Itinerantdaughter's Blog

From the same article…

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“So you’re going to make an article for Harper’s about this band we had that never got sufficiently recorded?”

Ted Casher has a point. We’re sitting in a Stow, Massachusetts Dunkin’ Donuts, which, due to overzealous air conditioning, feels more like a meat locker than a coffee shop. Casher has been telling me about his ongoing life as a professional musician: hustling to gigs up and down the Eastern seaboard, teaching saxophone lessons, holding thankless titles like “composer-in-residence,” eking out a living. He was on the road when his son was born, he says. Seventy-six years old, and he’s still doing it. “I’m too nervous to steal,” he says, rolling his cartoonishly big eyes, his lips curling up into a most charming smile.

But while Casher’s life is interesting in its own right, it’s really one small slice of it I’m after: the three years he played flute in the aforementioned insufficiently recorded band, a “chamber rock” outfit headed by flagrant, bawdy, formal, iconoclastic housewife-turned-poet-enchantress Anne Sexton, dead forty years ago this month…

“There’s always a line, it comes into my head whenever I step onto a plane, even today,” Casher says, a touch wistful. “Wait Mister. Which way is home?”

This entry was posted on October 29, 2014 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Things I Love That I Go to Inappropriate Lengths to Track Down. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.