood friend, Bonnie. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and facebook, I was able to find her last year around Christmas. We have been emailing since, and had finally come up with a plan to meet in, of all places, Las Vegas.  She flew from our hometown, Rochester, New York, to Pensacola, Florida to meet up with HER sister and her sis's boyfriend. They slammed across the country in 36 hours in a Ford Taurus and got to Vegas several days before Lee and me, but we met them bright eyedthe next morning under the Arch d'Triomph of Gay Paris for breakfast.

The non-stop talkfest began immediately, and it was easy to remember why we had gotten in so much trouble as kids for talking during class. We caught up on classmates, family and each other. Bonnie's sister headed to the casinos after breakfast (she is very lucky and won lots of money) while Lee, Bonnie and I wandered from hotel bar to hotel bar in the 110 degree heat, sipping cold drinks, stopping into a few shops and talking all the while.

What does any of this have to do with The Sound of Music? Well, Bonnie and I were friends through the 10 years between 2nd grade and when I graduated and left town after 11th grade. She played clarinet and I played cello. Eventually I played tuba and French horn too. We sang in the choirs. We played in the pit orchestras. We were in every music group together for eight of those 10 years. We stomped around the snowy fields of our suburb, played Clue (she always won) and rode bikes, learned about sex from another girl hanging around the apple trees in the vacant lot and dated boys who were also best friends. We walked to school together in the predawn cold of a Rochester winter, except when her dad drove us to school in their Ford Falcon.  And the one thing that we shared all through those years was our love of music.

In about 5th or 6th grade, I became infatuated with two movies. The first was Mary Poppins. The soundtrack recording of this movie was one of the first records I ever owned. I knew every song, and could sing them with proper English pronunciations. I thought Julie Andrews was marvelous, and I wanted to BE her.

But there was another movie that Bonnie kept telling me about. She had the record and we listened to it over and over on her little stereo in a suitcase on the floor of her bedroom. THIS was the movie to end all movies. If you like Julie Andrews, you are going to LOVE this! Finally, I got to see The Sound of Music. I don't really even remember the circumstances of the actual viewing of the movie. But, yes, this movie had it ALL over Mary Poppins. It was for adults, a serious story, a love story. The songs were about adult things. Learning those songs, and singing them gave me glimpses into adult life. Nuns, Nazis, the Alps, teenage betrayals, a stern father relearning to love his children: this was epic.

Together, Bonnie and I learned The Lonely Goatherd, and performed it as a duet for our class during General Music class (yes, we had such a class in those days). I remember that she knew the words better than I. It was the silliest song in the whole show, and maybe that choice was a reflection of our not-yet-ready-to-leave-childhood state of mind, but The Sound of Music was a jumping off place for becoming my own musician. It was a grownup musical, unlike Mary Poppins, which was obviously for kids.

Until that time, the music I had listened to was pretty much the same as the music my parents listened to. Bonnie, in turning me on to SoM, became one of my first non-family music influences, and she and I continued to influence each other's musical experience through high school. When I think of anything having to do with music as a child, she is almost always there in my mind. As we chatted fast and furious in Las Vegas on a hot summer day in 2011, this influence came back into focus, and I felt reconnected not only to my childhood BF, but to my own musical roots.

My life in 6 Songs: Part III Water Music

7 a.m. in the Crocker household at 10 Ironwood Dr. in Rochester NY. The family is stirring, beginning the day. From the radio in early years, and the homemade stereo "hi-fi" tuner in later years sounds the reveille that accompanied the morning every day for the 17 years I lived with my parents: George Frederick Handel's Water Music- specifically the Hornpipe in D that was the sign-on signature from WBBF-FM 91.5 on your FM dial.

Dad was a guy who had to have the radio going, tuned to his favorite radio station every day from Water Music to the National Anthem. The classical play list of WBBF was the background of all activity in our household, and is the reason I didn't know much about pop music till I left home. Such was Dad's dependence on his personal soundtrack that he installed speakers in both bathrooms, the dining room, the basement and the back patio. With kits purchased from Craig Audio Shack, he rigged up elaborate switches to control which speakers were playing, so it would be possible for us to watch TV in the living room, while he enjoyed a Mahler Symphony in the backyard.

Dad was an expert on this music, and would confidently announce the composer and name of a piece playing whose introduction he had missed (how? Walking from the car where the radio was also permanently tuned to WBBF? Walking from one room to the next? In the flush of a toilet? Or the buzz of a saw during a building project of which there were many? ) I was always amazed that he knew so many of the pieces, could identify them within a few moments. When I asked him how he knew so much, he said it was from his days as an usher in a theater in Minneapolis where he grew up. I guess instead of Coke-sponsored trivia quizzes on the screen accompanied by up-and-coming pop artists, the movie theaters of yesteryear played classical music for their patrons.

Many years after I left home, my parents retired and bought a house on 20 acres near Columbus, Ohio. My sisters and I loved this rural retreat with its woods full of songbirds and spacious grounds including a small pond perfect for swimming and puttering around in various dilapidated watercraft.

One day, after a compressed year of school and who-knows-what other kinds of stress, my older sister and I visited the "farm" for some R&R. We decided to take a ride in the crummy rowboat that spent most of its time upside down on the grass. We pictured ourselves languidly floating around in the green water, chatting and listening to the quiet. But here came Dad, sliding open the doors to the large garage and pulling out two large speakers, aiming them right at us! Just in time for Shostakovitch 5 he told us! Here, you can listen from right where you are! If you know this piece, you can imagine that it was just the thing to destroy the mood of a bucolic afternoon shutting up the birds and thwarting any quiet chat. My sister and I just shook our heads. Some things never change.

Nowadays, I am called upon to play cello occasionally for weddings with a local string quartet. Almost every time out, we play the Hornpipe from Water Music, either as prelude music, for cocktails or sometimes for the wedding itself. Dad has been gone for over a decade already, and WBBF is thousands of miles away. I wonder if they still play Hornpipe every morning. But always, every time we play that piece, memories of early childhood morning in the Crocker household fill the space just behind my eyes. And when I listen to our Southern California KUSC classical radio station and miss the introduction of the piece, I amaze myself that I can confidently name the composer, if not always exactly the name of the work. Thanks, Dad.