Breaking Into Song
Breaking Into Song
Transcript for Breaking into Song (full episode)
Christopher Worth: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.
Wendy Goldburg: And I just, um, gave voice to that free feeling I had.
Thousands of miles away from home. I am having an adventure. This is something I've always wanted to have.
Victoria Hurst: Wendy Goldberg is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, and in the fall of 2011, she was on a cruise, but this wasn't just any cruise. It was a study abroad program called Semester at Sea.
Wendy Goldburg: And we set out from Boston and picked up students, and Montreal went across to Morocco and we went around the world essentially. And as we were returning from our trip, our last stop after we went through the Panama Canal was Roatán, Honduras.
Victoria Hurst: Roan is a tropical island north of Honduras. It's a popular spot for tourists.
A lot of them like to go zip lining, you know, when you strap yourself to a pulley that's attached to a cable and go flying over the jungle.
Wendy Goldburg: And I'd really said to myself, I wanted to go zip lining and I'd missed the opportunity in Costa Rica. And so here was my chance.
Victoria Hurst: Once in the jungle of Rotan, Wendy climbed up the ladder to the platform where his zip line began.
Wendy Goldburg: Way up high with V vast territory below me and the wind rushing by. And I felt kind of sovereign up there, you know, surveying everything below. Um, and what I saw was, you know, just the forest canopy way up in the trees. There weren't many people below. Lots of different colors of green, and I could see, you know, far as the eye could see.
Victoria Hurst: Wendy started recording with her iPhone.
Wendy Goldburg: Am I ready? [00:02:00] Yeah.
Victoria Hurst: She got strapped to the Zipline seat, walked to the edge of the platform, and right as she leapt off, something happened.
Wendy Goldburg: In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the
Victoria Hurst: she broke into song.
Wendy Goldburg: Well, you know, I'm not even sure I decided to break into the song. The song broke out of me. It just suddenly bubbled up in me.
Victoria Hurst: It's rare life brings this moment so exciting that all we can do is start singing. Why does this happen? Are there emotions that just have to be sung? And what happens when we give into that urge? Life's not a musical, except sometimes it is.
You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project, and I'm your host, Victoria Hurst. In each episode, we bring you stories centered on a common human experience giving, lying, questing, sleeplessness. In today's episode, we're asking why we break into song.
We're talking about a particular type of singing. We are talking about that moment, that surprising moment when feelings, melody, lyrics swell inside us until we have no choice but to open our mouths and break into song.
In our first story, we find out what happens when you open your heart and break into song for the girl who may or may not be the one. In our second story, we [00:04:00] take you to Thailand, where a Stanford alum dares to break into song to honor a very unlikely request. In our third story, we go to France to find out what happens when two lifelong enemies break into song together.
Right as we started investigating what it means to break into song, we met Danny Smith. Danny runs a Stanford student group called The Red Couch Project. They capture the stories and performances of independent artists in an online video series. Danny told us about Chris Worth, a Stanford graduate, now independent artist who is coming to town for a red couch project show.
On the night of Chris's performance, Danny interviewed him about a song he improvised for a girl he loved. It'll be up to you to decide what you think of the song, but as for the consequences of improvising, well, when you break into song, sometimes you break things.
Christopher Worth: Yes. My name is Christopher Worth, and this is Worth Music.
J That's a matter of fact, always got the back.
Danny Smith: In February, singer and songwriter Chris Worth came to Stanford to put on a concert for the Red Couch Project. A few days before the concert, I called him to talk about his set, and at one point he told me about a time that he broke into song and the consequences of that moment. This is the story of what happened.
Here we go. Take one. I'm just kidding. There's knocking, knocking takes.
Christopher Worth: Don't you wanna put your, uh, mouse closer to the mic. Sorry.
Danny Smith: So it starts at a warehouse party in Oakland, California. And there Chris meets a girl [00:06:00] and she's that kind of girl, the girl that all your friends tell you you're really gonna love before you meet her. And then bam, there she is.
Christopher Worth: She's wearing some huge like golden afro wig and like this ridiculous eighties like spandex outfit and she's a pretty good looking woman.
So I was me like, oh my goodness, hello. And she ran up to me and jumped on me and straddled me like immediately.
Danny Smith: Pretty soon that encounter and that girl will make Chris break into song. He calls the song and the Girl, Mrs. Rosie. So that's what we'll call her too. Anyway, as the night went on, things between Chris and Mrs. Rosie got more intense
Christopher Worth: and then later we went to her house and I was helping cut one of her friend's hair, like her dreadlocks, like in a bowl around. And there was this moment in the bathroom of cutting the hair where like this extremely intense attraction developed out of nowhere. It was like palpable in the room, you know, other people were uncomfortable. Some of those moments in life where you meet somebody and it's just completely different energetically than meeting any other people, you know, few and far between. Yeah, the fire
Danny Smith: Chris and Mrs. Rosie made out that night and felt like something was really developing between them, but they lived in different cities and the next day they went their separate ways.
Chris moved back home to Portland to work on his album, and Mrs. Rosie stayed home in Oakland. But they really thought that they might have something. They, they didn't have expectations, but thought it might be worth the shot, whatever it was. So one weekend, Mrs. Rosie came to visit Chris.
Christopher Worth: The first night we spent together was really bizarre. It was really, it was like the magic was gone, but we were dedicated to how strong we had felt. So we were going to get through it. Oh. And we stayed up all night. It's funny 'cause we never had sex. Um, but I spent the night with her, you know, a couple nights, you know. But it was very tame in some ways.
Danny Smith: Clearly this wasn't what either of them had expected, but they kept trying to make things work. Mrs. Rosie went back down to Oakland. Chris [00:08:00] stayed in Portland. They kept in touch with emails and texts, and they even talked on Skype, but they never recovered the heat from the spark they'd once shared. This went on for well a while, but Chris and Mrs. Rosie felt like something had connected them, but at the same time, things were falling apart. Chris could never quite find the words to tell this to Mrs. Rosie but then one night he did.
Christopher Worth: I didn't know what the song was gonna be. I didn't really know the chords or anything, but, um, I just started playing this riff and I was like, oh, the fire is really hot right now.
Like, it's the same energy as I felt when I met her, same, same kind of thing. When the inspiration is strong, it's a, I guess, a deep presence. So I'm trying to sign onto Skype and contact her and it won't, like, it just will not work. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna record this on my phone. Just, just, I gotta get it. It's going now. Like it's, it's coming right now and it's gotta be laid down right now, whatever this is. So I press record on my phone and just start playing. And as I'm doing that, Skype turns on. I'm like, oh, great now. But I'm like, okay, I'm gonna keep going. I've already started the song. I'm just gonna play the song from start to be finish and see what it is.
Danny Smith: So I have it, I have it here actually, and I just wanted to play a short snippet and then sort of like
Christopher Worth: the heater is in the back room, like going, you can hear it in the recording. It's really bizarre. I think that electric sound. Yeah. That the, there's like spirits in the walls of the house, just like time to play.
Danny Smith: So right now she's, she's on Skype.
Christopher Worth: She's not listening right now, but right as that's gone, I've signed on. So she has seen me sign on, probably is thinking about me and I'm imagining this conversation with her that I was trying to have in freestyle form, basically. Which, that's why I like this song because it's really conversational and it's literally just the simple truth and it's not pretending or trying to be anything other than like, I just wrote this little song about this situation.
Danny Smith: I wanna make you happy. I wanna see you cry.
Christopher Worth: I don't wanna see you cry.
Danny Smith: [00:10:00] Oh, I don't wanna see you cry.
Christopher Worth: No, I was born to make you happy. Ah, okay. Okay. Like there's purpose here.
Yeah. Don't you know a
look on your face,
tell you chill out.
Danny Smith: So half of this song is really lovely. You might say it's exactly what you'd expect from a love song. I was born to make you happy. I don't wanna see you cry. But about halfway through the song, it changes
Christopher Worth: the sassa FRAs your ass baby.
Danny Smith: Why? You gotta be so rude. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's the sassafrass in your ass? Why you gotta be so rude? What? It's as if the re improvisation Chris is saying something he didn't quite mean to say, or something he didn't quite know. He felt, and perhaps he didn't even realize he was saying it. So Chris had the recording on his phone. He didn't have to send it to Mrs. Rosie. He could have just kept it for himself, but he sent it to her anyway. What, what did she say when you,
Christopher Worth: oh, I don't think she thought it was a very good song. Yeah, I don't think she cared. I think the whole point, I guess if I had expected an answer, it would've been what I got, which was nothing. No response. Did you get it? Yeah. Okay, cool. So you got it. All right. So you, you listened to it? Yeah. Cool. Moving on
it. My God. Yeah.
If I remember correctly. And then the relationship was over within, you know.
Danny Smith: That song cost Chris, but he doesn't regret it. He actually loves the song.
Christopher Worth: You [00:12:00] know, I just don't care. I love this. I've, I love this. I love singing it. It's the first song I'm gonna sing tonight. Hey, Mrs. Rosie.
Danny Smith: For Chris, the song isn't about what happened. The song isn't even about reality. Well, technically it is, but it's really about more than that. It's about capturing something in the moment, something that flows through you. It's about what Chris called the fire. When you break into song, you can't predict the end result.
You let a chord progression take over. You let lyrics, rhythm, emotion, take over. You accept the consequences without really knowing what they'll be beforehand. When you break into song, sometimes you break things. But what Chris told us is that it isn't just about the consequences.
Christopher Worth: Yeah. It's about presence or being present and fully aware. So that's, that's really what that recording is. It's not even about the lyrics. It's about being present with emotion. I felt like con connected outside of myself. I wasn't even moving my mouth. It was just coming out.
Danny Smith: In flow. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Victoria Hurst: This piece was created by Danny Smith and myself, Victoria Hurst. It features music from musician, Chris Worth. You can find out more about the Red Couch project at youtube.com/red Couch Project, or at our website storytelling.stanford.edu. You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.
Today we're investigating what it means to break into song. When someone dedicates a song to you, it's moving. But when someone breaks into song right there for you, [00:14:00] now that's really special. But sometimes, no matter how well intentioned the singer, having someone break into song for you can be overwhelming.
Andi Harrington explores the boundaries of Breaking into Song, and our next piece entitled The Part Of Me In You.
Jared Muirhead: We all know the feeling of being moved by a song, but what if somebody could write a song just for you, and that song captured exactly what you were feeling?
Andi Harrington: My name is Andi Harrington, and if I were to be any animal, I would be a hummingbird.
Jared Muirhead: That's just what Andi Harrington does. She asks you for a few words, she takes a look at you, and then she sing. We asked her for the first thing that came to mind. Hot chocolate On a cold day.
Andi Harrington: Hmm.
Sitting by the fire. I wonder where you've been, but I don't care 'cause for a while, you and I can sit and watch the snow clouds come in, sitting right here with my hot chocolate in between these 10 fingers .
Why won't you come a little closer and linger for this snowy December?
Jared Muirhead: But not everybody asks for songs about drinking hot chocolate on a cold day. Sometimes people ask Andi to sing about much darker experiences. Once while Andi was living in another country, she discovered that her singing could take people to really difficult places, and that her talent came with a shocking amount of responsibility. [00:16:00] But let's start from the beginning. For Andi, singing used to be something very private. Four years ago when she was a sophomore at Stanford, Andi wouldn't sing in public.
She would hide every time she sang, so no one would hear her. But one day Andi was alone in her room.
Andi Harrington: I remember there being beautiful sunlight shining in on the side of the house, and it was so peaceful and serene. And I just picked up my guitar and found chords and was just singing out words, and I felt so at peace with everything.
Jared Muirhead: That day, someone walked in on Andi,
Andi Harrington: and then I thought I heard a knock on the door, and it was as if the curtain had dropped and the sunshine went away. And I was just dying because I thought someone had heard me and then they were gonna ridicule me and tell me to shut up. And so my friend Theo walked in and just sort of casually mentioned, I heard you singing.
You have a great voice. You should do the talent show.
And I remember that it just was what I'd always wanted to hear from someone. I always wanted permission to play. Uh, and so she walked out and then I remember thinking, I'm gonna write a song for the talent show.
Speaker 2: I couldn't quite locate her. Explain.
Jared Muirhead: So Andi set out to write a song, but writing a song was harder than she thought it would be.
Andi Harrington: I tried different chord progressions and everything I was doing was wrong and it sounded cheesy and it was artificial and forced. And um, I just was thinking, okay, well I'll pick a few ideas I wanna sing about Sunshine. The hawk singing outside and my room and the way it looks, and that, that's like a basic outline.
So I'll show up and then work on the rest.
Jared Muirhead: The talent show is in a small room, maybe 20 or 30 people in the audience, mostly friends. This was her very first time on stage. And for Andi, the weight was torture.
Andi Harrington: Finally, the mc, who I think this night is just like stumbling on stage. Belligerently says, [00:18:00] and now for our last act, it's Andi Harrington, and no one knows I can play guitar. No one knows I can sing. I've really been adamant.
Jared Muirhead: Nobody had any idea what would happen. Not even Andi.
Andi Harrington: So I take the microphone. I said, my name's Andi. Um, oh, you already know that. Um, well, I, um, can do, and, and as I was talking, I was panting and really a mess. And then I explained to them, I can write music on the spot, and if you just give me ideas, I, I will just create something collectively.
Jared Muirhead: It was spring quarter close to graduation and someone in the crowd asked Andi to sing a song about the problem of anxiety, of being scared to leave Stanford.
Andi Harrington: And then I just ran with it, um, and just decided to go and stop the process and just start the song. When I closed my eyes, just everything around me dissipated.
I was just no longer anything besides a voice in my mind, and maybe a few colors, but just little ideas of colors. And I was nowhere. I remember I couldn't even feel the bench underneath me. And then I opened my eyes and it was just dead silent. And then there's a roar of applause, and people were crying and just rushed the stage. And embraced me, and uh, that was my first show.
Jared Muirhead: After the talent show, Andi continued to sing and perform. She kept seeing these little wisps of color, and the colors got more intense.
Andi Harrington: I thought for some reason there was strobe lights on, but there weren't. And so the whole room disappeared and I was in my own head and, but still somehow connected to the people around me.
And then I realized, oh, Daniel's voice is red. Her voice is yellow. His voice is, and it was just very sharp, and I could match my pitch and my tone with their colors.
Now I know what that is called. It's called synesthesia.
Jared Muirhead: Synesthesia is a real phenomenon. It's when the sensory pathways in your brain get crossed [00:20:00] so that you experience sensations in multiple ways, like if you could taste blue or hear sunshine. For Andi, the colors she saw were like a visual connection between the feelings she got from the people in the room and her own voice.
And so singing improvised songs for audiences became a big part of Andi's life.
Andi Harrington: So when I play a song, I got so many things to go off of. I got deep thoughts, reds and purples, greens. Yeah, those two. You know, it's just so complicated. Sometimes I don't know what to do, and if I stay calm and let itself carry on, let itself create these magic moments. If I can just not hate myself for a moment and just stay confident and calm, and carry on, carry on, keep calm and carry on.
Jared Muirhead: In 2012, Andi graduated from Stanford and moved to Thailand to teach English. But when she got there, she quickly learned that her singing could have unexpected effects on people. Andi learned that she could move her audience to the point that it scared them and scared her too.
Jared Muirhead: That's Andi introducing herself. And Thai, she was teaching English classes at a local school in Bangkok, but she felt she could give more. The first weekend of her winter break, she decided to volunteer for a center for sexually abused girls.
Andi Harrington: The center had hired a van to pick me up 'cause I lived the furthest possible point away from it.
Um, and so every morning I would get into the car and then drive with them for half an hour and go through rice fields and ancient temples and walls to the center.
Jared Muirhead: Andi stepped outta the van and the director took her to the classroom.
Andi Harrington: There's 35 girls, um, ages from seven to 19. None of them really can speak English, and they were all put in one room with me six hours a day, for three days straight.
And there's just no instructions for me what to do, what to teach them.
Jared Muirhead: So [00:22:00] Andi did what she does best. She sang
Andi Harrington: I would just make up songs that it would, um, include my lesson plan I just taught. So we would do 1, 2, 3, not three. Because it's really hard to say those words. Um, or ABCs plus colors. And then how old are you?
What's your name? The all time favorite is what's the weather like outside?
What is the weather like today?
I was really nervous because I had been told their stories before I met them, is
it sunny outside? Is there sun in the sky?
And then I realized really quickly on that they're, they're amazing and incredibly inspirational women.
They're not victims of abuse. They're survivors. And all of them were incredibly excited. Even for the alphabet, they would go three hours straight of teaching and then take a half an hour lunch break and then start.
Jared Muirhead: But learning a new language can be tiring. And when she and her students needed a break, there was one song in particular that they loved.
And so they asked Andi to sing it to them.
Andi Harrington: Their heading slowly, diamond, slowly taken, and the violins causes silence. Who are we mistaken?
And I have no idea how they've heard this. And I speak a little tie, and I was able to ask, you know, how did you hear the song? And they were like, eh, you know, as a child in my rural village in Thailand, we heard zombies by the current, like ridiculous that that would be there.
So I played zombies nine times in a row every day. And the one line is, um, like what's in your head? In your head? Zombie zombies.
What's in your head, in your head? Zombie, zombie. Zombie.
Andi Harrington: But it's a really, um, like kind of a dark, darker note and, um, they just belted that it wasn't even singing along me.
And these girls were feeling that song, those notes and that expression of the music. So that was really powerful every time to kind of [00:24:00] build up to that point. And then have 35 girls and women screeching out the pain in their head.
These girls, you don't really see the pain they suffered. Um, I was, I was unfortunate enough to see some of their actual scars of like iron burns or whips and like intense lacerations, but the scars of the mind you don't see and they're just as intense.
Jared Muirhead: On her second day at the center, Andi told the girls she could improvise for them the way she did back home.
Andi Harrington: So I basically explained in Thai that I think, and saying same, same
Jared Muirhead: the little girls understood what Andi was offering. So one of the girls gave Andi a word. Andi heard the word, but she didn't know what that word meant.
So the girl walked over to the dictionary and pointed to the word she wanted Andi to sing about.
Andi Harrington: The word was violation. I remember thinking, can we do the word violet, which is below? Can we do violin? Can we do something else? And, you know, trying to move her finger. And she was at very adamant, this is the word I want.
Uh, it's just so heartbreaking. Um, and your eyes water and your chest shrinks and your stomach goes away and you feel like you're dizzy and and you can't let that show. Because it's just not fair to the, the Vic, the victim of that.
Jared Muirhead: Andi wanted to honor the request, but she didn't think she could do it because she had not lived through anything like that in her own life.
Andi Harrington: If someone were to say, talk about how I was raped when I was seven, it's really heavy and it's just, I can't do that. I don't know how that feels, but if there's a, is a deep, dark blue, maybe I felt the sky blue some way, and so I just kind of sing to myself in them.
Jared Muirhead: She focused on the word and tried to find the colors and sounds to match the feeling she was searching after. [00:26:00] She closed her eyes and she tried to open herself to their experience to become their voice, to access a feeling she had never experienced before,
Andi Harrington: and so I just took a deep breath and started to improv it. It was a very quick shift. I do remember feeling chills. You know when you do something really well, sometimes you get startled.
Jared Muirhead: Andi was in the middle of her song when suddenly she felt that something was wrong. So she opened her eyes and
Andi Harrington: I opened my eyes and there's just girls biting their lips, girls off in the corner who just couldn't handle it and wanted to get outta the room. Um, girls that were in the fetal position, just like feeling that pain, um, one of the girls was crying for her mom, whom she'll never see again. That went from happy Andi singing, and then within a minute we're just gone and I put them back in that place of intense trauma.
Jared Muirhead: Andi hadn't expected her singing to have such a strong effect. She didn't know she could do that.
Andi Harrington: And so I switched the chords to really happy and really pretty, and then went back to zombie.
In your head, zombie, zombie, zombie.
And when the girls, the girls who were able to, when they really took up the song and were belting it out, it was sort of calling to the other girls in the room to join them and to come back to the moment. And so it was, it was really fascinating to see girls unravel themselves from a fetal position or to stop punching the walls.
I saw in a lot of the girls a recognition that things are gonna be okay. And, um, that this is a song that we sing when we're upset, uh, as a community. They acknowledge this song is the song we sing when we want to be more in control of our emotions, when we [00:28:00] wanna be more present in our day-to-day life.
And then that only lasted for about two seconds before it was just collectively decided that the song was over. They all stood up and then started laughing, and then went outside and started to, um, do hula hoops, which is something that they also do, I think as a fun calming thing. And I just, just left in this room watching them do hula hoops.
And thinking to myself, what just happened? It really terrified me because music I didn't realize how powerful it is. It can take you to a memory where you're being apparently, I guess in this situation, raped. It can also take you to your first love, to your grandparents' house, your favorite mountain, and the spectrum of that and the power of that, that if you get the chord structure right, if you get the right melodies in the right sounds, that can transport people someplace.
So I actually stayed in and kept playing guitar, but while they were, um, letting go of their own ways, I decided to, to write music for myself.
The power of singing is that for a split second, you get to put down the backpack that you have in your mind of all these things. You've accumulated all of the pain and the stress, and you can just lay it down, come to a room and open up your voice, your lungs, your mind, and just breathe out notes that express that.
And it's sort of in a way, a restart button to life. You can pick up all these stresses, pick up all these horrors, these burdens, and then when you sing it out, it restarts it and you can handle it again.
Little girl, she is playing around, she is part of things. When suddenly I see her fall down into a nightmare, [00:30:00] clenched up the fear she can't get out.
Oh, I see her drowning, scared, and drive behind brown eyes. Please don't believe the sadness going on in your head. It can be defeated, but you gotta stand. You gotta stand up. Don't believe the things you feel. They don't have to become real. Just let them go. Let them go. Again.
I know that you want to win. Who am I to tell you how to feel? But I've been there before and I know that this sadness, that drowning is real and you don't have to go there.
At all, huh?[00:32:00]
Victoria Hurst: The story you just heard was told by Jared Muirhead. It featured improvised singing and one recorded song by Andi Harrington. It was produced by Natasha Ruck and Bonnie Swift with help from Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg, and Kathy Yuan.
Now for our final story, La Vie en Rose Stanford's storytelling project. Senior producer Natasha Ruck shares a memoir about the fraught relationship she had with her grandmother. Natasha takes us on a journey from France to New York from the present day to the 1930s and through breaking into song, she takes this from confusion to understAnding.
Natasha Ruck: I imagine that for most grandparents, singing to a grandchild is an act of love, but for my grandmother, it was an act of war. And I was the enemy. I grew up in the north of France near the Belgian border, and when I was seven years old, a Belgian singer gave my grandmother her weapon of choice. A song titled Natasha.
The song tells the story of a little girl named Natasha when she's born, and her Russian parents realize she's not a boy. They are dismayed. What a catastrophe they sing. Yet that is Russian for No. Yet, yet, yet, no. To Natasha. We don't want a girl. We want a Nicola. Now, my mother's parents were Russian, and my name is Natasha, so I hated that song.
Singing that song to me was like pouring malted lava in my ears. [00:34:00] I was seven years old and that year meme, that's how I called my father's mother meme, would sing that chorus to me every time I visited.
It's not that I was a horrible child. For meme, the problem was that I was a girl. For meme, girls were nothing. She called girls pieces. In French, that means bed wetter, except Meme did not mention any bad girls piss. That's all they're good for. Meme had given birth to three boys and that was the right way to do it.
When I was growing up, she had five grandsons that she doted on, but they were also two granddaughters. My sister Aurelia and me.
Visiting meme was torture, but my sister and I found ways to cope. Mainly. We tried to get to meme stash of chocolate. My grandmother loved chocolate and she kept endless supplies of code door bars and Leonidas. But what she loved even more was to use her chocolate to play mind games on us. Once I went to visit my grandmother on my birthday, I must have been 13 years old.
I'd come alone hoping to get a present of some sort. As soon as I walked in meme's kitchen, I spotted a gift on the window sill. I knew from the golden wrapping that it was a pound of Leonidas chocolate, so I looked away and hid my smile. This visit would not be in vain. They may ask me if I wanted some water.
But I knew it was more than a [00:36:00] simple question. There was a certain ritual I had to follow as far as I can remember. My grandmother would always welcome me the same way. She'd be in her s spotless, gigantic kitchen, towering over me like a white-haired silverback gorilla. She would ask me what I wanted to drink and offer me a choice between dry vermouth or water, and I would say, I'd like some water, please.
And she would reply, water is for ducklings. Now, hearing that phrase water is for ducklings was unbearable. Meme always said that, and she said it every single time. She said it to me, to my brother and sister, to my dad. She said it if you chose the water, but she also said it if you chose the vermouth.
Whatever you said, she would always say water is for ducklings. So on my 13th birthday I walked in my grandmother's Lysol and cinnamon scented kitchen. I was offered a choice between water and alcohol. I picked the water. My grandmother called me a duckling than to wished a happy birthday. I knew better than to show my longing for the chocolates.
So I sat at her giant kitchen table and talked about school. All the while hoping there were Whitely Uni as per in the box. The box remained on the sill. It got dark. It got time to leave stalemate. As I was putting my coat on, I went for it. Mimi, what's that box on the window sill? I said, then she said, oh, that's a little something for your cousin Anthony.
I looked at her face, her high forehead frame by the coarse white hair. The light gray eyes with the metallic sparkle. And she smiled, and I knew she had bought the box exactly for that moment, and she knew, I knew that made her smile some more.[00:38:00]
That game of pettiness was pretty much how all my visits to my grandparents went. The years flew past, my grandfather passed away. I moved to another town. My grandmother moved from her four story house to a two bedroom condo in a large apartment complex. I moved to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York, and when I would visit home, usually once a year, I only went to see meme because it made my father happy.
And when I was there, I would try to collect some sort of gift, maybe a chocolate bar or a birthday slash Christmas check.
But one summer the game changed. I'd been in the country for a week and I dropped by to visit meme. As I stepped inside her home, I scanned the place. Most of the furniture she used to own is now crammed in this two bedroom apartment, the carved ivory table, the Louis 15 style couch with its faded Rococo golden trim.
They all feel cramped and crowded. I follow meme into her kitchen. It's a tiny, tiny room with a light green form mica table propped against the wall. It can see two, one facing the window and one facing the wall. The usual smell of cinnamon and Lysol is gone. Meme asks me what I would like to drink. I opt for the water.
She says Water is for ducklings, and she hands me a glass of water. I look at the glass, it's almost caked with calcium deposits. We move to the living room. I sit on the hardest bone couch, and as I sip my ritualistic glass of water, it gets to that moment, the moment with elderly [00:40:00] relatives when you run out of small talk and you are both a bit too silent.
I look at her and she looks at me and we both look away. Her nose is just like my father's, only her skin is ashen. Her forehead is as tall as mine, and I feel like there is so much that could be said, should be said. I say, it's really cold today. She answers, I don't even have a little piece of chocolate for you.
I say Next time, knowing. I have no intention of seeing her again on this trip. I glance sideways at my watch. I've been here for less than five minutes. So I stare at the life-size photographs of all my male cousins, and I begin to imagine what this place must look like in her mind.
Meme clears her throat. I look back at her and she's frowning. She has this kind of absence in her gray eyes and she says, do you want something to drink? And I raise my glass of water and I say, well, water's my poison. And she answers water's for ducklings. And while I listen to her say waters for ducklings, I wonder if I have entered my own private version of hell.
But then I realized that my grandmother's brain has basically rebooted to my arrival. I've been there for six minutes. So basically meme has six minutes worth of live memory. She's like a 1981 Commodore 64 or something with less than 16 kilobytes of Ram. That day, before I duck out, Memay calls me a duckling three more times.
When I finally leave, I make it to my parents' house and tell my sister. She confirms that my grandmother now has the attention span of a goldfish, but Aurelia tells me she figured out how to handle this. She tells me to just ignore the present and have Mimi talk about the past. It's actually kind of nice.
Aurelia says she really spills the beans. [00:42:00] I'll show you. So a few days later, my sister and I go back to see my Meme together, and Aurelia is right. Meme has the funniest stories about the thirties, stories about stumbling into a gay bar in Spain, stories about falling head over heels for her best friend's boyfriend, a mysterious Jewish boy, and seducing him.
I'm astounded to realize the exotic Jew she describes turned out to be Peppe, my grandfather. Then meme tells us that before she met Peppe, she was almost engaged to another man, her sweetheart she calls him. My sweetheart, left me. She says, he left me to join the army. Meme tells us that her sweetheart was stationed on a submarine and that he died when the submarine sank.
My sister and I have never been so entertaining in meme's house, but when we leave her, we wonder if it's safe for meme to stay on her own like that. We ask my father, and he tells us that putting meme in a private home would be a death sentence, and he's right. He's a doctor. He's seen this happen with his patients, but he knows this would actually be worse for meme.
My grandmother is a fury of a woman as long as he's known her. She has set the rules in the family. She made everyone bake apple tarts like she did and clean as often as she did. The only person who resisted her was my mother. No one could bully my mother, but meme boss, her husband, her three boys, she was so hard on her boys.
She wanted them to be the first in the family to go to college, so she pushed them hard. Sometimes literally. The one time my uncle Paul came home drunk, she pushed him to the ground and sat on his chest, slapping him across the face until he sobered up. So I get what [00:44:00] my father is saying. Meme doesn't quite live in the present anymore, but she should stay where she is.
My visit ends and I fly back to Brooklyn. While I'm away my father tries to keep his mother in the crammed apartment as long as possible. But one day she goes to the bakery. She wants some milk, which they don't have, but she doesn't believe them. She knows there is a cow behind the counter.
I'll milk the cow myself. Meme says to get to that imaginary cow, my 91-year-old grandmother wrestles the baker to the ground. You don't mess with meme's, food. Luckily, someone knows my dad and calls him.
The next time I see my grandmother. She has been placed in a nursing home, but it's not really a nursing home. As we drive to the hospital, my dad says, you'll see it's a very good place. As we approach, he grows quieter. When we walk in I hear the doors behind us lock from the outside. My dad points at the card activated security system to me. Brightening up he says she's escaped twice. Once she made it to the street. As we walk through the hallway, we pass many patients slash inmates seated in their twin cells. They stare at us and certainly we find my grandmother in a small courtyard. She has shrunk in size. Her hair has taken a yellow hue. She's wearing the old distended flower print cotton shirts that I remember used to hug her bux and figure.
Now she looks more like a live orangutan than an alpha gorilla, but she's still got game. My grandmother is sitting at a table with her roommate and her roommate's family. The family brought a box of candy. Meme is eating some. Today's a good day [00:46:00] Meme recognizes my dad. My son, the doctor is here today, meme says, taking a page from the Jewish side of the family that never quite accepted her.
Then she looks at the mousey old lady sitting next to her and asks, what is it that your son does again? The old lady closes her box of Candy. He's in sales. She admits defeated. My father is pointing at Mimi's ankle. Show her your thing he says to my grandmother. That's when I see the gray band just above Mimi's drooping sock.
My grandmother is wearing an electronic ankle monitor. That thing actually rings if she steps out the door my dad says. My father is proud of his mother's ankle monitor of her willfulness, but he knows as well as I do that stealing her roommate's chocolate and looking down on her roommate's son can't make up for the fact that Meme's life is miserable.
I can only imagine how she hates being. She hates the orderlies, hates being told what to do, hates the sterile uncluttered environment around her, but worse, she does not understand why she's here or what kind of here this here is. My daddy is asking her if she knows who I am and I see her eyes go fuzzy.
She looks at us and she frowns. We've been here for six minutes. I guess she can't quite remember who we are now, but dad says she's my daughter, so she's your granddaughter, the one in America. And meme looks at him and she says, you are way too old to be my son. My dad laughs. Meme has been sitting next to me the whole time, but she has come and gone.
And while I listen to my dad laugh at her jab, I wonder what it must be like for her to wake up every six minutes in this world. I imagine that in her mind everything is fuzzy and looks wrong. She tries to make sense of it, but she can't. She's like a coma victim, waking up on a futuristic [00:48:00] hospital bed after 60 years of sleep.
I imagine her seeing this world around her for the first time. There are all these contraptions and she can't fathom what they are. Transparent, flexible tubes, strangely resonant surfaces and natural fabrics. Worse of all, everyone around her is so old. Their skin sags and white whiskers spread out of their ears and noses. But she, in her mind, she's a young woman again, perhaps in her mid twenties.
She has just escaped her parents' farm in Belgium. She's escaped her mother and made a life for herself in France. She has snatched her best friend's boyfriend, that Jewish boy with a sensuous lips, and she does not care that his sister call her a shiksa. It is spring 1938, and she's not ashamed that she lived with him before he married her and that she was pregnant when he said, I do.
She looks around the courtyard, but her husband isn't here. Instead, there's this old grizzly bear of a man pointing at her ankle and smiling. What does he want from her? Do they know each other? What kind of sick, twisted humor prompts him to tell her he's her son. What was that gigantic hairy nose and that spit on his drooping lower lip?
He puts this strangely square object in her hand. The object is black and it crinkles to the touch. There's something hard sealed inside. The old grizzly bear of a man takes a crinkly black square from her. She riches for it, but he slaps her hand. Then he quickly puts something back in her palm. It is unnaturally cold and smooth against her skin, but as she clutches it, it leaves brown streaks on her flesh.
Eat it, my father says. And at first Ma may resents the order, but then she kind of remembers something she [00:50:00] isn't quite sure, but she puts the mini Mars bar in her mouth. It's chocolate you dummy, my dad says, and I feel really sad because my dad, he loves his mother, but he's just a guy. He's a guy raised in the forties in a country, devastated by war, by a British mother.
So he doesn't know what to say or how to take care of her. She didn't have any daughters. She had three boys, so there is no one to buy her new socks, no one to dye her hair or even buy the blue tinted shampoo, the one that would get rid of the yellow streaks in her hair. There is no one who can help the neat freak that she was, retain anything feminine or neat about her.
And the only way my father has to show his love is to marvel at her will to escape and to give her chocolate. So he keeps feeding her little Mars bars. At first, I'm angry at my dad because he could be giving her the court door bars she liked so much, or Enes, but no, he's giving her this crap American candy bar.
He could be touching her hand, but he just stands there utterly lost. So I decide to make the best of the visit like my sister and I always did. I don't just let things happen. I encourage them. If my grandmother thinks it's 1936, fine. If she thinks it's 1948 and that I'm her husband's cousin, the one who married a GI and moved to America, fine.
I ask her questions and she tells us the stories she remembers best. There are stories my father never heard, stories I've never heard. At 5:00 PM I tell her I have to go back to my GI husband and she asks if she can come with, I think I finished my work for the day, she says.
Another year passes and another year. I [00:52:00] go with my father to visit my grandmother one last time. But this time my sister joins us. She has devised a new mechanism to cope. The new method is a kind of banter, some sort of vaudeville call and response act. The three of them play. My grandmother doesn't remember much now, not even the past, but she's still somehow herself trapped in there.
So my sister and my father try to find ways to bring her out. This time. I joined them and I joined the show. We're in my grandmother's room was its two single beds separated by a plastic curtain. My grandmother is seated on her bed. Her roommate is there too. The roommate has aged a little better than my grandmother.
She's mesmerized by our arrival. My father points at me and asks my grandmother, do you know who this is? And Meme looks at me and I can see in her face that she knows this is a trick question that she's supposed to say yes, but she does not really know who I am. I see her nod, but really she looks at me and it's like the first time she sees me, my long hair, my high forehead.
I imagine that maybe I look a little like the girl she used to be. In her mind, I look like the girl she thinks she is. The girl who wanted to go to school to be a school teacher. The girl who instead had to go work in France to earn money, money to support her parents and her baby brother, Camille.
Camille, the brother who had lied, lied to me about my sweetheart, about my sweetheart who died in the submarine. My sweetheart, who never wrote any letters except my sweetheart, did write letters, love letters. And Camille, my own brother, he knew. He knew, but he didn't tell, didn't tell me that mother took the letters.
Mother hid the letters, burnt the letters.
Do you know who this is? [00:54:00] My father asks again. In the hospital room, my grandmother is staring into space, lost in some memory. So the roommate jumps in, it's your granddaughter, she says, excited to have the upper hand, the other one. And Mimi looks at me again and I smile and I say yes. And Mimi asks me, what do you do for a living?
I start to answer, but my sister cuts me off and says, Natasha lives in America and she's a chorus girl on Broadway. You know, a chorus girl, my dad says she sings and dances on stage in her underwear. I'm beginning to get the contour of the character I inhabit in the new narrative. My father and sister have concocted.
They can't get my grandmother to remember who any of us are, but they can still get her riled up. Mimi likes to rant. They like to see her rant. She rants everyone's happy. So I forget that I'm a documentary producer and I enter my sister in my father's game. I say yes, Mimi. That's what I do, but I still have some dignity, so I add, I'm an actress.
I'm not always wearing a tutu. Sometimes it is a long, tough to dress with a big hoop. And anyways, people like the dancing, but mostly they come for the singing. Singing, after all is what Carnegie Hall is known for. Against all odds, my grandmother does not launch into a rant about this type of girl, the one singing in their underwear because they don't have the wits to make a living.
My grandmother, she sits up and smiles. She seems strangely proud of this. And then I noticed that her roommate's mouth is a gape. I doubt either of them knows what Carnegie Hall is, but the roommate is quite horrified. I say the crowds love me and meme looks at her roommate and meme looks at me with her foggy goldfish eyes and she's beaming with pride.
Your hair is pretty, [00:56:00] meme says. Which is perhaps the first compliment she's ever paid me. Her shaky hand reaches out towards me and she touches my hand, our hands clasp, but her roommate is not buying it. She's fuming. You are lying. You are no singer. She says, why would I lie? I answer, singing is my life.
Then the roommate says, sing something. I look at my father and my sister. They are loving this. I look at my grandmother and she looks at me with those wide blue eyes, like a wind swept cloudy sky. I love singing and I've been taking singing lessons to get better at it, but I'm borderline tone deaf. Yet there is this one song I sing at the underground, Romanian Jewish Karaoke Steakhouse provided I've had enough vodka and so I clear my throat and I start.
And this incredible thing happens. My grandmother's face lights up and I can see her consciousness rowing out there in the distance. It's gathering momentum, it's gathering speed, and suddenly she sets foot on shore and she starts singing.
And I listened to that helpless, thin little voice, and I remember all the times I was helpless in my grandmother's care, the chocolate she dangled in front of me. I remember when she would hum the Natasha song while doing the dishes and feign innocence when I cried and I listened to her voice as it begins to weaken, [00:58:00] and I lent her my voice.
We are both of us singing in unison, and she looks at me with perhaps not love but joy because she knows the tune, she knows the words, but once she's not startled, she knows what's coming next.
[01:00:00]
Victoria Hurst: The story you just heard was written by Natasha Ruck. Music was composed by Owen Callery. Visit our website to find which performances of Levion Rose he drew from. Today's program was produced by myself, Victoria Hurst, as well as Natasha Ruck and Jonah Willin Gans with help from Rachel Hamburg, Charlie Mintz, Bonnie Swift, Xandra Clark, Joshua Hoyt, and Sophia Paliza.
Special thanks to Danny Smith, Katie Strub, Kathy Yuan, Jared Muirhead, Dr. Wendy Goldberg, Andi Harrington, Chris Worth, as well as Ken Grobe. Also check out our website for a bonus story featuring Katie s Strub. We've just listened to three stories about how we can be transformed by breaking into song. In her story, Katie shares how the act of singing can transform our bodies.
For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts. The Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Bruce Braden. Remember, you can find this in every episode of the State of the Human on iTunes. You can also download them and find out more about the Stanford Storytelling Project, live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling stanford.edu.
Tune in next week for more stories about the state [01:02:00] of the Human for the state of the Human, and the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Victoria Hurst.