Eclectic Company: Serendipitously, Goddesses

My law school best friend Laura tells me I should hand out buttons to my friends and acquaintances with the legend “I Know Leslie Berman, Do You?” because there are rarely six degrees of separation between me and others. Buttons, or maybe t-shirts, would help my ad hoc matchmaking sideline. Hmm. Maybe I could cover my phone bill if I sold them.

Laura was the beneficiary of one of my friendship matchups a few months back. I was visiting her in San Francisco, and introduced her to my friends Rosemary, a former New York music critic who’s lived in Frisco for a long time, and her husband Glenn, who’s taken up winemaking with a few pals. I thought they would all have things in common, and they did. But at the end of our evening, a chance mention of Laura’s prior New York employer led to the realization that Rosemary’s late and former mother-in-law had been a friend of Laura’s from her prior workplace! Here we were 3,000 miles and at least a dozen years from where and when their lives had already missed crossing. What were the odds they’d be in the same place again, so I could introduce them years later when the woman who would have connected them directly was gone?

Laura seems to be right about my two degrees of separation life – but I attribute my matchmaking abilities to the sheer volume of my acquaintance. This all probably started when I was in grade school (PS 39, kindergarten and first grade, PS 215, second and third grade, and finally PS 104, 41 kids in my sixth grade class), expanded when I was in Junior High School (JHS 180, so many kids that two of us were selected to play each role in the school plays, and the extracurricular chorus led to glory by Mr. DiNapoli had 300 members), and grew exponentially when I was in Far Rockaway High School (5,000 kids, triple session school days), because I’m a product of the post-war baby boom. Of course, going to three different grade schools and a humungous Hebrew School (Shaaray Tefilah, four afternoons and Sunday mornings each week for six years), and music lessons, dance lessons, youth groups, cheerleading, theatre clubs, and my extended family (I was told there were 69 members of the cousins club on my mother’s side of the family in my grandmother’s generation) meant I had already rubbed shoulders regularly with thousands of people before I was 18 years old.

It stands to reason that with so many folks in my history, I would run into some of them, or some in their circle, sometime, somewhere. I used to take a lot of this for granted, but recently even I’ve been amazed by the serendipitous connections I find in unexpected places. I mean, there we were, at a random social gathering, when the POSSLQ dragged me to meet a woman who grew up down the street from me in Far Rockaway. Literally, down the street. Where I lived, next to the Indian graveyard, until I was six. Five years older than me, so we didn’t meet growing up. But still.

And then, last week, there were the Folk Goddesses at the Ethical Humanist Center in Garden City, Long Island. I’m always pleased to find old acquaintances in new settings, and to see how our separate histories have somehow traveled in their independent arcs until we’ve circled around to meet up again. When our common ground is music, I’m even happier to remake their acquaintance.

In the 1970s I was living in Syracuse, New York, and briefly running The Beggar’s Cup coffeehouse upstairs in the Marshall Street firehouse with some friends in Cranberry Lake Pickin’ and Singin’ Society, a jug band formed after a summer program at the state Forestry School. Syracuse had incredible musicians playing just about every musical style you’d want to hear; among the talent there was an all-girl bluegrass band that soon moved up to regional and national gigs, and so it goes, on to Nashville. The gals (who are still playing music, mostly) included Susie Monick on banjo (a female Tony Trischka or Bela Fleck, check out her early jazzgrass Melting Pots album cover), Nancy Josephson on standup bass (now in the Angel Band, and married to uber-guitarmensch and violin-maker David Bromberg), a fiddler, a mandolin-player, and a deep-voiced guitarist and songwriter, Martha Trachtenberg. Now, 30 years of marriage and a college-age son later, Trachtenberg holds down one-third of the Folk Goddesses, when not playing solo or with her guitar-god husband Tom Griffith.

Live onstage, the Goddesses are a folk Andrews Sisters, hinting at that even jazzier/sexier group The Boswell Sisters, with their tangy harmonies, Trachtenberg’s woman’s bass voice and rock steady rhythm guitar, Hillary Foxsong’s dumbek (goblet-drum) and percussive fills, and Judith Zweiman’s lead guitar and scat singing. Zweiman is alumna of the Greenwich Village Fast Folk singer/writer collective, and her songs appear on several of their albums which are now housed at the Smithsonian (yes, Judith says she’s finally become a museum piece. Snort.). Foxsong is the one I hadn’t heard before, though she’s in a group called Gathering Time with a pretty nifty guy I’ve heard singing around at Exceedingly Good Song Nights, my monthly a cappella singing fix held in the backroom of Jimmy’s 43 on 7th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

The Goddesses’ songs were pretty wonderful – great lyrics, great tunes. I kept thinking this song should be on the radio. I’m especially partial to “Go To Hell” (if you’re tired of Miami) and “I Want To Break Your Heart” (to see what’s inside), both by Trachtenberg, Zweiman’s “I’m Gonna Buy A New Outfit” (retail therapy) and Foxsong’s “What Love Can Do” (“love has cornered me in dark alleys / it’s rifled through my pockets and stolen my heart”). They sang each other’s words in beautiful, smart, inventive and sassy arrangements, with a few guest appearances by Folk God and hubby Tom, and I didn’t want them to stop. Neither did anyone else in the audience. So they gave us a couple more. Yeah.