By Jeanne Treadway from Next World Stories, published in January 2009.
FOR MORE THAN 20 years I’ve relied on three musical traditions to carry me through the ferociously maniacal holidays. On Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree makes me laugh so hard I usually pee myself. Dec. 8, I mourn John Lennon’s death and celebrate Jim Morrison’s birth. I dervishly dance to Spanish Caravan, Waiting For the Sun, LA Woman and When the Music’s Over until I fall in a puddle of sweat and spent euphoria. Then I play a hodgepodge of John and Yoko and add my personal chorus to So This Is Christmas. I thank John and talk a bit to him about the state of Peace on Earth these days.
Finally, on New Year’s Eve, I play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Jessye Norman’s incredible soprano lifting Ode to Joy to the heavens. These personal rituals remind me of the essentials: ecstatically singing out loud, dancing long and hard, laughter, peace, love and joy. So often during the past 10 years, though, I felt as if I was just going through the motions during these sacred days. What the hell could I say to John Lennon about peace?
Since Nov. 5th, my mood has improved. I actually feel hope stealing around my heart and into my thoughts, that �audacity of hope’ thing. It’s not a gushy goofy hope either. I am all sunshine and daisies because Barack Hussein Obama got himself elected but I still simmer in an edgy stew of 10 outrageous and unholy years, which can suddenly boil up and choke me with fury. So, I’m cautiously happy. No matter how brilliant, well-mannered and beautiful he is, Obama is a politician and most of them are scoundrels, so he might be one too. But when I read that our soon-to-be-President called Nancy Reagan to apologize for making a joke about seances in the White House, my cheerfulness settled in for a while. This man just might have integrity. He might understand his power to wound and to heal. Imagine.