An antidote for an hour

After watching enough truncated reports on the deaths in Nice, France, I needed something else.  I could not read the book I just started. I couldn't sit in the yard, too hot, couldn't watch TV, too stupid. But on the streaming PBS station I found an episode of American Masters, with opera great Renee Fleming, about song. All about music and singing. Nothing about violence or politics or current events or this day or any day. Simply about music, masters and apprentices and the power of that music.  Gospel, pop, classical, opera, jazz, new music.  All of it.

If you can find this on your TV, please consider watching it. For an hour, Renee Fleming introduces us to a dozen singers we know and many we don't.  The power of the voice is such that it makes you laugh and makes you cry. Tonight it made me cry more than I anticipated. Cathartic, I guess. To hear Alison Krauss sing "Ghost in the House"... well, I rewound that about 4 times to hear it again and again.  Her voice is that of wise angel, pure and yet sad and knowing. "I'm just a whisper of smoke, I'm all that's left of two hearts on fire that once burned out of control."  It's perfect.   And Dianne Reeves, jazzing up a song that makes you smile and mentoring a young woman on stage with a smile and some advice, so generous.  And another young woman whose name I forgot doing a cover of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" that will make you stare at the ceiling with your mouth open and you will shake your head in amazement at her rendition.  "..It'll take you a couple of gin and tonics to get you on your feet again." Trust me, it kicks butt.

And so much more. Kim Burell, an amazing Gospel singer launching into "Let There Be Peace on Earth" simply brought down my personal house and I used a half box of Kleenex right there. 

Commentary from one singer: When you sing, you have these parts coming together to create this whole.  It's a wonderful metaphor of how you wish society would be.

And yes. Try to find this PBS episode, if you can. If you have Netflix, you can find it on your list of stations/channels. If you don't, well, see if this helps:  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/american-voices-renee-fleming-full-episode/3739/

For one hour I was almost able to put the tragedy of Nice on hold. Yes, I cried through most of it because of every reason, especially because of the contrast between the beauty and simplicity of music and the ugliness and complicated madness of terror.  And I wept at the beauty of music we know and that we don't know, at the power of that music to move us, at the simple gift of a simple line of notes.  What it is, I don't know. On a night like this one, after another 80 deaths for no reason, I know nothing. I am still crying. Enough.

But sometimes there is an hour of solace. And I have learned to take that solace when it comes because when it appears, it is sorely needed.

Goodnight my friends. I wish you well.

xo 
as we say in our family: LTBT

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