Episode 30 - Engaging with the Culture

I met Joi Razinha, known professionally as Tamra Henna, in high school. I had a couple circles of friends, one that smoked, drank, skipped school, and got into other miscellaneous teenage hooliganism, and one that was artistic, academically successful, and sat on the edge of the pool talking about Sylvia Plath and whatnot. Joi was in that second group, although she told me she maybe would’ve preferred to be in the first.

After reconnecting on Facebook many years later, as high school friends are prone to doing, I first saw Joi belly dance at a hookah lounge in Addison, I believe, around 2013 or 2014. I had never seen it before and had no idea how to react. She hung out and chatted with me between dances, and I realized that she was not the shy, quiet person I thought that I remembered from high school. She was smart, funny, and charming, and I’ve loved watching her adventures through the lens of Facebook ever since. As she says, I could do a whole series of episodes on her and her life.

Thank you so much, Joi, for the time and energy you brought to this project. If you like the result, we should definitely collaborate again. Hearing smart, thoughtful people talk about what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it is the best way to grow, and looking into universes in which you yourself don’t live is the best way to expand your worldview and develop your compassion.

You can find Joi at:

tamrahennabellydancer.com

Instagram: TamraHenna_Official

TikTok: TamraHenna_Official

Facebook: Joi Razinha

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Music from Audiio: “Welcome to Us (Instrumental)” by Sebastian Kauderer; “The Slowest Journey (Instrumental)” by Good Weather For An Airstrike; “Bang Bang Bang (Instrumental)” by Moarn; “Acceptance (Instrumental)” by Frankie Orella; “Intertwined (Instrumental)” by As Tall As Pine Music; “Enter” by Christopher Galovan. Music from YouTube: “Arabic Wedding (arabic instrumental)” by Boris Skalsky; “Sahara Rains” by Hanu Dixit; “Shesh Pesh” byJR Tundr. The song “Ya Tamra Henna” was originally performed in the 1957 film by Fayza Ahmed, and this version was commissioned by Joi Razinha from, and performed by, Matias Hazrum. Other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the tabla and the outro music, which I put together from instrument loops on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Joi: Well, it's funny that the name of your project is Caterpillar Goo. And that really made me smile when I saw it because, I think I had seen recently the whole thing about how, when a caterpillar transforms it essentially disintegrates and comes back together, and I resonate with that quite a bit actually, and I kind of feel like I'm always in a state of goo. I'm not sure if I've ever actually become a butterfly. I'm just always kind of gooey. Maybe that's not the same for everyone, but for me it's true. I'm always changing and trying to figure out who the hell I am just in general.

If you don't have any experience with belly dancing, it's okay to look at the dancer. It's okay to interact with the dancer. The whole point, if you're ever at a place and a belly dancer shows up, is for the whole evening to be more fun. No matter if the dancer doesn't look like what you expected them to look like, or if you are weirded out because you're not used to that, it's just all about having fun and enjoying the moment. I like it when my audience interacts with me. I want them to yell and scream and applaud, and they can tip, and they can get up and dance with me. I don't want touching or anything like that, obviously, but I want interaction. That's really one of the biggest things about being a belly dancer is that you are there to facilitate the party. And there is not a worse crowd ever than one that is I not looking or just refuses to be into it. It just sucks every bit of energy out of you. It is so hard.

I've done a lot of shows, and I've had a lot of people tip me in a lot of different ways. Depending on where I'm at, in the nightclub where I first started, in the beginning, they did not allow anyone to touch the dancers. So you could not accept tips in your costume. They could hand it to you, but it was mostly, they would come out on the dance floor, and they would do a money shower and they were allowed to dance with you a little bit, but the bouncer would escort them away from the stage if they stayed too long. That was awesome. I felt like such a rock star back then. But other places where I danced, where it was maybe a smaller restaurant, I would accept tips in my costume. And usually what I do is I tell them where I want them to tip me and, side of my hip, maybe I'll have an arm band, and I'll point to my arm band if… Maybe I'll let them do it in the front of, like in my strap. But a lot of people go straight for the front of the bra, and you just have to block it off. But, mostly it's Persian grandmas want to shove $20 bills down your bra, and I'm like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing now.

I've had very, very few incidents where people were really handsy, or I've had real problems. Occasionally you get somebody who decided they want to dive down the front of your costume to give you that whole dollar that they had in their hand. And you know, it's like, you just get really good at evasive maneuvering. But mostly people are respectful. The worst problems I had were probably with 20 year old college girls trying to twerk on me.

My dad is a Muslim, he's a white guy, and back in the seventies when everyone was converting to Islam, that's what he did, and him and my mom got divorced when I was really young. I was about two. And so I never, he wasn't in my life a lot because he went off and did his own thing. Spent some time in Bangladesh I think. And then got married again and married a woman of the faith and then went off and lived someplace else, and just wasn't a very present person in my life after that. He's lived in Turkey and Cyprus and places like that.

But I think the fact that he became a Muslim kind of in the back of my mind peaked my curiosity about the Middle East maybe. And so the story is that I was signing up for classes at community college in Austin and there was a course called Mideast Dance. So there was a connection there and I think that's what kind of peaked my interest. But I quickly realized that you're not going to connect with your Muslim family member by becoming a belly dancer. That's just not the best way to do that. And he's very religious, and there's a lot of tension in the Middle East between people who are very religious and people who are more secular, and the dance is definitely frowned upon in religious communities in the Middle East, because it's not how traditional Muslim women would behave, right?

So yeah, I started taking Z-Helene's class and, her name is Z-Helene, and there was, they used to have a show at the Student Union, and so that was where I went and I kind of saw my first actual belly dance show, and I was so enamored with, you know, the ladies were beautiful, and their costumes were sparkly and everyone's dancing and everyone's free. And, you know, I'm 19 at this point, 20, and I just thought it was amazing and it was so different from what I had been around growing up, that I was hooked. I really wanted to do that thing. And I really fell in love with it. I fell in love with the music, actually, is what happened. And it really did change my life. I mean, obviously it took me in a direction that I never would have gone if I hadn't taken that one class.

So yeah, I took a couple semesters with Helene, and her style was really a lot different from what I do now. She's a very American, hippie, goddess kind of thing. And as I started studying the dance, I kind of became a little bit more interested in how it related to the cultures that it came from. And, so I wanted to do more of the Arabic style. I loved the Arabic music. I wanted to use that kind of stuff and learn.

I had a job at a hardware store off of 29th Street. And I was a cashier for a couple years and one of the guys that worked in the paint department, people would come up to me and say, hey, do you know Jonathan's girlfriend is a belly dancer? And I was like, yeah, whatever, because this is Austin. And like the hippies used to dance at Eeyore’s Birthday Party in their patchouli and their broomstick skirts. And they were like belly dancers. And I was like, that's not a real belly dancer, you know, I'm just like, yeah, right. Whatever. And when they would go to Jonathan's house and see his girlfriend, they would go, hey, this other girl, she's a belly dancer. And she would go, yeah. Right. Whatever.

So then we met each other, and I don't even remember how we met, and she's probably been the biggest influence on my life. We're still best friends, like 26 years later. She was dancing at the Student Union. She was teaching through the Student Union. She started doing workshop productions and things like that. And I was just kind of her tag along buddy. I would do whatever because I was broke and she would let me come to things if I worked for her.

So I just, I was doing it as a hobby, really, only. And there were a couple of restaurants that I started dancing in, in the late nineties. There's a place called Ararat, a restaurant called Ararat on North Loop. And that was one of the first places that I gigged at. And then there was another little Persian place called Best Middle Eastern.

So I danced at a couple of places, but it was really intermittent. And, then in 2001, my ex and I ended up moving back to Dallas. And that really changed my life as far as actually becoming a paid gigging dancer and really, teaching and all of the things that I've been doing for the past 20 years.

I started working, Dallas had the clubs, it had bigger nightclubs, it had a Greek restaurant, it had a Lebanese club called Al-Amir, and it had Persian nightclubs. So it had things that Austin did not have. It had nightlife and it had paying gigs. So I started dancing in the clubs and either… I think I did my first professional gig in Fort Worth at a restaurant called Byblos, which is still around. It was New Year's Eve. He probably couldn't get any of the local dancers. And I was probably cheaper than the going rate because I didn't know what I was doing, but that was my first paying gig.

And then after that, a good friend of mine that I ended up dancing with for a long time in a professional troupe, she got me a job at Al-Amir, which was the prestigious club. It was where all of the Arab families went, and it was a really great international club. She got me a job there, and I started working on the weeknights when it was slow because you gotta work your way up in this business. And I think it was 50 bucks on the weeknights, and sometimes I wouldn't even dance because there was not enough customers to dance for.

But then the weekend shows were amazing. And it was a three level club and there were, it was packed with people. We had bouncers that would walk us through the crowds to the stage and it was just amazing. And so yeah, I danced there, actually danced at Al-Amir. That's actually the job that I've had the longest, my whole adult life. I worked at that club from about 2002 until I moved here to Ohio in 2021.

I have a website it's tamrahennabellydancer.com. I have an Instagram. It is TamraHenna_Official with an underscore. So my TikTok is TamraHenna_Official. And I'm on Facebook as Joi Razinha. And if you, I'm less politically vocal on Facebook than I used to be because I've been Zucked a few times and I figure I'm going to lose my privileges if I say anything more about what I really think about things politically on Facebook anymore.

Rod: I'm glad you said the Tamra Henna part, because I was going to ask you that. Where did the name come from?

Joi: Tamra Henna is a movie character, and she was in this movie. She was a dancer. She danced with the family circus, and It's kind of an Egyptian My Fair Lady story, like rich guy comes to the circus, makes a bet that he can take this girl and make her acceptable to society. And the dancer that plays the role, she was actually a dancer and an actress. She was one of my favorite of what they call Golden Era dancers, the dancers from the ‘50s, like the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema. The title of the movie is Tamra Henna. And the song is “Tamra Henna”. And the character is Tamra Henna. And I loved the song and the dancer so much that when I decided to pick a name, and this was back when it was the thing to do to pick an Arabic name if you were going to have a stage name or some kind of stage name, I decided that I would pick that name because it's a fictional character, and I figured I'm not passing myself off as an Arab woman. I'm naming myself after a fictional character so anyone who hears the name, who is of the culture, knows that's not my real name. And the song's a great song. I still love to dance to it.

Rod: With the belly dancing, what was it about it that resonated with you? Like how, how did it get it hooks into you so fast and deep?

Joi: Honestly I think it was the permission to move and to be kind of free. And I think that's what really draws a lot of people into it. And unfortunately it does tend to draw a lot of people who've had, you know, trauma, bodily trauma in their lives and have not been able to express themselves physically because it's so much about personal expression and expressing your sensuality, your… it's not so gendered as it used to be, but like when I started it was all about expressing your femininity and the whole goddess angle, and being a woman and yada yada. As of 2022, we've kind of moved past that somewhat and realized that both people who are male and female and everywhere in between, like to express those sides.

But I think back in the day, it was definitely marketed quite a bit towards women and freeing, kind of give a space to express yourself, physically and to dance and be sensual. And to feel beautiful. And I think that's initially what drew me to it. And there's a lot of orientalism in that as well. Like it's exotic, it's sparkly, it's a persona that you can put on. I think the thing that really kept me was definitely the music. It was deep and complex and it really struck me. And then when I started learning about how did people move to this music, it was also really different from any dance form that I had seen before. And I think that just kind of captured my imagination and really pulled me into it.

As you go along, you start creating, not necessarily a persona for yourself, but in a way it kind of is a persona for yourself. And I became a belly dancer, and that's who I was and what I was. It's not spiritual, but it is. It's very, very physical. For me, it was the way to get in touch with my body, and it's like that for a lot of different people.

Rod: I get the sense that you think deeply about how you engage with belly dancing as a white person.

Joi: I do. I definitely do more now than I did. I mean, there's racial bias everywhere, and it's just when you have people that start pointing it out, people who are of other races and say, hey, this has been our experience in this community, it's really kind of, it was a challenging time, and I think it still remains a challenging time. When you're a white person engaged with the world in general, you really look at it one way and then you have an idea of how the world is. And then when you start hearing other people's experiences, then hopefully you realize that it's not the same for everyone.

It's really easy as a white person to get sucked into, “I'm so put upon; nobody likes me because I'm white,” and I've seen that conversation happen. I know how people get sucked into the resentment of woke culture because I've seen it happen within the belly dance community. I have felt it within myself and had to wrestle with it and go look, this is not the road you want to go down. This is not going to uncover a part of your own personality that is good, so check yourself. But it's easy to do. And it did make me take a step back and try to be a lot more introspective with how I'm engaging with other people, with the dance form, the cultures.

And so I did have to be… I don't think I had to be; a lot of people have chosen not to. But I became a lot more introspective about what it means to be a white person in a space that is not mine. It's not my culture. I think a lot of dancers who spent a lot of time in this space just assumed we're getting these jobs and we're gigging, and it's because, always it's because of our ability or whatever it is that we have that is appealing to the audience and to the venue owners, whoever's hiring us at the time. And so we assume that we're getting jobs because we're the best person for it. And a lot of other people having found their voice online, were able to come in and say, hey, I'm a dancer, I'm a black woman. Or I'm a man, or I'm a trans man, or whatever, and I'm trying to get jobs. And I can't be hired because of racial biases that exist and people who are gatekeeping and who have a lot of say on who gets to dance and who doesn't. And sometimes it's because there's racial bias in the owners of the venues, and they tell you as a scheduler that they don't want certain kind of people. I know I have been told, I did the schedule for Al-Amir for many years and other clubs, it wasn't just there, but I've been told so and so looks old, don't have them back. I've never been told specifically, we don't want black dancers, but black dancers on the schedule have felt like they weren't welcome.

And I heard that from people who were in my community who said that that was the way that they had always felt. There's a lot of racial bias, all over the world. Anti-black racial bias all over the world. It's not specifically a white American thing. I've seen other biases, size biases, people being told that dancers were too overweight, too old, too this, too that, whatever it is. And some of it was in the professional spaces, where I was more familiar, and in other situations it was members of the community, say a teacher would make comments to her students about who looked right, or dancers being too dark for this or too light for that, you know, just whatever.

And so I think people started talking about the biases that they had experienced in this dance form. And it caused a lot of consternation, and a lot of people weren't ready to hear that maybe some of the things, the ways that they had behaved themselves, were problematic for other people. And there's a lot of controversy around it. I think that there are a lot of people who felt like it went too far. There was a lot of talk about canceling certain people, and some people needed to be canceled because they had really hurt a lot of other people and didn't really seem to care. But it's really interesting because it's kind of a microcosm of the same conversations that you may have seen happening in our culture at large over the last year or so. It happened within the community on a smaller scale, and with everyone being home and being online, people were talking about things a lot more.

So it did make me have to think about what was I doing? How was I engaging with other dancers? How was I engaging with the culture? You can't help the skin you were born in, on either side, but you do have to recognize how have I benefited, how have we benefited I should say, from being the right color or at least not being the wrong color.

And do I even really need to be practicing an art form that belongs to a different culture? And it took me a while. I never thought that I would give it up, but I really thought that if I'm going to do it, I need to be thoughtful about it. I've engaged with the communities personally for a long time. I worked in nightclubs that were owned by Lebanese and Syrian people, and I heard the conversation from their end on what are they looking for in entertainment, so I understand why am I making the entertainment choices that I am making. I don't present the dance form as a cultural exercise. It is very based in the traditional styles from the Middle East, but there's also an element of Las Vegas showgirl happening. And for some people, they feel like it invalidates the, like a lot of people want it presented as, this is a thing that I have learned, and it's an academic exercise, so I am doing this dance from this region and I'm, you know, and it's very specific. Whereas I come from the entertainment side of it, whereas I kind of know what the traditions are, but they've asked me to do fire. So, which is not necessarily traditional, but my boss is saying, hey, we want the New Year's show this year to be like, what can you do to make it bigger than last year?

So it's a real balancing act trying to stay somewhat traditional and always be respectful of the cultures that I am interacting with, but understanding that Friday night is Bollywood Night at the Arabic nightclub and the crowd wants me to dance to Bollywood music. And so I do, because they tip when you do it, because they're happy that you're dancing to music that they like and enjoy, you know what I'm saying? So it's real interesting. But if I posted a video of myself doing that, somebody online who has been studying belly dance and has some really, ideas about, what is appropriate and what's not, and are you being orientalist and are you doing all of that? They may look at that completely without context and go, what are you doing? You're just contributing to the muddying of the waters. And as an outsider to the culture, I have to understand what I'm doing and make sure that I'm not going too far, if that makes sense.

The teaching world, the hobbyist world, and the professional world are sometimes really different. And a lot of people made their living as dance teachers and had studios and taught a lot of people and put on a lot of big workshops and made money and produced other dancers. But depending on what area of the country you were in, you might not have any real opportunity to engage with anyone from any of the communities where the dance is native to, or where the dance is from. So if you're in some small town somewhere and there's no one who's from the Middle East, but you like belly dance because you were exposed to it, like you could open a studio and teach everyone that you know how to do this dance. And no one has met a single person from the Middle East.

So I think in a lot of cases, that's where there's some divorce from the reality of engaging within the communities and just a bunch of Western people, in a lot of cases a bunch of white people, doing a dance form that they can tell themselves a lot of different stories about that aren't necessarily true. Like there's a lot of incorrect history of the dance and how it came about and what it was for. If you've ever done any Googling of the history of belly dance, and I don't know why you would have, but if you ever do, there's a lot of stories out there that it was goddess worship, or it was birthing rituals, or it was this or that, or the other thing.

And none of those things are true. Belly dance is not thousands of years old. It's from the turn of the last century. And it kind of came out of, what we see today as being placed on the stage entertainment in nightclubs and in the movies and things like that, kind of came from the cabarets that were started in Egypt in the early 20th century, late 19th century, mostly early 20th century, but was kind of a result of colonization. There were nightclubs because people wanted to see Western style shows. And they were kind of catering to their own culture, but also trying to emulate the colonizers, perhaps, in putting these things together.

And then you get the movies which were heavily patterned after Hollywood. There would be musicals where, or any movie, didn't matter what the movie was, had to have a belly dance scene because it's what, people wanted to see stuff like that. So there was a lot of cross pollination even back then, but what we do today came out of that time. So what was happening before then, the dances that were the entertainment that was happening in people's homes, at weddings, at gatherings and things like that looked a lot different than what we see today.

And so, no, it wasn't thousands of years of birthing rituals and, and goddess worship, but when you're in a little town someplace or some place in California or whatever, it sounds really cool, right? It sounds great. And it's appealing to your customers who are middle aged housewives, and it sounds really awesome, and I want to worship myself like a goddess, or I want to take part in this dance that's as old as the pyramids. And so there's a lot of stuff going around out there that we made up. And now it's possible to be confronted with somebody who is from North Africa and says, wow, that's a bunch of bullshit. What are you doing?

So we're being confronted as Westerners with our own colonizer ways, I suppose. And it's not always fun. It's not always fun to hear. So it's been a tumultuous time within the community. And I don't know how that really has changed what I'm doing. I think it has caused me to think more about how I've benefited from my own privilege and to really examine, am I doing anything to help people who haven't been, for whom it hasn't been as easy to participate, am I doing anything to help those people feel more welcome? Am I making sure that the choices that I make don't stray too far and go into the realm of disrespect.

But I've been doing this for a really long time. I can do something else, and I guess that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm not ready to do something else yet. Gigging is an addiction, truly. Performing is addictive, and steady income is addictive too. This year I'm turning 50. How many 50 year old belly dancers gigging in clubs are there is the question, and the answer is probably more than you think. But you know, there are younger dancers coming up and you don't want to be asked to leave, so it's better to leave on a high note. I don't quite look my age yet. And I can still teach, and I think I'm not too bad at that. I've done okay with the teaching, and I'd like to do more of it. I can still do it physically. I can still do everything that, almost, that I used to do before. I don't have any physical limitations yet. In this business, it's more about, does your client perceive you as being the right age to be entertaining them? Because ageism is a thing, yo. Everyone at the nightclub is still 21 and I’m not. But I do have to start thinking about what do I do when I'm not a dancer anymore full time. What do I do with that? So it's like the next chapter. And do I try to stay a dancer as long as possible? Or do I just chuck it and open a restaurant?

So I've talked about what I've been doing, but I really haven't talked about how it changed me, I guess. Like how did I change from being a really, really shy teenager to, I don't, I'm not shy anymore. I was really shy, or maybe I wasn't shy. I think maybe it was circumstantial. Um, you know, it's, I was always the new kid because we moved a lot. So I never had really the opportunity to make friends, you know, and this is when I'm going to get emotional. So just bear with me. So when you come from a really shitty situation, you, I personally don't want to bring that, like I don't want to burden other people with that I guess like how do you talk about it? I just wanted to go to school and get away from it. And I certainly didn't want to make school life for the friendships that I found there about my personal drama, I guess, so it was just like, I don't have anything good to talk about. So I'll just be really quiet.

I guess that's kind of where I was at at that point in time. And really, I, I don't know that dance changed me. I think it just drew it out what was already there, if that makes sense. I think maybe if I hadn't had the experience of becoming a belly dancer and having all of the different experiences that I've had through that, I might have stayed more reserved. I don't know, or just would've gone a different direction. But this was really a way for me to figure out who I was and who I am and really just express that. And like I said, I don't think I'm different. The transformation has been in allowing me to become who I am. It's like the butterfly isn't any different from the caterpillar. It's just the final form. It's the same DNA, right? It's just whether it's able to figure out how to fly.

Episode 028 - Claiming Death is Valuing Life

It’s been a struggle staying active and healthy and creative as this pandemic stretches on and on and on, and I just haven’t felt much like writing or creating or editing and adding music to the audio I recorded with brooks back in January. Often the basics have felt like just too much work. But here it is! Just in time for new surges in hospitalizations. Death is sitting right down on the couch with us and eating our snacks these days, so we might as well talk about it.

So although I often thought of Eddie Izzard’s bit on “Cake or Death” through the making of this episode, let’s all have a bit of cake AND death, shall we?

My thanks, as always, to Flora, whose steady support, love, humor, and real talk have made this pandemic so much better, at least for me. I don’t know about you.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the outro music, which I made on Soundation.

The podcast story on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that I reference in the intro is Radiolab's “The Queen of Dying”.

Here’s the transcript:

brooks: My name's brooks kasson. I don't know what else to say, except that I'm a Scorpio. I guess I should start, the origins, not that I knew at the time, stretch back to when I was 32 years old and I joined for some inexplicable reason, I joined the Austin Memorial and Burial Society. So I have been a member of that for 40 some odd years. And I'd get the newsletters, and they were always interesting to me. And that particular organization now is called Funeral Consumers Alliance of Central Texas. And Nancy Walker is the Executive Director. She's fabulous. Fabulous.

And it may have been her that introduced me to Jo Jensen, who was an Oncology Chaplain at Seton at the time. And I had, all within a matter of a couple of weeks, I had heard about Death Cafes, and my ears perked up. And then the topic came around again. It was about 8 years ago. I met up with Jo and told her that I was interested in starting a Death Cafe, and I think that had occurred to her as well. And somehow we met up, and we decided to start or to hold a Death Cafe. Of course, neither one of us had ever been to one, but we were both interested in it, hers with the end of life process with her patients and me by whatever fluke, natural inclination I suppose. And so we found or went to the Death Cafe International website and learned a little bit about the origins of Death Cafe.

Voiceover: From the early 1980s, Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz and his wife Yvonne worked together studying the rites and rituals of death. After her death in 1999 and his retirement in 2002, Dr. Crettaz held the first of his Cafés Mortels, a salon of sorts that he facilitated gently with only a couple of rules: participants must always exhibit deep listening and rigorous honesty. The purpose was to pierce the taboo of speaking openly about death. Dr. Crettaz continued to host his Cafés Mortels until 2014.

In 2010, Jon Underwood, a web developer in the UK, was working on his own collection of projects about death. In his research, he read about Café Mortel and decided to hold an event in his living room in Hackney, London. He established the current Death Cafe model, built a website, standardized protocols, and spread the idea globally, with thousands of Death Cafes currently in existence in dozens of countries. A key innovation in Jon’s model was the addition of tea and cake to every Death Cafe event.

brooks: And traditionally, and of course I jumped all over this one, you served tea and cakes at a Death Cafe. Very British, very European. And I was already attracted to that idea. I grew up in the military and the first, in, when I was 4 and 5, we were in England right after World War II. So I have that European love of tea and pomp and circumstance kind of way imbued in the early neurology and preferences of me.

And I went out to the Salvation Army and bought dozens of tea cups and saucers, and of course made a big production of the whole thing. And we ended up in that first, and we advertised it, we spread the word, and we had like 50 people show up, way too many to do a Death Cafe effectively, but nonetheless, it was very new. And so we ended up with, Jo and I broke the group up into two circles of 25 people each, and then each one of us facilitated a circle.

And I think we had two or three meetings in that mode. And then it became obvious, a big circle was too much to handle and have any kind of intimacy, so we changed it to four tops. So we had four people in a group and then Jo and I would move around from table to table and just kind of sit in on the conversation. Every meeting I baked homemade brownies that were chock full of pecans and extra chocolate chips in there, and people brought their own water or tea or whatever it is they wanted and ate chocolate while we talked about death. If you're going to talk about death, you have to have chocolate. It is just part of the deal. And the format that we used there was a talking stick, and we used, had prompt cards, like a deck of cards with some questions on it that people could use for, to get their small group begun.

Rod: For you to have 50 people show up on your very first one, clearly it had some resonance in the community. I mean, it must’ve met a need that wasn’t being met elsewhere for it to immediately just jump off like that.

brooks: I agree.

Rod: What do you think appealed to you? You said you joined the group about funeral information when you were 32. What do you think it is about death and talking about death that connected with you?

brooks: Aside from the fact that I'm a Scorpio, and I'm constantly in transformation, which means that I'm involved in a process of loss on a very regular basis. And I'm very aware of that. I can't answer why I joined it back when I was 32, except that it was interesting to me.

You know, it's not like I've had a near-death experience. I can't tell you it's something glamorous like that. And it's not that I had my favorite childhood friend die in front of me. None of that. I didn't experience death in my family in any unusual way, other than losing grandparents, and then eventually in my 60s losing, my parents died. So the only thing, I mean, I'm just making up stuff here. All I can pin it on is just my natural inclination to focus on the loss piece.

I grew up in the military. My dad is, was, an officer. So that whole mindset, and I come from a long, I mean, my mother was second generation military as well. So I come from my long line of warriors and that's all about following orders, doing just what you're told to do, and killing people. Now, you don't want to inspect the killing people part. It was never talked about. The first dead body that I was presented with was from my father's mother, and I didn't want to look at it. So I didn't, with the open casket. So I didn't. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding was how I was brought up with the topic.

OK. So here's a, maybe a better answer, especially in this culture. We, where it's a consumer culture. We are about getting things; we're not about releasing things. And all I know is that I've never been interested, for instance, in the beginning of life process. Didn't want to be a midwife. Didn't, wasn't particularly interested in birthings, but am very interested in the letting go piece, partially because it feels in this culture so off balanced, because we don't look at losses as a part of the process. It's something to be avoided. It's something be not talked about, run away from if you possibly can, or buy your way out. And I absolutely disagree with that. As I've aged, claiming death as part of my life is, and owning it, and keeping the topic current, is all a really important part of valuing life.

Rod: Really the one Death Cafe that I experienced personally with you was on Zoom. I feel like I kind of missed a whole dimension of it with the cake and the tea and everything. That seems like such a valuable piece to it. Do you miss that aspect of it in the COVID time?

brooks: Well, that's a great question, because to be honest with you, when it became apparent that there weren't going to be in-person gatherings, I thought, do I want to give this up? And the answer was absolutely not. And especially in these times with the topic being so prevalent and ubiquitous. I forced myself to learn the mechanics of Zoom, and I wondered would I be able to hold space electronically with people being little squares on the screen? Would I be able to create intimacy under those conditions?

But let me back up and say too, Rod, that every Death Cafe, even mine, from month to month, every Death Cafe is different, and every facilitator runs their group in a different way, so there's a different flavor. There's a nurse in town who started a second Death Cafe, maybe a couple of years ago. I don’t know whether it’s still going or not. But again, presumably because of her background being a nurse, the flavor of, and I never went to one, I just, Heather Black, that's her name. I just had lunch with her once. And her offering in a Death Cafe, I think, was more practical things, your paperwork and the physical things that happen.

So as you perhaps recall in the Death Cafe you went to, my interest is more in the emotional, spiritual, transformative aspect of death. And it's really important to me to hold that space so that people can fall into that kind of intimacy. The topic is such a taboo and delicate topic that it really, whatever entry door is available, it’s important to open it because again, the topic is so not discussed in our culture.

Rod: Did you shape yours intentionally to be what it is? How did you prepare to start? How did you know how you wanted to run it?

brooks: We became, if you can imagine, a circle of 25 people for the first few events down to a table, 8 or 10 tables of 4 apiece, automatically the intimacy has increased. Right? So, not that I thought about that at the time, it just became obvious that we didn't want to do the big circles. So we switched to the talking stick and the smaller tables, and then eventually Jo had retired, she’d gotten tired of co-facilitating, and so I had the choice of, do I continue this on my own or not? And I wanted to, so I moved, wondering if it would survive, but moved the venue to here to South Austin, and began more like what you experienced when you came to the Zoom meeting.

So the most I've ever had, the biggest number I've ever had here in South Austin is probably 15 or 16, maybe 14, right around in there, crammed into this small room, people sitting on floors and so forth. But typically the numbers tended to float around 8 to 10, sometimes as few as 6 if it was raining and snowing outside or whatever. But it stabilized in a smaller group. Now what I'm using is what you experienced, is what's called the Conversation Cafe format.

And so I'm finding that, and just briefly what that is, you go around, and you open the circle by going, each person says their name and why they're here and what they expect at the beginning. And then the body of a meeting is open to open discussion. And then right before the end, you go back around the circle again. It's like a closing of the circle, and everybody says, this is what I got out of the meeting. And that's a good way to recall what it is, but it also lets everybody else in the group know that their place and their offerings are important to the group as a whole. And with this format that I'm using now, there's so much richness, Rod, and people discover things about their own beliefs and talk about their own fears, and sometimes, much of the time, for instance, it doesn't have to do directly with death, but it always has something to do with loss.

Rod: I was curious who tends to come. Are they typically people, I guess not, typically people that are dealing with a recent loss of a loved one or something like that?

brooks: It tends to be people of age that are aging into this part of our lives. And there are some young people that come that have insights that just blow me away. It could be that they're dealing with their own health issues perhaps, and sometimes not. Sometimes they're coming because, I don't know exactly why, but they're interested in the topic and/or there's not very many places that are open to the public that you can have truly safe, intimate discussions.

And so people are certainly, aren't required to talk in Death Cafe. On the other hand, in my opinion, they showed up for a reason, and I'd like to know what it is, so I'll do what I can to help them feel safe enough to speak. It's not about voyeurism for me. It's about participating in a group and in a topic that is delicate and difficult to talk about. So for me, at least, the structure is helpful in establishing the safety.

So people come as they're able to, or as they're drawn to, or as they want to. And sometimes they'll come like two times and then skip a time or two, come eight times in a row, that sort of thing. It just depends on where they are, and sometimes they'll be gone for six or eight months, and then all of a sudden they're back again. It's wonderful, I think, to have that kind of continuity and familiarity for me.

Rod: How has going online affected your turnout? I would think that in the time of a pandemic that people would be flocking to it.

brooks: Yes. And I think that certainly has drawn people back. And I have to say that the numbers have stayed stable, kind of where I was talking about,  in and out of a dozen or so. But the other thing is at this stage of the pandemic, people are Zoomed out. I mean, they are just, enough of the electronic communication and connections, which is why I do my best to keep the electronic piece in the background and make intimacy a priority. So in order to do that, some structure is, in my opinion, is absolutely necessary, and so is the safety of not cross-talking, not having somebody want to fix if I break into tears or something. The scariest thing is to have somebody want to fix me or make me stop. But my emphasis is when somebody is indeed having a breakdown of tears and emotions that they are allowed to do that and begin to recognize their own strengths in being held energetically in the group.

And so I talk about that at the beginning of every meeting, that these are the parameters, and that silence is really important. So that for instance, if somebody makes an offering of an incident or whatever, then I ask that before somebody else speaks, and you could be all excited about, Oh, I have this other experience that's similar to that, that I want to talk about, but before they speak, I ask them to take a breath or two. And so what that does is that it allows the offering that has been made to land in everybody. And it helps make the gifts of people's feelings and experiences sacred.

Rod: You’ve been doing it for 8 years you said?

brooks: Seven and a half. Yeah. Come I think next June it'll be eight. Is that right?

Rod: How do you think it’s impacted you? How do you think it’s changed you to be doing this for so long?

brooks: It surprises me every time I say the number of years. Like really? Because it seems so ordinary. And I look forward to it because every single time, Rod, every single time, I have not been to, I have not experienced a crummy one, and every single time I come away feeling satisfied, like I've had a really good meal. And as a Scorpio, it's important to me to experience life in as much, with as much juice as possible. So I get a regular dose of that, which I absolutely crave and love and love to offer it. I do it for other people, and I do it for myself. I would not do this if it did not feed me. I'm too old for that kind of stuff at this point. And I never wanted to be and am not so inclined to be Mother Teresa anyway.

Rod: Where do you see it going from here? What do you think it would take for you to feel safe to do it in person again?

brooks: That's a good question. I will have to feel safe being in a closed room. And what I'm finding very interesting about COVID now is how different people have different levels of fear and safety around this particular virus. So, as we both know, there's people that don't come out of their house, and they still have their groceries delivered to the front door, and they spray them with Lysol or whatever before they bring them in. And then there's those that insist that there's no such thing as a virus, and they refuse to wear a mask. There's just all levels of how people deal with this. So I really won't know until I know, and part of it will be, am I comfortable being in a closed room?

And I wouldn't say, because I don't think it's a reasonable answer to put a pencil point on when there's a virus, then I'm going to do this, I mean, a vaccine, then I'm going to do so-and-so. I don't know that. I'll know it when I get there.

Rod: Have you developed any relationships out of it?

brooks: Oh, absolutely. Oh, sure. Sure. These days, of course, there's not much meeting outside, but I've had lunch with people and continued relationships or telephone calls or whatever, that sort of thing. I mean, seven and a half years is a long time to have a thread of a person in and out one's life. And so, yes, that's delightful.

Rod: How do you handle it if somebody dies, if there’s a regular who’s been coming, you said people come because of, they age into it. Have people come and gone?

brooks: Well, in fact, that has just recently happened. And so my way of handling it has been to reach out and talk to the spouse, which I was doing before the spouse died anyway. So it's more like a continuation of that. Or regular members, for instance, whose mom or dad's died, then I will express my own personal feelings and sympathy around that. But there's no like group collection and send her some flowers. There's none of that sort of thing going on.

Rod: Do people come with misconceptions about what it’s going to be? Have you ever had anybody say that was…?

Brooks: No, and I'm glad to say no. and part of that reason is that everybody that I know of, almost, has come because of a referral. So they come knowing a little bit of something about it, and maybe what has prompted it is the death of a parent or a pet or something like that. And I also, because I'll email them back and forth ahead of time, because especially now that we're on Zoom, I know who's going to show up because I send out a notice that Death Cafe is going to happen, and then these days, what I say is, if you want to come, you need to email me back and let me know that you're coming. And that way I have the chance to communicate with a newcomer and let them know how I run the meeting so that they can think, well, this isn't for me, or I'm intrigued. I think I'll show up. It's very important to me to maintain, to create and maintain the sanctity of the group, which I could do certainly when we were in physical proximity. And so that's one of the reasons why I'm careful about, for instance, not sending out the Zoom invitation to my full email list, because I want to know who's coming and that they are committed to a certain protocol.

Rod: You said a lot of it comes from referrals. Is that mostly how you, I don’t know if market is the right word, but mostly word of mouth, or do you, have you developed any relationships with hospitals, hospice?

brooks: Nope, Nope. It's all word of mouth. Yes. And I'm clear that although there's plenty of grieving that happens that this is not a grief group. I mean, I'm not qualified to run that. I don't have a social worker's license or whatever.

And I guess I would like to emphasize, it's not all about death. What it's really about is living. It's really about how do we be alive and hold in us and in our awareness, the fact that we will not be here forever. That's the entire point is that it's that kind of wholeness that I'm most interested in supporting, because it's so lopsided in this culture.

Rod: Well, I really appreciate your time. I think you were nervous about doing it. I hope you found it a comfortable experience.

brooks: Thank you. I did. I did indeed. Rod, thank you so much for asking and for prompting me to speak about what I love to do. It's been a delight.

Episode 027 - The People Are Right In Front of You

I spoke to Andrea Rudnick, one of the founding members of Team Brownsville via Zoom in July. They are a group of Brownsville citizens who are doing necessary work in even more difficult circumstances now under the challenges of COVID-19 than they were facing over the last two years. If you are moved to support them, please do. They spend close to $100,000 per month in feeding, clothing, and sheltering a couple thousand people in a camp in Matamoros who are waiting their chance to request asylum and enter the United States legally. You can read more here about the cynically named Migrant Protection Protocols, and the other new U.S. policies designed to essentially eliminate asylum seeking. The U.S. signed the 1967 Protocol, agreeing to provide asylum to refugees, and has stayed in compliance with it for half a century. Since then, a process has been in place to verify refugee status for asylum seekers. Recently, that process has been cynically manipulated to eliminate it in fact if not in law.

Andrea references the Department of Homeland Security page about Migrant Protection Protocols, here.

Our theme song is Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the outro music, which I made on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Andrea: Transformation. Transformation comes slowly. You can't really seek transformation. It comes to you. It comes to you because of what you do, because of the ways that you put yourself out there. I could say that all of us that have started with Team Brownsville, that we've all been transformed in ways that we never would've expected, that our eyes have been opened to things that we just never knew about. I don’t know. Your priorities change, I think, when that transformation happens.

We started in July of 2018, and we've gone through a lot of changes, certainly more changes than we ever would have known about. We continued just by trying to meet whatever the needs are that day. Because if we had known what we were going to be doing for two years, we might've said, nah, we can't really do that. That's just too much. But this way, just, just one day at a time, let's see what today brings. OK. What are the needs today? What needs can we meet? That's really how we continue, just every single day.

You would think it would give people more compassion, more understanding of that situation, that the crisis was here. It wasn’t somewhere else, and so it was a lot harder to throw up your hands and say, well, I can’t do anything, because yeah, the people are right in front of you. There are people here that ignore that and go on with their business as though there are no people sitting in an encampment in Matamoros. I guess my biggest surprise has been that aside from Team Brownsville and a few more people, there’s a lot of people that kind of choose to ignore the whole thing.

I think each of us has slightly different creation stories of how Team Brownsville was formed, and the truth is that we came to the same work in different ways. We came in just as teachers and administrators from the school district here in Brownsville. The skills that we bring in, our skills that we've had from being teachers and administrators and working with kids with special needs, working in a community that's a high poverty community, the community where you do have a lot of kids that are undocumented, kids that are families that struggle a great deal. We came in with that more than anything, just that background of, these are our people. They're not different from the people that we'd been working with all along. For me, what inspired me was going to the big march, the March Against Family Separation and just, I knew about it. I knew what was happening. And then I went to that march and it was a really big march for Brownsville.

So I would say that was just a catalyst. And then the next thing that happened for me personally is one of the organizers, one of the people that works for the ACLU, his name is Mike Seifert, he sent out a message saying please do what you can, because we have people that are sitting on the bridge with nothing. The truth is if you feel called to this work, and you see people sitting on a bridge with nothing, with no shelter, with no water, with no food, you have to do something. You can't just ignore it. Or at least I can't. And I think that the people who eventually came to be Team Brownsville, couldn't ignore it either.

We started with five or six people and pretty quickly we got up to maybe 10 or so. We kind of had to come up with how are we going to do that work? And we did have good models to go by because there are other organizations that have been doing the work, especially in the bus stations. Like there's an organization in San Antonio and I'm sure there's one in Austin as well that meet and greet people at the bus stations. So this would be the starting place because we have three detention centers in the area of Brownsville. They would bring people that were released from the detention center to our bus station. I mean, we were getting people from here to wherever and we just had this network of people that would meet and greet at bus stations all over the country. The numbers have gone up and down. Right now because of COVID, I think that they're releasing more people because they have had many COVID cases in the detention centers. And so there's been a big outcry to release people.

And we talk to a lot of people and horrific stories and the stories affect you. You realize that there's so much you can't do. And I don't know, for me, that's just, my drive is just to keep doing what I can do. But just knowing that I can't do everything and I can't meet every need and I can't, there's many things that go on, in the encampment that we have no control over. There’s cartel activity everywhere in Mexico, and that doesn't exclude the encampment. Those are all things that we don't have control over.

I really don't know how these families got here, but they're getting here at a really bad time. But it was really metering that set these people on the bridge, because that stopped them from crossing into the United States to request asylum.

Rod: The population that you’re serving isn’t illegal anyway, right? They’re following the legal procedure for seeking asylum, right?

Andrea: They are, and a lot of people don’t understand that. But that’s also the rhetoric that comes through from the current administration, that these are illegals, they’re coming for the wrong reasons. It presents these people in the worst possible light. Hence the Migrant Protection Protocol. It's not protecting the migrants at all. It's protecting the American people against the migrants. Look it up. I think it's on The Department of Homeland Security webpage is where they have like a write up about what MPP is and you'll see, you'll be shocked. I was.

Because the rules say that if you're on US territory, you can request asylum. But if you put the checkpoint right at the midpoint, kind of straddling the line, and you don't allow these people to cross the line, well, then I guess it's fair game. It was making sure that asylum seekers did not get through to request asylum. As long as they keep them back in Mexico, you know, they haven't, they haven't requested asylum yet. So we never had people sitting on the bridge like that waiting to, to request asylum. They were, they had always been able to cross freely.

And so it was kind of like go back and take a number and then very, very slow crossing of people to request asylum. Where before, they would arrive, and they would cross, now they would arrive, and there might be 50 people ahead of them. And they were crossing people, they might cross two men one day, then they might wait a few days and then they might cross a family. And then a couple of more days would pass and then they'd cross a few more, you know, it was never very many. And so just had this effect of more and more people arriving and not being able to get across, and so just kind of building up and building up the encampment.

And it's frustrating and infuriating to think about, you know, you're serving these people that have been through so much, and our own government refuses to let them in. And we have people now that have been there a full year because MPP started near the end of July in Matamoros. That's when they started the policy, and we had our first family cross and come back to Matamoros. We almost didn't believe it when we heard it, almost thought, no, it just can't be. But when we got the first families back, everybody was devastated. All the people that were waiting were devastated because of course they had kind of heard about MPP and the possibility, and they knew that it might mean that they weren't going to their family in the States, that whoever was waiting for them in the US wasn't going to receive them because they weren't coming. And so now we have people that have been there a full year. It's heart wrenching to see people go through so many different things. And COVID is just another thing thrown on top of everything that was already really terrible there, just makes everything that much worse.

But how are we going to meet the needs of these people? Because at that point, which was the fall, it was growing and growing and growing and growing. So we went from about 150 people prior to MPP to by, let's say October, November, there were probably 6 or 700 and it was just growing by hundreds every month. So now, there have been up to 2000 in the encampment, and then there's been another 2 or 3000 they say in the city of Matamoros, there's a lot of people under MPP.

I think if we get a new president, I'm pretty sure that things will change. I think that MPP will end quickly because it's such a horror. I just cannot imagine that it won't change, be one of the first things that does change. I just, and if that happens, then the encampment will empty out. There won't be an encampment anymore, which is great. I mean, I'm actually looking forward to the day when I don't have to cross into Mexico multiple times a week with, and I don't have to receive numerous calls because this one needs that and that one needs this. These people have suffered tremendously and deserve a chance to come into the United States. These are not bad people. These are people that have suffered and have gone through terrible traumas, many of them, and they just deserve a chance to live.

Because right now the numbers say less than 1% are actually going to get asylum as it is. And then if they, and if they pass that new round of rules that they're trying to pass, it's going to be a tinier fraction of 1% that are actually going to get asylum, which means that the majority of the people in the encampment will never get to come into the United States and they've waited for a year for nothing, suffered for nothing, gone through traumas in the encampment, as well as back in their home countries, and now it's not going to come to fruition, and they've done it the legal way. That's the thing that gets to me. These people have actually done it the legal way. They've followed the process. They've followed the rules. They haven't crossed the river, like so many other people have.

Rod: Do most of the people who come, come knowing that the rules have changed and that their chances are extremely slim, or are they still operating under the belief that things are the way they were before Trump?

Andrea: You know, it's interesting. I see most people, and you cannot convince them that they're not going to get asylum. They just kind of hang on to that. You know, God's gonna let me, and I have suffered a lot in my own country, and God's gonna be with me and lead me to the promised land. And even if you put it down to statistics, you'll still hear people say, well, then I will be in that less than 1%. That will be me. And I guess when you've gone through as much as they have, that's all that you have left, is that hope.

Rod: How many, you, I saw on the website, you have a dinner program, a breakfast program, the bus stop program and a school program. How many meals do you think you, I, I don't, I'm sure everything has changed with Corona, but how many, how many meals do you serve in a day?

Andrea: So the breakfast meal is about 6 or 700. Not everybody gets up. Dinner meal is about 1200, but we also are providing food staples because a lot of people prefer to cook for themselves. And so they've made clay stoves in the encampment, out of the dirt that's there. It's full of clay and they mix it with water and they know how to do it. And they make stoves, incredible stoves that you cannot believe that somebody could just take a shovel and mix it with water and make a stove like that. But they do it. At this time we’re purchasing kindling, what you would think of kindling wood. That's what it looks like to me. And we pay someone to do that. And so they bring three loads of that wood a week and distribute it to everyone who has a wood stove so that they can cook.

Our funding goes in a lot of areas, and a lot of areas that people wouldn't even know about because you see, OK, they're funding food, clothing, shelter, all that kind of thing, but you don't see the other funding that we do, which is transportation costs to asylum seekers that come to the bus station and don't have a ticket. Buying phones, we've bought many phones, because when people get out of detention, and they have no way of communicating with their families, and they're crossing the country, sometimes we just feel like we need to do that, but that's an expense that most people wouldn't know about. We also help funding the shelters in Matamoros that take in asylum seekers, because there are people that definitely don't need to live in the encampment, that shouldn't live in the encampment, people that have chronic illnesses, people that have newborn babies, there's all kinds of reasons. And so there's two shelters in Matamoros that will take asylum seekers in, but limited numbers. Right now they're full, and they're not taking anybody, again because of COVID. They're scared, don’t want to take new people in.

When we could go into Matamoros, I was going into Matamoros three or four times a week, and each time I would go, I would be there for hours of the day. Now we're not, we can't really go into Matamoros like we did. We've been delivering supplies and leaving them, having some of the asylum seekers come down out of the encampment with their wagons and pick up supplies and delivering things that way. But we have chosen to stay out of the encampment really since this all broke, because we don't want to be the ones that take the virus in.

So it's hard, it's hard in the encampment. It's hard to get them to wear masks until there actually was the first diagnosed case in the encampment. I think they've been hand-washing, and well, social distancing is another thing. When the tents are wall-to-wall tents, it's kind of hard to say that you're socially distancing, but they're trying to keep people apart in lines, like lines for dinner, for breakfast and things like that. But we know that people get together. They just do.

So I actually retired from the school district three years ago. So, but I retired to help my daughter take care of her young son, who's now, he just finished kindergarten. We ended up homeschooling him from March on because there was no classes. So I didn't cross at all during that period of time. And my daughter is a nurse, and she's very opposed to me crossing, because she knows how the asylum seekers live close together and things like that. And so she's... 

I mean, I don't like just putting responsibilities on other people and not doing it myself. I don't feel right about that. But yet at the same time, I also have to live in the reality of, There is no winning. There's no… Either way. If I say, OK, well, you know, I need to do this. I'm going to do this. Then she says, OK, well then I guess you won't get to take care of him because you're going across. So that's kind of a big threat, isn't it? You're going to get your one grandchild that you have in Brownville, you're going to get cut off from him.

So, yeah, it's a stressor. I mean, it stinks. But as far as other things pre-COVID, it definitely affects you. And I'm the volunteer coordinator. And up to the point that COVID stopped people from coming, I was receiving probably 10 to 20 calls or emails or texts a day about people wanting to come and volunteer. And so that was in a way taking up every bit of my time that I wasn't across, that I wasn't in the encampment, or I wasn't at the bus station. That was taking up a lot of time, and I didn't really know how to stop it. I couldn't really come up with a way of both addressing people's desire to come and volunteer and my own need to actually have some time where I could think about something else other than this work.

Well, as it happened, COVID kind of cut all that off because we can't accept volunteers right now. So, I'm sorry the volunteers can't come, but in a way it was like a relief for me because I didn't have to deal with all those calls and letters. Looking at the positive here, I would say that because we have to rely on the Team Brownsville people that actually live here to do anything, we have become closer and perhaps more organized because we're the people that we have to rely on.

Rod: Do you think you were in danger of getting burned out before COVID kind of put the brakes on some stuff?

Andrea: Not, not burned out from the work. Where I was feeling burned out was from that job of volunteer coordinator, because it just, I had no way of reining it in. I didn't, maybe I needed some professional person that says, hey, I have a degree in nonprofit management or something. I know how to do this. Let's come up with a better system. And so it was always, you know, contact Andrea, contact Andrea, contact Andrea. And I certainly didn't mind talking to people or telling them about the work that we do and all that. I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying. It was really more of the unending quality of it. There were like six different ways to contact me. And sometimes people would contact me like in three or four different ways. And they would get irate and like, well, I called you and you didn't respond, or I sent you a text and you...  and I just, I did my best is all I can say.

Everybody always thinks of retirement as, Oh, OK, well now you'll be able to do all... now you'll be able to travel, and now you'll be able to do all the things you wanted to do. And now you’ll be able to relax, and you'll be able to do nothing, and any number of responses. But that's not been retirement for me at all. I think I'm actually working harder now than I did when I was working a paid job. It's just constantly thinking about what is the next thing? What is the next thing I need to do? What have I forgotten?

In January, so we had been doing it for, already for a year and a half. I had been talking to World Central Kitchen about coming because I said, what's happening is that we're getting a lot of volunteers, but nobody knows how to cook for a thousand people. Nobody has experience doing that. And so when I say, well, what we need volunteers for is to prepare a meal for a thousand people, people would often say, we can help in whatever way possible, but I don't know how to do that.

And we, because it's an all volunteer organization, we didn't have a person that was assigned, that was hired to, OK, you're going to be the head chef, and you're gonna lead all these volunteers to make the meals. We didn't have that. So we had to kind of work around ourselves and trying to find someone in each group that maybe had a little more experience with cooking and just giving people menu ideas and talking about budgets and how much. And the thing is, so we expected them to, if they were going to come with a group, we expected them to come up with a meal plan if they were cooking, one night, two nights, OK, you gotta come up with a meal plan. You're preparing a meal for a thousand people. How are you going to do that? And we would give them some resources, other people that had come and cooked.

 And it worked very well for some, pretty well for some, and not so well for some, but everybody managed to get a meal across anyway. I mean, even if it was hot dogs and store bought cookies. Occasionally people did that, they said, OK, well, we'll just make hot dogs and buy carrot sticks or something like that. OK. All right, let's go with it. Or sandwiches. Sandwiches was another thing that a couple of groups made.

But so finally, World Central Kitchen came, and they have their whole setup. They have, I mean, they cook for 10,000 and 100,000 people. They know what they're doing. So they came in January of 2020, they started. And so they set up in the parish hall of a church, and it was great. We had to kind of let them tell the volunteers what they needed to do and how to help. It was tricky, and we were just really getting used to it when COVID stopped everything, and they had to leave. And so they really only cooked for two months, and then they had to leave because we couldn't cross the food anymore.

So right now we are paying a restaurant. So this restaurant is now cooking both meals with a little assistance on a few days from a church that cooks some meals. But right now we are not cooking and crossing because we can't. And so we are totally relying on this little restaurant, and we have brought them a lot of PPE. We have supported them in whatever way we can to try to just let them do the work, and of course they've had to hire more people, just from going from a little mom and pop restaurant, which would maybe have, I don't know, at the most 10 people in it at any one time to now having to cook daily meals for over a thousand people.

Rod: How do you think you personally have changed over the last two years? How has this affected you?

Andrea: Well, As a person of faith, and that's challenging in this environment, I think that I’ve seen how other people's faith has carried them along through this process, and I feel like that has, well, it's made my own faith grow in a lot of ways. I am a seminarian at this point. I am an Episcopal seminarian in the Diocese of West Texas, and so as one of the other things that I do, I have to go to classes and study and do papers and all that kind of stuff. And so I am now in my, going into my third year. So it happened to be, and I never, ever would have planned it this way, it happened to be that I started seminary, and I started working with Team Brownsville, almost at the same time.

And I have been told that maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it's taking too much time away from my studies and the work that I, the seminary work that I have to do. And I have just said, look, this work drives the seminary. If I don't have this work or some work, some meaningful work, some work where I can actually see the whole point of the Bible and the gospel and all those things, if there's not something tangible for me to look at and say, this drives me to that there, this is the meaning of that, then I might as well not go. I'm not going to say, oh, I'm going to not do, I'm not going to be part of Team Brownsville, I'm not going to do the work because I need to study some or other theologian’s book.

I mean, I get the work done. It may be at midnight and it may be last minute, but I always get things in. I mean, I'm very driven in that way. I do the reading. I watch the lectures, I do the papers. I attend the classes. I do what I need to do, I guess is how I see it.

I think my call is to work in this ministry, work in migration ministry and to work with families in a colonia here. I don't see myself being placed in some church that they might want to place me in, because I already know what those churches are... They’re churches that are, well, I don't know if you know much about the Episcopal Church, but we have a long history of being a mostly white church, and not just white, but also the people that had money. I don't want that to be my church. And so I have presented and am going to continue to present the argument that my call is to migration ministry. And I live on the border. And even if the encampment closes, that's not the end of migration ministry. Migration ministry has been, there've been people migrating for forever, and they will continue to migrate. And there will be people in my community that are undocumented, people that are struggling, people that need to hear that  there actually are people that care about them and are concerned for their well being. And that's really what I want.

Rod: Well, I did want to ask you, what do you need, what do you want from people?

Andrea: The needs we're facing are we spend close to $100,000 a month on food, clothing, shelter, all the different things, wood, water, paying the people that bring that stuff in. I mean, there's so many different facets, all the bus station stuff. We just have a high outflow of money, and now because of the new people that are coming that don't have a place to go, we need to try to address that. How are we going to come up with a place? Do we have to buy, build, rent a building, make a shelter of some kind? I mean, how are we going to meet their needs? And so every one of those things costs.

Luckily before COVID started, we had gotten some fairly large size donations, and that's carrying us because we've been able to do the things, like kind of make the transformation from carrying the food across to having to buy all the supplies for the encampment. Right now, Team Brownsville is buying everything, every bit of everything that is supplied to the encampment. All food, all clothing, all is either donated, I mean, we take across things, donate directly like through Amazon, and we use the money to pay for all the things that we're buying. But the Mexican government does not buy anything. They're there. The immigration people are there. They’re more like a police force in a way you could say for the migrants. But they don't buy anything, and we sometimes say, what would happen if we weren't here? What would these people be doing? What would they really let them starve?

Rod: I've heard when people really want to donate after a weather disaster or something like that, that relief organizations would rather have money donations than material donations, because it creates a problem of sorting and storing and distributing. Is that true for you? Do you accept material donations?

Andrea: It has been true, and not so much now. We cannot accept any more used clothing. They're not allowing us to cross used clothing into Mexico, and we can't take it. And we got some good donations, don't get me wrong. We also got a lot of really junky stuff that we had to just literally throw away or get in there with gloves, because you never knew what you were going to find, clothing that was just so dirty and stained and ratty that were you really gonna give it to someone in the encampment? No. But so in a way it was kind of a relief when the Mexican customs people said, well, you can't cross used clothing anymore. You have to bring receipts. You have to have tags on the clothes.

So now pretty much what people send is stuff from our Amazon wishlist, which is stuff that we use and we need, or they send money, or we've gotten donations from CWS which is Christian World Services, which is kind of a ecumenical organization of a lot of different denominations. And they provide blankets, and they also provide some other things, some other like disaster relief kits and things like that. And we've gotten other donations from other organizations in the United States. There’s one that's called Baby to Baby that would send us just a lot of nice things, diapers, wipes, bags with baby clothes, things like that. This one group raised money for lanterns, for solar lanterns, and came down, and we got to distribute those with them. Then another time they raised money for Crocs, Croc-type shoes, cause people were saying they needed things that weren't flip-flops, things that had toes because of the mud and everything.

So people have done that. People have, yeah, lots of different kinds of donations, so we're grateful for that. We're grateful for people making donations, continuing to actually think about these people right now in this COVID time, because it's hard to think about anything but yourself. What am I doing now, or am I just staying in my house all day long and can't go anywhere? 

We have had very strong outreach from Austin to Team Brownsville, and there's a large group of Episcopalians. I guess I attract Episcopalians. But no, we've had really a lot of denominations like that, but this group just happens to be from a number of different Episcopal churches in Austin and they've come down. They actually started coming every month, and they would come and they would bring donations and they would work at our escuelita, which is, was, on Sunday morning. And they would cook, and it was great. It was great. We're sad to not have them coming right now.

Well, I could talk about Christianity and things that were meaningful to me as far as the teachings of Jesus and what all that is about, but doing this work has made it much more concrete, has made it much more tangible in a way. So when people talk about things about, well, what are the teachings of Jesus? Or what did he say about this? Or what did he say about that? For some reason, migration ministry always seems to fit right in. There's never a moment when I can't in my mind think about, well, he said this, and it relates to that. And I actually have to kind of hold myself back on more than a few occasions, especially when I'm around church people, because I know that you can bore people, and you can piss people off, and you can make people think that you have dementia because all you can talk about is asylum seekers. The eye-opening aspects of doing migration ministry have also opened my eyes to the fact that so many people that go to my church have zero interest in this. And actually they don't want to have anything to do with it.

Well, the other thing I discovered is that probably the majority of my church are Trump supporters, which also floors me. I guess I never would have, I mean, this is Texas, this is Bush country. And not a big fan of Bush either, but now he kind of seems like a saint, unfortunately. If there's anything positive that I could say about the Trump presidency, it's that it has brought enlightenment to a lot of people, their eyes have opened to, oh my gosh, what is he saying? This can't be. No, this is all kinds of wrong. He's driving people that are not supporters of him to action. He's driving people to reach out to others in a way that we haven't done in a long time. I mean, really since the Civil Rights Movement. That’s really the only positive thing I can see about the Trump presidency, really. I want to believe that, I want to believe that five years from now, we will look back and say it was a transformational moment, and not just another moment.

They keep trying to call me. I’ve had like 3 or 4 calls from the encampment just in our little talk here. I don’t know what they want, but anyway...

Episode 023 - Let Loose the Bird

Today we have Clay Boykin, a Marine, a retired business executive, and a New Compassionate Male. He was called to servant leadership in his professional life and in retirement has made connecting and helping others connect on a heart level his mission. My favorite quote of his from this interview is, “And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves, the divine will of God moves… Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.”

The word “heart” appears 17 times in the transcript below, and Clay is definitely living his life completely in touch with his heart. My sincere thanks to Clay for all the time he spent with me on this project, literally hours before boarding a plane to Kenya. He is something to behold.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Redwood Trail” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 7:26

“Tiny People” by Alexei De Bronhe at 11:27

“Rastafarian” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 13:46

"Almost New" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 17:16

“Marathon Man” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 21:08

“Living in Hope” from Purple Planet at 25:24

"Laid Back Guitars" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 28:01

“Haunted” from Purple Planet at 31:21

“A View From Earth” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 33:05

“2 Above Zero” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 39:23

"Carpe Diem" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 44:25

Here’s the transcript:

I went to Texas A&M, and I got a Marine Corps scholarship there and took a Marine Corps commission, and that was in ‘76. When we were freshmen, they marched us over to the Memorial Student Center, and they said, “You memorize these lines.” It was an inscription. It was a Bible inscription. It was John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” And that’s the heartbeat of A&M. And so I went into the Marine Corps. I served 4 years there, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. If a person is looking for an example of leadership, and leadership from the heart, it’s there in the Marine Corps.

In the Marine Corps, they teach us about servant leadership, and that really was ingrained, although they never used that term. So leadership begins there. Old gunnery sergeant back in the Corps, when I first checked in as a second lieutenant, and I said, “Look, Gunny, What can I do to help clear things out in front of you, from in front of you, so that you can do your job?” He’d pull me over to the side sometimes when I was heading off in a direction, and he’d say, “Lieutenant, don’t do that.” And he’d kind of keep me on the straight and narrow, and I’d support him.

When I got out, and I got into the corporate world, that spilled over. And I brought that into Motorola. I’d have supervisors and lead production operators, and I didn’t know about semiconductors. I didn’t know about test floor or anything like that, so I really had to rely on them. And so it was the same principle. What can I do to help you do your job and clear the stuff out of in front of you so that you can come through and be successful. Today I would say that I brought heart and spirit into the organization, but back then, we called it leadership, and I thought about it as servant leadership.

Motorola had gone through a quarter where it had lost money, the whole corporation, because of the downturn in DRAM prices. Well, it was a $250 or 260 million organization. I got there mid-year, and we ended up at $300 million. And so it’s time for forecast. I’m the marketing director. And I said, “Well, I’ve done an analysis, and based on this chart and numbers here, I just want to grow the business wisely, just add $100 million a year to it, and that’ll be good. But you know, I’ve done a little bit more study, and I think we could really do $460, so let’s forecast $460, but let’s budget on $400.”

They said, “Well, that’s fine. What are these numbers.” I said, “Well, it’s funny you should ask. I was looking at the Austin American-Statesman this last weekend, and there was a chart in there, and I found a correlation between that chart and the trends in that chart and our business, and so I’m using that as a guide.” “Well, what was that chart?” “Well, it turns out it was the history of rainfall for Austin, Texas, by month, for the last 10 years.”

Well, you could hear a pin drop. “What?” You know, “what?” And this really happened. The point being is, nobody can forecast, and you can’t forecast DRAMs. Sales guys were like, “Did you hear what Boykin did, forecasting on rainfall?” During the year, the sector president would come poke his head in the door and say, “How’s the rainfall forecast doing?”

Now, here we are in the semiconductor industry. High tech. And it was fun. There’s so much stress. And we had this crazy vision that we were going to forecast our business based on rainfall. It was crazy. But it was something to rally around.

Well, we missed the forecast. We did $461 million. We beat it by $1 million. Now think about that. A volatile market goes up and down, and bingo. You hit the number. Now how do you do that? It’s not by analyzing things. It’s by people putting their heart into something. People seeing something greater than themselves, being part of a bigger picture and getting some good energy out of it.

People noticed that. People engaged with that. People felt connected. And to notice that, and to bring that out within a group of people, within an organization, is to connect on a deeper level and aim at something greater than yourself. That’s the formula of success from my standpoint. About 3 years later, the organization was about $750 million.

So fast forward. I left Motorola after 22 years and went with a couple of startup companies. I ran one here in Austin for about 3 years, and then I was with one that was based in New York City.

I was running pretty fast and hard. I was pretty worn out. In ‘07, we took some vacation with Laurie’s family to Jamaica, and while I was there… You know, I like to get off into the woods by myself and just enjoy the peace that’s there, and I had my little Swiss army knife, and I would make things, just using whatever’s out there. And I started to realize that I was really not feeling well, that I was having symptoms that I thought were heart attack symptoms. But they would come and go. As long as I was calm, I was fine, but if I exerted myself, I would start feeling really bad. And I thought about going to the doctor, but then I thought, mmm, we’re in Jamaica. I don’t know that I really want to do that.

So I just stayed calm, and I also contemplated that really this is, these are heart attack symptoms, and this really could be it. And then I continued to work on my crafts. I don’t know what it was, but I went into an incredible peace during that time. It was leaning against the veil, as they say. Part of it was, gee, there’s a lot I don’t have to worry about anymore. But the other was just, I don’t know, it’s hard to put words to it. And there was almost a mystical experience, the things that happened there before we came home.

Well, sure enough, 24 hours after we got back to Austin, I had a quintuple bypass. I had 3 months of convalescing, and so I had a lot of time out on the patio reflecting on that and asking the questions. Who am I? Why am I here? And where am I going? And really thought hard about that and had a lot of confusion about that point.

Because you know, we guys, that’s what we’re taught to do. We’re taught to go to school, get out, climb the corporate ladder, so that someday you can retire and do what you wanted to do in the first place. Well, that sets up a real anxiety. I’m always looking over my shoulder as I’m climbing the corporate ladder, and that’s a way to trip up. And so I was reflecting on all that.

Well, I went home. The market was crashing. A few days after I got home, I got laid off. First time since I was 16 that I wasn’t earning a paycheck in some way, shape, or form, and I panicked. I really did, and began working desperately to get work. I barely got an interview for 2 years, and it took me down, hard. And I was just questioning my worth in the world, and goodness, I was deep depression, extended, eventually hospitalized.

So coming out of the hospital, I thought, “OK, maybe it’s time to go get back into church or something like that.” And so I would go down to church downtown on Sunday for 8 o’clock service, and I’d run up to the Unity Church for 9:30 service, then I’d head across town to the Austin Recovery Center for an Episcopal service over there, and I called that churfing. And I remember specifically, it was about 9:20 in the morning, January 3, 2010, I walked into the Unity Church for the first time, and if you’ve ever talked to anybody that goes to the Unity Church, and they’re talking about their congregation, they say when we walk in, we feel total love, total embrace, no judgment. And for me, I felt like the prodigal son. And it really, really touched me.

I remember early on, I’d sit in the pew talking about making notes and mind mapping everything, and I’d cry. There’d be tears. Something Reverend Steve said that really struck deep, but you know, one day he was talking, and I don’t remember the overall talk, but at one point he said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t have to build a condo there.” And I slapped my forehead. I thought, “Oh! I have choice! I can choose to move away from this victim mode. I can choose to do something different, take a different path. It’s well within my power to do it.” I was 54 learning that lesson.

After I’d been there for about a year, Reverend Donna came up to me, and she said, “You know, I think you’d make a good prayer chaplain.” And I got this big old lump in my throat, and I said, “Well, that scares the heck out of me, and so I guess I’m supposed to say yes.” And I did.

I became a prayer chaplain there, and I’d make hospital visits periodically, which I never was comfortable with earlier. What do you say to the person? What is there to say? Well, I’ll tell you what you say: nothing. You just show up, and the right thing will come, and it will come from the heart. But more than anything, it’s just the presence, sincere presence, to stand there and basically, “I see you.” To be their witness that they are going through something. At a certain level, that’s healing in itself. Those are the experiences that, and the opportunities to really connect on a heart level that I found over at the Unity Church and being a prayer chaplain.

A couple of guys, there were only like 3 or 4 of us out of 30 prayer chaplains, you know, 3 or 4 guys, and we started getting together to say, “OK, well what does holding space really mean? What is prayer really about? How do we show up? How do we make hospital visits?” And so, we decided to meet every week and talk about it. And it was a very formative time for me because I grew up not trusting men, and so I was beginning to step into being, it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s OK to speak.

And I look around the foyer after service, and all these men are out there, and they’re not talking to anybody. And I said, well, if I have this feeling and this drive and this curiosity, and I’m afraid to talk to another man, I bet you there’s another guy out there that’s like that, or maybe there’s a few of them.

So in one sense, it was self-serving. I said, “I’m starting a men’s circle. I’m going to do it once a week, because that’s what I need. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m putting the word out, and I’m going to be there and set a drum beat. I’m going to show up.” And I did, and we had 12 guys show up.

So we started there, and we’ve been gathering every week for 7 years. And we may take off a week or 2 during the year, but that drum beat is there. And we’ve got a different mix of guys every Monday night. We’ll have 18 to 20. We had 37 one time this last year. And it’s so fascinating how we figured out how to set a container that’s safe, where people can, men can step away from everything that’s going on out there, and they can sit with other men.

And that’s really the essence, and I’m not teaching anything. I’m facilitating. And it’s interesting to watch the dynamic, especially when trust is built that a man can speak his heart, and nobody’s going to try and judge him. Nobody’s going to try and fix him. But he’s going to be heard by other men and accepted for where he is in life. Where can you go and do that? This is the one place for me where I can safely do that.

And that’s another thing. At the very beginning, I would say, “I want to make sure everybody has an opportunity to speak.” So I’d go around and make sure everybody had spoken, and then I pulled away from that because there are guys that are coming in there, and they’re wounded, and it’s enough for them to be in a circle of men. That’s a big step, and then just to listen and hear the experiences of other men. And they will assimilate themselves, and at some point they’ll say something. So that’s sacred time, and I can almost see the wheels turning when somebody is silent in there. And to hold space for somebody because they’re on their path, and there’ll be a time when they’ll share. More times than not, somebody that’s been silent for a long time, I mean weeks and weeks, first time they share is incredibly profound, and we all come out better for that.

Here’s an interesting fact: last year, 49.4% of the people who went to that website were women. And I was talking out in Bastrop, Texas, around the table at a luncheon that I was at, and I pointed that out, and they said, “Well, why is that?” And I said, “Well, the most obvious is that they’re women looking for a resource for their man.” A woman sitting next to me, very seriously looked at me, and she said, “Clay, I’ve been following your website for a long time now, and let me tell you why. I’m a man in a woman’s body. Where do I go? Where do I go to figure this out?”

You know, I knew intellectually, but to look into her eyes and see the pain, and to hear those words was very sobering to me and reminded me that we have no idea of how far our ripples go. And if we’re putting good energy out there, you have no idea of all the good we’re doing in the world. It’s still men, OK; on the website I also point out that it’s anybody who gender identifies as male.

And that’s the other thing is, I don’t ask anybody to commit. Guys will come up to me and say, “You know, I’ve been going and stuff, but a few months ago, I kind of got sidetracked, and business, and life and stuff, and I really need to commit to come back.” And I said, “No no no no no no. Don’t set yourself up for failure. You’ve got enough commitments in your life. You don’t need another thing that you’re going to beat yourself up for when you don’t show up. Set an intention. Set an intention. My intention is to be there. And I’ll be there, it turns out, when the time is right.” That’s how it plays out. It gives much more latitude because there’s so much going on in life. This is a place to relax and go within. It’s a contemplative circle. We can be pretty shallow at times. We pride ourselves on being shallow at times. But we can go really deep as well.

Back to the job side of things, I had resumes everywhere, and I got this phone call, and it was a young fellow at Office Max. And he said, “Clay, you’ve got a resume as long as my arm. What are you doing applying for a $9 job part time at Office Max?” And I said, “I just got to reconnect. I just got to reconnect with people.” And this was right after I’d started going to the Unity Church. And he said, “Come talk to me.” So I did, and he said, “You’re not going to be here long, are you?” And I said, “No, but I’m going to be your best employee that you ever had. You see, I’ve got to reconnect with people. I have to have that energy, that interaction.” And so he hired me.

So I went from the top of the Empire State Building, at the top metaphorically, and my next job was $9/hour part time. But that $9/hour job was so enjoyable, to observe myself learning again and observe myself connecting again, and just the energy made a huge difference. And then about 6 weeks later, an old Marine Corps buddy heard of my circumstance, and he called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” So we did, and he described what the position was, and I said, “I’ll take it.”

So I eventually became general manager of that company, then moved on, did some business development work, and then this past October, I decided that, you know, reflecting back on Jamaica, sitting in the woods, at the end of my life, doing my arts and crafts, doing something creative and being at total peace, that’s what I was doing at the end of my life. Well, what’s to say that today’s not the end of my life? And am I doing what’s mine to do? Am I on purpose? And it was at that point, I got home, and I said to Laurie, I says, “You know, I’ve been doing this for 42 years. I’m tired. It’s time to change. If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?” And so, the 1st of October, just a few months after my book came out, I left the business world.

When I was a kid, that I would catch birds with a box and a stick and a string. I caught one one time, and I had it in my hands, clasped down, and I could feel its wings fluttering in my hands. And my Mother said, “What do you got there?” And Dad’s like, “Let it loose.” And I was a little kid, and I ran off with it. Well, in the process of running off with it, I didn’t realize that I was squeezing down on that bird, and I killed it. And that fluttering that was in my hands, that I could feel, translated up into my gut. That twinge, that anxiety, I felt like it had been transferred into me, and I was filled with guilt and shame. And metaphorically, I grasped that anxiety, that flutter, with my hands, my one hand was guilt and the other was shame. And I held it tight.

And that flutter is the divine energy. And guilt and shame is what I’m holding it in. And you know something? It’s stronger than we are, and it’s going to come out one way or the other. So when I can turn loose, open my hands up, turn loose of that guilt and shame, that divine energy, that light can integrate with us.

So yeah, October 1, I said OK. You know, I said it in my book, I’m committing the next 20 years of my life to men’s work, and I mean it. I put it in print. I guess I need to do it. Well, a couple weeks after that, mid-October, a woman called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” And so we did. Turns out that she was the local director for Charter for Compassion, Karen Armstrong’s organization. And she and I talked, and she said, “You know, Clay, you really ought to go up to the Parliament of the World’s Religions. It’s in Toronto, the last week of this month. And if you decide to go, would you represent me up there?” I said, “Well, yeah, is there any budget?” And she said, “No.” So I thought, “Well, OK, this is another one of those things where this door is opening, and I need to walk through it.” And I did.

Well, Karen Armstrong had an influence on me in my book. Just look up Charter for Compassion, and one, sign the charter saying, “I as an individual believe in these principles that are about the charter.” IPeople think about compassion as being the soft side of things. Some people say, well, that’s the bleeding hearts club. It’s anything but that. I say compassion is not for sissies. Sometimes you have to do hard things. And the president of the Charter says that a compassionate city is an uncomfortable city because they are leaning into the norms to affect change, and that’s uncomfortable at times.

So I set my intention to meet Karen Armstrong and give her a book. And there she is, and to get my picture with her holding my book. It’s pretty cool. But I also had looked, and I said, “I want to meet the board chair for the Charter.” And I kind of ferreted out where he was, and I went and talked to him, and I shared with him what we were doing with our men’s circle. And I pointed out to him and said, “You know, I’m just looking around here at the Parliament, like 10,000 people, 80 religious traditions, countless sessions going on. Do you realize that there’s not one session on men?” He said, “My goodness, isn’t that something.” I said, “Yeah, and furthermore, the Charter for Compassion has got 12, they call them sectors, their initiatives. And the last one, they’re in alphabetical order, the last one I saw on the website was Women and Girls. Where’s the Men and Boys?” I said, “My vision for the Charter is that there be a Men and Boy....” Well, I said just men. And he said, “Well, if you add boys to that, why don’t you write it?”

And I said, OK. Another door opening. No, I’m not going to sit down and write it. But I’m going to create the conversation. He said to me, “OK, why don’t you introduce yourself to the woman who leads the Women and Girls sector? and you’ll see what she’s got going on, and learn from that.” That’s what we’ve been doing. And the truth of the matter is that in a way, the Women and Girls sector are giving birth to the Men and Boys sector. I’m translating what I’m learning. It’s not going to be the same. We have different things going on with us. We have different issues and stuff.

So I’m still up there at the Parliament, and I run into an organization called Gender Equity and Reconciliation, International. In a nutshell, they are about deep healing between men and women. And it’s recognizing that both men and women are wounded by the patriarchy and creating a space for women and men to come together and do that deep work. And I spoke with them for just a few minutes, But he said, “Why don’t you come out? We’ve got a facilitators workshop. I said, “Well you got any budget?” He said, “No.” I said OK. So after the Parliament, I flew home, changed clothes, and flew to Seattle, and I spent a week out there. And it was a transformative week for me.

And for men and women to come in together, a group of 20 or 30, and to go to that level, and to hear each other’s wound, to connect on that level, there’s an alchemy that happens. And it’s eye-opening. It’s one thing to generally know, but when a person really gets down to it, and they’re sharing that most intimate fear, that wound, you can’t walk away and be the same person. It changes you.

But this is what is so exciting to me about the Gender Equity and Reconciliation. We’re doing our work. We men have got to up our game. We’ve got to come up here and meet women where they are, and that work is work that men have got to do with men. We’ve got to get over this “I don’t want to be vulnerable” business. You know, there’s half a dozen different models for men’s work, and there are hybrids and stuff, but you’ve got the Jungian model, you know, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. You’ve got Robert Bly, which is mythopoetic. You’ve got Mass Movement. You’ve got neopagan, drum beating in the woods. You’ve got the traditional, you know, Knights of Columbus. And then you’ve got this integrative reflective.

All those models are kind of an outside-in approach except for the integrative reflective. These are “break the man down, get him to his heart, and then grow him from there so that he can connect head and heart.” What the Circles of Men Project recognizes is that there’s a whole population of men out there that are already in their heart, and they’ve gotten there because something is broken. They’ve been broken open. They don’t need somebody to break them open; they’ve already been broken open, and they’re in shame, or they’re in fear, or they’re in guilt, and they don’t know where to go because they’ve gone through their recovery program, and they’re looking for something a little bit higher level, maybe something a little more positive. And I can speak with my wife deeply, but there’s still a level underneath that that she just doesn’t have a frame of reference to connect. So I need to go to another man, but we’re raised, “Don’t trust other men. Don’t show your underbelly.” So where do I go?

So if we can create a circle of men where we can begin to open those hands up, connect with one another, then we can do our work. That will enable us to then be ready to move into something like Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t agree with those other models. I do. Matter of fact, I’m in conversation with the board chair for the Mankind Project. Mankind Project is a big one, and it’s about rites of passage, and it’s about breaking, I want to say it’s productively, but it’s opening the man to examine himself. But it’s coming in from a different frame of reference. Absolutely valuable, and the Mankind Project is also connected to Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

And it turns out that one of the women who is a trainer for the Gender Equity and Reconciliation organization is from Kenya. And when I was out there, she said, “Why don’t you fly down to Kenya and do some work here. Do a men’s retreat here.” And I was going to do that, but a rocket attack on a hotel in Nairobi kind of shut things down. The State Department said no go. But tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to Kenya. I’ll be running a young men’s retreat. It’ll be a 3 day retreat. The first evening at least is going to be one question: what is it to be a man in Kenya? Who am I, this western white male, to come over there and think I’ve got the answer? You guys gotta teach me first. Help me. Assimilate me in, so then I can take my wisdom and share it. Not teach it, but share it, after we’ve built trust, after you’ve heard my story, after you’ve seen me open and share, stand in my truth with an open heart. It’ll be 30 or 40 young folks, and I’ve got 2 gentlemen that are there from Kenya who are my co-facilitators. I’m just thrilled with the opportunity.

So things like that are unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Every day something’s unfolding. And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves. The divine will of God moves. Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.

So in years past, I’d be a bucket of nerves right now. I’ve got to get my PowerPoint slides. I’ve got to get this thing all nailed down before I go, and I’ve got to go blah blah blah. Well, no. I’ll show up. And it’s how I show up and recognize that so much of life cannot be scripted. It’s all about showing up.

So I’m thrilled to be doing that. After that… Let’s see. I come back, and a few days later, I go up to Baldwin City, Kansas, and there’s a men’s retreat there that I’ll participate in. And then I come back from there. I go to Houston, and the Unity of Houston has invited me down to work with their team to give them a workshop on doing a men’s circle. And they had some budget to spend on that.

Rod: Somebody finally said, “Yes, there’s a budget.”

Clay: Yeah, all of this has been out of my own pocket! Yeah, but so I do that, and I get back from that, the first couple of days of October I fly to Atlanta. I get picked up there to go to North Carolina to do another Unity retreat. And I come back from there, have a little bit of a break, and then October 16th is an alchemy event in Seattle, where the woman who heads up the Women and Girls sector and me and a group of people are coming together to put on a day-long event, and there’ll be men coming and using circle principles to get a sense of what it feels like to speak on a heart level with other men. Women running circles, doing the same work, and then in the afternoon we’ll come together and have a mini-taster they call it. They’ll get a taste of what the Gender Equity and Reconciliation work is all about. There will be, we’re anticipating about 300 people to be at that. So it’s blossoming.

In May, I was invited to join the Gender Equity and Reconciliation team at the United Nations. And we put on a workshop for the Committee on Spirituality, Values, and Global Concerns. The first step into the United Nations. And what an incredible experience that was, to be part of that, women, men and women from all over the world. And the common theme is the patriarchy system around the whole world, and it’s wounded the whole world. And to be in that, immersed in that, with the United Nations of all places, again, I would’ve never dreamed that. And to make that, just those few days, it moved the needle just a little bit.

I go back to servant leadership. To create an inspired vision, to model the way, to enable others to act, to encourage the heart. That’s… To set a vision for something greater than yourself. It’s connecting at the heart level with another person, connecting on a level of compassion, bringing that good energy into the environment. And that’s not la la land, that’s the real deal.

Why not connect at a deeper level? I spent my career chasing a paycheck and had my chest cracked open and was reminded that there’s a little bit more to life. And look at the stark difference that I’m witnessing within myself since the first of October. I am connected to something greater than myself, and I’ve got a passion for it. And it’s helping me heal along my path. And I’m trusting that to make it sustainable, that the funding will be there, the part-time consulting work will happen. But I’m not focusing on getting this job or getting that job. I’m aiming at something higher.

Rod: Well, it’s good to know that you’ve really slowed down for retirement, have a nice relaxing time sitting on a beach. You’re a busy man, and I really appreciate that you committed the team to me and my little project.

Clay: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I really do. And I want to thank you too. Well good. Are we complete?

Episode 022 - Earthly Angels Bring Me Puzzle Pieces

Today we have Steve Birch, who is chock full of stories about sneaking into shows as a teenager and tracking down musicians at their hotels. He has been a musician, a producer, a songwriter, an author, and played many other roles on his journey through this world, and he shares a couple of those stories about the beautiful people who turned up in his life at the right time and in the right way to really make an impact on him. Here is my favorite quote, because it’s just what I need to hear at this point in my life, “That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open.”

My deep gratitude to Steve for spending the time and sharing himself and his experiences with me. I can’t wait to read his book.

My loving thanks to Flora Folgar for her help with the editing.

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive which, at the time of publication of this episode, has been acquired by Tribe of Noise and is not currently linkable. Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Trio for Piano, Violin, and Viola” by Kevin MacLeod at 6:49

“Kelli’s Number” by U.S. Army Blues at 12:51

“The Edge of Nowhere” by Scott Holmes at 16:17

““Driven to Success” by Scott Holmes at 20:14

“Sweet Spot” by Scanglobe at 27:12

“Bells and Vibes” by Michael Brückner at 35:23

“I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” by John H. Glover-Kind at 41:41

“Deep Dual Love” by Jared C. Balogh at 44:32

Here’s the transcript:

As a kid, I remember my earliest memory, my earliest really vivid memory is being in a basket under my mother’s grand piano in our living room. And she was like the president of the chamber music society, and she was always having chamber music rehearsals and everything. So I was in this basket, and I looked over to my right, and there were my mom’s bare feet working the pedals, and I could hear the dampers on the strings above me thunking on the strings, and I looked out, and there were the string musicians, like a cellist and a violist, in their folding chairs swaying with the music, and I could smell the resin from the bows.

So music was, it was just always there. It wasn’t, “Do you want to play an instrument?” It was, “Which instrument do you want to play?” So I picked up the flute. It looked like an easy thing to carry. And I liked the way it sounded. Because I saw these other kids lugging tubas and euphoniums and stuff around.

I was pretty resolved that I was going to be in the music business. I didn’t know how, but I was just so drawn to it. And at 13, I started working in this college radio station. They were in the midst of an inventory, and I asked how I could help, and they gave me a broom and put me to work doing things that no one wanted to do, just helping them with inventory and emptying the waste baskets and stuff. But that changed really quickly. If someone didn’t show up for their show, I was on the air, and before I knew it, I was doing radio shows and teaching the new college students coming in how to run the equipment.

And then when I got older, I got into junior high and high school, and I was not working at the radio station anymore, but I still wanted to meet all these people that were coming through town. First, I would cold call all the hotels in town and ask for their rooms. One of the people I wanted to get was Chick Corea when he was in town doing a concert, and so I called around and just asked for his room at the Hyatt or whatever hotel it was, and his manager picked up, and he figured out what this was. I was just a kid who wanted to meet Chick. He gave the phone to Chick, and so we talked for a minute, and he said, “So are you coming to the concert tonight?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well just, why don’t you just come backstage?” I said, “Ok.” 

It’s almost like these footprints were laid out in front of me, and I was just as nervous and scared and ill-prepared as I was, I just put one foot in front of the other.

And so I went to this concert, and when it was over, I went backstage, and there was just this crowd of people there, and they were all getting autographs and taking pictures, and people bringing him flowers and all kinds of things. I’m pressed against the back wall, and the people started to part, and he points at me and says, “Steve?” I say, “Yeah.” And he calls me in, so I go in the dressing room, and we sit on the backs of these folding chairs next to a fruit bowl, and we just, I started… He was so open with me, so giving. He just says, “So, what’s going on? I heard that you wanted to go to New York. What do you want to… Is there anything that you wanted to ask me about?” And we just had this probably half an hour conversation. Me and Chick Corea, in his dressing room, sitting on the backs of the folding chairs, and it was expanding my world to know that this person who I had been listening to and studying and admiring was just a guy, and he was accessible.

And you know, when it didn’t work, when I couldn’t reach them at a hotel, I’d call around, call everyone, and no one would have them staying, they’re probably under a different name or under someone else’s name, so what I would do in those cases is I would go to, the afternoon of the concert, I would go to the venue to the stage door, knowing that they would be off-loading equipment onto the stage from the trucks. And I walked up to the stage door, and there’s a stage manager there and everything, and just walked over and grabbed a mic stand off the back of the truck and walked it in and went back out, grabbed a little box of mic cords or something, and did that like 3 or 4 times, and then I was in. And it worked. It worked so many times. It worked time after time after time.

So that was my bridge from this small town in Michigan to getting up the nerve to say, “OK, yeah. I’m going to go and immerse myself in this world.” And so that’s what I did. L.A., when I was 20.

I was so ill-prepared. I had been there for maybe a week, and I decided, “OK, I have to go down to the Hollywood Musicians Union and see what this is all about, see if I can make some connections and stuff.” I remember, I went downstairs into the basement, and there was a big band rehearsal going on. They have the door open because it’s blazing hot down there, and they’re just doing this rehearsal, and there’s this guy with this tenor sax on a stand, and he’s just slumping in a chair smoking a pipe while this rehearsal is going on. And I’m listening. The band is kicking. And he takes his pipe and puts it on the music stand at one point and reaches over and picks up the sax and straps it on, and still laying back slumped in his chair just blew the most blazing sax solo I had ever heard, effortlessly. And I remember being just awestruck and defeated at the same time realizing that no, these were world class players. I had stepped into something that I was absolutely not prepared for.

But I was picking up whatever I could, and there just wasn’t any work. And it got to a point where I just had to make a living, just to be able to stay there and not move back to Michigan and lose face. You know? Because I was the one who got out.

Talk about transformational moments. Sometimes they’re nice and perfectly laid out, as if planned. And sometimes they’re trainwrecks. And this was my trainwreck, this was my bottom. I was driving a delivery vehicle in Skid Row and the Jewelry District and the Garment District, and just all over L.A., and I was doing a lot of drinking, and so I would drink to put myself to sleep at night, and I’d get up in the morning and take little white pills and stuff to get me going, sometimes like a handful. And drinking coffee and taking these pills. And I remember, I was in this frenetic state, and so I would rush through everything, and I was driving very recklessly and everything. I came around a corner and realized as I swung around the corner that there was like a shadow of a person in front of me, and I just brushed past them, and I looked over as they fell away from my truck. I could see this horror on their face, this terror. And I still see that face today. I will always see that face. And as I continued to drive, I looked in the rearview mirror, and he’s cursing me. He’s OK, and he was just one of the guys on Skid Row. You know? But in a way, he’s the guy who saved my life because almost running this guy over, almost killing this guy, was the thing that made me say, “I can’t. I can’t keep going like this.”

And so, I drove the truck to my therapist’s office and just sat in the waiting room until she would see me. And she came to see me, and I gave her the keys to the truck and said, “I’m done.” And that afternoon, I was checked into a hospital, and I was there for about 10 months. I was having suicidal feelings. I was having even homicidal feelings at times. I just had all this rage inside that was unresolved, and so I had to take that time. And fortunately, I had insurance that allowed me that time. I just stopped my life and said, “No, I have to fix this.” And I had this sense that, if I didn’t fix it, I wouldn’t be able to live out my purpose or even find what that purpose was.

And I had a boss who kept my job for all that time and in fact welcomed me back when I left. I was so blessed with just wonderful people. There were these angels that just kept appearing that were just wonderful. That’s a theme for me, is these angels who pop up. And sometimes it’s a very mystical thing, and other times it’s like that guy I almost killed. To me, in my memory, this is the guy who helped me turn that metaphorical corner in my life as I almost killed him turning the corner with the truck. And I imagine, in my musings I imagine, maybe I had the same effect on him. I don’t know.

I got back on my feet. And I was at this for a long time. I mean, I was getting my act together for the good part of a decade, and I got to a point where I was feeling really grounded and assessing my life and saying, you know, there were problems. Some of that stuff I did with music, I did for the wrong reasons and all that, but I still loved music, and there was still a big part of me that wanted to be there because those are my people. That is my tribe, you know?

So I decided I’m going to go for it again. And at that point in time, I was pretty clear that, yeah, it wasn’t going to be as a musician. I just wasn’t that good. So I decided that I still liked putting music together. I liked the studio aspect of it, putting the pieces of a song together and working with musicians. So I thought, yeah, OK, I could be like an engineer or producer or something. So I took a bunch of classes at Cal State L.A. and UCLA. And I met this guy, he was one of my teachers, he was a Record Production teacher, and he was a serious working musician. This guy was a monster player. And we hit it off, and he helped me put together my production demo so I could show my skills as a producer, and I decided, OK, now I need to find somewhere where I can work my way into the business and do this record producing thing. And again, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just went for it anyway. And I remembered that there was this guy who I had met a couple times in passing back in Kalamazoo.

So I figured, if I could get this tape to him, since he had become a producer, a really hot pop producer, then maybe there could be some work there. But I didn’t know how to reach him. But I knew he had a studio in San Francisco, and I knew he was from Kalamazoo. And I figured he’s gotta still have some family there. So I went back to my old childhood ways, my tricks, and started cold calling. 

So I called and called and called, and then I got his mother, and I said, “I’m going to be in San Francisco on business, and I was really hoping to connect while I was up there, but I don’t have any of his current contact information or anything.” And so she just assumed I was an old friend. She said, “Oh, baby, just a minute, let me get it.” So she gave me the address to his studio and the telephone number to the studio. So I drove up. I rented a car, booked a hotel room, spending all kinds of money I didn’t have. I was going to take this tape, I was going to get in that door somehow.

So I drove up there, found the studio, it was just around the corner from San Quentin, found a phone booth, and called the number. Now this guy, he was huge at the time, and he was just in this incredible zone as a producer. So I called him, and he had like 10 people working for him in the studio, but for some reason when I called, he picked up the phone. So I just went to work. I just started to talk my behind off. He said, “So where are you now? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I’m just up the street in a phone booth.” He’s like, “Here? In San Rafael?” So he reluctantly asked me if I wanted to come down. I said, “Yeah, be there in a minute!”

So I drove down to the studio, and he met me at the door, and the first words out of his mouth as I was walking through the door, he said, “So what do you have for me?” So I reached in my pocket, and I hand him this cassette tape of my 3 little musical pieces, and he put it immediately into a boombox there in the lobby and listened to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 seconds of it, turned it off, and handed it back to me. Oh man. OK. So is this how it’s all going to end? All this stuff, all the classes, all the studio time, all this stuff, he was my best bet to get in with a production team. And he was clearly not interested. He knew that I wasn’t up to their level.

But he was nice, and he said, “Hey, look, you want to come back and see what we’re doing?” So I followed him down this dark hallway to the control room, and there was this little guy hunched over a piano in one of the booths, and he walked over to that room. He slid the door open, and he stuck his head in and said to the guy inside, he says, “I want you to meet Steve. He’s from Kalamazoo. He’s a writer. You guys talk.” And then he turned to me, and he said, “This guy is the songwriter of the ‘90s. You guys need to work it out.” And then he left.

So we talk, these 2 socially awkward musical geeks trying to carry on a conversation, and it’s going nowhere. And so, in my head, I’m tallying up all the money I’ve spent and saying, well, I’m just going to have to write this whole thing off as an experience. And so I’m starting to say my goodbyes, and I get one foot out the door, literally, and he says, “So do you write lyrics?” I say, “Yeah.” I had never written a lyric in my life. So he reaches over to his desk and picks up this cassette tape, and he’s going, “I have these 3 songs. I need lyrics. I need these things done. I was like, “Cool.” So yeah, I took the cassette, I said, “So when do you need them?” And he said, “Tape rolls tomorrow at noon.”

So here I am, with the opportunity to write the first 3 songs of my life, and I have about 18 hours to do it. So I drove up and parked under a streetlight in front of an all-night diner so I could keep the coffee flowing, stay awake while I hammer out these songs. Now, I had no idea how to write a song. I never paid attention to lyrics because I was so into the music, but here I am being asked to write the lyrics to these songs. And they were completed songs. They were studio-quality with a la-la melody over the top and a song title. So I had to create these stories around a song title to match the melody. I didn’t know what to do, so I just went by the seat of my pants and said, “What would a writer do? How logically would they go about it?”

So I just wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, until I fell asleep. Woke up the next morning. The lyrics are crumpled at my feet, and I pick them up, flatten them out. The sun is high in the sky, and I still have 2 verses to write. So I crank them out really quick and hit the road. I get there about 20 after 12. They’ve been there, they’re just waiting for me. The music is up on the monitors. The vocalist is all warmed up waiting in the vocal booth, and this writer is across the room nervously, I’m sure, imagining the extra money he’s going to have to pay for the studio time because he doesn’t have lyrics for these songs.

And he sees me walk through the door. “So you have it? Do you have it?” And I just raised up this legal pad, this crumpled legal pad with the lyrics, just cooler than I had any business being. And he rushed over and took it from me and read through the first one, then flipped the page real quick and started reading through the second song and started to slow down, and slowly turned the page and read the third and just sat there for a second and then turned to me and said, “Cool.” Walked out into the studio, put this pad on the music stand and taught this singer the melody to show her how the words would go with the song. So those 3 songs ended up being the first 3 of over 200 songs we wrote together. And that was what launched me into this career that consumed the next 10 or 15 years of my life. Never had I set my sights on being a lyricist. I’d never imagined that. But I found that it was the perfect thing for what I had been prepared for in life.

I set the intention, but when you set the intention, one of the tricks to that is that you can’t be rigid about it. You set your intention, and you release it to the universe to whatever is going to happen, whatever door swings open for you. I was on this journey to reawaken this childhood dream of being in the music business, and I thought I knew where I was going, but I didn’t. And that’s happened to me so many times in life that I’ve come to really trust it. That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open. 

I have to go back a little bit. My immediate family, my father and us kids, we were like black sheep in the family. We were really different. But it always bothered me that I didn’t know why we were so different. And then we had a grandfather who I did not connect with at all. He was this beloved doctor. He delivered me, and I never connected with him. 

When I was probably 16 years old, my dad pulled me aside and explained to me that my grandpa was not his birth father, that he was his stepfather and that my father had been adopted when his stepfather married my grandmother. It was apparently very serious for my dad. And “Don’t bring it up because it really upsets your grandmother” and all this subterfuge, all this stuff. It was apparently a chapter in her life that she just wanted to bury.  I knew that my dad was really, he was really wounded when his father left him. He was 9 years old. His dad left, and he was never heard from again.

But I wanted to help my dad find what happened to this guy, and I imagine from the way my grandmother tightened up and got angry whenever the subject would come up, I just assumed that this guy probably just died homeless under a bridge somewhere. But I continued to help my dad look. And his name was Joe Miller. We didn’t know what state he was in. But years into this, after helping my dad search every 5 years or so, I’m grown. And I’m on the phone with my brother, we’re having this conversation, and we’re finishing up the conversation, he said, “Oh yeah,” he said, “Did you hear about the circus picture?” It’s like, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, there’s… Larry found a circus picture.” And Larry was a guy who was my parents’ best friend. He introduced them to each other and everything.

So what happened was, he was down in Florida, and he was going through a local yard sale. He came across a stack of New Yorker magazines for a nickel apiece, so he bought the whole stack to have something to read while he was down there. And he opens up one of these New Yorker magazines to see this picture, a class picture of the sideshow from the Barnum & Bailey Ringling Brothers Combined Circus. And there’s a guy down in the corner who my dad’s best friend said looked just like my dad looked when he met him in college. And he was doing a contortion that my dad used to do when he was in college. It’s like when they met, when these 2 guys met, my dad and his roommate, they’re getting to know each other, and my dad says, “Yeah, they tell me that my grandfather was a contortionist in the circus, and look, I can do some tricks too!” And he disjointed his shoulders and crossed his arms behind his head, with his arms sticking out straight the wrong way. And there’s this picture of this guy looking like my dad doing that same contortion in this picture from Madison Square Garden in 1929. It’s entitled “The Congress of Freaks.”

And I’m doing Google searches to try and find something. Boom, there’s a posting from a circus genealogy bulletin board where people are looking for their relatives from the circus. There are no responses to this posting that was posted like 6 years prior to my seeing it. It’s just sitting out there. And this woman is looking for, I think her great uncle Lan, or her uncle Lan, or something, who was double-jointed.

So I write to her, and it’s after midnight, and the house was totally asleep. And there’s this email from a woman who says, “I can’t believe it. Seems like every year at Christmas, another relative finds me.” She was in her early 70s. She had been a lifelong genealogist who had done the whole family tree, but it had run cold at her uncle Lan, my great grandfather, that leg of the tree.

So she writes this letter back to me, tells me what she knows, and I’m starting to close this thing down, and I notice that there’s an attachment to the email. So I open it back up, click on the attachment. It opens up, and there’s this picture, this sepia tone picture of a little boy, probably 4 years old, who looks exactly like I looked at that age. And written in calligraphy underneath the image, it says Master Joseph Dustin Miller. This was the first picture I ever saw of my grandfather, and I’m at this point, I’m well into my 40s when I see this for the first time.

It was one of these moments where everything became very surreal. It was very unreal feeling as I’m sitting there looking into the eyes of this child from generations before me. And I get a sense that my wife is coming down the stairs, and I call her name, and she doesn’t answer, and so I look up from the picture, and that’s when I saw the ancestors gathering, gathering like they would around a street performer, with little kids trying to see between legs and between people to see what’s going on as I’m reconnecting with this lost generation in my life. I mean, and it was filmy, and it was just light, but it was clearly people. And they were there for the moment.

So the next morning, I write to the woman. She writes right back, and she introduces me to a couple of people, and they introduce me to a couple people. And I’m doing more and more searches now that I know where he was.

He’d left in Prohibition Chicago. My grandfather, turns out, was an emcee in Vaudeville and burlesque, and he would tell corny jokes. It was like, he would take a piece of bread out, and he’d say, “Now I’m going to sing, ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody’,” and he’d put it in his pocket. He’d come to the end of the song, he’d pull out a piece of toast. It was just really bad, corny Vaudeville stuff. This man who was a Vaudeville burlesque entertainer had had a knock down, drag out fight with my grandmother because he caught her with the grandfather I knew growing up. They had this fight, he disappeared, was never heard from again. Nearly 70 years, never heard from. And she would never help along the way, help us put it together.

So I break the code. The code is broken with this circus picture, you know? That’s the thing that lit me up to search again, and to search with passion. Things started falling into place like... you know, they talk about moving in the direction of your passion, and the universe will conspire to support you. I felt like I was riding a wave and like I was having all these, at the time I would refer to them as rolling epiphanies because it was like everyone I talked to, every turn, every email I received, there were all these people welcoming me to my connection to my family. People who knew my grandfather, people who loved my grandfather.

So there’s all this stuff is emerging, and it’s all emerging, I’m telling you, from the moment I opened the picture in the email, to see that picture of my grandfather, that little 4-year-old boy, to 5 weeks later, I’ve met all these people. And all these people come together to celebrate what would’ve been his hundredth birthday, and I was the guest of honor. All these mystical experiences started coming at me. It was this season of awakening for me that changed everything.

But I learned through this experience and connecting with these aunts and uncles that had no idea that I existed or my dad existed. I was able to bring them all together and find a place for healing those wounds, for reconciliation, for reconnection. And ultimately, I believe, to heal those wounds for those who had long past. There was so much damage through the generations, so much disconnection, so much pain that it needed to be healed. It needed to be healed for all those who are living today who struggled with their strained relationships with their father, you know, this man who abandoned my father, and for all the generations to come.

And that happened very miraculously. It just… It just happened. It fell in my lap, the one person who was best equipped, because it meant so much to me to solve the mysteries for my dad. And also because I was the one who was, who had become now a wordsmith, through my lyric writing and all of that. So I didn’t know how to write a book, but I knew enough to get a start and imagine what a writer would do, just like I did with the lyrics. And so I started doing it, and more things started coming, and I started getting visited by Spirit and by earthly angels who had a piece of the puzzle to bring to me.

And so I’m taking pieces of that, stringing all those experiences together, those things I didn’t feel like I was worthy enough to tackle. Who am I to say I’m a writer, or to suggest that I had anything worthwhile to hear? But I’m at the point now where I’ve had so many experiences and learned so much in life and feel like I’ve been gifted so much that now I’m compelled to get to that place where I can share it, share it out.

But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. None of this is sacred. I like to have fun with it all. I don’t take myself that seriously. I’ll tell you, when I hit 50, that’s when I decided that I was going to be honest and speak my mind, and when I hit 60, that’s when I decided I was, if I’m going to share myself, I’m going to share my heart. And I’m not going to do it halfway. I’m going to do the damn thing. You know? My wife says that. Whenever she sees me backing away from something or being cautious, she says, “Just do the damn thing.”

Episode 020 - We're All Real Nice, and We're All Assholes

A very Merry Christmas Eve to you all! Here is our last episode of the season, an interview with Curtis Myers, longtime Austin sound engineer and shredder. He’s the perfect person to represent goodwill toward men this holiday! I had a great time talking to him, and I’m grateful to get to work with him day in and day out. All of our best to you and to yours, from me, Flora, and all of ours. See you next year!

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Except for “Pick Up On My Mojo” by Johnny Winter and “DOA” by Blood Rock, all music for this episode comes from 1 by Cave Pool, which you can find here:

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/cavepool

Here’s the transcript:

Curtis: That’s when I started recording, when I was 10. And I just had like a two-track machine that I could do ping ponging. You record on one track, and then you take that track, and play along with it, and then record onto the other track. So now you have two things on the one track, and then you play that one back and record on it, while you’re erasing the… And you just keep… And then you have three things on that track. And then… And as you go, you sort of lose stuff in the quality.

That’s pretty much how I started in recording and figuring out how to lay down recordings and make sounds and stuff. The guitar just became natural to me. I just sort of understood it, you know. I could look at how other guys were playing, and I said, “Oh, I can do that.” And so I understood that, and then I just was into the guitar like crazy. Then I heard Johnny Winter. Then I heard Jimi Hendrix. The day I bought my first Jimi Hendrix album, the guy at the record store, he said, “Oh, that guy just died today.” And I was pissed at the guy for telling me that. I just was like, “What’d you tell me that for? You just ruined it. He’s my favorite guitar player.”

And then that was in the Philippines, so I bought it at the PX, on base. I was just a military brat. 14. 9th grade. And I was really into Hendrix, and Johnny Winter. I thought everybody else sucked. I kind of liked Clapton a little bit. Thought he was OK, but…I just was into the faster guitar players. Shredders. They didn’t call them shredders back then; they just, guitar players. I don’t know. But I liked Roy Clark, because he was fast. And I liked Glen Campbell, I thought he was pretty good, too. If they played fast, I liked them. I probably didn’t even know who Chet Atkins was at that point.

Rod: So how did you turn it into a professional gig?

Well, I first went to the Teen Club on base, and I played with my band. At first we were called the Thunderbirds, and then we found out there was another band called Thunderbirds. Of course, there’s been probably a lot of Thunderbirds. And then one guy said Blueberry Doorknobs. So that was our name for awhile.

Rod: Must’ve been the ‘60s.

Curtis: Yeah, well, that was about turning into the ‘70s, yeah, about that point. And all I had was, I had a some kind of weird turntable that I’d turned into an amplifier, and it had a 10” speaker that I would set out, and that was my amp. And we just played the shit out of it, you know. We only knew probably four or five songs, and none of us would sing because, you know. But I mean, we’d make a little bit of money. They’d give us french fries, and they’d give us Cokes for playing and stuff.

So then I moved back to the states, here to Austin, and the first band, I mean, within two months, I was playing in a band. I loved playing guitar. I just, I would skip school and go play guitar. And I went to this place, and I met this drummer, and I liked the drummer.  He was 14; I was 16. And he was huge. He was like 6’, and he swole up like, he just started, I don’t know if he was taking steroids or what, but he got real musclebound. And his brother was a guitar player, but I didn’t like him because he was shitty. I thought he was shitty. And then we found this bass player, and he was great, and he was like sasquatch. And I was just a little bitty guy.

And so I played with these guys. I didn’t like standing up when I played, and I didn’t like, and I was writing music, but I didn’t like vocals. I really didn’t like listening to vocals. I’d rather just hear the guitar. So all the music I wrote was all instrumental. And I found out that after I learned a song by Hendrix or Johnny Winter, I didn’t like it anymore when I’d listen to it. So I quit learning other people’s songs because I figured if I learned it, then I wouldn’t like listening to it anymore because it would just kind of, I don’t know. It just did something to me if I learned the song, then it wasn’t any fun playing it or listening to it anymore. It was kind of weird. Now it’s different. Now there’s certain things I like learning, as I’m older now. I’ve learned to appreciate learning other people’s songs, but back then, it was kind of like, “Eh.” It takes the, I don’t know, the fun out of it, once you learn it.

So I basically went playing and playing with these guys, and we got some gigs. We got a Battle of the Bands at the Sacred Heart Church over there on the northeast side of Austin. And we ended up winning it, and I didn’t, we just packed our shit up and left after we played. And then everybody came back to the drummer’s house and says, “You guys won! You guys won!” And said, “Won what?” We didn’t really think of it as… We were just wanting to play. Anywhere we could play, we’d play parties and stuff. And we just had a blast.

And by the time I think we were, the summer was over, the band sort of fell apart because the parents were getting tired of the, the bass player’s parents were telling him, “You’re going to college. You ain’t doing this shit.”  We were all dedicated musicians for about a whole summer. It was hard finding musicians that I was happy with. I had, ended up hanging out with this one bass player for the next two summers, and during school. And we formed a band. We found four guitar players. I was teaching them all the parts. So I was trying to do like orchestrations of my music, and the only thing we had to record was an 8-track. Not an 8-track like in a professional studio, an 8-track tape, you know, and I’d buy blank 8-tracks and record on that, and we had two microphones, we’d stick them in there. And it sounded like shit. It was god-awful. And I took that down to Armadillo World Headquarters, and a matter of fact, Carol was the lady that took my tape. And she listened to it, and she said, “Eh, you guys need a little work.” And so we never did get to play there, but I kept at it.

Then I got to work for, I was, Johnny Winter was coming to town. It was about ‘75, I think. And he was playing with Floyd Radford, another badass guitar player, and it was probably my favorite lineup with Johnny Winter, just because it was a really rockin’ outfit. And I got there at like 9 in the morning, and it was nobody there except the roadies. And I was there, and one of the roadies came up to me, and he goes, “What are you doing here?” I says, “I’m here to see Johnny Winter.” He said, “Well, you’re a little early, aren’t you?” And I said, “Well, I wanted to make sure I got good seats. I’m here to see him.” He says, “You want a job?” And I says, “Sure!” So he just put me to work. He said first thing, he says, “OK, see this thing? Write on this piece of paper ‘Winterbago.’ OK? Just make it big letters. ‘Winterbago.’ One piece of paper.” And so I just took that pen, and I wrote “Winterbago,” and then I says, I started writing all this other stuff on it. “Cool man! Far out!” You know, stuff like that. And the guy comes back, says, “What the hell is this? I said just write ‘Winterbago’ on it.” He flipped it over. “Write ‘Winterbago’ and that’s it.” So I did that, and I said, “OK, I’m sorry man. I’m just excited.” And he says, “OK, what else you want to do?” He says, “How many tickets you need?”

And so I got tickets for all my brother and everybody. I called them up. So we had four seats right there in the front, man. And Point Blank opened up for him, and they kicked ass, and then Johnny Winter came out and just tore it up. And just smokin’. And I was like, “This is the coolest.” We were right up front, had the best seats. And then at the end of the show, the roadie that was put me to work and everything, he says, “Come up here. Come on up.” My little brother came up with me, and we looked kind of alike. And Johnny Winter’s cross-eyed, right, so I had noticed it, because that was the first time I’d seen him up close like that, and so I stuck my hand out to get my hand shaken with Johnny Winter, and my little brother, and Johnny Winter reaches over to my little brother and shakes his hand, and then walks off. And I’m like, “What the fuck?” That’s just the way it was. But it was cool. I still, I’ll never forget that. It was just the greatest day of my life, I thought.

I got more involved into different things, and playing music wasn’t really my big thing anymore. I was trying to support myself, looking for jobs and stuff, and I found out it was hard to find bands that would stay together and really work hard, find dedicated musicians. And so, it was kind of tough, and I ended up doing odd jobs and stuff. But later on, about as I hit about 19, 20, I started really working harder on the music thing. And we went into this one band, and we were called Tough Luck, and we started getting gigs where we were opening up. We opened up for Bloodrock. I don’t know if you remember them. They had the one song, “D.O.A.” “I remember we were flying along and hit something in the air,” and then it would go, “Doo doo doo doo...” They had this big hit. But they were sort of regional. They had a regional hit, you know. And then we opened up for, let’s see, Bloodrock, Bubble Puppy, Leslie West of Mountain. We opened up for them. And we got to play the Armadillo World Headquarters, and so we actually did some stuff, played around, and then our bass player got shot in a drug deal, and then we got all our equipment stolen, and sort of things just went to crap at that point. And that’s why were called Tough Luck. No, that wasn’t why, but we thought Tough Luck was actually a cool name, you know, when… But it wasn’t.

And we sort of had a pretty good following for a local band and stuff. And we did as good as we could, went as far as we could, but they, the paper wrote an article on, the Austin American-Statesman wrote an article, and it was called “Glitter Punk” is what they called us. Our vocals were just really weird, because I had a real low voice, and then the other guitar player had a real high voice, I mean higher than Geddy Lee. So when we sang together, it was kind of neat, but it was just, we just weren’t that great of singers, I think.

But after that, I went to a recording studio. Back then, there was like maybe 4 or 5 studios in town. One of them was Earth and Sky, and it was ran by a guy named Kerry Crafton. And he took me under his wing, started showing me how to record, and how to use the mixing board and stuff. And he used my house for a pre-production studio. He’d come over there, and he’d do his bands. He’d say, “Rehearse over here, then we’ll go over to the studio and lay down some tracks.” And so he started teaching me that, and from there, I got into, I was going to electronics school at the time, and I said, “Oh, I really like electronics, and I might as well get into it,” because I was figuring computers were just about to happen. This was about 1983, ‘84, and all this stuff was happening.

And so I just got into that, and I learned all about electronics, and I learned to record. And then I got an offer with Radio Shack to work on their computers, Tandy Computers, after I finished school, and I moved to Houston. And there I met a guy who had just retired. I got a gig playing this one homeless shelter, and his wife’s sister liked me, so she told him about me. He came and saw me, and I was trying to run live sound and play guitar at the same time, and he says, “Do you mind if I help you out? I can adjust this for you.” And I said, “Sure, go ahead. If you know what you’re doing, that would be great, because I’m having a hell of enough time just playing the damn guitar.” So he started twisting my knobs, and we just started sounding great. And I was going, “Damn, this guy knows what he’s doing.” So I said, “Where’d you learn to do that?” and he goes, “Van Halen.” I’m going, “What?” He says, “Yeah, I used to work for him, but I don’t do that anymore. I got out of the business.” And he sort of showed me a few things, a few tricks here and there, and I learned from that.

Then, after, oh, I guess about three years in Houston, I had had enough of working on computers for all the prisons. There was one day that I walked in, and one of the prisons, I was on death row, and I’m working on the computer, and one of the guys, one of the prisoners walks in, and he goes, “I like computers.” Two guards rushed in and grabbed him, and they came in and said, “Oh, Mr. Myers, we’re sorry about that.” And I said, “OK. That’s all right.” But after that, it was just, I just said, “You know what? I think I’m going to go back to Austin and get out of this business.” And then I moved back to Austin, and I started a little, I built a little recording studio, and from there, it just, I started getting gigs there. And then one day, a friend of mine says, “Hey, Curtis, can you come to the Back Room? Their sound man left.” So that’s how I started getting into live sound. I started working at the Back Room. And that, and the studio, and then I started getting gigs with Johnny Hernández, that’s Little Joe Y La Familia’s brother, and I just started getting all kinds of gigs, and people started hiring me here and there, and I just went crazy after that. I just started doing sound. But I still liked to play guitar.

Curtis: Well, I got to work for Jimi Hendrix once. But he was dead.

Rod: He was already dead!

Curtis: But it was, you know, it’s a pretty cool story. I entered this contest. It was the Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition. You had to mail in a tape and everything, so I was like, “Cool.”

Rod: Did you mail in an 8-track?

Curtis: No, it was actually a cassette, and I thought it was a pretty good tape. And it said, just record a couple Hendrix songs and send it in, and I sent it in. And then, the sound company I was working for called me and says, “Hey, I got you a gig. You’re going to be doing sound for the Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition.” And I said, “Shit! That means I’m disqualified. I can’t work...” So, but I had, that’s how I made my money. I had to do it. But I got to work it, and I’m sitting there, I ran the sound for everybody in the whole competition, and I was like, “Oh, man. I’m better than all these fuckers.” You know how guitar players are. We can all do that better. So I walk in, after it’s all over, I walk in the green room, and I’d met Jimi Hendrix’s dad. That was cool. I got to meet his dad, talk to him for awhile, and I met his sister. So I got to know them, and that was great. And then, so I walk in the green room, and they’re, all the judges and everybody’s in there,  I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know y’all was in here,” and one of the guys, one of the main judges, I think he was from Fender, he goes, “Wait a minute. What did you… Who did you think was the best?” And I said, “Ah, it was that Italian guy.” And so I walk out, and thinking nothing of it, and then the Italian guy wins.

Two months later, I’m getting ready, I got a gig, and I got my bass player and drummer, I’m calling… I call up my bass player, and I says, “Hey, you ready for the gig? Are you going to come pick me up, or how are we going to do this thing?” or whatever. And he goes, “Oh man, I was going to call you, but I just got this gig. I’m going over to Italy. This guy that won this Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition just hired me to be a bass player.” And I said, “Son of a bitch!” And the guy that it was was the guy that I said, “It was the Italian guy.” So he ended up winning the whole thing worldwide.

Rod: Wow. All on your vote, huh?

Curtis: Yeah, and then, my bass player, I lost my bass player to that guy.

Rod: Casual word in the wrong ear, and all of a sudden you lost your bass player. You’re a dad, right?

Curtis: Yeah. Yeah, I have two wonderful kids. And I found out I have a third kid a couple years ago from when I was out on the road. And the lady finally got a hold of me and told me that we had a son together. He’s 38. He went to Rice University. He played football for Rice. He’s doing fine. He did fine without me, and she did probably a lot better without me than…

Rod: Did you get to meet him and everything?

Curtis: I haven’t met him yet. We… I’m waiting for the opportunity when it’s, when he wants to know about me and all that.

But yeah. And the best I think that I’ve learned as, because I set out to be a rock star, the best guitarist in the world, set all that in my head, but I feel like as I went, I think I learned that the best things in life are just the best things in life, just doing it. And there’s failures and there’s highs and lows, and I think I’ve had a good life at this point. I’m 62 now. I don’t regret a lot of it. There’s things I do regret, of course, but I don’t regret not being a rock star, because it probably would’ve killed me, and I don’t think I would’ve lived to be 62, because I was pretty wild. I had my wild streak. You know, I don’t want to use the names to protect the innocent. But I’m pretty mellow, I think, as far as it goes, and I think it kind of kept me on an even keel.

Rod: You got any other, any other stories? Ones where you don’t protect the innocent?

Curtis: I could say some things about, you know, but there would be times where I would meet musicians, and then they would be, just turn out to be complete assholes. But I think of it now, as I look back, and I think, “Well, they probably were having a bad day, and no telling what they were going through on the other side of it,” and what I could’ve done maybe to make them nicer. And I could mention names, but I don’t want to do that, because a lot of people will have, it could’ve been a bad day they had, and they’re probably really nice people, because we all are. We’re all real nice, and we’re all assholes at the same time, so I don’t want to say any of those bad stories. And I could say some good ones, too, but I think I’ll leave it with the Jimi Hendrix and the Johnny Winter, I think it’s better that way.