Satin Doll

Satin Doll
---------

1968 was the year of love
and war
and mini-skirts

"showing the world
everything they've got,"
said my mother of girls
wearing those mini-skirts,

as though that was all
"they've got."

Television was filled with
body counts
and domino theories

--we boys,
not long from the draft call,
had queasy thoughts
of strategies:
--college (if you can get in)
--natiional guard (one step above draft dodging-all filled)
--air force (no ground combat [long waiting list])
--coast guard (stay in U.S. waters)
--navy (you stay off shore)
--marines (you're toast)
--army (you're double toast)
--running away to Canada
--becoming a carney...

but for me, it was yet another
move,
this time
from Connell, Washington
--where
potatoes and alfalfa
put food on the table
---
to Richland, Washington
--
where _nuclear_ power
was the answer to everything,
---
where a floor mural of a bomb
decoreates the main entrance
to Columbia High School
in Richland
---
where a mushroom cloud serves as a backdrop
for team logos

---

as the school's only bass trombone player,
new at the school that Fall,
i was asked to
scrape the bottom
of the brass
in the stage band,
a role that I adored ...

... just grubbing for the biggest,
baddest
dirty gliss that I could find
at the base of any
chord

--there was no place
I would have rather been
at that particular time
and place

between stage band,
swing choir,
concert choir
and concert band
it was a year of music

a place where i
could shrink away from
the death tolls,
the propaganda
and the forty mile trek
past Rattlesnake mountain
into the heart
of the Hanford
nuclear reservation

--where reactors go to
live and breed and die
a slow plutonium death--

(that helped make
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
household names)

that's where my mother
taught at a one room school
on the Columbia river
by the Vernita toll bridge,
surrounded by rows of stumps
from orchards cut down to make
way for the Manhattan Project
---
because of the distance
from home to school
I had to stay with people
in town for concerts
and special events ...

one of which was a weekend
fund raising telethon
that the Columbia High School
stage band and other groups
were scheduled to perform at

---

that time,
I stayed with the band
director,
a man who loved jazz
and loved the big sound
I could
coax,
--no, drag--
--rather, coerce--
from my bass trombone ...

on the way to the televison
studio where the telethon
was being broadcast,
we picked up a darkhaired
girl
i always liked ...
she sang in the choir ... i

--I was terrified of her --

at seventeen, i still hadn't
figured out how to navigate those
waters ...
it would become life-long
struggle ...

but on that Saturday night,
the three of us arrived at the studio
past midnight ...

it was a bit early and there
were groups from
Kinnewick and Pasco
scheduled to go first

so there it was ...
the studio ..
the cameras ...
the bright lights
a young man marvels at

--but there was no band.

Pasco's stage
band was scheduled
to perform,
but we were staring at
an empty soundstage

and on the monitor
it was announced that Pasco's
schools could not perform
on the "Sabbath" ...

however ...

the media voice said,
"through the _magic_
of _videotape_"
the Pasco High School
stage band would perform

and then the image

of their vocalist
filled the monitor,
with the sound stage we
were staring at in the background,
but on the monitor,
there was a band,
a conductor
and (of course) the music
rising up from instruments
---
the dark-haired girl and i were
dumbfounded ...
how could it be ...
there was the stage
in from of us ... _empty_!

...yet...

there was the band,
on screen,
in the air,
inside television sets
throughout the Tri-Cities
...
we had never seen anything like
it before ...
it defied all logic ...
it just didn't seem possible,

we just had to agree,
that it was _magic_ ...

it was
--so
appropriate that
the music coming from the
empty stage,

from the velvet-voiced singer
from somewhere
that ghosts inhabit
mysteriously, were
the

smooth sounds
of Duke Ellington's "Satin Doll":

--Gigarette holder,
--which wigs me,
--Over her shoulder,
--she digs me
--Out cattin'
--that Satin Doll.

josjr (2010 1114)