There is a fine line between circumstance and syncronicity.

How about this for a life changing example.

I am 19 with no particular ambitions
except to one day have some ambitions.

I have moved to NYC to be with my brand new, very first boyfriend. We live in one tiny room /loft with 2 cats and an enormous German Sheppard dog. There is a pole in the middle of the room…for holding up the ceiling I supposed…the pole was also the pivot point for my boyfriend’s nightly meanderings while he tugged at his hairless beard writing poems in his head.

We live in a cheapo flophouse outside Greenwich Village. The residents belong to two general categories-live ins and transients – and to four sub categories- junkies, hookers, Buddhists and wandering souls.

My door is wide open on this particularly muggy summer day. I am sitting on the fire escape windowsill smoking KOOLS, wearing my light blue Bedouin dress…the one I immigrated to New York with – greyhound bus , no shoes, 53 bucks in my pocket, boyfriend waiting for me at the bus station tugging at his hairless beard…..….when a man (transient – wandering soul) runs into my room. I had never seen this person before and after about less than a minute I never saw him again.
He wore a long kaki coat and held a small cardboard box in his hands.

The man ran up to me …looked me straight in the eyes and actually threw the box onto my lap.
He shouted….”Here , you take it …I don’t know what to do with this anymore!” …and he ran out…disappeared.

Wish I knew where that guy went to….there were so many times I would have wanted to thank him…or slap him…

The box he dropped onto my lap was a box of paints.

I have been a visual artist now for 35 years.

On ‘how sometimes making a fool of yourself
can earn you money in the long run’…

Sometime in the last century, I was talked into auditioning for a TV commercial. Labbatt’s Blue was looking for someone with big hair to ‘play fiddle’ on a hay wagon.

I can still hear Michael Wrycraft on the phone cajoling me as I protest… “I have only been playing an instrument for 2 years and I can only play a few Cajun songs …and besides they are looking for a sexy Blonde in cut-offs!’
“No! no! really Soozi…you can do this…this is totally for you!’, he insists. ‘They say you don’t even need to actually ‘know how to play at all’…you just have to have big hair and ‘look like you know how to play!”

I buckle under Michael’s inimitable persuasiveness and so with party dress, cowboy boots, fiddle and hair, I go to my first ever and last ever audition.

I am brought before a grim panel of men in flowered shirts and women in tailored suits. Everything from this moment on moves in super high speed and excruciating slow motion all at the same time.

One of the panel members tells me…“ We want to listen to how you play along with this music!” …and it is insanely fast bluegrass music in an impossible key!!

I figure if my parents made it through Siberia during WWII, surely, I can adapt…so I just start sawing randomly –and I mean really randomly… what else can I do?… and it is ugly….not in the correct key – not in ‘any’ key… arrhythmic – not even remotely sounding like music!
And then for my psychotic dénouement I find myself swinging my hair around, wildly! After all isn’t this supposed to be all about the hair?

When the torture is finally over somebody asks, ‘…ahem…do you actually play the fiddle?’ I say, ..‘yes, but only Cajun music.’…‘Oh really? (sarcastic)….and what does ‘that’ sound like?”

So, I let them have it with the full force of my Swamperella personality! I play and sing Valse de Balfa – a killer Cajun lament.
They look like a tornado just hit….and I guess it kind of did.

‘ Nice hair they say…um …and we really like the way you spell your name.’

Before I can escape, my Polaroid is taken and added to some kind of directory. Years later I get some calls for some wacky, lucrative gigs…. a nationwide subway poster for The Second Cup, an ad in the Star for the Beer Store , and a gig as a fortune teller reading a racehorse’s future for a racing magazine!

Incidentally, that Labatts TV commercial?…. they choose a sexy, straight haired Blonde in cut-offs to ride that hay wagon!

…sans fiddle of course.

https://soundcloud.com/soozimusic/09-valse-de-balfa

I can not count how many times I have heard people tell me at gigs how they ‘wish’ they could sing or play music, or, at my art shows, how they ‘wish’ they could draw and paint.

Wishing is a good start.

Please don’t stop there.

In grade school I got the worst possible marks for singing…because singing like a sweet, little girl was just not my thing…I was belting out the national anthem from day 1 (like some weird under-aged cantor)…and in high school I was not permitted to take art because I could not fit a drawing completely on a page…!

I am, as you may know, both a singer and a visual artist.

My friend recently asked ‘can anyone make art’…this is my edited answer… yes…no…yes.
-creativity and self expression is our birthright.
-everyone comes out of the womb screaming their little wrinkled faces off…there is self expression right there…and all little kids draw/scribble and colour…They stop when someone tells them ‘trees aren’t purple, pigs aren’t orange’…or when the natural inclination to compare one’s self to others stands in the way.

Anyone can try to create ‘things of beauty’ …as they see it…and, I believe, can succeed…and the success is in the ‘doing’….
no! not everyone can sing in tune…(or scream in tune)…but everyone – everyone- if they have the need to and desire to and the nerve to, can try…can work at it …and possibly succeed in getting the ‘it’ out of their system.
Bonus if someone else sees beauty in ‘it’ .
Extra bonus if someone wants to part with money for ‘it’!
‘Can anyone be an artist’…was the next query…
-my comment is this.
Being an artist ‘starts’ with a state of mind and heart and soul- a way of seeing, feeling and observing the world…and the relentless need to reflect on or communicate those observations…in some tangible form…and the often irrational courage to do so.
But of course that is not enough!… there is then ‘the doing’… putting that ‘feeling’ into some format or framework…and not giving up when the the ‘thing’ doesn’t look or sound like the ‘thing’ you had in mind….(Picasso said ….‘at the end of a project, if you end up with exactly the same thing that you had in mind when you started a project … you have failed’.)
The artist…must dig away, chip away at that ‘feeling’ ‘vision’…that ‘urge’ …long after it even makes sense to do so.

I am speaking from experience here and that is why I am writing this…all of my artistic and musical endeavors started long after the typical expiry dates.

This isn’t about talent…(of course a most useful, excellent ingredient in the mix! ) This is about action.
…of going beyond a wish…and of honouring the natural urge for self expression
…and not stopping….

So good luck with ‘your’ journey…and keep me posted.

AND do check this out if you have ever felt ‘scared’.
http://vimeo.com/58659769

Years ago I was commissioned by Allison and Bobby Watt to paint an 8’ x 5’ double portrait of their two dads walking down a country road in Scotland. I composed the painting with the dads ‘walking out of the picture’, as it were.

I worked on the painting for a good year and a half and was planning on having an in-studio art show before passing it over to it’s adoptive parents when quite unexpectedly my own father died.

In time I returned to the painting and found I had become entranced- maybe even obsessed by the road on which the two dads were walking…the ‘road of life’ perhaps, and I started adding deeper and deeper colours to it….purples and dark reds.
I finally called the Watts to ask them to come and get it before the whole painting turned purple.

We had a nice in-studio showing and The Two Dads were taken to their new home outside of Wakefield.

Sometime later on that year, Swamperella played a gig in Wakefield and Bobby contacted me suggesting that I come see the painting in situ. He also mentioned that he had ‘something in the painting’ he wanted show me. After sound check he drove me to his new house. I could see my painting through the front window. It hung high above an archway dominating an entire wall between living and dining rooms . Bobby offered me a seat in front of the painting and in his thick, endearing Scottish accent he purred, “Now, Soozi, do you see anything on the rrrroad?” he pointed to a section of the road with an enormously long yardstick. Allison was standing nearby, wide eyed and grinning.

“No …no I don’t”, I said, “What do you mean?!”
I became quite agitated.
“Rrrrright therrrre”, he is tapping the yardstick on the canvas, “in the rrrroad…can ya not see it?”
“No …I don’t see anything…just a lot of purple and red…!”

“Can ya not see it, lass?” he insisted.
“Look, it’s your father’s face! You‘ve painted your own father’s face rrrrrright therrre on the rrrrroad!”

I was horrified….the subconscious had taken over, which normally is a magical thing, but this painting was a commission and I had a serious responsibility to deliver the correct goods. I started apologizing and saying I would fix it.

“NO NO!” They laughed and hugged me. “We love it even more! “And now we’ve started calling it ‘The Three Dads”!

Thank goodness for kind souls
and great senses of humour!

and thanks to the dads…all three of them!

I grew up in a fish store. My best friend/nanny was a bag lady whose name was Udasha. The following is a small excerpt from a 40 min. performance piece I do called ‘Drowning is Fun’. I will be performing the entire piece this autumn at Musideum.

Udasha is a bag lady and lives no where and sometimes stays with us. Udasha shows up and then disappears
and we never know when she will do either.
Daddy says Udasha is a little bit kookoo nuts in her head.
Udasha is the colour of fresh rye bread without the caraway seeds!
She has a big clowny face just like the two clowns she always brings with her that are on the brown paper shopping bags that say
‘its fun to shop at honest eds its fun to shop at honest eds’.

The first thing the 3 clowny faces do is go up stairs.
Udasha sits herself down on the kitchen chair and sets the clowns on the floor one on each side of her and then she picks up her big skirts way above her chubby knees.She wears band-aid coloured old lady stockings that come up to her thighs and are held up with wide elastic. In these stockings Udasha hides her most important stuff – stuff that she doesn’t want to lose and now that she is safe inside she can take all her treasures out and that is just what she does.

From one stocking she takes out:
-a package of buttons (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-a bunch of safety pins – all sizes- safety pinned together (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-an envelope of streetcar tickets (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic )
-a bunch of elastics all elastic-ed together (wrapped up with a cloth tied up with an elastic)
-and most important a little wooden stick with a hook
called ‘crochet needle’!

From her other stocking she removes bits of string that she has collected – string collected from the street or the park and mostly from daddy’s stinky fish garbage.

She ties them together to make a long piece so she can crochet
and she starts crocheting and she starts telling stories…
She makes little circles that turn into hats for my doll (when my doll had a head ) or she just crochets little circles that get bigger and bigger…she crochets until the string and the stories run out…and when the string runs out, she undoes all the little circles and starts all over again…circles and stories (the same circles and the same stories).