Hello, I’m Nancy and I’m a Blogger
When I started singing at Occupy Oakland and Occupy Berkeley events, I started writing about them but didn’t have a blog set up to post these pieces on.
Then we decided to have an Occupella website, and now, with the help of my daughter, Nancy Ibsen, internet maven, I have a home for my blog. Sometimes I write about moments, like the five Buddhist monks walking by us in their orange robes when we were singing at the Montgomery Street BART station, one carrying a matching bottle of orange juice. Sometimes I write little stories.
My other blog, Writing Malvina, is about writing a book on my mother, Malvina Reynolds, with snippets from my source material, and sometimes it’s about what I do in between writing.
Friday, Jan 11, 2013: Idle No More
The Tax the Rich demonstrations at the top of Solano started up again this Monday and it was good to see the regulars and sing the regular songs.
This morning I go to a circle down the hill on Solano in support of Idle No More and Chief Theresa Spence who is doing a fast ceremony in defense of her people and Mother Earth against the tar sands destruction of the Canadian forest and the pipeline threat to the Canadian coastline. This circle, in front of Gathering Tribes, is one of thousands planned across Canada, the US, and the world today. I get there fifteen minutes late and the circle has started, but a woman I’ve met before (at Occupy the Farm, as it turns out) motions me in, so I stand between her and the woman leading the circle, who is explaining the situation in Canada and prayerfully calling on us all for support. We pass around an abalone shell of burning sage and an Ohlone man drums and sings. Then the leader, Pennie, says we’ll go around the circle and each say a few words, speaks briefly and turns to me. I thank Chief Spence and all the First Peoples for fighting to protect the land and themselves and us newcomers as well, because we are threatened too. I find I am choking up a bit, and so do some others as they speak. There is even a Canadian woman there, thanking us all for support. Many people talk about the children and the grandchildren.
Then Pennie invites us into the store to get warm. But everybody wants photographs so we hail a willing passerby and she takes pictures with about four cameras and phones people hand to her. Inside Gathering Tribes I look at the books and the art in the store and listen to Pennie’s husband, Michael, talking to the drummer about his paintings and jewelry, then somebody says “Let’s eat,” so seven of us go up to Bistro 1491 for breakfast and I learn more about Pennie, who also paints, and Aurora, who has a science background and is interested in the intersection of environmental and Native issues. I hope I can keep up some of these connections.
I was more involved when we were changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day in Berkeley back in 1991. We got to preview the exhibit the Lawrence Hall of Science was putting on for the quincentennial, and I got to see the Indian activists point out the inaccuracies in the exhibit to the curators. This stood me in good stead later when I was at a National Storytellers’ Network conference in Seattle and I inadvertently sat next to a rather obnoxious man at lunch. I’d been avoiding him since we’d already had a hopeless argument about feminism. This time he was decrying the romanticization of the American Indian. “Why, they even had human sacrifice in their religion!” he said. “And what was the Inquisition?” I asked. “I never thought of that,” he said.
Comment from posted 1-11-2013:
Good work Nancy, have a great weekend!
Thursday, Dec 20, 2012: Thoughts on Violence
Tax the Rich is on vacation and I’m home with a cold and reading way too much about the school shooting in Connecticut. Some people I know in Children’s Music Network are posting—one has a niece in the school (who didn’t get shot but the teacher she had the year before did) and one sings at a nearby preschool so probably some of her kids have older siblings in that school. People on the list are writing about how to talk to kids at this time, how to respond to what they ask without giving too much information. Susan Salidor posts a link to a song she wrote after the Aurora shooting, “Peace in My Fingers.” I’ve used the song with kids, didn’t realize the connection. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UhXG2Sk1l8 After the Oakland Hills fire and 9/ll I used Ruth Pelham’s “What Do I Do (when my sister is crying)” and if this cold hadn’t taken away my voice that’s what I would be singing now. http://www.mp3olimp.com/ruth-pelham.html (sung by children)
I have experienced so little violence in my life. My father would give me a swat or two on the behind if I did something unusually bad, but mostly I got privileges taken away. Once, when I’d slept late on a weekend morning, he called me to come out of the house, he had something for me, and I came out in my pajamas, expecting some nice surprise, and got doused with the hose. I wasn’t hurt, but I was sorely disappointed.
A friend has told me about how her father used beat her with a belt. When I was a kid, I don’t think I knew such things happened. Kids died of polio back then, or in car accidents, or they were killed in bombings in faraway countries, but it never came to my attention that people would deliberately beat or kill children or threaten to. I didn’t know about the Jewish kids in concentration camps in Europe, although some people here did, and we still turned away ships full of refugees. I didn’t know that. I felt safe.
Even my parents’ stories about the Depression seemed benign. My father talked about taking part in the Ford Hunger March but it was a funny story, he didn’t talk about the four young men shot by the police. My parents talked about being arrested, but they were the heroes of the stories, not the victims. My mother talked about the police taking her typewriter “as evidence” after the KKK raid on her parents’ home and her never getting it back, but she didn’t tell me about the blood on the walls from the raid. I found that out later from somebody else. I suppose it’s possible that I heard and forgot the bad parts of these stories, but that seems unlikely.
Somebody threw eggs at a peace march I was on in 1960 but they just hit the signs we were carrying, not us. When I went on the ’63 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the people who had a dinner for us the night before the march said they weren’t going to march because they were afraid of violence. I thought they were being over-cautious, and saw no hint of violence the next day. Just masses of people being especially nice to each other. Recently I read a book about the planning for the march and evidently there was real cause for fear, but there were plenty of precautions and the violence just didn’t materialize.
I didn’t go South during the Civil Rights Movement. I suppose I could have gotten hurt at the blockades of the Oakland Army Induction Center but I didn’t, and I wasn’t afraid. I think partly I was lucky and partly I wasn’t putting myself in dangerous positions. I was around thirty then and not one of the hot-headed youth.
I went into Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement sit-in, but left before the cops dragged people down the stairs, and I was outside the San Francisco City Hall at a peace march when the cops were using a fire hose on the anti-HUAC demonstrators inside.
I didn’t see any violence at Occupy Oakland or Occupy Berkeley or Occupy Cal, partly luck, again, and partly because I went home at night to sleep.
When I was in college a friend had a rifle and we went out shooting tin cans off fence posts in the hills a few times but I never got into it. I liked archery better. I took a semester in college, did some at summer camp, and when I got married we would take the bow that my then husband had made in a recreation class in college out to some park and shoot at targets. That’s about it for me and weapons. I remember seeing a bow-and-arrow hunter when I was taking some kids on a hike at camp and thinking that was so much more fair than a rifle. More sporting. I do carry my keys in my hand when I walk to my car at night, and I do think of that fistful as a weapon.
Comment from Carole Leita posted 12-20-2012:
Thank you for sharing, Nancy.
Friday, Nov 23, 2012: Occupy Walmart!
Leslie, Hali and I carpool to the Walmart at Richmond’s Hilltop Mall, with Betsy coming in from the other direction on her way home from the holiday and Bonnie home with a cold. When we arrive, the Brass Liberation Band is playing, and lots of people are holding signs, some wearing chartreuse teeshirts saying “OUR Walmart.” Several bunches of chartreuse balloons make the atmosphere even more festive. This is one of many "Black Friday" demonstrations in support of Walmart workers around the country. The band is loud. We try to figure out what to do. We pile up our instruments and walk the line a while, chatting with friends.
Then Elaine says there’s another smaller demonstration with no music down the stairs at the side of the building. She and her partner lead us down, and we meet one of our stalwarts coming up looking for us. We follow him to a side entrance with about a dozen people standing with signs or passing out leaflets. We set up, pass out a few songbooks, and start with some zipper songs. More join in the singing and we go on to the parodies. I pass out lyrics to “Solidarity Forever” which isn’t in the book (yet). We sing that and “Union Maid” which isn’t in the book either, obviously we need union songs besides “Roll the Union On.” Conveniently, some of our lines about Wall Street can be changed to Walmart: “There’s a Walmart here and a Walmart there, sit down, sit down/That’s why we’re sitting down everywhere, sit down, sit down.” Someone comes around with teeshirts for us to don for the occasion. I wish someone had hats.
A young guy comes down the stairs with a bullhorn and immediately starts to lead a chant. I go over to him and explain that we are singing here and don’t need that. People who don’t know about us are curious and I pass out Occupella cards to the other demonstrators, maybe about thirty of them now. One young couple live in Berkeley and take the information about the Tax the Rich rallies. Many of the people going in and out take leaflets, smile, thank the demonstrators. An employee walks past us and then gives a thumbs up when he’s a safe distance away. The company has been retaliating against employees who speak up.
We sing for an hour and a half, then turn in our teeshirts and go upstairs. The speeches by politicians, union leaders, members of the clergy and workers are over and the band is playing again. We drive home feeling happy and satisfied.
Wednesday, Nov 14, 2012: Rally to Save the Post Office
Hali is out of town and everybody else is at work so I come to the rally on the Post Office steps as a civilian, not as a member of Occupella. Dave Welsh is here with his keyboard and lyric sheets for his postman song. Then the WPA guy and several others make speeches. Another Dave shows up, Dave Blake, who is typesetting my Occupella book. I had on my to-do list for today, “Call Dave,” but I get to speak to him in person. Dave Welsh sings his “Rockin’ Solidarity,” me joining in where I remember the words and a few others on the chorus. Then we march to Constitution Square, all of one and a half blocks. Dave Blake says, “It’s the right length march for this crowd.” Indeed most of us have grey hair.
At Constitution Square more speeches. A grey-haired woman asks if I am registered Peace and Freedom. I say I was, once, long ago, but not now. Really not, now. She insists on giving me a leaflet about it, scoffs at the Greens, says we’ll never get to their goals without socialism. I pretty much agree, but balk at agreeing with her, she seems so sure of herself, so disapproving of any other path. I talk a bit about organizations like the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment that recognize the relationship between these problems, but she doesn’t want to hear that, says again that we need socialism. She draws me into being earnest too. I say goodbye. And only just now doing a writing exercise four hours later realize my problem with the conversation. What does she want socialism FOR? I think socialism is necessary to deal with the environmental crisis in a way that does not run over the poor, but it is not sufficient, otherwise the Soviet Union would not have left behind so much pollution.
The writing prompt was about parallel lines “promising our eyes to merge” and I wrote about perspective and humor. If I am to be proselytized, I want it to be by someone who does it with gusto, someone like my father. I remember him talking about perspective. He probably was something like her when he was a young know-it-all, but I was born when he was forty-two, and I got to know him when he’d mellowed out a bit. Some don’t seem to mellow.
Yesterday at the farmers’ market I ran into an artist I know and we had coffee and talked for a while. He told me he had gone to Norway for some conference or study and come away impressed with a statement he’d read about what’s required for the people to have good health. Besides nutrition and education and all, the Norwegians had listed “Fun.” I told him about the button I’d bought at a rally for some health proposal in the California legislature that said “Fun is my spiritual path.”
Comment from carole leita posted 11-26-2012:
Oh dear. I'm learning so much as I age! I would hope the gray-haired woman you spoke with had learned perspective by now.
Thursday, Nov 1, 2012: The Storm and the Occupiers
A report from the Nation
A year ago I somewhat facetiously said that we should reframe Occupy Oakland as an earthquake preparedness exercise to get more public acceptance. Well, here’s an article in the Nation about Occupiers in New York City stepping up with their experience to volunteer in the wake of Sandy.
Two excerpts:
“Today I volunteered from 11am to 9 pm at the Red Hook Initiative, a youth services organization serving the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, whose incredible staff (who live in public housing) opened their doors today to operate as an impromptu center for receiving and distributing supplies, cooking and serving a ton of food for something like 200 people, and giving out information to comfort to the community. . . .
“On the volunteer side, there were a half-dozen occupy trained organizers on-site doing kitchen, social networking and media outreach, community outreach (biking around to any local organization or establishment that might have resources or information) and organizational infrastructure. Today I saw Occupy alive, providing much-needed support and coordination of efforts to help the slightly overwhelmed RHI staff serve the population.”
But please read the whole article.
Monday, Oct 15, 2012: International Blog Day, “The Power of We”
Children
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead
Mead didn’t say “one person,” she said “a small group.” My Representative when I lived in San Francisco in the sixties was Phil Burton. He told us that he had to have at least one other person in the House who was as progressive as he was, or he couldn’t get a second to his motions and his ideas would not be discussed. An individual might have a revolutionary idea, but they need someone to second the motion, or give their invention financial backing, or allow their study to be published in a peer-reviewed journal for the idea to get anywhere.
This year’s theme for International Blog Day was “The Power of We.” I don’t care for the grammar, but the theme is one that informs this blog. On Monday, the day we were all supposed to post, I was flying home from the Children’s Music Network International Conference, so I’m three days late, but that gathering was also about the “power of we.”
Members of CMN don’t camp on Wall Street together or go on strike together, but we are an illustration of the other part of the “power of we,” mutual support. We second each other’s motions, so to speak.
Music teachers are usually the only one of their kind in a school, and they are usually working in more than one school, so it’s hard even to find allies among the classroom teachers. A touring musician has an even lonelier professional life. When I was touring around the country in a van telling stories in schools, libraries, bookstores and conferences, I usually toured with a partner, but one time my partner dropped out and I had to go alone. I missed having another performer/driver/navigator, of course, but I noticed that what I really missed was someone to talk to about the kind of weird children’s librarian whose house I stayed in overnight, or the gig that went wrong and why.
Getting together with other teachers, writers and performers of children’s music gives us a chance to check in with each other, ask hard questions and cheer each other on. This year we were particularly cheering Sharon, Lois and Bram, the Canadian trio that’s been singing children’s songs on stage, television, and recordings since 1978. We gave them the Magic Penny Award, named after my mother’s song, which Bonnie and I led. We also sang their songs, including “Rags” (I’ve got a dog, his name is Rags/He eats so much that his belly sags/His ears flip-flop and his tail wig-wags/And when he walks, he goes zig-zag) which I used to sing all the time in the eighties and had all but forgotten about. Funny how a song will drop out of your repertoire and you hardly notice.
Bonnie and I led a song swap called “American History in Song/Song in American History: Expanding Freedom.” Bonnie talked about not liking history in school, where it seemed to be all dates and battles and presidents, but now loves the history of people and their struggles. She introduced and sang “Do What the Spirit Say Do” as used in the Civil Rights Movement. I talked about hearing labor history from my union activist father and noticing that none of this showed up in our school books. I told a story about an eleven-year-old striker in the 1836 cotton mill strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and sang “Cotton Mill Girls.” I got the story from It’s Our World Too! Stories of Young People Who Are Making a Difference, by CMNer Phil Hoose. Then we started around the circle with Monty Harper’s song about the Oklahoma Land Rush. Patricia Shih did the Neville Brothers’ rap about Rosa Parks, which started a discussion of the “tired feet” myth. The discussion is continuing now on the CMN listserv. Sarah Pirtle sang her song about an African-American teen who broke color rules on a train long before Rosa Parks, Ruth Pelham sang a rewrite of La Bamba she did with Havasupai teens, protesting uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, Lin Boyle spoke about writing responses to “This Land,” introducing the verses not included in text books, and encouraging high schoolers to respond to how they felt about "this land was made for you and me." We had so many songs we went overtime, and I’m glad we did, because we ended with Joanne Hammil leading us in her “Freedom Train,” a seven part round with seven choo-choo trains circling the room in harmony!
We always come home with new songs, of course, but also with new energy to do the music we do and to fight for children to have the opportunity to participate in music-making, whether by learning an instrument or singing in a chorus or writing songs in class or singing along in an assembly.
Part of the energy comes from having fun together, and that we do. A newcomer to the conference wrote in afterwards, “I thoroughly enjoyed meeting EVERYONE.... such a fun, incredibly warm, fun, talented, loving, creative & did I mention fun, group of people?"
This year we met in Zion, Illinois, right on Lake Michigan. Yes, Sally Rogers sang her “Lovely Agnes” (And we’ll cross Lake Michigan, so blue and so wild). Next year we will meet in the hills outside Los Gatos, California. I’ll be working on publicity for it. I plan to bring new songs and see old friends. If you use children’s songs as a parent, a classroom teacher, a music teacher, a librarian or a performer, check out www.cmnonline.
Comment from Anna Stange posted 10-19-2012:
Gosh Nancy, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and putting words to my thoughts. Anna
Comment from Patricia Shih posted 10-19-2012:
This is a terrific piece, Nancy. I too love CMN and try never to miss our annual international gathering because it's all you've said and more. As I read your last paragraph, next-to-last sentence, I wanted to add "I plan to bring new friends and sing old songs too."
Thank you!
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 10-19-2012:
Here's another report on the conference, from a newcomer who gave an excellent workshop: http://www.ecmma.org/blog/movement_matters/all_one_family_childrens_music_network_conference_2012
Comment from Liberal Cabrera Raya posted 10-29-2012:
Does this site have a page on Facebook?
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 11-16-2012:
Occupella has a page on Facebook, is that what you meant? So does Children's Music Network.
