Monday, August 13, 2012

Live Performance This Thurs: You can watch cuz it's online

Cindy Lee Berryhill's Live Stageit show link 

Join us from your computer this Thursday Aug. 16th 7pm.

Too busy to go out to see live music cuz the kids need to be in bed at some ungodly early hour? Be an armchair audience! No need to go anywhere cuz you can watch us from the comfort of your own love-seat. This is an online only performance.

Cellist Renata Bratt and I will be performing live from Open Path Recording Studio in San Jose and you are invited. It's 5 bucks (or any donation you see fit to send us) and we will be performing in front of a very small studio audience and you out there in computer monitor land (or even the screen of your cell phone!)

This is my first time doing a Stageit show, so lets have some fun with it. You can Twitter me or FB messages while I'm performing and we'll try to have a read and talk back to some of you hecklers. And the cool thing is I can completely ignore the real hecklers cuz it's all virtual and we have hundreds or thousands of miles of airwaves and underground cable between us....

Here's the word on Stageit's self image:

Stageit is an online venue that allows musicians to stream exclusive LIVE concerts to fans. The vibe is incredibly intimate often featuring performers playing from their homes, directly from their laptop.



here's me and renata at Open Path Studios in 2010

Cindy Lee Berryhill's Live Stageit show link 




Monday, August 6, 2012

The Once And Future Room


I've been working the past 2 weekends, with much help from my dear friend Paula, on my husband Paul's 'office', the room in our apartment where he once upon a time did work, file, ship, write, play solitaire, edit, and lay out Crawdaddy Magazine....

Paul hasn't asked about, nor stepped foot in that room for over 4 years, and he's 3 years now in the nursing home. I think it's time to make it my own room. But man, ...how hard it is to process all those piles of things. Process meaning: throw out, box, mail out to others. And then there are the things you don't really want to find, (not to mention the 7 year old bags of weed). 

A random page, torn from a journal, dated Feb. 1, 2006 Paul wrote: " I'm feeling on the edge of some kind of madness-
unable to find J.L. tapes/cd's- again!
playing solitaire compulsively--
unsure what to do each day, each moment."

Very difficult to move through this stuff. So many things. A life that was lived. Who am I to make the decision to keep or to purge?

*   *   *

At any rate, we visited Paul at his nursing home Sunday....here's the flip book version.








Sunday, August 5, 2012

It Wouldn't Hurt To Go In And Look Around

I had a dream this morning: 


My 2nd mom and her daughter Sherrie, decided to move away from me and my son Alexander. They'd gotten an offer for a corporate job in Chino and decide to take it. I was sad to see them go and it left me with a whole in my soul: that place that feels a loss of 'belonging' and that is at once afraid of being close (and counting on someone) and fearful one will never have that feeling of belonging with another or community again. 


So I, dream-person that I am, toyed with the idea of going to work at a corporate job myself. 


There was a big office building where some folks I sorta knew worked and this place even had it's own recording studio (they touted a list of celebrated mix-media artists that had recorded there). I thought to myself, 'It wouldn't hurt to go in and look around'. 


It was lunchtime when I arrived and employees were streaming out of elevators and stairwells, some were in the lobby with their lunch packs and knotted up in little groups of 5 or 6. I found a group where I recognized about 3 or 4 of them from church or my kids school and went and said hello to them. 


Maybe they didn't hear me, because no one responded to my greeting. I sat on the ground and looked up at them in their lounge chairs eating sandwiches smiling and laughing and talking about nothing much. Not noticing me. So I let my eyes move elsewhere in the lobby with it's hugely vaulted ceilings and fake trees and the advertisement/TV media-wall playing random broadcasts, unwatched.


People that worked here obviously made good money. Look at them...most of these employees had the latest styles on, stuff right out of the pricey showrooms. Cute polka dot blouses with leather cuffs, paper-mache high waisted pants, tailored antennae dresses and men in fashionable pinch-toed shoes. 


These were people that knew how to make money, and knew how to spend it. 
The question was: 
Did I want to work in this vast, seemingly unending building with very few doors in or out, and shoehorn my life into this linear schedule?
Answer: Not enough. So I got up off the ground and woke myself up.