Boom Boom Baby

Guest Post

About a year ago, I wrote about my lifelong friendship/duet with Beck (A Lifelong Duet, 1/27/24). We grew up musical together, wound up in nearby locations, and shared life events with each other along the way. About 20 years ago, Beck was diagnosed with breast cancer. Like everything she does and has ever done, she met it headlong. Double mastectomy, chemo, baldness, the whole nine yards. When she recovered, what did she do? Went to nursing school. She kept playing the violin the whole time (concertmaster of the Wyoming Symphony for 29 years. Freelance gigs all the time all over the place). And a nursing job, as though this was a perfectly natural thing for a busy musician to be. Beck works in hospice care now. She wrote me this email recently, and I asked her if I could share it on More Than Meets the Ear.

My first CNA job was at a facility for developmentally disabled adults, with the kind of people who squawked and flapped and screamed and shrieked and walked awkwardly when you saw them on a group trip at the mall. I used to cross to the other side of the huge corridor when I saw them coming because I felt uncomfortable around them.

Somehow I got involved/coerced ("You know music, right?” said my supervisor) into "teaching" music to this varied and not-like-me (I thought at the time) group of people, who didn't know their names, if they had hands, if it was day or night, if it was a picture of a dog or the moon.

The rest of the staff would leave me ALONE with this group, and I would be responsible for 10-ish of them. Suppose they walked away? Had to use the bathrooom? Fell out of their chair? I borrowed xylophones, hand bells, boomwhackers, all kinds of Orff drums, rhythm sticks, and noise makers from school district colleagues in an attempt to connect on some level to this group, who were the most unusual students I'd ever had. Was I trained in any way for this? Of course not. I let music guide me.

It took me HOURS of research/planning/organizing/gathering to pull off a one-hour "class" of "music.” It was fun and interesting. WHAT COULD I DO that might connect with their unique way of processing information? What would be meaningful to them, in any way?

I played recordings of Mozart, jazz, Gregorian chant, Beatles, harp, Beethoven. Everyone listened quietly, every time. We clapped, we sang Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Kookabura, we banged on drums, with no rhythm, with glorious freedom and glee. We did 'pretend' performances. A patient would say, "Ladies and Gentleman please hold your applause until the end" because they'd heard that on TV. Singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" accompanied by maracas because why not, with squawks, yelling, random physical movement and flapping. Everyone was happy and smiling and very engaged. It mattered not that their brains worked differently than mine. In those moments, we were all the same.

The most amazing moment of this months-long-WTF-am-I-doing-with-these-people happened when a Down's Syndrome man, our age, looked up, in spite of his complete limitations of being totally nonverbal, not being oriented to anything other than being fed, unable to care for or do ANYTHING by himself on any level, amid Orff drum/boomwhacker//rhythm stick/finger cymbals/random beating/banging, said with absolute clarity, "BOOM BOOM, BABY!" smiling, full of joy, and very clearly enjoying himself. WHERE did that come from?

I LOST IT.

I'm crying as I type this, ten years later, because it was one of the greatest moments of my musical career...in spite of all the Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, being on stage with the Moody Blues, Placido Domingo, Yehudi Menuhin, Marilyn Horne, an affair with a Spanish conductor at the Met, playing the complete Messiah as a high school sophomore, playing in other countries, sometimes on the beach, whatever-whenever-wherever gigs, "BOOM BOOM, BABY" was an even greater experience, a spiritual moment, profoundly simple but powerful. Music unlocked that man. It speaks to us like no other language can. The best thing my father ever did for me in my entire life was to sign that paper in 3rd grade that said I'd be taking violin lessons from Sister Regina (did she even KNOW how to play a violin?!?!)

Eventually I asked this facility to pay me my professional "teaching" fee, instead of the $11.50 per hour that I was paid to be a CNA. Of course they declined, the "music" lessons stopped and I soon left to go to Hospice.

"BOOM BOOM, BABY" still makes me smile. While I've survived the technical ordeal of playing the Scheherazade and Swan Lake solos in concert, "BOOM BOOM BABY" was a far more important performance. It was the pinnacle of something, absolute proof that music heals, transcends, and saves us. Music is life, really, sometimes in ways that we don’t even know.