03/31/2020
My early days
Mar 5, 2020: This question was posed to me “Did you ever sing?” I first learned how to sing and read music in the church choir in junior high school years. At the age of twelve I was given my first guitar. It was a nylon string classical guitar. I learned how to play from a lady giving free lessons and handing out free copies of sheet music to local kids.
Then we moved from San Diego to Rochester, New York State (USA) for my first year of high school. I took a class called Choir. Also, at this time I applied for a singing role in the school musical production of South Pacific. At the audition we had to sing for the choir instructor as he played the piano. I did not win the audition but I did get some feedback from my instructor that I wouldn’t otherwise receive. He said my voice had a full range from Soprano to Alto to Bass. This was a good motivation to continue my love of playing the guitar with singing.
We moved from Rochester, New York after a year to Alexandria, Virginia. The neighborhood we lived in an expensive neighborhood called Stratford Landing. I went to the high school named Fort Hunt High School. There was a local park nearby that contained ruins of the old Fort Hunt on the Potomac River. My friends and I would hang out at this park and play music or just play around. If we skipped school this is where we would go. It got so that so many kids were using this section of the park that the cops had to close it up.
In the three years that I went to this school I met a lot of people. Lots of the kids in the neighborhood were from well to do families. I met a girl named Lisa Ward, daughter of a staff photographer for National Geographic, at the schools outside smoking lounge and we became fast friends. We were bad girls. She liked to drink and I like to drive fast. I was always getting speeding tickets. She was always getting calls about parties in the neighborhood, and I was her ride.
I also met Brendan O’Connor and his family including his sister Moira and younger brother John in school who lived around the corner from my family. My younger brother made friends with John O’Connor. My younger brother loved to play the electric organ that my parents purchased for us to play with. He still plays keyboards to this day. I saw John a lot always looking for my little brother to hang with.
As kids we would get together in the house to play our instruments from time to time with friends. I don’t have specific memories but being in close proximity I remember that Brendan and I did a lot together up until we had a fight when he was about age 15. I was always playing my guitar and it apparently motivated John O’Connor to also get a guitar and learn it. John plays the bass to this day.
After high school I went to a college in upstate New York outside a small town called Ithaca on a farm to learn to be a horse riding instructor and horse trainer. Here two guys who were friends, Albert Capagni and Larry from the local bar scene ‘had’ me, and eventually I chose to drop out of horse college after three months.
When I returned home I enrolled in community college and worked part-time. I continued to know my old friends from high school at this time period. I then met my boyfriend named Robert “Robbie” Martin (who has since passed away). Robbie loved playing the guitar and he would invite me to parties at his place with other people who played guitars. Later I found out he was in a band, and he would invite me and Lisa Ward to the gigs playing parties in peoples homes. This was Lisa’s first experience with a band too. Later she would dump me and hang out with another girl who she had made fast friends with and are life long friends. I didn’t see her but maybe once or twice after that. Robbie and I eventually drifted apart, and then he was killed in a work related accident about a year after I moved to California in 1980 to live with my aunt and attend college.
While in San Diego I went to a local park to eat lunch and I met a talented young man named Warren Ovadia also there for lunch. He had just gotten out of the Navy, and was living with his family. We started talking and the next thing I know he was my new boyfriend because we hit it off so well and liked each other. We became fast friends and glued at the hip so to speak.
Warren and I did everything together. We became best friends, and moved in together rather quickly. I got to know his whole family; he had two brothers and his single mom. They were from Ohio and were quite bright. They all played musical instruments I found out later. Warren played the violin and mandolin. His bother Mark played electric guitar. One of his brothers met this country singer who had trouble with her vocal chords, but wanted to get back into singing again. Mark had us over to his house one time for practice. She asked me if I wanted to sing. They had the whole band set up in the garage. My stage fright kicked in and I said no. I had never seen a live local band before this time. None of my other friends played in clubs; even though they played parties. They kind of introduced me to this social scene. I was only with Warren ten months and then we broke up. Warren still plays in bands to this day.
I later met William “Bill” Gussin where I worked, who was not a musician. He made furniture for a living. He loved aviation history and photography. He taught me how to use a real camera with fancy lens. At this time I was introduced in college to Ian Llael and met the architects of the Post-Modern movement in architecture and furniture through my instructor Stuart Flaxman (now deceased from Aids). Bill and I got married and were together four years before splitting in 1985. I moved back home to be near my family in Virginia, and for their support.
When I moved back to Virginia I met John O’Connor again through my brother Jim and met John’s older brother Brendan again when he went to hear John perform with his bands. I heard that Brendan had a band and went to hear it play. Come to find out at this time in his life he was actually managing a country music band; he wasn’t actually a musician. I was a little taken aback by this; actually shocked. It seemed he had clearly changed his taste of music since I had known him as a kid. John was shocked that I didn’t play the guitar anymore. The question did come up from John “Do I still play” and I had to answer him that buying a car was more important than a guitar at the time. The guitar I wanted was $800, and this was back in 1980. But it is like riding a bike, and you never forget how to play. But I found out that if you don’t use it you lose it (If not in your brain then in your heart). I had to explain that I had been living with my older brother just before I left, and couldn’t find my guitar to take to California with me. When I returned from California he confessed that he had stepped on the back of the guitar by accident and put a hole in the back of it. He never told me about it until I moved home. He gave me the guitar and told me the story.
After my break up years later with Mark Eckert I met a young lady named Kimmy Holland who was a local celebrity with the open mike scene at Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern in Herndon, Virginia. She introduced me to Karoke. She showed me how to download music to songs to sing minus the vocals so as to play at the bar for doing karoke singing. I did this for some time up until I had to travel for my work in 2010. Unfortunately, the songs I chose were too country sounding, so people thought that I favored country music. At this time I did finally get the guitar(s), and took payed for a lesson or two. However, like all toys they lasted for a while until other more adult pressing matters always took over. So now they sit collecting dust and I hope to pick them up again some day. Just got to figure out what songs I want to play on them.
