Road Trip

Road Trips. How I love them.

I still don't have a licence, but I totally and completely buy into the dream of the American open road. Manifest Destiny! Capital F Freedom! I used to be surprised at the sameness of the views from the highways- long wide stretches, plains and hills, shades of green and gold and brown, occasional livestock...- but when you spend hours, really hours, looking out the windows you realize that it's not a sameness, but a slow creeping change. It's the middle. The in-between. Not quite all-the-way change, but a range of shades. I think that this is what makes it different from driving for hours on end in France or Spain or England or Germany. Eventually, in Europe, you hit a border. Here, our interstate misses the distinction that different countries can lend. I mean, when you cross the border into Switzerland, you know it. There are places you have to stop and talk to people in official-looking hats and suddenly all the houses look different. On US highways, difference is couched in similarity. Maybe what I like isn't the idea of discovering a new world, but some secret inside expanse of an existing one. One with rest stops.

Granziella's

I love rest stops. I love the weird non-space you find in the square-mile indoors of Granziella's and the freeway-side taco stands. I love the people at rest stops who linger because they want to be where they're going but they really want an excuse to stand and roam freely through olive bars and plastic-molded picnic tables and surprise regional specialties. 

I got the opportunity to go North with the band I've been singing with. Hernandez Hideaway took two cars for its six members, and we headed from El Cerrito to Eugene early morningish after a Tuesday night rehearsal. Hit the road around 9 and rolled at least a good 20 minutes before stopping for gas. It was, of course, only the beginning.

One thing I dig about road trips is that the non-space gets filled by all this frivolous and sometimes sneakily important stuff. You get to consume things you wouldn't touch otherwise. It's like everywhere you stop is that island Pinnochio goes to where everything is deliciously sinful and you know you have to leave before you get too drawn in. Our violin player bought at least two bags of  Pork Skins. A liter of Huckleberry milkshake did it for our bassist, whose temple-bodied organic farmer hands gripped that styrofoam monolith so smoothly, so lovingly. Fritos and Original flavor Corn Nuts for our trombonist. Egg-cheese-sausage biscuits for our saxophonist and accordionist. I don't remember where we were when I saw the Pop Tarts Ice Cream Sandwich. Washington? I only regret that it was breakfast time. Taste America.

We hit the Dairy Queen, Subway, a roadside taco stand, a diner with a picture of Not The Biggest Dog but Close on the register and an EAT sign out on the road, and a decent handful of truckstops equipped with showers and car-maintenance aisles and, inexplicably, display cases of blown-glass collectibles. These were not the highlights of the trip. Of course. We made a fire in the dark in Oregon and drank beer and roasted marshmallows. We dipped our wiggling toes in the river and our naked bodies in the boiled-egg smelling hot springs. We greeted people in Portland and Seattle and a lovely spot called Gig Harbor and played music in bars and danced and celebrated a wedding and ran amuck in new venues and with old friends. That was great, lovely, the REAL point of the trip. But for me, it was during those shared moments in the cars and booths and gas pumps that I felt like we were growing together. Girl talk in the gear-stuffed but so much more comfy 4x4. Conversations in the front seat of the sedan about family and music and choices and directions and bug corpses on the windshield. Pillow organization in the backseat, the naming and slow consuming of Mister Cabbagehead, who rode all the way up but only  part of the way back down.

Mister Cabbagehead. In memoriam.

And all that bonding between important moments gets stored like so much LSD in the fat cells generously provided by the wonderfully nutritionless stuff we put in our bellies. She may forget the conversation about surprise adulthood and life changes, but it will live on in the 5 pounds she gained on the six day trip. Just like you can build memory into muscle, I think road trips whip up a special kind of padding that shapes the way you see things, or at least the way you will hold yourself for a little while. Like some physical memory. A souvenir. I wonder if, when we burn off these calories, we'll tap into the same feeling of scenery flying by and similarity morphing into difference while the faces and profiles of our companions stay the same. 

Can You Handel It?

Georgie Handel himself

Christmas time has come and gone. New year's day as well. Now, a time to reflect, to ponder, to look forward with the wisdom of another year. A time to ask such burning questions as: Why could I not find a Sing-Along Messiah in San Francisco??

For the last decade or so, I have been able to belt out yearly Hallelujah choruses and ridiculous melisma, sometimes accompanied by baroque orchestras, sometimes by solo organ. I have been able to socially breeze across voices in a hodgepodge of choir-members and weekend singers, singing alto with my lower-voiced buddies, soprano I with the high pipers, outside of the restrictions of "rehearsal" and "assigned parts". More often than not this happened in the American Cathedral on George V, led by a spirited choir director expertly hiding fear of losing the reigns of the packed and weighty-voiced house. 

As I was on the board of the Paris Choral Society, I was charged with getting the word out, and I always depended on touting the grand tradition of a Handel's Messiah Sing-Along to a susceptible French audience. But it appears I was full of lies. Did I make it up? Is singing the Messiah alongside a trained choir not a thing we do in the States?

PCS Sing-Along in action

I was certain that some opportunity to whip out my well-worn sheet music would come along. But no. Oh, there were plenty of Messiahs out there, but I couldn't find a single one that would encourage the audience to join in. Perhaps I was not sufficiently observant, but I was nonetheless outraged. I didn't want to LISTEN. I wanted to EMOTE VOCALLY. I took to singing it from beginning to end as I walked through the city. I put it on at every opportunity, hoping to spark a flash-mob. 

But it didn't happen. I was reduced to attempting to get my family humming on Christmas Eve, to no avail. I suppose America is not quite what my rose-colored memory retained.

Although, since this is a choral-oriented post, one thing San Francisco HAS offered in that realm was a FABULOUS semi-amateur choir rendition of Orff's Carmina Burana (of car commercial and pop canon fame). I attended because a friend was singing, and was delighted. The singing was nice, the orchestra too, but the best part was the showmanship. During O Fortuna (the big one A-AAh A-AAh, A-AAh A-AAh, A-AAh-a-aah- AAh. AAh. AAh), the singers held tiny LED flashlights to their faces as if telling ghost stories. During the Tavern movement (basically about men drinking in the tavern and how great it is), the choir shined the same lights through what looked like owl masks at the audience. Fabulous. Oh, and the soloists had three costume changes each. Including the tenor, who made all his onstage during his one dying-swan aria. 

When we performed Carmina Burana in Paris, I remember having to wear flowers in my hair, but that was it (well, it's possible the male choristers sported potato sacks, but maybe I made that up). Our crowning glory was found in the flurry of young modern dancers in colorful leotards that came in and out of the aisles during instrumental movements. The San Francisco Choral Society? Same dancers. From the Champs Elysées to Davies Hall, semi-pro choral scene brings kitsch and swooping drama. Wonderful, comforting consistency. My heart is a little warmer for it. 

Hallelujah.