Nancy Schimmel, photo by Sandy Morris
Welcome to my blog. I have been writing a biography of my mother, songwriter/activist Malvina Reynolds, but I keep getting interrupted—first by Occupy, and Occupella, a song-leading group that grew out of it, blogging at occupella.org, making a book out of the blog, Occupella: Singing in the Lifeboats. Then came The Former Guy, and now the pandemic he assisted. Both the guy and the virus are distracting, scary, and exasperating.
So on this blog I will be posting about my family (my father, William “Bud” Reynolds was an organizer of the Ford Hunger March of 1932 and other disruptions), about the process of writing the bio, and also writing about these weird times and about my own life, writing songs, walking my neighborhood, working on a fantasy novel for children. It’s a good time to be hanging out with witches, dragons and trolls. The other kind of troll.
My old blog, Writing Malvina, got interrupted too. You can find it by clicking 2007-2010 Blog at the upper left.
Wednesday, Sep 20, 2023: Prompt: Wild Thing: The Seventies
Renee played Chip Taylor's "Wild Thing"
as a prompt for our Tuesday night write.
I remember a different but similar song in the early days of women’s music. Not only can’t I remember who wrote it, I can’t remember any of the names of the women who didn’t write it. Oh. . .okay, it probably wasn’t Cris Williamson, definitely not Margie Adam, probably not Meg Christian, but it was that era, and we did feel a bit wild. Coming out, kicking over the traces, hitting the road, doing take-back-the-night marches. I did one in San Francisco and one in Pittsburgh (the real Pittsburgh).
We weren’t wild, really, just doing things women shouldn’t do. We were supposed to hit the road with a man, if at all. The time my planned roadmate couldn’t come at the last minute and I went on a storytelling tour alone and a guy at a gas station in the midwest said, “You’re pretty far from home, aren’t you?” and I doubt he’d have said that to a man. Cris Williamson tape or Margie Adam tape in the player in the van, eating up the miles on those long straight roads, heat lightening on the horizon.
Dayum! It was Cris Williamson —with the wind blowing in the intro. Funny, the song I remember is the one in the prompt, the Chip Taylor one. It came out before Cris’. When did I hear it? I bet someone in women’s music covered it. Can’t find that on google, though. But Google says it was covered by the Muppets!
I think I’ve aged out of wild now, if I was ever there. Aged out of wilderness hikes, for sure, though there are coyotes in my central Berkeley neighborhood these days. What a different world it is now, from that one in the seventies, driving across the country in a van that probably got ten miles to the gallon, and nobody thought anything of it.
Saturday, Aug 26, 2023: The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
I was there
In March of 1963, the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement came to San Francisco with a huge sit-in at the Palace Hotel demanding better jobs for employees of color, who were restricted to jobs as maids and pot-washers. The sit-ins spread to auto row, where people of color could wash and polish cars but not sell them. Hundreds of people were arrested, many students among them. My mother was at the Palace Hotel sit-in (along with comedian Dick Gregory) and I stopped by on my way home from a California Democratic Clubs conference. These local sit-ins inspired my mother to write “It Isn’t Nice.”
That summer, I was asked by Women for Peace to represent them, along with another member, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. My mother was young enough to enjoy much of the sixties (which were her sixties too) but she wouldn’t have wanted to spend three days and two nights on the CORE bus going to the march and another two days and three nights going home, like I did. She stayed home. The caller from Women for Peace said apologetically that they couldn’t afford plane tickets. I didn’t like flying then, so I was just as happy to take the bus.
I didn’t know the other delegate, a young black woman named Mary Ann. But we settled in to the very back seat and talked the whole way to Washington. There was a film crew on the bus, headed by Haskell Wexler, before he was the Haskell Wexler, winner of Oscars for cinematography. They were making a documentary called The Bus. We were told that if they zeroed in on us in the middle of a conversation we should just go on with it as if they weren’t there. Fine. But then when Mary Ann and I were in the middle of a conversation about the death penalty they asked us to move to different seats and start over again because the motor was making too much noise where we were. We tried starting over, but it wasn’t really the same.
The conversation I thought should have been in the film but wasn’t, was one they filmed when we were at our last stop before DC, walking towards yet another Howard Johnson’s for lunch, wondering if the weather would be as hot as this the next day, talking about what we should wear to the march, totally trivial, and we rounded the corner and saw a bunch of black kids and white kids in overalls. SNCC! Wow! This was really happening!
We were put up at a college dorm. That night we had dinner at the home of some locals who were not going to the march. They had heard there might be violence, and they were afraid. We had slept on the bus and eaten at all those HoJo’s to get here and they were right here and not going! Recently I read Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington by Charles Euchner. He writes about the real threats of violence the march organizers were taking precautions against. We were naive, which was just as well. We needed an unperturbed night’s sleep in real beds.
Back at the Women for Peace meeting in San Francisco, they had told us that they barely had money to get us there and back, and none for bail, so we were not to do anything that would get us arrested. No sit-ins, just march. We agreed. But the morning of the march, when we were waiting in the designated hotel lobby for the rest of the California delegation so we could all march together, a bunch from SNCC came in, singing and conga-lining, and Mary Ann and I just fell in with them. To hell with the California delegation! As we approached the White House on our way to the Mall, we wondered if they planned to sit in or something. They were still singing. We kept following them, singing. If we got arrested, so be it. But they passed the White House and we got to the Mall. We were at the far end of the reflecting pool from the stage. [In a crowd of 250,000, we ran into Ross Flanagan and his wife Dorothy, who had moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia.
Not only was there no violence, but I have never been in such a huge crowd of people being extra nice to each other. We listened to a lot of speeches and songs, then Mary Ann and I got restless and began to walk back to where our bus was parked, among the hundreds of busses. We were between a couple of government buildings on one of the streets leading off the mall when we heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. begin his speech. The sound system carried perfectly, so we stood and listened to the whole speech. Then we went to our bus.
There was no film crew on the trip home, and we lost some of the passengers, too, who were students going to eastern colleges. The anticipation was over and we sprawled out, tired and relaxed. We passed the time talking to various folks, and one older guy with a saxophone would play tunes and we’d try to name them. While I was in Washington, my husband and some of his friends hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney. I was sorry to miss that, but I’m glad I was where I was. I wrote a song (my first ever, aside from parodies) about going to the march. I don’t know where it is now and can’t remember it. I didn’t write another for years. I kept up with Mary Ann for a while, then we lost touch.
In 2013 I was interviewed for the Sunday Oakland Tribune fiftieth anniversary piece about the CORE bus and when I read it I found that Mary Ann Rock had died the previous week. She had become an artist and lived most of her life in the San Juan Islands in Washington.
Comment from Ruth posted 8-26-2023:
It's good to read your memories of those times. It seems to be a time for old folks to write about their memories. It is so important to write down the personal stories, so the next generation can read it. I recently finished writing about my families escape from Germany at the beginning of WWII.
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 8-26-2023:
Ruth--I would love to read that.
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 8-27-2023:
Ross Flanagan was the chair of the peace march organizing committee that met at the AFSC house in SF. He was the best meeting chair I ever knew, and this group was a handful!
Saturday, Jun 10, 2023: Oral Tradition
Carole and I went to an art fair up in Fairfield a week ago, and after wandering around enjoying my cousin’s husband’s metal sculptures and sitting under a wide-spreading tree eating barbecue and enjoying the music of Foxes in the Henhouse, an all woman band, we were looking at the art in the booths along the path to the parking field. One had art birdhouses, and the grey-bearded man sitting there said, “I’m a retired teacher and maker of birdhouses.”
Carole said, “We’re two retired librarians.” He perked right up and started talking about teaching. We were all saying how we were lucky to work when we did; now it’s much harder.
He said, “They don’t let you be yourself in the classroom any more.” He said he taught special ed, and one class was the kids none of the schools wanted. Multiple disabilities, many of them. He gave an example of how you have to tailor your approach to the kid. I said I had a friend who sang and played guitar and chose to teach special ed partly because he had more leeway to bring music into his classroom. “I sing to the kids too,” he said, “especially this one.” And he started singing, “Love is something if you give it away, give it away…”
“My mother wrote that song,” I said.
“What?? Really?”
“Yep, my mother, Malvina Reynolds.”
He got out a notepad and a pen. “What was the name?” I gave him my mom’s name and mine and said I was a songwriter too and we both had websites and he could look us up. “I sang that song every day,” he said.
He sang it every day and didn’t know who wrote it. I’ve been saying for a long time that if any song of my mother’s passes into oral tradition and hardly anybody knows who wrote it, it will be that one. The process seems to be starting.
Comment from JoEllen Arnold posted 6-11-2023:
Wonderful story, Nancy! We sang that song at camp and in the classroom, too, but I always knew who wrote it. Why have I always known your mother’s name and work? The earliest moment of recognition is not a memory unfortunately. Thank you for your work and for keeping people aware of her work!
Comment from Jean Tepperman posted 6-11-2023:
My kids learned that in preschool and I loved it. Had no idea who wrote it until decades later.
Comment from Pam posted 6-11-2023:
Great story, Nancy! Malvina, Presente! And I'll be singing that song for days over & over now that you've replanted it in my ear-canal. . Your mama was indubitably The Queen-Mother of Righteous-Earworms-That- Bear-Repeating!
Comment from Sydney Gurewitz Clemens posted 10-24-2023:
Love reading this, Nancy. And I'm thinking, that you are ten years older than I, so you remember the Rosenberg Case and maybe Malvina was active in the local work? I have found a wonderful woman to write Helen Levitov Sobell's biography, and if you have even a tiny bit of a story for it, I'd like it. So would you comb your memory's locks for some bit of history to add to this extraordinary feminist leader of people needing justice in a period with an awful few of such? You can email it to me, or I can put you in touch with the biographer. You would like and approve of her. Most warmly, and thanks for your clear thinking over the years!
Saturday, Apr 22, 2023: Sing to Wake the Power Up
I couldn’t find this line again in Joy Harjo’s video to see if I got it right, but it doesn’t matter to the writing, it’s what I heard, and this writing is about me, not about Joy Harjo, and she is talking about a different kind of singing and a different kind of power.
The kind I’m talking about is on view in Amandla! a video about singing in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In one scene a street-filling crowd is singing and dancing forward. I’ve sung that way, in the Pride Parade and peace walks but we didn’t dance. I couldn’t now, but I could have then. In the video, it looks unstoppable. It isn’t, the cops have guns, but it looks, and I bet it feels unstoppable.There must have been some dancing in the Pride parades, but just having fun, not dance as a force for good. And singing does influence the cops. Betsy Rose said she could see them relax when Occupella started singing.
I think it has to be singing--though we did hire some bagpipers to lead a peace march in San Francisco back in the Sixties and it did feel like that music was propelling us. The pipers were amused to be playing for a peace march because the bagpipe is an instrument of war. Which makes me think of St. Francis’ prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace,” but I bet he wasn’t thinking about bagpipes.
I miss singing live with Occupella more than I miss singing live with the Organic Women’s Chorus or at the In Harmony’s Way song circles, because singing is my political instrument, always has been. I’ve written leaflets and letters to the editor and put money in the collection can, but it’s singing that feels right for me. It never occurred to me to run for office, though my mother and my father and my mother’s father all did, or to make speeches, though my father coached me to make my first one when I was a toddler (I’ve already written about that).
Comment from Bonnie Lockhart posted 4-24-2023:
Well, yes, we did dance in the street at Pride many years with Sistah Boom! And when Sistah Boom--the all-women's samba band that played for decades of SF Pride & Dyke marches--went to DC for Gay & Lesbian Liberation (as we then called it) in 1987, a band of 50 strong, our dancers came with us! And yes, that felt unstoppable! And yes, that was both for fun and expanded freedom. My first and enduring love is singing. But for street action, there's noting quite like a big, grooving samba band moving together!
Friday, Apr 7, 2023: Parts of Constellations
Another prompt write
The prompt for tonight’s write was the poem “The New Speakers” by Gloria E. Anzaldüa.
I chose this line:
We don’t want to be stars, but parts of constellations
Indeed. I just watched a seven-minute film about Ansel Adams, who was also a musician, which I didn’t know, and he talked about the photographic negative being, to him, like the score, and the print, the performance. Musicians are more likely to be parts of constellations than visual artists (unless they are muralists) or poets. And so many of my friends are both musicians and writers, or both storytellers and painters, or some kind of two-fer. So like we all contain multitudes, not just Walt Whitman. And then collaborating: Both co-writing, like Gilbert and Sullivan, and being in writing groups or critique groups. Oh, the writing I’ve heard, that will never be published but that captivated everyone in the room.
But what this poet is talking about is our words becoming part of the language, like ticky-tacky, or our political parodies becoming part of the energy of marches and demonstrations, like Occupella, and that is what I want.
Thursday, Carole and I went to one of our favorite places, Point San Pablo Harbor, just north of Point Molate in Richmond, a tucked-away place with goats and chickens and yurts and houseboats and boat-boats and now . Burning-Man-sized sculptures Art hidden in plain sight, you just need to know where it is. For us in Berkeley, the Albany Bulb is handier and better known—well, maybe not, Pt. San Pablo has a restaurant (closed until May) and band concerts and the Bulb doesn’t, just art painted on or constructed from junk.
Carole is good at asking questions and she asked a guy in a Pt. San Pablo Harbor teeshirt what he and two other guys were doing—they had a machine digging a slit several feet deep into the sod. They were putting in a power line. We told him we loved the place and Carole thanked him for keeping it up, and he said it means a lot to get recognition. So what had been fun and refreshing became also warm and fuzzy.
They have a new sculpture since we were there last, a giant lacy Victrola horn. The alligator and the bee are still there, and a couple of other old ones. We got a picture of the horn, waited for the goats to get out of the road, and headed home.
Comment from Renee posted 4-8-2023:
Love this piece- I felt like I was seeing a place I've never been to. Felt like respite- a deep breath- a gift. :)
Thursday, Feb 9, 2023: Begin Again
Another prompt-write
The obvious point where I began again was 1974-75 when I left my husband, came out as a lesbian, quit my day job and became a traveling storyteller, but I’ve written about that. I don’t refer to myself as a storyteller any more, but as a singer-songwriter. I don’t think I could put my finger on a date, though. I did both for a long time. And when I quit my job at a library I didn’t stop being a librarian. On one of my tours I was in the main New York Public Library researching a woman who captained a sailing ship in an emergency back in the day, and somebody came up and asked me a library question. They knew what I was. And libraries were a homey place for me to hang out when I was on the road. Books, chairs, bathrooms. And free.
I just read an article in the New Yorker about book banning in Florida. The order is that books can’t be available to kids till they’ve been vetted by a trained librarian. It’s a little surprising that they would trust us. I mean, after all, we read books, but it turns out there is a state training workshop the librarians are now supposed to take to, uh, learn how to be censors. What is not surprising is that there is no money to pay for the extra time it will take the librarians to look at all the books. If I’d thought, I’d have known that. When the feds started requiring that kids be given standardized tests, they didn’t provide money for testing.
When I was in college, a girl said in a way she felt sorry for me, being raised an atheist, I didn’t get to experience the breathtaking feeling of freedom she had when she realized that religion was 90% crap. (I have a list on my wall titled The Immutable Principles and one of them is Sturgeon’s Revelation: 90% of everything is crap.) So no, I didn’t get to reinvent myself as an atheist or as a socialist. I tried becoming a vegan but that didn’t work. Begin again? at 87 I don’t think so. I think I am who I am--and just trying not to be so pissy about it is enough.
I was telling my book group, most of whom are neighbors, that I’m having a hard time dealing with everything while Claudia recovers from another setback to her spinal healing and she can’t, for instance, cook, and two of them volunteered to cook something for us. From Jean we now have a yummy vegan bean stew in the fridge and from Naomi, promise of Asian style pork ribs on Friday. In the email with the offer Naomi also said her granddaughter’s basketball had gone over the fence into our yard, so I went out and got it and threw it back and had the pleasure of emailing back, “The ball is in your court.”
Comment from Carole Leita posted 2-9-2023:
Oooh. Asian style pork ribs! Can you tell I haven’t had dinner yet?
Comment from Renee posted 2-10-2023:
I love this first line soooo much.
The obvious point where I began again was 1974-75 when I left my husband, came out as a lesbian, quit my day job and became a traveling storyteller, but I’ve written about that.
Comment from Mara Sapon-Shevin posted 2-20-2023:
Love reading this story of transitions.
Comment from Hoyle Osborne posted 2-10-2023:
Sturgeon's Law has been so comforting whenever I've grown dissatisfied with current music or whatever.