In My Own Voice Vol. 1 edited table of content updated -

Dr. Lant passed away April 16, 2023

In My Own Voice
Reading from My Collected Works Vol. 1
Assorted Selection

Dedication

This dedication goes out to the children’s librarians in the Downers Grove, Illinois Public Library. These are the ladies who gave me, at a very early age, access to their fine 78 RPM records of poets reading from their works. I have never forgotten the experience, and hope that every librarian will recommend the chapters and readings that follow. With grateful appreciation from the author.

Contents
Introduction 3
https://youtu.be/yXOOvSoeBPw 3
Chapter 1 6
“‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…’ Thoughts on turning 65 February 16, 2012 and my most memorable birthday.” 6
https://youtu.be/pUf3qUS75po 6
Chapter 2 10
“January 12. The first nor’easter of 2011. Thoughts from within nature’s wallop.” 10
https://youtu.be/2wdPu7QT2b8 10
Chapter 3 14
“Wicked Cool: The hubris and high jinks of Captain Owen Honors, United States Navy, sometime captain of the USS Enterprise.” 14
https://youtu.be/U4eHA2gXrzE 14
Chapter 4 18
“An appreciation for the turbulent life and undeniable talent of Amy Winehouse. Dead at 27, July 23, 2011.” 18
https://youtu.be/ZdWJiwXQlRk 18
Chapter 5 22
“‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’, America, the Andrews Sisters, delivering a billion smiles when they were most needed.” 22
https://youtu.be/jB74WUaw2Dc 22
About the Author 27
SPECIAL WRITERS SECRETS CATALOG 28

Introduction
https://youtu.be/yXOOvSoeBPw

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/yXOOvSoeBPw

Each of us, in our individual lives, has a moment or two of epiphany. That is to say, a moment of surpassing importance and significance. Mine took place along the hot and sticky asphalt streets of summertime Downers Grove, Illinois.

You could follow my progress by the skid marks in the asphalt. Chances are, I was on my way to the library. There was a perfectly logical reason for this speed into the metropolis, and that was the fact that it was one of the few buildings in the community that was air conditioned. Therefore, it needs no explanation from me. Everyone in the state of Illinois knows the peril of that temperature, and the need to escape it.

My mother had begun taking me to the library very early in my life. I was such a regular participant in the programs and readings the librarians delivered, that I had my own chair with my own name, rather like a Hollywood producer, “Ladd”.

I was voracious about stories, could never get enough of them, and was always grateful to be advised on their presentation and explanation. In this way, the librarians came to present me with readings from the great poets… people like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.

I can well remember being told by the ladies one day that they had a present for me… and so they stationed me in a rather dark, gray room, everything cool to the touch, and turned on their latest acquisition.

“I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long. — You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. — You come too.”

“The Pasture”, Robert Frost (1915)

I played this poem so often, each time hearing a little more of its author, the often irritated and irascible Robert Frost. I like the way he rolled those three little words: “you come too.” Only he didn’t pronounce it like that. Great poets have great eccentricities, and his were encapsuled in his rendering of these three words. Thus “ah you come too”. It was a call to come and be sociable, come and share, come and see your neighborhood and everything in it.

So powerful and so unfading were these words that when Robert Frost’s Cambridge home came on the market, I almost bought it, just so that I could sit in the parlor and read my envious friends from the poet’s ghost that resided there with all its poems, just for me.

Now, I have the opportunity to read my own works… to you, and hope that you will hear just how personal they are, and how each one, so powerfully written, touches your heart, because that is what I aim for.

This book contains five of my favorite essays… the one that I wrote when I turned 65; the one bringing you inside a great nor’easter; the one detailing the foolish hijinx of Captain Owen Honors, United States Navy; the one detailing the turbulent life of Amy Winehouse, a warning if there ever was one; and finally, one about the Andrews Sisters… three girls who kept America jumping throughout its greatest war, and reminded us what we were fighting for.

I have a special word for all you young people reading these essays. You have so many media choices that you may well overlook the importance and value of hearing authors read from their own works. This is something you need to do… you need to hear what they write, in their own way, and you need to recite what they write in your own way. If you cannot do this, you will miss so much of the pleasure of both author and reader.

And this special note to you library ladies: you did me such a life-changing favor so many years ago. Now, I want you to take what I have written, what I have recited here, and pass on the importance of the writers voice for the next generation, and the next after that.

And now without further ado, the first chapter of this book. Read the text along with the video, then read it again, until you are as expert in my quirks and foibles as I am myself.

Dr. Jeffrey Lant
From The Red Drawing Room
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 2016

Chapter 1
“‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…’ Thoughts on turning 65 February 16, 2012 and my most memorable birthday.”
https://youtu.be/pUf3qUS75po

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/pUf3qUS75po

Author’s program note. I have always liked Charles Dickens. Not only was he a writer able to make words do his bidding, but he roused multitudes of people, people who after reading this master could never see the world as before… but only through his eyes. That is power indeed.

When I was a student living in London in the late ’60s, Charles Dickens’ house was right around the corner on Doughty Street; I went often, my mission clear: to see how the master of words lived his messy, turbulent, always productive life. That didn’t help; I had to wait until I lived my own to find out how it’s done….

But I resolved that when it came time for me, as an older man, looking back on my young and tender self, that I should incorporate the great beginning to “David Copperfield” (published 1850)… and so today I shall do so:

“Chapter 1. I am born.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

And so, very similarly, it went for me… and, no doubt for you, too; for at that moment we are all similar… something we ought to remember later, when we cultivate and embrace divisiveness instead of diversity.

Seeking clues, finding clues.

There is no adventure so thrilling, so personally significant, so completely fulfilling as going on expedition to find yourself, for the discovery of you cannot help but be the most important journey you will take.

And so we begin…

I was born in Illinois February 16, 1947, making me a card-carrying Baby Boomer. It was the date of my parents’ first wedding anniversary; the date, too, when two of my paternal aunts gave birth to boys the same time. Family, fecundity, faith in the Great Republic and its devices were in the air.

It is fashionable, particularly in political circles, to minimize what one’s parents had, while enhancing the struggles they faced; the deprivations many and humiliating visited upon the hapless children… but this is not my story, even if I stretched the truth.

When I see my life in its whole, the words that come to mind are words of security, amplitude, family… words about the Great Republic, its especial place in the firmament… and of small town life and verities… where everyone knew you, almost from the first moment of conception. There my father built us a rambling ranch house graced by a sign that said “This is the house that Don built, 4906 Woodward Avenue”.

It was set in the midst of acres of violets whose very color I can never see without a lump in my throat….if in such circumstances we may have lacked this or that, we didn’t know and it never mattered… because we were blessed in so many ways… No one more so than I.

“You looked at me,” she said, “with interest and intelligence, as if you had come to tell me something and know me better.”

Life revealed one of my important traits right from the start. My mother was young and feared delivery and the burdens of maternity. She told me often in later years that she didn’t want children, didn’t like them… and was resentful when her early pregnancy was discovered. But then… then… a nurse placed me in her arms for the first time… and that changed everything.

She told me, always as if she had never told me before, I looked at her at that crucial moment of acknowledgement… not with fear, anxiety, trepidation or even uncertainty… but instead steadily, with empathy, as if I had come to cheer her and tell her all would be well.

Thus it came to be said that I had a special mission to humanity and the necessary skills and healing gifts. If so, I used them that day.

Prodigies

All mothers probably think their children prodigies, especially the first born… but my mother’s oft reiterated belief about what she saw on our first meeting put my feet upon the path I continue to tread this very day… a path that gave me what, age ten or so, I told them I wanted: to go to Harvard, to write books, to be a millionaire, all accomplished before thirty. This is how it happened…

Exemption, recognition

Boys in 1950’s Illinois needed to be good at sports, especially baseball, basketball or football, handy with cars, or at some practical subject like mathematics, a requirement for careers in engineering and the like. I was good at none of these… and yet it never mattered. I was, from the first day of school, the recognized school leader, master of words and thoughts which were always more adult than my schoolmates, who might so easily have derided… but never did, not least because I was always perceived as a friend, even confidante of my teachers, able to empathize and understand their situations; always, therefore a (young) colleague, never merely a pet. I used this influence for the good of my classmates, my instructors, the support staff… and myself. As such, I had the ear of all, for the benefit of all.

I learned what it took to assist authority and to achieve what I wanted… by helping such people get what they wanted. And this skill, once planted, has never deserted me… and as a result I have always been welcomed by the intelligent, the accomplished, the powerful, and all manner of people whose brains are fertile, whose visions are expansive, and for whom life is a grand thing, to be savored, improved, enhanced at every step and always shared, as I share mine with such people; now including you. In this way I lived a life enhanced by those good people and kind who have chosen to live it with me, as you perhaps will do, too.

My favorite birthday.

Have I then become the hero of my own life? Even now, it is too early to tell, though I remain resourceful and always hopeful. But I can resolutely tell you this: my favorite birthday is my actual birth day for from it everything else has come… and it all started with a look, two eyes just opened looking for the first time into two eyes anxious and frightened just a moment ago, now with a dawning realization that all will be well and with incipient happiness, too.

That is why, so equipped, I approach each new day as a pilgrim to this planet; ready to smile, to laugh, to use my talents, to enhance life… and above all else to love… for love explains all, enables all, enhances all, forgives all, understands all, embraces all… which is why, just 65, the best is yet to come… the last of life for which the first is made. So Browning enlightened my mother; so my mother enlightened me… and so I trust, on this special day, I have now enlightened you.

For this is the only acceptable kind of life… where, one by one, we reach out to each other… determined to engage… to touch… to venture upon the ocean of time with hope, humility, humanity. This is what I have learned in my first 65 years… and now it is my present to you… gratefully given… and I hope gratefully received and used for good… for this is the way if you, too, wish to become the hero of your own life, as I know you wish to do…

Musical note

For this epic journey — for your life must always be that — I have selected the lush 1969 score by Sir Malcolm Arnold to one of the several filmed versions of “David Copperfield”. Play it now:

Chapter 2
“January 12. The first nor’easter of 2011. Thoughts from within nature’s wallop.”
https://youtu.be/2wdPu7QT2b8

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/2wdPu7QT2b8

I am writing to you today from inside one of nature’s bona fide wonders: a good old New England nor’easter. I hadn’t planned to comment on this blizzard; I tend to ignore them whenever possible. New Englanders are used to them. But I was awakened this morning by the snow insistently
thumping my window, demanding my attention, insisting, lordly in its sway that I gaze out and make my obeisance to awe and wonder.

And so I shall.

First, the facts.

What is snow anyway?

Millions of people, their lives intertwined with this seasonal commodity which ebbs and flows, would, when asked… hem and haw, embarrassed by their ignorance of something so powerful, so regularly omnipresent, so, well, obvious. “I’m not really sure,” they’d say — myself among ’em — “I just know it when I see it.”

The Farmer’s Almanac to the rescue.

My dictionary says snow is ice crystal flakes: water vapor in the atmosphere that has frozen into ice crystals and falls to the ground in the form of flakes. This is, well, adequate, good enough; it’s better to seek out the experts at the Farmer’s Almanac (published first by Benjamin Franklin in 1732.) Snow, somehow, seems more real in the country, its sinews more apparent, its destructive power the more on view and genuinely regarded, with picturesque Currier and Ives panoramas at every glance. No wonder America loves these images of its earliest and most enchanting self, first published in 1813, when a view was verily a fine prospect indeed.

Here’s what the Farmer’s Almanac says,

“Snow is formed from water vapors in the cold clouds that have condensed into ice crystals. Ice crystals fasten onto a dust speck. One crystal attaches to another forming a snowflake. Once the snowflake is heavy enough, it falls from the cloud. A snowflake is either a single ice crystal or many crystals. The size of a snowflake is determined by how many ice crystals join together. The tops of clouds must be below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 degrees Celsius in order for snowfall to occur. Snow can fall from any layered cloud that is cold enough.”

“Snow’s effect on the ground.”

“Snow accumulated on the ground helps keep bulbs and plant roots (beneath the ground) from freezing in frigid weather. As soft snowflakes pile on top of one another, pockets of air are left between them. This air helps protect seeds, bulbs and roots from freezing beneath the soil in winter. In spring when the snow begins to melt, some snow soaks into the earth to water the soil, while other melted snow replenishes streams, lakes and rivers.”

Now, that’s a definition to be proud of. And I bet you, like me, hardly knew a whit of this. Still, it is good to know the brave little crocuses already peeping shoots above the ground will not be harmed. They are the vanguard of spring, and they cheer us every time they ascend to the sun and their brief tenure as bits of joy in the mud.

5:55 am Eastern

It is not quite six a.m. now and the hegemony of snow is absolute. Or almost so. The snow plows are already at their work; their promise of relief and liberty at hand. Their noise must be fearsome for, snug and warm, I hear them as they go about their work. They bear names like Ariens, Toro, Craftsman, Husqvarna, Troy-Bilt, MTD Yard Machines, and Honda. You can tell as well as I that many of these are foreign names, and so with every flake, American money leaks to foreign shores.
The snow plows are manned by happy crews of determined folk who relish their work. Soon, they will be found in taverns citywide sharing brews and tales of the Big One which will lose nothing in the telling. They are proud of the work which pulls them from snug beds into the Big Machines whose power, growing now, will soon efface that of snow itself. Commuters who come later, grumbling, will complain about where the fruit of these machines has been left.

New England’s poets knew their snow

John Greenleaf Whittier (born 1807) wrote a best-seller in 1866 entitled “Snowbound: A Winter Idyl”. Easy to understand, its simple imagery and paean to nature do not satisfy our jaded tastes and so, sadly, this idyllic pastoral goes unread today.

Sadder still is the fate of “The Cross of Snow” (1879) by my near neighbor on Brattle Street, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His poem, gut wrenching, is not so much about the snow itself as about the snow covering the grave of his long-dead, fervently adored wife. I have been in the room she died, where there is love and pain, producing reflections almost too poignant to be written:

“In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face–the face of one long dead–
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died,
and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.”

But this report must not end on such a note of mourning, no matter how haunting and elegiac. Thus we end instead with the sage of Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson who in “The Snow Storm” (published 1841) said this:
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of Storm.”

***

I am now in that tumultuous privacy of Storm, where
outside the elements contend, heavy, portentous, disruptive
ephemeral, though they do not know it. Soon this will pass…
Musical note
I have selected the portion of the Russian version of “War and Peace” (1966), especially that part where the happy Rustov children dance and dress up as mummers and are then propelled across the snow in sleighs that move like the wind.
It was noted specifically that this was the last happy event for the young Countess Rostova, for she was soon to jilt Prince Andrei, and blight her life, as she thought, forever. But human affairs move like the wind itself, from one direction to another. And so they did with Natalie Rostov.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4EcRSoOG_w

Chapter 3
“Wicked Cool: The hubris and high jinks of Captain Owen Honors, United States Navy, sometime captain of the USS Enterprise.”
https://youtu.be/U4eHA2gXrzE

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/U4eHA2gXrzE

Let me introduce you to a cool dude, cute too, who knows how to party and had the perfect place to do it. I’m talking about U.S. Navy Captain Owen Honors, only just relieved as commander of America’s only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the proud USS Enterprise.

Honors, who never met a camera he didn’t like, a man determined to please his crew, liked to spend his week preparing videos — starring, guess who — Captain Owen Honors, 49 year old Top Gun pilot and decided off-color video star.

Honors had at his disposal the very best video equipment generous U.S. taxpayers could buy. His effects were right up-to-the-minute, like having three separate screens in which (guess who?) appeared as three different
(all cool) characters. Wow!

Honors, each week determined to outdo himself on week-end XO nights (when his latest videos were shown), somehow found time in his very busy days. The USS Entereprise, after all, was deployed supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A man of dedication, energy, imagination he somehow found the time
to work on video ideas, plots, film venues, and a dazzling array of really cool outfits perfectly tailored. This caring captain was determined to give his eagerly expectant 6000-person crew the very best. He certainly did, particularly in 2006-2007 when his bold ideas and still bolder presentations took the Enterprise by storm and riveted every eye on the ship. What, they all wondered, would their daring executive officer, then
Captain Honors do next?

They never had long to wait.

There was that hot video when their cutting-edge commander simulated masturbation at his desk. As Paris Hilton would say, “That’s hot!”

What about the never-to-be-forgotten episode of two naked guys soaping each other off in the shower. Honors was a nut for saving water… and wanted to drive home the point with eye-popping visuals. And, to be completely politically correct, he did the same scene with two of the women of his crew.

There was more, much more since Honors was an indefatigable guy with an unceasing appetite for more and better; ambitious videos of which he soon became the master with the help of designated members of
his command.

There was the anal probe episode… and all the “fag” plots, pratfalls and plays. That commander… what a cut-up.

There were the in jokes, like writing “little XO” on his you-know-what. It was hilarious, pure camp, what a guy.

And just think, he did it all while on deployment in not one, but two war zones. How did the guy do it, inquiring minds wanted to know.

Alas, there was irritating criticism from small minds.

It’s hard to imagine… but disgracefully true… that there were members of the Enterprise crew who found their commander’s hard work and
dazzling results offensive. Small minded, picayune, uptight… these folks made a fuss and criticized the coolest guy in the fleet. This rankled with Honors, for he was working so hard. Why his bravura video on the “f-bomb” was pure poetry. Really, who could object?

In a rare outburst, this commander of poise and sensitivity lashed out at his anonymous accusers: “Over the years I’ve gotten several complaints about inappropriate material during these videos, never to me personally but, gutlessly, through other channels.” Gutless, indeed! If there’d been a plank aboard the Enterprise, Honors would have been well within his
rights to put the snivelers on it.

Instead, he opened one of his last videos with these mild, entirely justified words: “This evening, all of you bleeding hearts… why don’t you just go ahead and hug yourself for the next 20 minutes or so, because there’s a really good chance you’re gonna be offended.”

That’s the man in a nutshell, empathetic, soft spoken.

Still one of these snivelers (probably gay), not yet identified by name, took (inexplicable) offense… go figure… sending the (to him) offending tapes to the Navy Inspector General.

Where all hell broke lose.

Despite the fact that Owen Honors was well-known throughout the Navy, despite the fact that he had a high visibility command; despite 3,400 flight hours in 31 types of aircraft… despite a chestful of bona fide awards and medals… the Navy moved expeditiously because it knew it had a real hot potato on its hands.

Navy media releases quickly went from “the videos were intended to be humorous” to “inappropriate”… to the announcement Captain Honors was relieved of his command as the Navy initiated, behind the scenes, the steps required to cashier him from the service he loved and had served throughout his life. My how the mighty had fallen!

Certain Navy personnel and those persons wedded to the good old days of fag baiting and the humiliation and degradation of women, predictably launched a campaign to save the Captain and his wayward views. They tried to convince by asking what was the big deal after all; the views advanced in the Captain’s high tech videos were commonplace, nothing to write home about, the way “everyone” thought.

Exactly.

This is why the Navy Department is to be commended on taking (reasonably) prompt action to lance the infection and proclaim zero tolerance for mocking good sailors, their sexuality and gender.

The Navy is moving fast now to get just-suspended Captain Honors out of public view, to bury this still young officer with talent and skills to burn and ensure that he becomes the complete non-person. He is, after all, a total embarrassment… the story breaking at the worst possible time, as the Navy shows that it can, with good humor and in good order, nimbly move into the post “don’t ask, don’t tell” era.

There is, the Navy signals, no place in this new order for Captain Honors, once absolute lord of all he surveyed. Such a man so powerful and so lacking in judgement is now an inconvenient artifact of an age and state of mind the Navy wants firmly, irrevocably behind it.

Musical note

I have selected for the music to this chapter the Overture from the 1968 production of “Dames at Sea”. It’s a ribald, suggestive little ditty, just the way the good (former) captain likes ’em. Indeed, I can imagine how fabulous he would be all dressed up in face paint and suggestive costume. Anchors away!

Chapter 4
“An appreciation for the turbulent life and undeniable talent of Amy Winehouse. Dead at 27, July 23, 2011.”
https://youtu.be/ZdWJiwXQlRk

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/ZdWJiwXQlRk

Amy Jade Winehouse was exactly the woman your mother was terrified you’d become… and nagged at you to avoid. She covered her body with old-time sailor tattoos… had a beehive style hair-do that looked like it was construction art… popped pills like juju beans… drank like a fish and then became a “bad drunk”… found men, let them abuse her, then ditched them… to do it all over again. And, if this were not enough, she experimented with every drug her international contacts could get her… then went through some more.

Yeah, she was a mess alright… but there was one redeeming grace… and that was the lady had talent… and an outsized personality that enabled her to showcase her works… and (when she was at her best) wow the folks… while changing the outmoded verities in the musical world… where she was a seismic force smoking out hypocrisies, superficialities, and any hint of silly sweetness. She was authentic to her fingertips… and that made a lot of people — including mothers with young girls — plenty nervous.

Now this volcanic force is dead, aged just 27, and we are left to wonder at why she gave up everything she loved — including her very life — to feed her destructive passions. A good place to look for clues is in her prize-winning 2007 tune “Rehab”. Go to any search engine now. Play the song once or twice, and pay particular attention to the lyrics… “They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’.” And then the kicker we all knew to be true, “Yeah, I’m outta control.” She was right… and it was the tragedy of her life.

She did what she wanted… with whom she wanted… where she wanted.. when she wanted. She knew what was acceptable behavior… she ignored it to achieve who she was. If that upset others, too bad. Her need to behave in ways you found selfish, reprehensible, ridiculous made her maddeningly impossible to be around; you never knew what was coming next… because she never knew what she’d be doing next. It was an exhausting way to live…. and no one knew it better than she did and in moments of clarity she screamed for help “I don’t ever wanna drink again”. But she did drink… and smoke… and shoot up… and inhale… engaging in every form of abuse she could think of, devise or learn from her cadre of fellow travelers, each going to hell in their own fashion….

But through it all there was the music and the talent that produced it. And if we must condemn her, let us do so for this reason: that she abused her talent, wasted her talent, insulted her talent, and treated her talent with contempt, with every injection risking it, threatening it, threatening all. For this she deserves the strongest possible condemnation…

…. Amy Winehouse knew this. But as time went on, it didn’t matter anymore… she knew she was on the road to oblivion. “Can you blame me for being a slave to my passion?” Yes, most assuredly we can… because her passion was not ingestion and self abuse (though it seemed so)… her passion was the music she created… the sound she shaped… the impacting words… these things were her passion and she squandered these with too little remorse and regret. Damn her.

The beginning.

Winehouse was born September 14, 1983 in the Southgate area of north London to a Jewish family whose inclination to jazz later influenced her work. She was the younger of two children (older brother Alex) of Mitchell Winehouse, taxi driver, and Janis Winehouse (nee Seaton), pharmacist. Mitchell often sang Frank Sinatra songs to young Amy, who took to a constant habit of singing to the point that teachers found it difficult keeping her quiet in class. Even then it was clear she had talent… Like other young artists there were many false starts… she got her first guitar at 13 and began writing music a year later. She also began working at this time, for openers a showbiz journalist for the World Entertainment News Network, also singing with a local group the Bolsha Band.

But her passion was the all-girl groups of the ’60’s, particularly The Ronettes, her favorite; it’s where she got her “instantly recognizable” beehive hair-do and Cleopatra make-up.

Break-through.

Just 20, her debut album “Frank” was released October 20, 2003. Produced mainly by Salaam Remi, many songs were influenced by jazz and, apart from two covers, every song was co-written by Winehouse. The reviews were good and brought comparisons to Macy Gray and Sarah Vaughan. In due course, “Frank” garnered a host of awards and honors… and reached platinum sales levels. The little Jewish girl from north London had her foot on the ladder… but as usual did it her way. Instead of engaging in the usual puffery, she said of this album she was just “80 percent” behind it. Her producers fumed… but the world smiled; here was a person who told the (often inconvenient) truths… and we all liked her better.

International success.

In these days, Winehouse was a prodigious worker, an artist who never tolerated the second rate in herself, or anyone else. She knew what she wanted from herself… and from you. “Back to Black” was the result, released in the U.K. October 30, 2006. It became the best-selling U.K. album in 2007, selling a staggering 1.85 million copies over the year. The money guys heard the clink of coin… and were willing to tolerate Winehouse’s often eccentric behavior because she delivered the bucks.

The most influential song on this album was “Rehab”. “Time” magazine called it the “Best Song” of 2007. Interviewer Josh Tyrangiel praised Winehouse for her confidence, saying “What she is is mouthy, funny, sultry, and quite possibly crazy,” and “It’s impossible not to be seduced by her originality.” The world agreed; prizes and honors were showered upon her… and, of course, money, lots and lots of it. All she had to do was keep her demons under control. But who can promise so much, even with the entire world and its golden prizes at stake? She still had higher to fly… the farther to fall when her punishing descent began. Let’s stay a little on the lady still ascending, for her fall is painful, distressing, the stuff of agony and dismay.

In 2008 she won Grammy Awards in the categories for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the single “Rehab,” while her album “Back to Black” was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Pop Vocal award. She was now well and truly at the top of the world… for an instant, until the contrary forces she had kept in balance, began pulling in opposite directions she could no longer control. Thus did mighty mayhem break loose… and Amy Winehouse lose her ascendancy in the world… and, far too soon, her life.

She was drawn to, loved, married, dallied with and tolerated, all the wrong people… the weak men who pandered to her vices and abused her body, her weaknesses and kindness; the ones who fed her pills and substances of every kind which she never needed and was unable to resist. Thanks to the constant lurid tales in the tabloids, we all saw it. Hers was a tragedy occurring before our eyes, an irresistible inevitability which at last on July 23 bore its strange fruit. The scene was dirty, squalid, disgusting… with honors, awards, trophies strewn about the place, indicators that life was vanity, all vanity. Short, ironic, painful, prideful, abashed, and all alone.

So did Amy Winehouse kill herself, her talent and her many dreams… but she could not kill her music, rhythmic, honest to a fault, intriguing, bold. Here was the woman at her best… and now this best must stand against the ages, to remind us of her integrity and audacity, for she had these in abundance, and so should we remember her.

Musical note

Here is the song for which she’ll be most remembered:

Chapter 5
“‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’, America, the Andrews Sisters, delivering a billion smiles when they were most needed.”
https://youtu.be/jB74WUaw2Dc

Reading by Dr. Jeffrey Lant at: https://youtu.be/jB74WUaw2Dc

Author’s program note. You were just eighteen or so, away from home for the very first time. You were glad to do your bit; couldn’t wait to get down to the high business at hand, a new minted citizen warrior proud to serve the Great Republic and save civilization. But it was cold at Union Station, the wooden bench was uncomfortable, and you suddenly realized you were smoking too much, way too much. Your mouth tasted of stale ashes and late nights of rambling conversations with people you didn’t really like.

No train yet on Track Number Nine.

Worse, your train, the next step in your journey to destiny, wasn’t due for hours. There was a long, lonely night ahead. Ma had known it would be this way and had packed you a box lunch, but it was almost gone now, demolished as you looked out the window and happened to see the name of the whistle-stop as it flashed by. Eldon, Iowa. Never heard of it… yet you were going to war to save the good folks of Main Street now dreamless in their beds, unaware their young paladin was swift passing by.

She’d wrapped some of the sharp home-pickled kraut separately, under the wax paper. As she packed it she said, “Don’t say it’s ‘kraut’. Some folks wouldn’t understand and calling it ‘liberty cabbage’ just seems silly”. Ma always knew what to do…. you opened her handiwork. All of a sudden you missed her. Then you saw the glint of metal; it was a man with a staff, child on his shoulder, St. Christopher and then just five words in her copperplate hand, “Wear this for me, son”.

As you put it on, you kissed it, just as you knew Ma had. Then did the night seem a little shorter, the bench less uncomfortable, and your fate less daunting.

There was one last thing in the box. It was a medicine bottle, RX clearly marked. The label said, “Open as needed for immediate relief”. Inside, on a slip of paper in your sister’s childish scrawl, were these three words: Maxene, Patty, LaVerne. So you cracked a smile and ate the kraut, remembering you were just eighteen, on your way to glory, saviour of the Great Republic, and could dance like nobody’s business.

America’s sisters, bouncy, effervescent, fun on a date.

They were real Americans, which is to say their mother Olga was born Norwegian; their father Peter, a Greek immigrant who anglicized his name of Andreus when he arrived in America. Like every teen-ager of their era, they were glued to the radio, the breakthrough technology that brought the world and its latest sounds to kitchen tables everywhere, a world parents warned against, and you couldn’t get enough of.

One of the stars of this firmament was the Boswell Sisters, a singing act composed of three siblings whose sound and celebrity made the strongest possible impression on the younger Andrews sisters. Loving the tuneful Boswells as they did, the Andrews sisters, in the best American tradition, thought they could do better. After all the Boswells, stationary, glued to immobile microphone, sang huddled together, squishing each other in front of a piano, say. Thus they got their characteristic sound. But, the sisters Andrews knew, in the way of those adamant for success, they would fly higher… and soon.

But the Andrews trio, right from the very start didn’t just want sound; they wanted action, movement, the chance to burn energy and dance the night away in astonishing gyrations and joy. As it happened America, emerging slowly from Great Depression was ready to dance, too, if only the right beat and raucous leaders could be found.

“It was like God had given us voices to fit our parts.”

What do you do in the foul weather of snow-blown Minneapolis? If you’re the Andrews Sisters you sing… anywhere, everywhere, even if the clueless could not hear in you the swing sound America was just learning to love. As Patty remarked in 1971, “There were just three girls in the family. LaVerne had a very low voice. Maxene’s was kind of high, and I was in between.”

Studying the Boswell Sisters on the radio, LaVerne (born 1911) played the piano and taught her younger sisters to sing in harmony; neither Maxene (born 1916) nor Patty (born 1918) ever learned to read music. Maybe that was their unduplicable secret…

In any event, after the sisters got their chores done at papa Peter’s restaurant, they’d spend the evening studying singers at a local vaudeville house, singing along with bands coming from anywhere, almost all going to nowhere. But life in the Twin Cities wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; wasn’t what Peter had in mind when he first saw the Lady with the Torch the blissful morning he became an American.

And so, greatly daring, he took the little he had and gambled it. Many folks did something similar… but they didn’t travel with a gold-coining cultural icon, which the sisters would soon become. One wonders just when he looked at his beloved girls, filing their nails, experimenting with hair-dos and blush, giggling, gossiping about the boys they liked and the ones they didn’t and knew? And so Peter Andrews brought his soon to be iconic daughters to New York, to the Statue of Liberty, one of the few things in America as immediately recognizable as they were about to become. Did he have an inkling yet? How proud he must have been.

“Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

However, they were, just then, nowhere near such celestial honors. There was work to do, and a lot of it. As soon as they arrived in New York in 1937 Olga, in the tenacious tradition of determined stage mothers, made herself and her daughters known to every producer who would see her. It was often heavy going, “They sing too loud and they move too much,” being amongst the kinder criticisms. Finally, Olga arranged for the sisters to sing on the radio with a hotel band at $15 a week. It was their first break… and it resulted in the break that mattered.. A Decca Records exec was beguiled and promptly signed them. Sadly, this smart scout’s name has been long lost. It figures… no good deed goes unpunished.

As for the sisters, they never looked back, particularly after their first big hit, “Bei Mir Bist Du Shoen” (1937), an old Yiddish song whose title means “To me, you are beautiful”. Sammy Cahn and Saul Kaplan wrote the lyrics. The sisters sang it to America… and America, particularly the dance crazed young, reciprocated with affection, enthusiasm and many tired, satisfied mornings after so many glorious nights before..

And so the greatest sister act in musical history was launched, just in time to go to war and show the world what an infectious beat delivered by three zealously upbeat girls, fresh, decent, wise-cracking with an acute case of the heebie jieebies could accomplish. That, of course, was everything…

400 songs, 80,000,000 records.

Now came the fat years…. the years where they could do no wrong… the years when America took them to its heart… the years when hardened GIs at the front lines danced with each other whenever the astonishing sisters belted out a dance tune which insisted on crazy locomotion… the years when “our boys” far away from home, so lonely, broke down and cried when the sisters sang of love postponed, of fleeting kisses and embraces cut short by death, as happened so often to so many. Maxene, Patty and LaVerne lightened our loads… put a smile on our faces… and reminded us of just how good, how unselfish and generous we were.

“This too shall pass.”

Of course it couldn’t last… and didn’t. The sisters got older, got married, got divorced… and said terrible things… about each other. Their cat fights made for sad listening, and, after father Peter died they listened only to their lawyers. Of course America paid attention; we can’t get enough of such melt-downs; then we feel guilty that we took pleasure from the pains of the girls who had, just a moment ago, been our girls.

Norembega Park.

But their story cannot end on such a dismal note. I won’t let it. And so I’ll go back to the young man we encountered in Union Station, the one with stale ashes and kraut which could be eaten but never shown. After the war was over he decided to visit some of his buddies and see what they were up to. One of them lived in Boston, home of Norumbega Park, one of the nation’s greatest dance clubs. He and his friend decided to take a flask and go, dancing the night away. And so they did… the girls polite, friendly, but not The One.

Then as the last dance was called, there she was… and as the band began
he summoned all his courage and asked for the waltz with the girl he had waited a lifetime to hold in his arms. At their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they danced it just as they had back then… slow, eyes locked on each other, no need to recall the steps which were part of their DNA. The song was “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”. Of course, it was sung by the Andrews Sisters and its potent magic worked that night… as it always did. Now, here it is again, as we remember it…

Envoi

LaVerne died May 8, 1967; Maxene October 21, 1995; Patty January 30, 2013.

About the Author

Dr. Jeffrey Lant is known worldwide. He started in the media business when he was 5 years old, a Kindergartner in Downers Grove, Illinois, publishing his first newspaper article. Since then Dr. Lant has earned four university degrees, including the PhD from Harvard. He has taught at over 40 colleges and universities and is quite possibly the first to offer satellite courses. He has written over 50 books, thousands of articles and been a welcome guest on hundreds of radio and television programs. He has founded several successful corporations and businesses including his latest at …writerssecrets.com

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In My Own Voice Vol. 1 edited table of content updated

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