The Other Mother
Fashion for book covers
For a minute yesterday, I thought I was having an 80’s flashback. My publisher invited me to help her pick out headbands and gold foils. Seriously?
Oh yes. Very. It turns out much fashion sense goes into designing a hardcover book. Here’s what I learned at Joggling Board Press’s HQ as we went over the proofs for “The Other Mother: a rememoir.”
Here comes the headband part. I wasn’t kidding. See that striped red and gold piece of fabric at the base of the book’s spine? It’s called a headband. I’ve never noticed them before, but that’s because they’re normally a boring black or grey that blends in with the hardcover. Nothing bland or ordinary will do for “The Other Mother” — if Byrne Miller ever wore a headband I’m sure it was as groovy as our gold and magenta pick.
And finally the gold foil part…
See all the little gold medallions I’m holding? Intern Sylvie (on the right) helped me pick the perfect shade of gold to serve as “The Other Mother” lettering on the cloth-like interior cover. It had to complement that gray swatch Susan’s holding in the middle — if you ever lose the dust jacket on this hardcover you’ll still have an elegant, modern looking hardcover for your bookshelf.
As Byrne often said (one of my favorite womenisms) … “If you’re going to be a snob, be unrepentant!”
Ghosts of Dances Past
I like my ghosts bite-sized, the connections to the past manageable. And so my visit to Santa Fe’s St. John’s college today was perfect. I wanted to see the beautiful campus where, in 1965, Byrne Miller talked her way on to the faculty without a college degree or any other experience teaching dance at the college level. And I wanted to see where the Byrne Miller Dance Theatre was born.
I snapped this picture on the walk up to the college. It doesn’t do the beauty justice. It’s a fifteen minute drive up canyons from Santa Fe and it feels as remote as a ghost town in the summer. The air smells of wild sage and fragrant Russian Olive tree blossoms. The arroyos are dry as a Georgia O’Keefe painting and the sky is a hypnotizing blue. The college was brand new when Byrne and Duncan arrived in Santa Fe nearly fifty years ago – an experiment in using the Great Books as the entire syllabus. It still does, only in the summer you can sign up for seminars like “Humanity Exists in a State of Rupture from the World”: Hegel, the Fall, and Spirit’s Alienation from Nature. Or the tidier-sounding “Reductionism, Naturalism and Undecidability.”
But I wasn’t here to check out the courses. There was a chance that I’d find more photographs of Byrne’s tenure here. On the back of one of her best publicity shots Byrne hand wrote the name Robert Nugent. During the research phase of writing “The Other Mother” I’d tracked down the accomplished photographer on the internet. We’ve talked on the phone and while he remembered Byrne and Duncan, he shot so many photos at St. Johns that he couldn’t place a specific shot. Since he did most of his work at the college in the 60s for hire, he thought the college would have copies in the library. Alas, they did not. At least not easily accessible on a random visit during the summer break.
But when I showed the photographs I already have to the college’s two librarians on duty (and their dog, behind the desk, it’s that kind of cool school) their faces lit up. It was like they’d seen a ghost – just not the kind I envisioned. It turns out the setting of this photograph of Byrne leading a rehearsal of “The Walls Between” still exists at St. John’s College – only now it’s a coffee shop.
And this photograph of Byrne’s collected son, Ben Barney, using a chair as a prop representing his departed grandmother… well the chairs still exist too. They’re called Jonnie chairs – St. John’s iconic piece of furniture.
It gets even better. The stage where the Byrne Miller Dance Theatre began is alive and well too. It’s called the Great Hall on the second story of the student center and it’s still used for lectures and dance performances.
Again, my cell phone photo doesn’t do it justice, but these plush red curtains open up to a stunning view of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains. I can’t say for certain, but if there are ghosts of Byrne’s life work, they were dancing in the beams of light streaming into the Great Hall of St. John’s college this morning.
Auntie Mermaid
Spoiler-alert…if you choose to read this blog you will find out one of the deep dark secrets in my upcoming memoir “The Other Mother.” I am a mermaid. Ask two out of my sister’s three kids and they’ll confirm it. They’ve even seen my tail. The original sighting happened just once, years ago, in the bathtub of my sister’s Orange City Florida home and because of that mermaid transgression, I’ve been on long-term suspension by mermaid management.
I had to have some answer to the question that has plagued me ever since: when do you get your tail back? That it isn’t up to me has been a good enough excuse to satisfy my two nephews (the oldest one until he turned 15 anyway.) But it didn’t seem fair that only the boys had actually been to Weeki Wachee Springs and seen the live mermaid show that started my nickname of Auntie Mermaid.
Well, I finally got to take my 8-year-old niece on a girls weekend where I introduced her to the wonders of her mermaid heritage. She too, believes she is a mermaid. After all, her name is Marina Teresa, after her aunt. She has personally applied the magic suntan lotion to my legs so that her Auntie Mermaid’s tail becomes invisible to anyone but other mermaids. We wouldn’t want any non-family members to find out my secret and ruin it forever. But eight years is a long time to go without meeting another living, swimming mermaid.
I don’t know which one of us was more excited, me or Marina. I love the fact that Weeki Wachee is a piece of old Florida, charmingly hokey while still a natural oasis. But I was a little worried that the whole park would seem stale and boring to a kid raised on special effects and amusement parks like Disney in her backyard. I should have had more faith.
The first Weeki Wachee show was, of course, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Marina sat next to me in the underground amphitheatre with its glass wall looking out an actual fresh-water spring. The curtain rose with a cascade of bubbles and when they cleared, four nubile mermaids waved back at us, their long hair drifting in unseen currents.
For the first few minutes Marina was so entranced she couldn’t talk, and then the questions never stopped. “Is she your friend too?” and “I think her tail is the most beautiful, don’t you?” were easy. When, during the second show, the emcee explained “how they do it,” Marina’s questions got trickier. We decided that fresh-water mermaids have to use little tubes to get air because they’re used to salt water. The girls with legs instead of tails are just actresses pretending to be real mermaids, or else they use the same super secret leg lotion I do to keep their tails invisible.
I would gladly slather myself in mermaid lotion forever to hold onto the magic of our Weeki Wachee weekend. One day Marina might think her Auntie Mermaid delusional and embarrassing, but for now she swears she wants to grow up and be just like me. Except for one thing. Instead of writing stories about what it’s like to find an “Other Mother,” Marina plans to write a book about being a mermaid.
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