Ode On Jazz Part 2

More about 2002, the Ode On Jazz, Logan Square-West Philly, etc: I've never been that much of a clothes horse. I just wear whatever. At that time and for the entire duration of the early Aughts, Mary wasn't quite so casual about her attire. In fact, Mary often went for the outrageous, where clothes were concerned. She liked to shock, startle, and alarm people with what she wore. She said it made her feel more alive: if others were alarmed by her, she felt more of a sense of social empowerment. Mary's big shock-number in the early Aughts were clothes which were obviously African in origin, including head-wraps often seen on African women. Not uncommon to see African attire, head-wraps and all, in West Philadelphia, but uncommon to see them adorning a white woman. Mary looked as though she were emulating black chanteuse Erykah Badu, in fact. I was often slightly alarmed for her, but her piercing blue eyes and imposing height (slightly less than five eight) seemed to push people back. I never saw her get pestered. Abby was more casual than Mary, and her mind was often preoccupied by whatever she was painting, and whatever her different girl-posses were up to. When I wrote the Ode On Jazz, and later performed it, I had in mind this kind of landscape, an urban one, which could be inhabited by a sense of communing with the earth nonetheless. That's something Logan Square and West Philly have in common; a sense of harmonious balance, at their best, between earthiness and the ethereal, the skyline and the grass, trees, backyards. And the voyage back and forth could be made on foot, or by bus or trolley. None of us had access to cars, and we were all the richer for it. Even as Logan Square brought out something slightly more wild about Mary than West Philly did.