Tales From the Road

Looking back over previous entries it seems that my most common introduction is, “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted…“ It’s interesting how much of my time and attention is taken by microblogging on Facebook and Twitter, leaving me little attention left for longform writing. Also, of course, longer forms involve a lot more vulnerability, which can be kind of scary.

I was rereading a post from a year ago and now I have a clearer idea of how my depressive episodes present; “I always wondered how my midlife crisis would manifest and now I think I know; life has become more about satisfaction than joy.” I didn’t recognize it as depression at the time, it was so subtle and persistent that I took it simply to be the new normal. Imagine my surprise when joy came surging back early this spring.

There had been a few early signs, things going unexpectedly well last fall and then glimmers over the winter. It wasn’t until March, however, that I realized how long I had been depressed as it very suddenly lifted. It was a bit of a shock, frankly, and not always a welcome one as I was suddenly subject to so many feelings. Ultimately, I’m very thankful to be where I am and doing what I’m doing, and glad I made it through.

In 2002 I found a cool place to play the lanes of the St. Louis Renaissance Festival. I liked it and I prospered there, as buildings sprang up in the area and I adapted to changing vendors and varying nearby acts. I’d occasionally play elsewhere but focused on the one spot, until becoming essentially stationary over the past five years.

This is how a lot of dulcimer players work, and I did well. I loved the neighbouring merchants, especially Molly’s Clothing. However, it’s not how I work at any other festival. For example, this was my schedule in New York this year:

10:00 info booth
11:30 front gate tower
12:30 queens landing
13:15 Robin Hood bridge
14:00 Robin Hood bridge official
14:30 mystic way
15:15 son of sandlar
16:00 Lundegaard
16:45 renboots
17:30 front gate
18:15 hair braider

Some of those shows are scheduled by my director, others are favours to management to enliven certain areas, and some are just places I like to play. But it’s varied because I like to be the surprise around the corner, the unexpected bit of music in someone’s day. It’s part of why I so enjoy busking.

And so it was an anomaly to have a steady pitch at the St. Louis festival, but I really loved the spot. Every year I said that it couldn’t last, but then the next year it would. Until it didn’t.

Molly’s booth was sold to the faire, and since I wasn’t on site the first few weekends to use my traditional pitch and Molly wasn’t being mama bear about it two other lane acts moved into the area. This is natural, this is normal, this is healthy, and I have no claim to the space.

It did provide a conundrum, however. A dear friend of mine kept repeating “I don’t know where you can play!” but rather than having a panic attack I approached the problem with an attitude of abundance. I wandered the site Saturday morning, picking out likely spots and checking them against various scheduled events that could conflict. I drew up an itinerary and brought it to life.

It was amazing.

I had great fun, being comfortably back in my role of unexpected musician. To top it off I made money, with both Saturday and Sunday beating my most profitable day last year despite some inclement weather (massive thanks to Marney Cullen and RenBoots for giving me a place to play out of the rain). I’m feeling good about life and eager to do it again next weekend!

Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit committed suicide last week. He was always very open about his struggles in his music and I’ll always be grateful I saw him in concert.

I’m listening to my favourite songs, however, and they are inevitably changed by this context. His powerful and recurring use of bridge metaphors, for example, is changed after his jumping from one as the means of taking his life. They’re not deeper now, but somehow corrupted in my eyes. It’s no longer the voice someone I admire for facing our common demons but someone whose example I fear.

This is exactly why I took suicide off the table a few years ago. No matter how little love I may feel for myself in a given moment, I always hold my music sacrosanct. Sylvia Plath has been reduced to “that poet who killed herself”, and I refuse to allow the same to happen to my own legacy.

The thoughts are still there, but I promise I’ll never let them win. If not for my sake, or for yours, then for the sake of my musical children.

Last week I mentioned on social media that this most-recent Italy tour was one of my favourites since the first, and that I was excited to know that I could still be learning new things after so many tours over the past twelve years.

That was in large part a deliberate process. The first few tours, 2006-2010, laid the foundations that I’ve been using ever since. In those earliest tours, especially, I was discovering the rules of various cities by trial and error. Later, my Italian was good enough to do research on the regulations of individual cities. Still, for many years I’ve held a lot of cities off my list because of a bad first impression.

Since 2016 I’ve been working to revisit some of those places. In the last decade, I’ve been sad to see that many cities that have been very good to me over the years have passed regulations that make busking problematic (I’m looking at you Padova, Bologna, Brescia, and Ravenna). I was becoming discouraged until I realized that change didn’t have to be in one direction only, and that places I didn’t like to busk could become more amenable just as easily as amenable places could become less so.

In this spirit of experimentation, I began revisiting old failures. My first breakthrough came in Prato, in 2016, where I won my first argument with a cop when I brandished the local regulations in PDF format, saved onto my phone (my karma would balance later that tour, when a policewoman in Perugia would acknowledge my correctness on the local rules and banish me anyway). In 2017 I continued the trend, and in 2018 I broadened it.

For example, upon my first visit in 2008 I had not had good success in Bari. I hadn’t found lodging that I liked; the single hotel in my price range was at the very top of that range and wasn’t worth the money. Additionally, the city was crowded with buskers and the pedestrian area was kind of seedy.

I did enjoy myself, though, and so in 2016 I went back as a tourist for two days when I was performing in the area. What I saw impressed me, and I decided to give the city a second chance. As luck would have it, Bari busking a few weeks ago was stellar, and I’m excited to try it again!

Other than Bari, I hadn’t been back to Lecce since the city passed a new busking ordinance in 2013. Upon review, however, I decided that I could work within the new framework and so I returned to an old favourite. Similarly, although I’ve always enjoyed the most liberal regulatory scheme I’ve ever run across in Naples, it had been several years since my return since the city has tended to exhaust me. I came up with some ideas to prevent that, and made a triumphant return (although hampered by the weather) and found myself merely fatigued by the scale of the city and the intensity of its residents.

In addition to revisiting, of course, I’ve continued to try new cities in order to expand the map. I played Martina Franca for the first time, and while it wasn’t particularly impressive on this go-around I did have fun and I think it could have some serious potential on a future weekend. I intended to play Caserta but bad weather intervened, meaning I’ll have to go back again another time. And, of course, I played tourist on my days off, day tripping to four places I’d never seen before (Otranto, San Severo, Alberobello, and Capri) and spent an additional day visiting Pompeii for the first time since my thirtieth birthday almost twelve years ago.

Enough things came together professionally, helped along by my solid performance anchors of Foggia and Taranto, that it was a financially successful tour as well as being personally fulfilling. While it wasn’t a walk in the part, especially considering the rain I had to dodge all week in Naples that turned into a snow storm that paralyzed southern Italy’s train system, I had an amazing experience overall. It was truly one of my favourite trips!

In the past two months I’ve read Madison and Jefferson, by Bernstein and Isenberg; The Templars: The Secret History Revealed, by Barbara Frale (whose discovery of a mislabeled trial transcript involving the heads of the order was revelatory of both the practices and the contemporary misconceptions about the order); Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Norwich; Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson; Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, by Melissa Mohr; and Henry Clay: The Essential American, by David and Jeanne Heidler. I love carrying a hundred ebooks in my pocket at al times!

I am an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, although the I and the P are both very much on the cusps between Introversion and Extraversion and between Perception and Judging. The middle two, however, are very much a part of my personality, so much so that they've become part of my identity.*

I am intuitive (the N in INFJ) to an extreme degree, which I find liberating as well as deeply frustrating. It's liberating because I react well in the moment, dancing an improvisation around my obstacles. I'm terrible at long-range planning, however, because I can't set into motion a set of plans that will inexorably lead to fruition. My best bet is to create a favourable environment and then seize opportunities as they arise.**

You are now equipped to destroy me at chess.

Because I am so intuitive, I have a hard time with the concept of rationality. I'm really good at rationalization, and I have a difficult time distinguishing between the two. I want some things, I wait, I see a means that does not violate my values, I act, and now I have a thing. I've become so practiced at this that I forget it's not how other people see the world, and that it has only been a part of my own worldview for fifteen years.







*I'm aware of how pseudoscientific such personality tests are, but like Astrology (Pisces, the flighty visionary) I believe they can be a useful launch point for introspection. As I mentioned with the Myers-Briggs, being told often enough that your sun sign indicates a certain personality trait can certainly accentuate it. Just as my friend says that her child is "acting" shy rather than "is" shy in order not to reinforce the trait, I'm fairly certain that Astrology has some merit because of the psychology involved in a culture where it is emphasized.

**I was once accused of Machiavelianism by a lover, when my entire strategy was to play "yes, and" improv games with the schemes that she, herself, was hatching. It's my life writ small, where I keep broad goals in mind and then evaluate whether courses of action will bring me closer or not. I'm an opportunist, lying in wait (Aaron Burr is my favourite role in Hamilton) and then charging ahead once I spot an opening. It's for this reason that I feel very close to the Roman goddess Fortuna, patron of luck and fate. I get a lot of credit for the work that I've put into my career and lifestyle, but without the occasion to use that preparation I'd be nowhere.

I'm a big believer in the power of luck. I've made many decisions over the years, creative and professional, but the biggest have often been leaps of opportunity. Last night I made another one.

I'm on a mailing list for bargain airfare, Scott's Cheap Flights, and when a winter/spring Europe sale was announced I jumped. I immediately scrapped my tentatively planned February southwestern US tour and brainstormed a southeastern Italy tour in its place. The cheapest airfare on the list was in Philadelphia, so I manically messaged a few friends inquiring about parking for the month and once I had a few viable options I booked the flight.

The whole process took almost exactly one hour, including the walk I took to clear my head.

This is me in a nutshell, making snap decisions to take advantage of opportunities. Also me, of course, will be seven months of second guessing until I'm in the seat of that plane, but I'm decisive in the moment. And this trip wasn't entirely out of the blue, it solves the conundrum I've been considering of how to return to the hottest part of Italy during the summers I have earmarked for European travel. Preparation meets opportunity and bam!

I'm not standing still I am lying in wait.

Honestly, I'm kind of boring. I wake up around 6:30, spend a while puttering around online and reading a lot of news analysis, and hop into the shower around eight. I putter some more, head out, have breakfast at a cafe, and play for a few hours. I grab groceries on my way home, eat a lunch of bread, fruit, and lunch meat and/or cheese. I take a nap, and have an afternoon walk. I play another few hours in the evening before eating the remainder of my bread, fruit, lunch meat and/or cheese for supper, and take an evening stroll before curling up with a book.

On my day off, when I'm neither playing nor traveling, replace the music with more walks and museums. I don't do much that's really interesting, but I'm deeply thankful that I get to enjoy my routine in some really, really cool places.

In 2007 my two best pitches in Genoa were on Via San Luca and Via San Vincenzo. Via San Luca stopped being a viable pitch for me two years ago, and Via San Vincenzo has deteriorated to a secondary location on my itinerary. However, Via Degli Orefici and Via San Lorenzo have stepped up to be far better pitches than I ever expected from previous experience, and Genoa has remained a good city for me to play.

On a larger scale, cities that were once mainstays of my touring life have passed restrictive regulations; Padua, Bologna, and Ravenna have all taken themselves off of my calendar. However, again it is not one-way. I had previous difficulties in Prato and Pistoia that research indicated was unwarranted, and last year I found success in both cities. Most notably Trieste, which had passed restrictive regulations five or so years ago, just eliminated their registration system. Not only am I finding new cities to replace those that have become restrictive, but some that have been restrictive are loosening!

I am a creature of habit and I find change disconcerting. One benefit to the way I travel is that, while my surroundings are in constant flux, my general routines are not. However, one reason I do so much traveling is that it does keep me on my toes, and I feel I'm a better musician, better performer, and better person for it.

I'm delighted to be closing the show! I was originally booked for four weekends, but my dates were extended to include the final two weekends of the faire. I really love this festival, surrounded by and working with friends, and it's been a joy to be back.

It's an interesting phenomenon to be an introvert in the entertainment industry. There are social gatherings going on all around me, but I bow out of most of them. I'm looking forward to seeing a vaudevillian comedy show tonight, Esther's Follies of Austin, but I turned down the invitation to kayaking and dinner beforehand. I husband my emotional bandwidth.

My thoughts are starting to drift to the future. I head to Italy in two weeks and I'm starting to get anxiously excited about the trip. As always, my brain is filled both with things that need doing and others that could go wrong. Still, after so many tours this is a familiar place to me, and almost comfortable.

I've really been loving the social time I've had here, even though it feels like I avoid most of it, but three months of solitary travel are a chance to really dive into my own head and work on myself. I'm very fortunate that my business model includes both intense community and deep solitude, in a balance I feel works well for me, tempered as always by the interactions with my audience. Wherever you are on that spectrum, I'm deeply grateful for you all.