Angel Lady

It's official, I'm an incredibly happy woman! I couldn't love the work I do more than I do. I love talking to the angels, giving readings and council, providing messages from people who have passed on and archangels.

Tonight! Pandora's Jukebox

This time, it's for real. Pandora's Jukebox is happening this Sunday night from nine to midnight. Our Summer Pledge Drive is barreling down the highway of the collective conscience, which means it's the absolute perfect time to show me some love. Call in with your bizarre requests and oddly improbably accents. I'll do my best to reciprocate with appropriately inappropriate responses. Someone slurry and apparently on mescaline called me last month, and I pretended it was a call from the beyond. Make this medium happy with your best dead people impersonations, and will do my best to channel the best music from the cosmos. I'll match your altered states of consciousness with my altared states and we'll have a ball. Hey Dubai, if YOU can't afford the membership, I'll assume you're a jailbird. In which case, you really should contact me with a music request. Cape Cod Community Radio is one of the last vestiges of sanity in these absurd, hyperbolic, obfuscated, translucent, barbaric, evolving, transcendent and paradoxical times.

A membership is just $50, and a sustaining membership of Healing Wisdom or Pandora's Jukebox or your favorite WOMR show for $156, gets you a pledge gift, a luxurious artfully designed beach towel. Or, you can buy vinyl records from our online store here. There's something for everybody.

Roman All Over Me

It's my husband's birthday. Before I met or saw my husband I heard him laughing. My heart blossomed to this friendly, good-willed stranger from behind a closed door. My dad was helping him carry a couch.

His dark curly ringlets, bronze hard body, primitive work out regimen and voracious appetite for eggplant parm fed into my fantasy. I believed the neighborhood Apollo must be Roman. It turned out he was (Russian) Jewish and really balls-out funny, and never wore shirts, which worked for me, because when he did they clashed with his busy shorts. As his hair grew out, people at work began to call him, The Dude. Most especially himself. Like the mayor of Venice, folks on the street knew him by sight because he was as friendly with grandma as he was with the kids from the hood as he was with Susie Q. He'd make everyone laugh and make everyone feel special. He was the hairy chested Jew with the 'fro and open shirt who ate at the taco truck and spent his three-hour lunch break walking around town. Because of or despite being an urban Thoreau with ADD in loud prints, women would throw themselves at him. Usually women with one thing on their minds. Learning to surf. He didn't actually surf, but his collection of cute Japanese souvenirs from his ex he wasn't over was endearing. Sometimes Aussies looking for a place to stay tried to move in. He often dated women who wound up preggers with the next dude they dated. It's a jungle out there.

He cooked dozens of fried chicken breasts every day, and he'd whip out his gallon jug of oregano and Walmart-sized mustard squeeze bottle to flavor it. He had no need for plates, because he ate standing up in front of a greasy frying pan with a knife. Fuck forks. He'd spend hours doing push-ups and lifting heavy arrangements of chairs after his twenty-mile bike rides. He was the guy perpetually clearing his head. He liked when I called him my mimbo. Yet, he had studied Shakespeare at Oxford, studied poetry in college and had written a Jane Austen parody. Night Call Nurses posters covered his walls and his old computer with the flying toasters screensaver gave way to really tight dialogue. I thought his minimalism was very zen, and he always had records playing. Usually surf when he was writing things for Trimark and Corman, et al. He was a real writer, because he was a hunt and pecker. Boink. He was perfect for me, because he wasn't serious about anything and we never thought it would last.

One phase led to another, and we both became more serious about the meaning of life, work and our paths. That was after we rejected an invitation during a meeting to create a "reality" show based on our TV pilot. The actually real producer hated 'my' character, but asked me to play 'myself'. "You're caustic, abrasive, outrageous, and in my opinion completely unsympathetic. Audiences will love you or loath you." The producer was a visionary. I felt misunderstood. Firstly, she's not mean. She's just honest. She's a sharp emancipated character who won't be held down by societal conditioning. And secondly, it's not based on me. The first draft was written before I came along." "I don't care one way or another. Do we have a deal?" Reality TV? Exploitative drama? Screw that, we thought. Idealists we were. Which accidentally led to a fulfilling and mystical path.

Raven's an adoring, thoughtful and attentive father for which I am extremely grateful. We're well into our second decade, and I Still Forget He's Not Roman. That outta be the name of something you'd find at Toys of Eros in Ptown.

Happy Birthday baby! Love you!

Wolf Girl Marries Off Mom In ShotGun Wedding with Hot Tub Dowry

When I'm not howling, moaning or biting someone's head off...

I'm a bit of a tough cookie, but that's just because I was raised by wolves, who were bad pastry chefs. Did you know a poetic license is not recognized by the state of Massachusetts? But seriously folks, I love my family. And am so excited at the possibility of my mom visiting us! In other local news, my hubby had a margarita and decided "Slut Tub" would be the perfect DBA for a hot tub line. But the name was rejected at the town clerk's office. Because this is Cape Cod. We resubmitted it as the 15th Generation Mayflower Descendents' Red Sox Fans Slut Tub, and we're in business! See, Cape Cod's pretty hip n' swingin'. Go Sox.

And the new prototype will arrive just in time for my mom's dowry gift. Because if you can't marry off a very pretty 60-something well-read, zydeco-loving, fiddle-guitar-and-accordion-playing, Edward-Gorey-admiring, British-mystery-novel-obsessed, painter/photographer/Reiki practitioner/astrologer, BBC-oholic anglophile, art-history-nut who enjoys a hot toddy on Saint Patty's Day and a tawny nightcap with her very own pre-market 17th-century-merchant-ship-shaped Slut Tub(TM) on Cape Cod, well then WHERE oh WHERE?

Pandora's Jukebox - Real Radio for Real People - Pledge Drive

Comedian Kate Clinton on Healing Wisdom

This Thursday at 9am EST on 92.1 WOMR, 91.3 WFMR, and streaming at womr.org

Guess who's coming to Ptown for Grrrly GirlSplash week? Why yes, it's Kate Clinton, feminist humorist (self-described "fumerist"), political comedian, author, columnist, film and stage actress. Her books include What the L? and Don't Get me Started. She's celebrating her 33rd year on the scene, with performances in Provincetown this summer. So, hop on the L train this Thursday morning with Healing Wisdom for a dynamic interview with a former high school teacher turned lesmedian. "I think that one woman's conspiracy theory is another man's history." She's brilliant.

On Living in the Closet, Quite Literally

Provincetown is your oyster and GirlSplash starts officially tonight. Wasn't it Debbie Reynolds in Singing in the Rain who belted out, 'Make Em' Splash, Don't You Know Everyone likes to Splash?' You probably have to be really into colorized technicolor films to remember that movie. I memorized the whole album by the time my front teeth had fallen out. Janet, my summertime neighbor and therefor best friend had a Pops who seemed ancient, even by my standards. So we'd go from Hair at my apartment to Fiddler on the Roof at hers, and together we developed a love of show tunes. On the way back from our trips to the liquor store, sucking on Sugar Daddy's, she taught me how to be sassy with teenage boys driving Red Ferraris, at a time when teenagers drove expensive cars. I feared teenagers more than anything else in the world. That didn't change as I got older, but thankfully the 80s came and went.

At that time, Janet was the only other kid I knew who lived in a closet, a walk-in closet mind you. You may even say we were blessed with the Mercedes-Benz of closets, but closets through and through. "You're lucky", she'd say, "at least you have a window." "A window", I'd retort, "It's an air vent". And despite the upstairs neighbors' bathroom noises, the good eves dropping location, and the neighbor's secrets I held close to my own, she was right, it was better. It gave me breathing room. It wasn't until later, when I tried to tutor an upstairs neighbor, that I learned how lucky I was.

It was latter that I met Jade, and learned to appreciate my own situation more. Jade was younger than me, and had learned to play hooky, before she could read. Her dad would come knocking at our door, periodically, for decades to come, looking for Jade. The perpetual runaway. "Look at how comfy my bed is", she said at my first glimpse into her apartment, with no discernible sense of irony. All smiles. She opened up the closet door, and showed me the dirty laundry she "got" to sleep on. It was spilled over on top of a pile of spiky tan high heels and a number of thread bare beige trench coats languished over stinky work boots, too long for the vertical space. Her mother was always half-worried, half-far away, smoking, and always wearing a trench coat in doors on sunny days. It speaks to the self-centered nature of my father, and the other men on the block, that they would spend time smoking cigars, or pot, and drumming with the dude. "He's Cuban", they would say. "He's really got some chops." "He has rhythm." "Ah. He's a good guy." Really, what about his catatonic wife? His girl sleeping in dirty laundry? The faded black eyes seemed to be invisible to the hippies. My parents loved to say, "It's none of our business", a gallant way of bowing out of taking on an adult sense of responsibility for enabling bad behavior.

Back to my friend Janet's dad, practical jokes and bad puns seemed to be among his worst vices. He used to put us in this square carrier, attach it to the hitch on his bike, and drag our skinny gap toothed selves from Venice Beach to the Santa Monica Pier and back. He was the kinda guy who would have lengthy debates with me about the nutritional value of Fruit Loops, but he'd always win with a declarative statement and a big smile. Yeah, but they're delicious and full of vitamin C, look. He'd be pacing the kitchen with a milk mustache, and my friend would ask him if he was okay. Then, he'd start worrying out loud about the poor kid on the back of the milk carton, until we'd distract him with a song or a game. If I were more cynical back then I would have been wrongfully mistrustful of him. There was a homeless guy he befriended, who would knock on the front door at the same time each night, and then walk straight into his coat closet and go to sleep. His daughter was very proud of her kindly, if slightly eccentric summertime dad.

We used to play photographer and model, which became Motorcycle Pimp and Aspiring Actress the summer she decided to stay the whole year. I was so upset that she had to go to a different school than I did, that I probably stopped talking to her for a few weeks, as if somehow holding a grudge against her for something she had no control of made me feel better. The pimp of our imaginations who replaced hide n' go seek, didn't do much but cruise for innocent young girls who wanted to be in the movies, sometimes he claimed to have a more venerable profession, but as soon as the girl got on the bike, it was back to his dungeon. Our version of having sex involved jumping on the bed, laying on top of each other, and kissing each other's hands while we "made out". One day, we kissed each other on the lips, and we freaked out and felt we'd gone too far. "What if my mom knows?" "What if she thinks we're lesbians?" "What if we ARE lesbians?" "Aaaaaa! Run!!" "I think we should stop, I think we should break this up, and call it quits." We were in full on panic mode. As if all the Catholic ghosts from all the nuns in Medieval Europe, were rising up from their graves, pulling us apart with their castigation and ridicule. Apparently, we couldn't see each other without a compulsive need to play Motorcycle Pimp and Aspiring Actress. In the many hours my parents left me home alone at night, I'd discovered masturbating to infomercials and it was the 80s, so there was a lot of big hair and big boobs to look at. A lot of 1-800-GIRLSSS. Perhaps, I was just too riled up to abstain from temptation.

How ever long we were apart due to our self-imposed moratorium, it was long enough to create a distance between us when we finally allowed ourselves to spend time with one another. Janet's dad got married and we didn't meet again until we were all grown up. Her Pops had went through a messy divorce where his wife took everything, and he'd died in his car, homeless in a shopping mall parking lot. His identity wasn't discovered for weeks. She hadn't seen him in years. She had blossomed into a beautiful beaming sorority sister from Florida who by her own account was living her life to fit in with the social climate, but longed to be in California. I'd read Sisterhood is Powerful with a romantic/platonic friend in high school, discovered that the patriarchy and not Eve were responsible for all the world's ills, read Mary Daly, Betty Friedan, Emma Goldman, and Adios Barbie. I'd chopped off my hair, started hawking loogies on SUVS, and began telling raunchy jokes at open mics.

For a long period my romantic relationships with women were mostly drawn out courtships of single moms that ended in poorly timed drug use, somebody becoming a stripper or someone trying to get someone else to become one, attempted threesomes, trips to the hospital, and being chased down a spiral staircase in a castle by a lunging Naomi Campbell-lookalike with sharp talons. I'm not proud of it. But at least I've tried to give myself all the GirlSplash my little heart could desire. And, I'm no longer living in a closet, quite literally.

On My Radio Show Carol Kaye July 31st!

Carol Kaye, is an American musician, is the most prolific and widely heard bass guitarists in history, playing on an estimated 10,000 recording sessions in a 55-year career for albums, film, and TV. She taught guitar since the age of 14. Her first passion was jazz, but she made a career out of inventing lines for rock n' roll, making songs pop and creating hits. She says the execs didn't realize the session musicians were some of the best jazz guitarists in the world. She's been really inspired by Sambas and Latin music, and added those elements to a lot of records.

Her and the other session players revamped and recreated poorly imagined songs in rock's early history. She played on Beebop, Motown, Soul, Funk, and rock albums, with folks like Tina Turner, Supremes, Sonny and Cher, Ray Charles, Mel Torme, Herb Alpert, Beach Boys, Monkees, Paul Revere & Raiders, Hondels, Righteous Bros., Marketts, Sam Cooke, Ronettes, Bobby Vee, Nancy Sinatra, Mel Carter, Vickie Carr, Johnny Mathis, Leslie Gore, Dobie Gray, O.C. Smith, Chris Montez, Gary Usher, Dick Dale, Deep 6, T-Bones, Grass Roots, Ripchords, Tiny Tim Stevie Wonder, Gary Zekeley, Mel Carter, Harper's Bazaar, Hedge & Donna, Sun Rays, Gary Pickett/Union Gap, Spiral Staircase, Gary Lewis & Playboys, PF Proby, Little Richard, 4 Tops, Electric Prunes, Jan & Dean, Ike & Tina, Ventures, Zappa, Animals, Ray Charles, Kim Fowley, Parris Sisters, Santo & Johnny, New Seekers, Association, April & Nino, Beau Brummels, Paul Anka, Timi Yuro, a whole host of singers and surf and soul groups, and Joe Cocker among others. Her abridged list of credits is twenty two pages long. Carol played guitar in jazz clubs with many such biggies as Jack Sheldon, Teddy Edwards, Billy Higgins, Jimmy Smith Trio, and then later with Page Cavenaugh, Bobby Bryant, and Oliver Nelson. She played in Teddy Edwards' jazz combo with Billy Higgins and Curtis Counce in late 1957 at the Beverly Caverns club.

Quelche Chose de Sucre

My precious pearl turns seven at the stroke of midnight! He's such a polite, loving, gifted child. It is a cause for celebration to have made it thus far without marring his beautiful spirit. I have hillbilly blood, so solar returns are marked with melancholy undertones. Where-oh-where are my six other children? By the time my great aunt Teet was my age she had birthed sixteen children. I wonder if the modern American birthday, with its array of loud distracting plastic and paper products covered in caustic, farty and morally reprehensible characters from blockbuster children's movies are just our way of mourning the lonely ova and sperm that pass through our reproductive systems like, strangers in the night, like ill-fated lovers.

Within this paradigm, wasted packaging seems to be equated with a joyful extravagance earned by merely surviving another year on the planet. Here, fanning the flames of greed is part of the initiation into our cultural pathology. "Go, Susie, go! You're not opening your goddamn gifts fast enough." "Tear it like you mean it, baby!" And kids are goaded to open all of their gifts before the guests go home, like it's a carnivorous military exercise. Lay Siege, little darlin'! Take charge! You the man! And we seem to foster this ravenous appetite for new plastic things pridefully. Passing down to a new generation a love of sweatshop goodies, the perpetuation of looking to the outside for gratification, satiation, and validation of the inner most self. Problem is the inner most self is unmoved by Jolly Ranchers and untouched by Savage laughter bubbling out of cola drunk mouths. The window of acceptable demonstrations of love and care opens and closes in the same time it takes to wash and dry a load of dirty laundry. A couple of fleeting Instantagramable moments, a pile of trash sky high, belly aches, and some toys that amuse for a few weeks are left in the wake.

Are these high-octane, junk-food-and-sugar fueled festivities punctuated by the destruction of wrapping paper and shiny gift bags, the result of clever marketing by the Gift Wrapping Industry, an initiation into brand identification and over-reliance of external stimuli to mask the vulnerable internal self, or it is merely a happy distraction from hunger to exponentially expand your brood and populate the planet with your DNA? Because after all, we are animals.

That said, birthday parties are fairly harmless. And, I think birthdays are a wonderful opportunity to celebrate people's lives. My own son's Star Trek(TM) birthday party was brought to a halt by a small guest list, and we've decided to reschedule when more folks are available. So, tomorrow will be low key.

I'm listening to Trois Couleurs: Rouge while I type up transcripts. And it occurs to me once again that, mon horloge biologique fait tic tac.

Kids Dancing!

Post by James Ellis.

What do I listen to while I type up my clients' transcripts?

This:

Great performance here. Still catching up with my clients protocols and transcripts from the channeled readings...

Turns Out, I'm a Troublemaker Afterall

Vintage Trouble is grounded by deep roots and carried by angels. My husband and I turned into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight, or we would have followed these guys to Portugal and even Stolkholm. Not like we have a syndrome or anything, we're just Troublemakers. We might get hypnotized into a gaga-like altered state of consciousness and never come home to our adorable son.

I was so impressed by lead singer, Ty Taylor. He is part preacher, part witchdoctor, and part godfather of soul. He got everyone pumped up and participatory, not easy even with an enthusiastic audience these days. Technology seems to have made people detached from their bodies, from their life force energy, and from living in the present moment. Just look at footage from big shows at stadiums and often people have their iphones raised above their heads, nearly motionless. Have American audiences always been so stiff? I feel ill if I try to say still when I listen to music. Vintage Trouble has an intoxicating quality, and they won't settle for a little submission. They want you to totally lose yourself. If anyone can make it happen, they can. And they did. We got down and stomped it out, even the last vestiges of stale repressive puritanism left in Helltown.

Yes, Vintage Trouble is just as phenomenal in Ptown as they were in Burlington and as they will be in Barcelona. They have limitless talent. Soulful, engaging, good humored, kind-hearted, and incredibly stellar rockstars. Beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful! Go Venice! My hometown knows how to birth real chemistry! And they sure know how to exorcise a congregation. Thank you Vintage Trouble for your shamanistic gymnastics. The Eastern Seaboard needs more of you!

Us Ptown Troublemakers have Tony Pasquale of The Squid Jiggers Blend to thank for the night of magic. I think the band rocked the puritanical stale air off the peninsula for good with their antics. I could have danced all night long without stopping. I'm hooked and I think I'm withdrawing, seriously, I need me some VT on IV STAT!!! Matty Dread of The Soul Funky Train spun some tunes between the acts and was fun and groovy as always. Jenny Dee and the Deelinquents were a delight and inspired many gyrations. Miss Dee is Deevvvvinnnneee. What a special night. And, our kid's still asleep. Amazing!! Please, someone pay me to sing jazz and blues, ride bareback in a German forest, learn Kung Fu, and really sword fight like I just stepped out of a Joan of Arc Epic by day.....so I can spend my nights dancing until dawn barefoot under the stars...listening to Vintage Trouble of course!

Guitarist Stevie Starlight on Healing Wisdom

Guitarist and singer/songwriter Stevie Starlight was on my radio show. Take a listen!

Stevie Starlight is the go-to guitarist for multi-platinum artists like Pharrell Williams, Ben Harper, and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. He has collaborated with Ty Taylor of Vintage Trouble and many other luminaries.

Lee McCormick on Healing Wisdom this Thursday

What an awesome interview...do not miss Nashville songwriter musician Lee McCormick on Healing Wisdom discussing addiction from a unique spiritual perspective. McCormick is co-author of "Spirit Recovery Medicine Bag: A Transformational Guide for Living Happy, Joyous, and Free". (Mary Faulkner is his co-author.) Lee founded The Ranch Recovery Center in Tennessee, The Canyon Treatment Center in Malibu California, Nashville’s Integrative Life Center and IOP/PHP Community Recovery program in Nashville, Tennessee. He leads people on journeys to sacred sites in South America.

Here we talk about his journey, what's missing for some people in the 12-step recovery model, how people can get out of a rut and get clear enough to live their dreams: THE INTERVIEW