Fl!p on Vimeo

The Firehouse Performing Arts Studio gave me a huge birthday present! They professionally video recorded and edited my concert. Zeke and I went down and played in their lovely auditorium while they ran 4 cameras, plus lights and separate sound with it’s own dedicated technician. The quality is lovely!

With performances shut down for the pandemic, they have been working to reinvent themselves as a support for all kinds of artists to record performances for high quality streaming.

I’d love for you to take a look, and maybe even share with friends. Just click on the link below and scroll down from there.

Love/Fl!p

FireHouse Studio

 

Fl!p’s 70th Birthday Concert


Thursday August 27, 2020 7:00 – 8:30 PM PST

I will be playing an online concert tonight in celebration of having survived 70 years on this sweet and astonishing planet.  Here’s the link. Click  on it and then scroll down till you see me, at 7 PM. The link won’t be live till then.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/298533994557015/

Fairhaven College Music Festival Streaming Series –
On the date and time of the the show please come to the page below to watch the Artists performance. Thank You Don Schluter, Fairhaven College Alumni/Music Festival Coordinator.

I was invited by Fairhaven College to play an online concert in lieu of the alumni homecoming celebration that usually happens this time of year. And it wound up to be easy to have it on my birthday!

I earned my self-designed bachelor’s degree in Listening As A Tool For Social Change, between 1971 and 1990. It took a while! But I’ve actually used what I learned in my life, daily.

I have received such amazing support for this event that my heart is broken wide open. First the invitation to play, and then our local community radio station asked if they could both run it on air and on their website. And then the Firehouse Arts and Events Center offered their professional videography as a birthday gift! They have shifted to offering excellent quality recording services to musicians, storytellers, poets, dancers and theatre folks. Zeke and I will pack up and actually go into a building besides our own home for the second time since March 11. The Firehouse team will both record and edit.

I invited friends on Facebook to request songs (can’t promise to play them all, sorry!) and am interviewing a few of those friends on Zoom so they can introduce their choice. (It’s not too late to contact me with a request.) We’re going to try to splice the little introductions into the concert. Fingers crossed!

So far, we have a mix of songs and instrumentals planned. There will be some songs I’ve written, some instrumentals, plus songs & tunes by Peter & Lou Berryman, Libba Cotten, Catherine Madson, Dorothy Attneave, and of course Zeke Hoskin. Zeke wrote a really beautiful new song about rainbows, with a physicist’s eye and a romantic’s heart.

If you’re planning to attend, I would love to hear from you, especially if you can let me know by Monday, when we are actually taping. That way I can hold your face in my mind and sing to you as I record.

Love/Fl!p

Happy Mothers Day


Zeke helped me write this for Bea’s 50th birthday, and here we are, 15 years or more later, still neighbors, and she’s still the heart of it all. It’s still for Bea, but it’s also for all you other mothers (and fathers and step-parents and grandparents) out there! As Bob Franke said in his wonderful song Boomerang Pancakes, “It may not be one of the things I do best, but it’s the best thing that I do.”

Love/Fl!p

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star


I just got home from a glorious PSGW weekend of music making with 100 musicians from all over the US. The music was so loving, so intimate, so beautiful. I got to sit in a circle of some of the finest musicians I have ever known and led them in a jam on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. (Anybody too grown-up to join in that song is way too grown-up for me.) I suddenly felt like I was holding my (now grown-up) toddler sons on my lap, as they held my grandchildren, and at the same time my mother held me, and her mother held her. We were a many-generations-chain of parents holding small children, and we were singing all together.

This reminded me of something, and I thought I might share it.

If I feel tears close behind my eyes, I have a use for them. If I put my mind rigorously on the goodness and beauty of this world, and the goodness and beauty of the people around me, and remember whatever glimpses I can hold of my own beauty and goodness, then every teardrop that falls is a piece of confusion falling away forever.

Love/Fl!p

Groundhog Day!

 

Here is Zeke’s song in honor of mid-winter. He’s written a new verse in honor of this year’s date, which is a palindrome. Although the new verse is not in the recording, it’s printed here so you can sing it to yourself.

Groundhog Day spelled backwards
Doesn’t make much sense.
And if you say, “Yad Gohdnuorg”,
Your friends will take offense.
But 02 02 2020 reads the same both ways
So have a happy palindromic Groundhog Day!