Singing a Little Differently

Singing is different now.

Like, really, really different.

I gave a concert on Friday took under an ancient Provençal oak tree, in a garden which is straight out of a Midsummer Nights Dream.

I’m serious. I kept expecting Titania and her faery friends to leap out of the branches.

Hosted by my beautiful friends and neighbors Elaine and TG, here in Les Baux, the first half was a poetry reading, second half, music by yours truly and my cellist friend, Ruth.

Afterwards, homemade Indian food for everyone.

It was the kind of musical evening I rarely had in the Before Times, back when I was living out of a suitcase in sterile Ibis hotels, living in airports and on airplanes and seeing lots of new cities but usually only the flourescent-lit dressing room of the theater and the inside of one restaraunt.

But it was *exactly* the kind of evening I used to have as a student in Berlin, when a bunch of us would gather in someone’s flat, the house all golden and candle-lit, and someone would cook a big pot of soup, and everyone got up to offer a song or a poem and we’d listen sitting on pillows on the floor in sock-feet.

It was the kind of evening I stopped having once I started having “a career.”

Friday in my neighbors garden was about poetry and music but it was really about community and neighbors and friends sharing beauty, and sharing love, and holding each other up in these times when we cannot physically hold each other.

Under the oak tree, there were no theater acoustics, no costumes, no light-director, no orchestra, no sound technicians, no make-up artists.

I sang things like O Mio Babbino Caro,  La Vie en Rose and Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

The wind blew noisily and a motorcycle vroomed  by AGAIN and the crickets almost upstaged us.

But it felt like exactly the medicine we all needed.

The neighbors all came. Masks were worn by virtually all.

Lovely Marie who brought me bread and marmalade, and Gerard who came with jumper cables when my car battery died. Marie-France and Rejan who taught this city-slicker how to care for her mint and basil plants came. Jacques entire human family came. Little Tia put on her nice party dress. Her mom even let her wear lipstick and before the concert started, I saw Jacques and noticed the white fur on his face was covered in pink lipstick kisses where she had kissed him.

And I felt safe and at home.

I always knew this was true, but one of the best and most healing things in life is to make music with friends, for friends.

It’s very painful not to have our musical homes open for us now and nothing is the same but we still have this.