“He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.” – Alice Walker, from Possessing the Secret of Joy

I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.

~ Nikki Giovanni

Delores LaVern Baker (b. 11/11/29; d. 3/10/97), popularly known as LaVern Baker for much of her professional career, came from a musical lineage of strong women that included Memphis Minnie and Merline Johnson.

After starting her career as a singer in Chicago-area clubs in the 1940s, LaVern (then known as Little Miss Sharecropper and later as Bea Baker) began her recoding career with Okeh Records in 1951, later switching to Atlantic in 1953.

It was during her Atlantic years, which lasted until 1964, that some of her best-known R&B hits were made, including “Tweedle Dee”, “Jim Dandy”, “I Cried A Tear”, “Play It Fair”, and her version of Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey’s “See See Rider”.

Though LaVern had many R&B hits during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as work with Alan Freed and Ed Sullivan in movies and television, wider success still eluded her, in part due to Mercury Records’ hiring of non-black Georgia Gibbs to cover her songs (as well as those of other black artists) for the middle-of-the-road world of pop music. Baker was deeply angered by the record company’s move, and a legendary public assertion that Gibbs would have no career if not for the work of others followed, along with LaVern’s petitions to Congress to give musical arrangements the same legal status afforded original musical compositions. Though LaVern lost her legal fight, it touched off subsequent social and legal controversies still being studied today.

In the late 1960s LaVern, like a lot of popular American artists at the time, toured with the USO to entertain US troops serving in the Vietnam War. After a trip to Vietnam, LaVern became ill with pneumonia, causing a lengthy stay at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines.

Upon her recovery, a friend suggested her as the Entertainment Director for the USMC Staff NCO Club in the Philippines, a position she held for 22 years before returning to the USA, where she spent the remainder of her life working on film soundtracks, appearing on Broadway, and releasing compilations of her earlier hits.

In 1991, Baker was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In a further show of strength after her return to the USA, she continued performing even after diabetes took her legs, and her last recording was “Jump Into the Fire”, which was featured on a tribute CD to Harry Nilsson.

LaVern Baker passed away in 1997, and after originally being placed in an unmarked grave, local historians fundraised for a headstone. She is buried at Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, NY.

I don’t know how I’d forgotten this fact; perhaps too many years spent among boyfriends, girlfriends and my adopted family of friends after having dodged my own childhood hell of mean, drunk, and childish relatives, I’d become soft and complacent during the interim two decades.

When it was recently our turn to take part in what is supposed to be one of the “last” traveling Christmas weekends of a classic abuser who happens to be my hubby’s grandmother. Her main target is my mother-in-law, a beleaguered caregiver at the end of her rope. The rest, which mostly included home caregivers, her billionaire daughter-in-law (out of her son’s earshot) and niece has recently branched out to include her son (a self-made man) for not building her an elevator, and even newer, me. My own fresh, personal hell comes by the way of supposedly not being “thankful” enough for the hand-me-down dress and coat and assistance with the downpayment on a condo for my new spouse and I (which was gramma’s way of making up for forgetting she was gonna help him with his student loans).

Here’s the thing about me: having worked my hardest and on my own for much of my life, I have often been accused of being TOO thankful, as in so much so that my tributes can make others uncomfortable. To the end concerning my supposed infraction of not saying thanks for anything and everything, I tried sweet, empathetic understanding as well as exact dates before giving up, thanking her for the terminally awkward moment she’d just offered me, and left just as her son – who she’d been upset with previously over nothing – arrived.

After some pressure from well-meaning relatives to go to the dinner I’d planned on skipping out of horror and fear for what might come next, it was assured there would be distance between myself and the proclaimed Queen of Mississippi. Instead, I arrived to find that this was not true, and that instead the only ope seats were directly next to and across from her. When the relatives tried bumbling musical chairs to make up for the mistake, I elected to just SIT DOWN and save us all even more embarrassment.

Here’s what happened: she apologized (apparently a first, an anomaly according to everyone else in the family) and went on to mention that she might be allergic to steroids, a fact she thanked me for mentioning months ago to her own daughter when she had first noticed her mom’s exacerbated mood swings.

Hmm. More on this steroid subject will be part of my next entry; I’ve actually got quite a volatile essay on my Kenalog experience.

Back to granny for a moment: I know she’s never worked hard for the $ she gave my spouse for our condo. Her son invested $ that his father worked hard for. She threatened to spend that gift of 50k on herself, and I had dared her to. “Please!” I pleaded, “live your life – this gift of love – to its fullest! Any less would be a sin!” “Well I just might!” “Even better,” I egged on, “spend double!”

Anyway, it seems to be a case of “mo money = mo problems”, in that, while everyone seems thankful for what they have, it’s a constant and simultaneous loyalty check and poke to the eye I’m grateful to witness as an adult but am happy to have missed out on as a child with a humble background; we had all kinds of real reasons to flip our wigs, money and whether there was enough being a constant threat. On the other side, once you have more than you can spend, keeping it that way seems to take precedence over most other activities.

May balance, love, light, abundance and positive challenges guide you, and when all else fails, don’t be afraid to crank “Jesus of Suburbia” or “Beverly Hills: Where I Wanna Be” while dragging the hose hundreds of feet to all your baby trees.

I love this country, no matter how much I have to fight or how many inequities exist. At least I’m in a world where I can WORK to rise above in one way or another.

Not thankful? Moi? Pshaw, I say, pshaw.

I don’t know how I’d forgotten this fact; perhaps after too many years spent among boyfriends, girlfriends and my adopted family of friends, I’d forgotten all about the abuse one can almost always find nowhere except for at the hands of a relative (either through blood or marriage) in a home the victim typically doesn’t frequent but a few times a year or, like newlywed me, for the first time ever. Whichever the case, some things we can all share in are maximum embarrassment in a foreign sphere, a choking down of hypocrisy, and lastly, a strange and latent masochistic desire to keep engaging the perp, for better or for worse.

My own fall from grace came from a scenario I lost with my partner, who very much wanted me to attend what (apparently, though at this point I seriously doubt it, at least if the feistiness of said relative is any indicator at all) is supposed to be his elderly relative’s “last Christmas” up at the farm/compound, one of those majestic and beautiful places seemingly sprung from the heavens specifically to engender these kinds of situations. Mo money = mo problems, indeed.

For whatever reason, the relative, an elderly woman whose very presence flies in the face of the reason we “honor our mothers and fathers”, seems to enjoy making herself out to be a victim of everything in the world despite having been handed a husband, a teaching job, and several million dollars with which to grow and play with. Apparently all of this isn’t good enough, and I suppose that if I refused to read a book or a newspaper or make friends or if I insisted on going nowhere or doing anything with the money left me except complain that I COULD do something if I wanted to, as no one I’ve helped is even remotely thankful (despite all of the thanks and praise, which somehow disintegrates into the ether before ever reaching her impoverished ears or eyes)…

…Sigh…at any rate, I’m being reminded this week of exactly why I have spent my last nearly 20 years of my adult life carefully cultivating my holiday crowd to the point of self-loving isolation: it’s all about Releasing My Soul From the Crazy. It is a worthy cause for those in the know.

Later: Let’s Get Specific-al…!