Dog Story

Meet Flaco (pictured). I saw Victor Medina's photo of his dog in a coffee shop and immediately fell in love with Flaco. I contacted Victor and he gave me permission to use his picture as a mascot for our shows. And, with his permission, here is how he tells the story of his dog, Flaco:

“This is a picture of my dog, named "Flaco" (Spanish for ‘skinny’). In Mexico, where I grew up playing soccer in the streets, it was friendly to call someone ‘Flaco’ or ‘Gordo’ (fat). Seriously, it is okay and friendly to call your friend ‘Flaco’ or ‘Gordo.’ I’m an equine veterinarian working with my wife Dr. Nicole Eller-Medina in a practice and on our horse farm. Flaco is a Standard Poodle/Wired Hair German Pointer mix. I work part time in a small animal hospital, where we do some surgeries for the Tri-county Humane Society (spays and neuters). It happened that one day I got there and there he was. I asked who was the owner of such a cool dog and I was told that he was from the Humane Society and was available for adoption. That day he came back home with me. He is an absolutely wonderful dog who makes me laugh a lot. When I think about it, it was some kind of love at first sight. I took this picture a month after he came home and was playing with our other dogs. He was looking so funny that I had to get the camera and shoot some pictures.”

Children seem to know all about this, but, by the time we're adults many of us have had it shamed out of us. I'm saying I'm falling and have fallen for Flaco, and find joy in his unambiguous, playful and stout heart. Some athletes have this. Don't heroes in the folk tales have this?

And, I admire Victor and the tenderness of heart he has for Flaco. I figure that anything I can do to keep this heart alive in myself and others, I hope to do. Probably, those who have these hearts and wish to keep them must have fierce protection strategies. I think we have to look out for that nasty Lord Byron and his admirers. Some women fall for Mr. Byron and his ilk, and usually suffer for having done so. I think we must have our shield of virtue clearly in place, and, if anyone reaches to diminish or eat our hearts, we can do a quick Aikido move.

I can't attribute it (help me if you know where this comes from), but I think it is true that there are at least three times when it is important to be gullible. (1) When I am with my art, (2) when I am with my lover, and (3) when I am with my God. Artists, lovers and the pious I trust seem to know that nothing happens without this vulnerability. I think this is true.

I don't want to be Lord Byron. I don't want to be "cool" in the way he was cool. I don't want to be cynical, world weary or ironic. I want to be just like Flaco, and do just about everything with that feeling that Victor has for Flaco.

Dogs figure prominently in world folk traditions. I stumbled upon this Welsh folk reference to Gelert, and this story about Saint Guinefort, the dog revered as a saint by a never officially recognized "cult" of the Catholic Church, until it was suppressed in the 1930's.

See more of Victor's work on his web site.

Grandfather's Throne

It was probably six years ago when I was in a busy copy shop in Uptown Minneapolis one morning and chanced upon my dear friend "David," with a little girl at his side, as they were on their way out after making some copies.

He gave me permission to tell this story.

That day, he gave me a warm smile and introduced me to his granddaughter, “Charlotte,” who gave me brief acknowledgement with a quick glance of her eyes. David was in his customary sweater and slacks. Charlotte, probably five years old, kept an imperious air. She had dark hair and eyes, and wore a crisp cotton dress with a belt, white socks and dress shoes. She clutched a doll in one arm. Her other arm was poised, lifted up from the elbow with her wrist tilted back slightly, and her fingers half open and pointing vaguely upward in kind of a regal wave. As I was introduced, she continued to maintain a private space between herself and her grandfather, giving me an impatient but gracious nod, but keeping her head tilted toward her grandfather as if they were being interrupted and were just about to resume their tender private conversation.

I felt a little left out. I usually got much more attention from David, but he, too, seemed to be waiting in suspension for the next sweet moment between himself and his granddaughter, and didn’t talk with me like he usually did. He explained to me while keeping his eyes on his granddaughter, “We’re having a day together…we have places to go…”

We chatted very briefly a bit longer. Then, I wished them well and bade them goodbye. Watching them leave, I vaguely wished I was going along with them, perhaps as a footman who would hold a hand as they alighted from a carriage or dash ahead to open a door.

At a small dinner party this past weekend, I told this story to our other dear friends, our hosts, whose son is expecting his first child, soon. This will make our friends first time grandparents. “I think there is something marvelous about to happen to you,” I said to our friends.

Then, last night, I saw my friend David again. Talking together, I reminded him about what happened in the copy shop long ago, and how his granddaughter was a grand princess sitting on her grandfather’s throne. David got a big heartfelt grin on his face as he remembered that day. Then he said of his granddaughter, who is now two months shy of twelve, “She doesn’t need her grandfather’s throne anymore. She has her own. She’s an amazing young woman!”

Do I need to say more? I pay attention to stories like this and carefully tuck them away for moments when they’re needed. I didn’t receive what Charlotte got, and yet I’m asked to give it. Many of us didn’t get what David gave his granddaughter and yet we are asked to give it. I have two grown daughters. No grandchildren yet. No hurry, I tell my daughters. But, when and if they come, I think I know what to do.

© 2011 Cristopher Anderson

All Rights Reserved

Heartbreak and Reassurance

Driving in the car to a Dancing Heart gig a few weeks ago, I asked my car mates if they wanted to hear some new music. Yes, I hear them say. I warn that it is folk music and that it can be intense. I hear, What – are we not intense?

Then I start the title cut from the Hungarian folk group Muzsikas of their 1982 LP/CD Nem ugy van most mint volt regen…(It Is Not Like It Used To Be). The snarling double bass breaks the silence and lays down a defiant, rhythmic line, going on like this for some moments. Then, over the bass, a tight, insistent, ornate fiddle twirls and tumbles like a bird startling and vaulting from the trees. After these two have established their flight together, on top of this, the moment is seized by the flat unadorned earthy plaints of traditional singer Marta Sebestyen. The three go on together in this way, unambiguously, for all to hear.

Then, car mate Peter reacts, “Oh my – heartbreak and reassurance at the same time…” The music is startling, bald, bold as a hero, sensual and knowing. The New York Times called it, "Ebullient...raucous."

Muzsikas is an extraordinary group with a performing, touring and recording career that started in 1972. They are responsible for carrying forward folk music traditions that otherwise would have been lost. I first came upon them when I bought their remarkable CD Maramaros: Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

I think I’m saying the obvious when I say many folk music players, singers, dancers and listeners go to the folk literature of stories, music and dance for a kind of soul food. We go for something that connects and nourishes us, through participation, to memory, emotion, beauty, and a sense of belonging. The music of Muzsikas can help engender this for me.

The folk corpus, taken as a whole, I believe, is about integrity – how to get it back after you’ve lost it, at a personal, interpersonal, village and larger level. I think it’s about how to make things whole. The Jungians and mythologists have written much about the dense psychological material embedded in the folk tales and sagas, and they show how they might be teaching stories, relevant to personal and community life. Intact indigenous peoples take care of their cultural stories as alive, precious and usually private, and involve themselves with them as a central part of community life.

I hunger for the feeling of integrity and wholeness, and I get glimpses of it now and then, and some of my deepest experiences of it can happen when I’m playing, singing, dancing or participating in a story. And that is why I keep coming back to the music, songs, dance and stories. And I keep hoping that I stay vulnerable to those flashes of beauty that might split my heart open to moments of communion with who and what is around me. Maybe the rich life is that lived with others inside a participatory folk opera of good heart?

Mid-Winter's Play

That's yours truly as Old Dame Jane, my wife as the Horse Doctor, daughter as Billy Pud, second daughter as Bold Slasher, making our salutes after our mummers play has ended at a recent holiday party. We sneaked down to the basement mostly unnoticed, donned costumes, then exited the side door to ring our own doorbell. We knew it was working when our dog, Romeo, didn't recognize us and set to barking at us (that's him in lower right).

Wikipedia says these death and resurrection folk plays, dating from medieval Europe are not to be confused with earlier mystery plays, but there seems to be some mystery in them.

What we know about this has come from maybe 25 years of participation, mostly as the visited, but also as players, with the Lowry Hill Players and the Ritual Drama Team, led by Rudd Rayfield. As in Europe a long time ago, mummers in strange costume traipse the streets during the Christmas holiday season, looking for good parties to crash. They start singing when the owner answers their knock on the door, and, in sung verse, they ask to be let in to perform their short play. Afterward, to song and dance, the players pass their purse for replenishment and gladly accept any offers to join the holiday party and table. It is a way to turn social norms up-side-down at least for one evening a year.

As a player, it is a nervy thing to knock on a stranger's door and ask to be admitted, especially in times of fear-mongering. Some homeowners blanch, scowl and shut their doors. Others are caught in the wonder, and slowly trust and come to joy and revelry with the strangers in their midst. Sometimes, guests at the party have the most difficulty, as they see their social status suddenly change right in the moment and they are suddenly made peers with a strange rabble that has been admitted by their host.

After the party one year, a friend who attended and who saw the mummers for the first time, confided in me that he was ready to grab them and haul them back outside. I know my first impulse can be to scream, run or want to fight when I encounter something strange and wild.

Here there is the thrill that comes after having taken such risks, both as players and as the admitting host, and having engaged the play-making that frames both life and that essential part of life – death – and then we recognize ourselves as still being alive and in the presence of good friends, and the smells and tastes of good food and drink. Ahhh!

Permission

The woman in the mink coat slumped down in her wheelchair in front of me is 101 years old. “Louise” has come with other elders from area nursing homes this December afternoon to watch the dress rehearsal of Kairos Dance Theatre’s recent show at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Take Me Back to Hip Harlem. She is someone I’ve come to know through participating in my wife Maria and Kairos’ Dancing Heart™ program for elders.

When I first met Louise in a Dancing Heart session, I heard that she is a former violinist who had played in the orchestra that preceded and became the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. She seemed slight, birdlike and old. At the end of our session, I went to her and asked if she wanted to hold my violin. She said, “No.” I asked again, and she again demurred. Then I handed it to her. With a look of horror, she accepted it, held it for as long as she thought she had to, then quickly gave it back to me, as if I had just done something terribly clumsy and stupid.

I became embarrassed, suddenly seeing my – until then – unconscious condescension and patronizing attitude toward her.

In subsequent sessions, I took more time to approach her, ask permission and wait until permission was granted. I came to experience her as very sensitive, precise, nuanced and heartfelt. She told me how she loved music and played it all her life. She could only listen now, she said, and her son sometimes brought her violin to her so she could hold it and smell it. She liked my playing in the group. I told her how I had come back to music about six years ago, loved playing the folk music, and was just feeling my way back into the music world. At the end of the sessions, I asked again if she wanted to hold my violin. She would say yes and I would hand it to her. She held it to herself expertly, cradling it, then drew it to her nose, and inhaled slowly and deeply the wood, varnish and rosin smells. Then, she would kiss my violin, hand it back to me and say, “Keep playing…”

Now, at the rehearsal, she is right at the edge of the apron of the stage in this intimate theater, twenty feet away from these powerful jazz cats – Peter Schimke, Kevin Washington, Douglas White and Fred Steele to be joined by Irv Williams. The musicians are feeling their way into working with each other, getting their groove on, and laying out elegant and impassioned tunes and songs for the inter-generational dancers, ages 4-100, who also are right here – in solos, duets and ensemble work of humor, sorrow, dignity and moments of redemption.

During a pause in the rehearsal, I had gone down and greeted Louise, kneeling down beside her. Once she recognized me, she asked if I had my violin with me. No, I said. I wasn’t in the show. “You should have it,” she replied.

Now, at the end of the rehearsal, in the ring-out of the richness of the show and after the applause, with the musicians packing up and the dancers getting their parting instructions, I kneel down again in front of her, extending my hand and thanking her for coming. She holds my hand and takes that tone with me that she sometimes has. Her eyes are molten, coal black and fierce, she holds her jaw and mouth in resolve, and from her is coming this fire, framed by elegantly teased red hair and the mink of her coat over her smart understated dress. No need to thank her, she is telling me. “This is me…I love this!” she says.

It’s as if I’ve put myself between the lover and what she loves, and I see her as a young woman in love with music, and imagine how a young man, seeing her like this, would fall for her. Flaring her lip and drawing out the word “love,” she says, again, as if I need to be tutored, “I love this…”

© 2010 Cristopher Anderson

All Rights Reserved

Medal from the King

In these photos, Paul Dahlin, folk fiddler and founder of the American Swedish Institute Spelmanslag, is being awarded the Knight First Class of the Polar Star by The Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Sweden to the United States of America Jonas Hafstrom. The ceremony was held at the ASI castle in Minneapolis a few weeks ago in front of a hundred guests and performers. The Polar Star is the highest honor bestowed by H.M. King Carl XVI Gustave on a non-Swede.

Paul accepted the medal in recognition for his many years of service with the Spelmanslag since its founding in 1985, and for continuing the tradition of this folk music from Rattvik, Sweden, that came down from his immigrant grandfather Edwin Johnson. Other family members that play with Paul in the Spelmanslag are his mother (daughter of Edwin) Nancy Johnson Dahlin, uncle Bruce Johnson, wife Marikay and son Daniel. The Spelmanslag is a folk orchestra of 30 fiddles, a bass, guitar, viola and a cittra, a Swedish table harp. I found them about three years ago, fell in love with the syncopated melodies and uncanny harmonies, and their gracious hospitality, and joined the group. We play concerts, and at dances, festivals and other events.

I also fell for Paul's clear, humble and gracious heart. I think I can say that all of us in the Spelmanslag admire and trust this man. He is another introvert who does very fine work as a luthier at House of Note violin shop, and who is quietly and persistently in love with this music. He has now turned over artistic direction of the Spelmanslag to the able Mary Hegge, but he is still a major part of the group. We always look forward to his parable-like stories of fiddlers and tunes and playing, his gentle wit, his deft knowledge and instruction, and his overall generosity sharing what he loves.

In our rehearsal on the Thursday following the medal ceremony, Paul noted, in his quiet way, that the award he received was for all of us and that it acknowledged that in which all of us were a part. This is typical Paul. And it engenders in us great loyalty and enthusiasm. We'd do anything for him – even practice, or show up before dawn to play a Lucia festival.

Right now, in addition to the music, I'm enjoying three things:

1. The simplicity, graciousness, heart and power of Paul's personality - like that 3rd brother in the folk tales who has the humility to share his food with the most humble person or creature he meets on the road, and who, unlike his prideful brothers, is the Knight who goes on to inherit the kingdom.
2. The verticality that Dr. Robert Moore talks about in his splendid book on masculine psychology, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, that goes from His Majesty the King of Sweden, through the Ambassador, to Paul the Knight, and then to me and others in the Spelmanslag. I feel it and it is lovely to be associated with this line of power and be acknowledged for our service.
3. And, that incredible title for the Ambassador - "extraordinary and plenipotentiary"! I think it evokes that old European image of the green man, the masculine figure intent on encouraging, planting and husbanding in many different ways. According to Wikipedia, plenipotentiary, in this context, means that the Ambassador has full authority to represent his government. It is interesting how the word plenipotentiary has the word potent inside it. And, here, it seems to come from the king. Moore, in his book The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche, explores how men can come into relationship with the king structure in their personality, while being responsible for what he calls the "shadow king." What person doesn't want to have his or her own full authority to do what he or she needs or wants to do? Move over, Powdermilk Biscuits.
   

So, now it is great fun to encounter this experience with the energy of the king externally as it actually comes from a temporal king, through his Ambassador to a humble Knight, and thus to all of us in the Spelmanslag, and to imagine how a similar experience might play out internally inside my psyche. Or, you can imagine how it might play out inside yours.

Paul previously received a 1996 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship for his work. Check the Spelmanslag web site for performance info. One hot tip – don't miss the Nordic Ball, scheduled for January 29, 2011. Spelmanslag recordings are available at the ASI book store and other outlets.


Top photo, Virginia Windschitl. 2nd photo, Jenn Stromberg. Used with permission.

© 2010 Cristopher Anderson

All Rights Reserved

Attractive Weirdness of the Elder

I was thrilled to be asked to offer a tune on my fiddle and a poem during one of two evening presentations by author and healer Malidoma Somé last month, presented by local organizer and men's work leader Dan Gorbunow in association with Mankind Project Minnesota. If you don't follow Somé's work, I recommend him highly. He has two PhD's and is initiated as an elder in his village in Burkino Faso, and is in the west, acting as a conduit between his somewhat mythologically intact culture and contemporary post-modern society. He has thrilled, perplexed and inspired us for many years up at the Minnesota Men's Conference.

Somé's society puts the initiation of youth into adulthood at the center of village life in order to maintain that life. Elders of his village are the "guardrails" for this work, he says, that allows youth to "bloom" and learn to use their gifts.

During his presentation, I was struck by his description of the worthy elder, and realized that these are the ones that I meet that I trust. Somé says the elder should seek an authenticity that is not self-assigned, and one that youth will immediately recognize. This authenticity is based in humility, my own lived experience, is not about seeking my own benefit, and is seen as a potential helping tool for everyone. As he said that, I realized these are the elders I trust and am immediately drawn toward. Somé says, "Our culture doesn't need old people, but we do need elders." Boy, do we ever!

Somé went on to say that the elder should seek an aesthetic that is an "attractive weirdness" that is true to ourselves, and that immediately communicates to the youth that where they are headed is just fine.

Working with elders in Kairos Dance Theatre's Dancing Heart™ program, I try to be vulnerable to their "blessing," even if it is a fleeting smile, to show them that they have this power. And, as I seek to develop my own capability and visibility as an elder, I start to pay more attention to what the world and people in the world want from me, and less attention to what I think I want.

It is humbling and touching to be asked to do something or be someone for a younger person, so that he or she might navigate some narrow passageway and blossom into someone and something bigger that might serve our community. That trust that he or she can extend to me is precious and I try to be worthy of it.