Eclectic Company: How I Spent My Birthday Week

Birthdays are big deals in my family, courtesy of my mother’s love of a big dinner party with immediate family, and the opening of presents. Not to mention, it’s my mother’s birth day each time we celebrate, because she (as she reminds us) did all the heavy lifting of actually birthing us, while we just splashed our way into what grew to be a relatively large clan. As we’ve all (my four sibs, their spouses, and children, plus two more sibs acquired through my mother’s second marriage, and their spouses and children and grandchildren) grown older, and had our own families’ and in-laws’ schedules to accommodate as well as mom’s, birthday meals have moved to restaurants with whoever’s free on the weekend day closest to the event. This year it was mom and sisters Allison and Jocelyn, and our brother and sister-in-law by marriage, David and Susan, on the prior Sunday, for lunch at my current favorite Kosher delicatessen, The Lido of Long Beach. Corned beef and pastrami on rye, natch, a kasha knish, plenty of deli mustard, garlic sour pickles, and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. Yum! One of my all-time favorites and an absolutely perfect meal. Now you know what to make for me if you invite me over for lunch.

When I realized I’d be on the road on my birthday, I emailed a few old friends who live along the route from my sister’s place in Woodmere, Long Island, to Albany, the capital of New York, and arranged for a few nights of catching up. Much to my surprise, my friend (and first guitar teacher when I was 12) had scheduled a concert series at the local library, with a performance the night I’d be there, which happened to be my birthday. Sonny Ochs assured me I’d love Nancy Tucker, who she described as a funny songwriter/former stand-up comedian. What an understatement!

In a small room off the main library corridor, and in 30 seats arranged in five rows, Tucker set up two guitars and a case on a table at the front of the room, and a case of CDs on a table at the back. Tucker is a slight pixie, who could be any age from 15 to thirty-something, but actually turned out to be in her late 50s! She speaks (and sings) in gentle, warm, and consistantly funny aphorisms and one-liners, almost drunk on language, and not surprisingly for a former biology professor, she sings a lot about nature. And threatens the audience with a humerus bone, if they don’t laugh on cue. I have never before heard anyone so fascinated with the sounds of bugs that their songs scraped along guitar strings imitating the chirping and scratching of wings and legs. Her instrumental, “Grasshopper’s Holiday,” was an amazing walking tune. You can get a taste of that kind of virtuosity on her YouTube video “Insects On Parade”.

“I called my mom from my cell phone, and she started crying,” Tucker said, her mouth turning up in her trademark sweet, sad smile. “Then I realized she thought I was calling from jail,” said the imp inside the teacher, whose smile widened as one by one, the audience got the gentle joke. “Outrageous, squeaky clean comedy,” said the Torrington, Connecticut Register Citizen, and for 90 minutes, that’s what she was. Only two days before St. Patrick’s Day, and the internet ringing with stories of whole classrooms of kids setting leprechaun “traps,” we (a crowd ranging in age from four to 84) were spellbound for Tucker’s entire show. And Tucker and the whole audience sang a lusty version of "Happy Birthday" to me! At the end of the night, I picked up a couple of Tucker's early albums, featuring none of the songs she performed that night, and after one listen, I already love them. You will too. More Nancy Tucker info at, what else? www.nancytucker.info.

On my way home after three intense days learning special trial practice skills, I stopped in at singer/songwriter Peggy Atwood’s “Monolithic” domes – a pair of interior and exterior concrete-sprayed spherical domes connected by a round-roofed tunnel walkway, up on a mountain near New Paltz, New York. The domes are finished off with gorgeous woodwork, lots of soft-edged wooden and wrought iron furniture inside, and smiling concrete eyebrows over the windows and doorways outside. The interior track lighting and lamps illuminate the circles and arches with muted and subtle shading. Individual glass blocks are placed seemingly at random and in a few groups of four on both orbs. The rooms are pie shaped or irregularly framed, but the whole is harmonious; it’s one of the most peaceful buildings I’ve ever been in, even though it’s unfinished. The domes, by the way, take no hurricane or tornado insurance riders – their shape makes them invisible to such weather phenomena.

Atwood was a military and diplomatic brat, her dad having been the architect of Japan’s reconstruction after WWII, and she and her sibs moved around the world for years, and were once evacuated from Beirut. I couldn’t stop talking and listening to her through a fabulous bouillabaisse dinner at a Kerhonkson restaurant, and herbal tea in the domes, and early afternoon late breakfast omelette. We talked about Anita Hill (“she was robbed”) and the sensibilities of women our age, and Woodstock generation stories and concerns. When we talked music biz, she pressed the Northern Country CDs on me. The first one is a disc of her own songs, written some years back, but remastered and re-released as an mp3 file. The second and third are also titled Northern Country (Samplers #1 and #2), referring to the sound and sensibilities of northeast songwriters with country music in their veins, and feature nearly 20 voices between singers and writers who performed for a series Atwood ran regularly at Harmony — a concert venue in downtown Woodstock, New York. Atwood’s instrumental music is heard on the soundtracks of many TV episodes and films, but check out her lyrics and smoky alto vocals at www.peggyatwood.com, and see what “Northern Country” means.