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Watching the Watchers as a Peach Tree Blossoms
Outside my studio window there’s a slope of wild shrubs and grasses – and in the middle of it, there’s a peach tree. Once a year it blooms for about a week. That week is happening now. I caught this branch just before twilight a couple nights ago....
1974-1988 Music School to Jazz Harp Trio (Chronology 2)
I started writing an outline of my life a few years ago for a TV producer who asked for an overview of my life. Like a lot of the content I’ve created, it’s waited patiently on a shelf. Last week was my birthday, and I made a commitment to myself: this...
Caught in the Spell
This blog is about a song, and this is the song: [audio: https://hipharp.com/cv/audio/ap2/10_caughtinspell_ap2.mp3] There were nights when I would walk through a deserted Pt. Reyes Station, with Black Mountain looming. I was 17 or 18, in love with a kid from town and...
Why Hair is Curly
Carol and Michael and I lived up above the Dance Palace, along with Emery, my dog. At one point, Sparks, who lived up the hill, started taking all his dinners with us, which was great, because Sparks actually knew how to cook. My culinary repertoire was spaghetti and...
Marin Memoires (List of Blogs)
40 years ago I left the place I loved to learn to be a musician. The place was Pt. Reyes Station in Marin County and the journey brings me back to the very spot of my first performance, where I’ll give a solo show 2013 at the Pt. Reyes Dance Palace in West...
Finding the Dance Palace
When I left High School a few weeks before graduation – because, what was the point of graduating? – I joined a true dropout, my friend Jan, and her boyfriend Marty – a bona fide bearded hippy, and drove from LA up to a town called Bolinas, just north of San...
When I was a Prescription
I worked in the West Marin Medical Center as a receptionist for doctors Whitt, Sokolosky and Kozinki from the time I was about 17 until I was 19 or 20. It was the only time in my life that I had a real job. I was the one who sent out the monthly bills, a...
Postal Celebrity
Condition #1: I am easily star-struck. And then I get shy, and I can’t say anything. Or I say too much, or say stupid things. Condition #2: I’ve always thought of postal workers as celebrities. Especially post-masters. I think it’s because, when I was 7, I met the...
The Moment I Became a Musician
There was a moment when I made the transition in my life from person-who’s-passionate-about-music to professional musician. It sits in a picture frame in my mind, the moment of realization. I lived, then, just north of Pt. Reyes Station, California – in an old...
