Joan Bauer's Journal

A Different Mothers Day

I’m in Chicago, it’s Mother’s Day weekend.  I won’t be with my husband and daughter on Sunday, and my mom died a few years ago, I’m here for auditions for the reading of SQUASHED The Musical, the most fun new venture -- a musical of my first novel, SQUASHED, the book that got me started in YA, the book I wrote after a car accident, neurosurgery, pain, and absolute despair.  I didn’t know what I was doing writing that first story! I’d never written a novel, I hurt like crazy, I was unsure, but my character Ellie Morgan -- she was sure.  I heard her voice, I let her show me, I gave myself to her story, and let her quest to grow the biggest pumpkin in Iowa be my quest for doing something big and bold.  SQUASHED was wonderfully reviewed, and now it’s got a new voice, a musical voice, and I’ve found my music after all these years.

I was surrounded by serious music growing up -- my mom was a jazz pianist -- that woman could swing. She had such a gift, such a love for it.  My sisters and I danced around the dining room table as Mom played.  I’m convinced there’s a great jazz band up in heaven.  I played the flute and Mom and I would play duets -- some of my best memories were standing at the piano doing that.  And here I am with this musical in the works and she’s not here.  It’s the one hole in the show.  I know, she’s in the soil of it, I know she handed me her love of music like a baton.  She told me to study the piano -- I didn’t listen -- why didn’t I?  But I’m listening now -- I need to get better on the piano, so much better, but every now and then I’ll play a deep bluesy chord and I know that my mom played that chord with everything she had.  

It’s easy to hold back on trying something bold and new -- oh, I’m too old, or too busy, or not old enough, or whatever.  For years I had carpel tunnel and couldn’t play an instrument, but those days are over, and when the stirrings came a few years ago to start writing songs, I could hear the melodies in my head, and I stepped out, so cautiously at first.  I found the nerve to sing one of those songs for a musician friend.  I waited for his eyes to glaze over, but they didn’t.  I waited for him to back out of the room when the song was over.  He didn’t do that either.  He encouraged me.  Keep going, keep at it, you’ve got something.  We need encouragers in our lives!  My husband, my greatest encourager, wouldn’t let me quit.  Keep going.  Okay!  I felt bolder and now here I am about to listen to singers audition for the SQUASHED reading with my collaborator, Jeff Bouthiette, head of Second City’s music training program. We wrote this show together.  

I can see my mother grinning, pounding out the beat with her mighty left foot, giving herself to the music.  You’ve got to give yourself to a thing, and let all it is and all you can bring to it come out.

How very cool to have a mother who taught me that.

Sing Your Song

I haven't been blogging.  It's been quite a while, actually, but I have been writing, some in entirely new ways.  I've actually started writing some songs, and it's all quite wonderful and crazy, because I used to do this when I was a teenager.  I taught myself the guitar and I wrote songs back then. There are things you think are lost to you -- you know, keys and glasses and earrings, an old diary you kept as a kid, and you have this rolling anxiety about that diary that it's out there somewhere being read by people who knew you back then.  But if it is out there, then I'm sure I wrote something like: If I couldn't write and play music, I think part of me would die.   

Well, the thing is, I did stop playing the guitar and the flute and I think a little part of me died.  But then I got used to not doing it, although not entirely.  I would pick up my flute, having not touched it for years, and play something that sounded so truly bad that I despaired, and put the flute away.  I would pick up the guitar and strum a bit, and it was fun for awhile, but then it didn't sound all that great, and then I'd remembered once sounding downright decent on the guitar, but that was gone, and the thought it was gone was stronger than the desire to get better by practicing. 

And I would listen to music and think, someday.  Then came carpel tunnel, surgery on both hands, and having to wear braces when I typed -- and I thought, no way.  I had always played the piano just a little by ear, I had a piano at home, but it was an upright, and I found it easy to walk past an upright and ignore it, or use it to pile laundry on or mail or books.  But then something happened.  My husband's grandmother's  grand piano came to live at our house.  It's hard to ignore a grand piano.  It doesn't want you to put laundry anywhere near it, it's quite certain of its purpose.  And in the middle of  the coming of the piano, I wrote a novel called Close to Famous.  In that book there is a mother who is a singer/songwriter, and as I was writing the story, I could hear some of the songs the mother sang. I wrote the lyrics to them, I had the melodies in my head.  She kept singing and the songs kept coming.  Something broke through for me with that book, and now I'm back to my music again.   

I suppose the moral of this story is -- if you have something you know you're pretty good at, if you've ignored it, or left it behind, or buried it, or just not been able to do it for whatever reason -- think about that thing now.  Sit down next to it, like you're meeting an old friend, stop telling yourself, no you can't -- change that to, hey, I'm going to try.  And just in case it's morphed into the size of a grand piano, pay attention.  Your laundry can find another resting place.  It's time to sing your song.