The Reluctant Non-Stepmother .... ©2002 Deborah Henson-Conant

From Reluctant Non-Stepmother to Family Music Director –
One Woman’s odyssey into Family Life, Lemonade Commerce and Composing for an Odd Quintet.

Here’s the equation as I learned it when I was about five: Family + Time Together = Music. Everyone sang, and you’d know who was coming by the accompanying repertoire. Patriotic Songs = Dad. Folk Songs = Grandmother #1. Yiddish humming = Grandmother #2. And my mother – yikes! My mother sang EVERYTHING – from English folk songs to the Blues to Opera!

There was no such thing as background music for my mother. According to her, the underlying motivation of the entire Muzak industry was to provide her with orchestral accompinament while shopping. And she did not sing discreetly. My mother was a Grocery Store Diva. I spent many a shopping excursion trying to pretend I was NOT with the woman belting out “Misty” in the frozen food aisle.

Was this embarrassing?

Yes.

Do I do it now, myself?

I refuse to answer on the grounds it may incriminate me (la-la-la).

When I was seven my mom taught me to play the ukulele. And at 10, she showed me how to read “jazz charts” on the piano. By 13 I was able to accompany her on popular tunes like “Girl from Ipanema” and … you guessed it …“Misty.” Obviously this had been her grand plan all along.

Whatever her ulterior motive, it solidified music as my first language and as the solid ground of family relations.
CUT TO THE LATE 90’s. After planning never to have kids, I fall in love with a man who has three of them. Suddenly all of us are living together for a year, along with a German Au Pair, in a house in Cambridge. I have obviously never wanted to be a mother, much less a stepmother. Plus, the kids already have a mother. But here we all are and I’m getting more desperate by the week, trying to figure out what my role in the family is.

Then one day, my friend Mercedes Emails me about her family rehearsals and suddenly a light bulb goes on in my head. “Ha!” I think, “That’s my role! I’m the family music director!”

So I institute Sunday night rehearsals and our Au Pair aptly names the group Half-a-Dozen-Monkeys. We perform for grandparents and guests, and it feels almost like home to me.

But then the year is over; we start seeing the kids only every other weekend and the Au Pair returns to Germany. The kids are learning musical instruments in school, so they’re not as interested in family rehearsals. And then we move, and we can’t get even the piano up the stairs into our family room. It feels like our music days are over.

Then one day, I get an idea. I write out a little blues arrangement that we can all play together: Leah (age 11) on flute, Ben (age 7) on drums, Zoe (age 14) on piano, Jonathan, my boyfriend, on tuba and me on violin (I can’t really play it, but the kids are new at their instruments, too, so it’s a chance for me to pick up an instrument I’ve always wanted to play). As bad as we sound, you can still kind of tell we’re playing the blues.

I arrange a couple more tunes and we have fun practicing together. Sometimes, when our windows are open, people stop in the street below and clap.

So this summer comes and the kids are going to stay with us for a month, and we pull together all our tunes and we practice and suddenly we realize: we have a “Repertoire!” We have nearly 4 tunes we can kind of play as a family! And we decide that, since we live near a bike path, why not set up our band out under the tree, play music and sell lemonade? So we do. And the kids make money! So I arrange some MORE tunes, and we make MORE lemonade, and this time we put up a poster. And even more people buy lemonade and clap, and sing along and hold our music when the wind blows.

I head down to the Cambridge Arts Council to buy the family Street Performer’s Licenses (Harvard Square here we come!) and while I’m buying them, Jane Beal, the community arts director there, asks me if I’ll be on their “Summer in the City” family concert series. I was planning on taking the summer off to finish an album, but a sudden thought comes to me: “Can the kids play, too?” I ask. And Jane says “Uh … well .. sure!”

So this Wednesday, our family band has its first ever public appearance (aside from the Lemonade Concerts, of course) at 7:00 pm in Raymond Park (Cambridge) as part of the “Summer in the City” series.
Come hear such family favorites as: Pava Diablo, New Blues, Don’t Feed the Geese, Big Bad Bug Bud and Belinda (the beautiful tree). Following the concert, a movie (not about us) will be shown outdoors in the park.
The Von Trapps we’re not, but we’re having a good time.