Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Forgot to tell everyone this story a while back: so you know how, in some articles or books or works of writing in general, the narrator will refer to his or her friend who is at the Iowa State Fair with him or has just given some super sage advice or something?  Well, I’ve always wanted to be that friend, and this fall, my wish came true!  My friend (see what I did there?) TR wrote a piece for Tablet about attending KosherFest, which is exactly as overwhelming as it sounds, and made a reference to lil ole me!  Shucks.  Excerpt below, but you can read the whole thing here:

“My friend and I exchanged knowing glances when we walked by a booth pitching a new cholov yisroel (a stricter dairy kosher certification) nutritional supplement—both of us recovered anorexics with now hearty appetites, these densely-caloric drinks were once a hospital staple for us. “Nugen is great for seniors and people who can’t eat solid food, and who won’t eat cholov stam,” a representative explained. Since a major deterrent for very Orthodox and Hasidic families sending their daughters (or sons) to hospital in-patient programs is that the food served us not up to their kashrut standards, I suggested the company reach out to programs like The Renfrew Center in New York and Philadelphia, both of which draw large populations of Orthodox Jews, with their new product. They took notes, and just like that, I felt less gluttonous and more magnanimous.”

From the same article…

***

“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?”