VADA THE YOUNG GIRL

vada

photo by her mother

I feel less a part of this world, week by week. It is the reverse of watching baby Vada grow into the world toward her fourth birthday, a week at a time, seeing the family on Sundays every week since before Vada was born. Every time I see her, she is new. A month ago, I saw the absence of baby and the appearance of little girl. Her mother keeps her in beautiful dresses, shirts, girl pants, shoes. In one way it seems like indulgence, which it is not, rather that she has such a beautiful face, living eyes, the wavy blond hair of childhood, a child so beautiful she needs pretty clothes to complement her face and personality. She is so accustomed, at almost four, to wearing pretty and colorful clothes, they have already become her personal style. Vada will be a woman few men will know how to know. When she finds one, he will be just like daddy, and daddy will go straight up through the roof. Hope daddy packs a parachute. In high school she will be among the best looking and best dressed girls in her class, a jock magnet. And, by the time she's in her teens, she will have at least as many deer kills as the hunters among the guys. She will be hunting with a bow by then. She will be a dancer, she will be a martial artist, and primarily she will be a singer. Mom, dad and I have talked at length about the necessity of a young girl being able to take care of herself. Rape culture is in full bloom in the colleges and military now, as well as out here in the  world. Rape culture will be in the high schools when Vada goes there, like it is in the colleges today and the last several years, and will go on for several more years. We want our babydoll to go into high school with a reputation that any guy wanting to dominate Vada Smith would only dare at serious risk to himself. Her daddy knows what guys are like. He's a good teacher. She will be winning archery tournaments by the time she goes into high school. She's likely to play on the girls' baseball team better than the guys, her daddy her coach playing catch.

vada and daddy

photo by her mother

Vada has her daddy's drive and her mama's drive too. They are different drives.  Her daddy's drive is to do everything he does well. Anything he takes up he learns it well. Last year he shot a running coyote in the head and called the shot. The friend with him said, "You'll never do it." He can robinhood an arrow at will. Doesn't do it anymore. Arrows are expensive, anyway the kind he uses are. Doing carpentry, he pays close attention to detail. House painting, the same. He can paint a straight line on a corner where two colors meet that looks better than taping it would. He likes to drive a powerful pickup with a rumble in the exhaust pipes and a Confederate flag in the middle of the front bumper. It means he loves the South and whatever else you'd suppose it to mean. He likes the rebel attitude of it. It's a sharp stick in the eye to them that don't like it. It says, I am I -- no apologies. He gets his meditation time on a boat fishing in a lake or the river. He throws back. Doesn't like to eat fish. He's straight-up honest in money dealings. It fires him up if someone doubts his integrity. His integrity he worked out for himself, not a supposed-to or religion thing. It's his own. In himself, it's his identity. It has meaning for him. He understands karma, that what you give out comes back. He has seen enough examples in his life of people too self-centered to value integrity, blaming others, unable to see self accountable for one's own fate. He is an excellent teacher. He can explain something with such clarity I can see what he's talking about. I like to hear him talk about hunting. It's something I cannot do. I don't want to kill anything. I stop when a squirrel darts back and forth across the road in front of me. Squirrels don't have long lifespans, which may explain why they never seem to get it about cars. I don't want to run over a squirrel. I don't even want to kill snakes. I understand hunters are the predators the deer need to keep the herds healthy. I like to hear hunting stories, but can't pull the trigger.

vada and elsa

photo by her mother

Vada's daddy's drive is introverted, while her mother's drive is extroverted. Crystal likes to have a business and go around to different businesses drumming up business. She enjoys working with people, individually and in groups, gives herself wide-open who-she-is in the exchange, is self-taught in everything she does, seeking and finding opportunities to learn what she needs to do, whatever it is she wants to do. She wanted to be a wedding and portrait photographer, got her learning on the job, apprenticed while she was in high school, set up a business and hit the ground running. Characteristic of her portraits is living eyes. She has a good eye and a clever visual imagination. She pushes herself keeping two businesses going, a child, a husband, and a house to keep spic-n-span clean and neat. She's an example of the saying, a woman's work is never done. I admire her ability to do so much and still have a life. She doesn't leave her life when she works. She works for herself and makes two businesses work well for her. She is a mother fully engaged with her daughter, her friend. She explains things to Vada, and Vada understands her. Vada does not need to be threatened or punished when she has an understanding of the rules of growing up human on earth. The furniture in the house, Crystal has bought for very little and restored in the basement workshop where she and Justin make things she sells. Her mind is popping with new ideas. I see Crystal's drive in Vada, as well as Justin's. I see their unique qualities in Vada woven together. I see the unique Vada, who is herself. Seeing her through her process of individuation, I am in awe of Vada, who she, herself, is, a three-year-old with understanding beyond her age, an automatically loving spirit.

vada conehead

photo by her mother

 
I had a horoscope done on Vada the day she was born. Reading it, I saw she is half her mommy and half her daddy. Almost four, she is the child I saw in the horoscope. Seeing her grow up, I see her grow into her horoscope. Sun in Gemini. Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars in Taurus. Ascendant in Scorpio. She's out-going and private too. Being a Gemini, the twins, duality, she can handle the apparent clash of seeming opposites. All her inner planets in Taurus. She's already stubborn as a donkey. She comes by it honest, too. Her mommy and daddy have it in equal measure. There is also the creative aspect of Taurus her mommy and daddy have in equal measure. Vada is at home. Venus, the planet of love, is the ruling planet of Taurus. I look at this picture of Vada above, conehead Vada, and see her horoscope. She loves to make others laugh. Knowing Vada, I see somebody who will endure. If anything comes along to knock her down, she'll get up, pull herself together and keep on. She has tremendous depth, a fast, retentive mind, a heart full of love and a charming personality. A few minutes ago I was looking at Vada's eyes in this picture of Vada conehead, and thought, Who are you? Who were you? Answer: Who I was is who I am, Vada with another name. If she wants to be a singer, possibly on regional bluegrass stages, she won't need a last name. Like Sade she'll be Vada. She loves her name. She has charisma in her presence. She performs in dances, song, acting. A few weeks ago when we were talking and she was in her Elsa dress, she said, "Are you glad to see me?" A flash in my mind's eye saw Vada with her band onstage in Seattle between songs saying, "I LOVE YOU SEATTLE!" Audience Roars. "ARE YOU GLAD TO SEE ME?" Audience Roars.

vada and her mother

photo by her daddy

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DORI FREEMAN FRIDAY NITE

I love this photograph of Dori

 

 

 

Dori Freeman performed with Scott Freeman, her dad, and Willard Gayheart, her grandpa, at the Fiddle and Plow Show at the Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn. It was music to the full satisfaction of the entire audience, twenty or more, mostly people who are there every week. It's interesting how much of a group identity we have amongst ourselves by now. We were slow getting acquainted with each other, though after a few years we did become acquainted and by now we talk freely with each other. This evening before the show, I went around and spoke to several, and during intermission I spent the whole time talking with some of the people I've become acquainted with there. It seems like we're all so well acquainted by now we know each other almost as friends, because we're the ones who love Willard and Scott's music and the music of the people they bring in to play there. We who have been going regularly since the beginning, about 3 years ago, have seen Dori develop her performance on stage singing for an audience. I don't know how she sees it from her own perspective, but I have seen her rise up from a self-conscious girl who wasn't sure she really wanted to sing in front of people. She began to sing with a little better self-assurance with each performance. She would go to the front, sing a couple of songs and leave.

 

Every time she gave a performance, she was a little bit better than the time before. Better in that she was more comfortable singing before several people. There came a time when she passed from a self-conscious singer to one who sings outward, projects her singing to the listeners with assurance she is connecting and she's not being judged. By tonight I was delighted to see/hear Dori opening up even further as a result of increasing stage appearances. She sang at last year's Wayne Henderson Festival as a featured guest. She gave a terrific performance. It was a big crowd. I was thinking it must be intimidating for her, such a big crowd, and she handled it beautifully. I noticed in the big audience of people who had never heard her or heard of her a hush run through the crowd and all eyes and ears were on Dori from just about one minute after she started. Scott with mandolin, Edwin Lacy banjo, Steve Lewis guitar, Mike Gayheart bass, and Dori with guitar gave the appearance of a bluegrass band when they came onto the stage and positioned themselves with their mics. Dori started singing her kinda Peggy Lee style, a moment of broken expectation ran through the audience, like they weren't expecting this. As quickly as the audience heard what she was doing, she had them. The entire audience focused attention on her the same as at Woodlawn with an audience of fifteen or twenty.

 

I've seen every time I have witnessed one of her performances that the people in the audience give her their literally undivided attention. She has a charisma that holds your attention just by her appearance on the stage. It's not just her looks, not just her hair, not just her guitar; her entire presence seems to hold an audience's attention. Every audience I've been in that heard Dori perform has loved her. After the Henderson fest, I felt it would be to her benefit to have an idea that she has a charisma she's not able to see from inside herself. I could see she had no idea of it. It seemed to me like she needed to know in her beginning, something to boost her self-confidence, and it's not something everybody has. It's a gift is the only way it can be named. I felt like it would serve her to know it, so I ok'd myself to tell her. It's one of those things artists of any sort cannot see in themselves; it takes somebody outside themselves to point to it, feedback. I didn't want to give her the bighead, and knew Dori well enough that I did not believe it would give her the bighead. She's given several stage performances at different venues, even the Carter Fold, and I don't see her with a swollen cranium. I meant for her to have the observation of her charisma to be a kind of tool she can use consciously. A year later, my sense is that she has a self-confidence in performance now, possibly somewhat assisted by her own recognition of her natural stage charisma, along with increasing stage experience finding that audiences really like what she is doing. Every show is that many more people in her growing fan base.

 

Dori is also a good short story writer, a very good short story writer. She is now writing songs as her musical talent is taking hold and pulling her in that direction. She gives a vocal performance with the same feeling of her writing. Her writing is clear and visual without any unnecessary words. I've read three of her stories, each one in awe. I was in awe that a young woman, then 19, was writing with such a mature style. She writes like somebody with a good many years writing experience. She came out of high school writing like she'd been doing it for a very long time. Her writing, too, has a kind of charisma in that I read it with fascination. She writes a song as good as songwriting gets. Her singing is trim and spare like her writing. I was noting at this performance how she brings Sara Carter to mind in her outwardly expressionless singing, like Ralph Stanley too, traditional mountain style. The point is, it's the delivery of the song from the heart through the voice. It doesn't need facial and other physical gyrations to make it's point. Everything is in the words. Like Sara Carter and Ralph Stanley, Dori Freeman doesn't take the cheap way of making a spectacle. Her vocalizing the words is all the song needs. She tells the story in song.

 

I don't like to project future expectations on her. I like appreciating her as I hear her. She brings to mind my year and a half old baby friend, Vada, who I see once a week. Every time I see her she's a little bit different, a little more confident of herself in a baby's body in a world where everything is new. I've seen Dori grow very much like I've watched baby Vada grow. In both cases it is largely a coming into awareness of a new life. Dori is growing into her life as a musical vocalist a little bit more self-confident every time I experience one of her performances. I won't live long enough to watch Vada grow up into a woman, and I won't live long enough to see Dori the Emmy Lou Harris of her generation. In Vada I see the woman in the baby, I see the woman she will be, and in Dori I see the singer who commands big audiences in her beginnings. Therein I find satisfaction. I have full confidence that thirty years from now Vada will be a remarkable woman. Like her mother in that way. And Dori thirty years from now will be a very widely respected singer, songwriter, guitar player and possibly short story writer too. Maybe even novels by then. The one thing I know is that both women in their maturity will be remarkable human beings in their own ways. That makes me happy. Gives me satisfaction.   

 

 

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