Literary Digs in South Beach at The Betsy

I just spent two wonderful days at the Betsy Hotel in South Beach. The Betsy sits on Ocean Drive across from Lummus Park in the Art Deco district. Recently renovated from the ground up, the Betsy is a historic property listed in the Florida’s State Registry of Historic Places. The pure white colonial facade of the Betsy shimmers among the crowd of art deco designs along Ocean Drive. Awnings and sidewalk umbrellas shade the street-side dining of celebrity chef Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Steak, where locals and guests dine on Angus beef and other culinary confections.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't gush about a hotel in this blog, I'd save it for my travel blog. But the Betsy is more than a hotel. It's a community in the making.

My room wasn't quite ready when I checked-in early at the Betsy. While I waited, account manager Livingston Alexander took me around the hotel and shared a bit about the philosophy of the hotel. The Betsy hopes to be more than just another place on the strip with rooms, beds and showers. Drawing from the legacy of historic hospitality, the Betsy aims to be a true public house, where locals mingle with guests for conversation, celebration, and cultural exchange.

This philosophy shows in the art that lines the interior walls. Currently on exhibit are photographs by renowned photographers Bobby Sager, Richard Bluestein, and a collection of prints from the Rockarchive. Large and luminous, the photos reflect the commitment the Betsy has with arts and literature. The Betsy welcomes non-guests to stroll through the hotel’s public areas to view the photographs.

Livingston walked me to my room on the second floor and showed me around. Most hotels of this class come with a mini-bar stocked with beverages and priced for profit. But how many hotels stock the bookshelves in the guest rooms with first-edition bestsellers? I went ga-ga when I saw this. He hinted at a writer in residence program under development.

Tingling with the thrill of a writer in residence program at this beautiful place, the next day I met with Deborah Briggs, whose title of VP Marketing and Philanthropy says it all. The EdD at the end of her signature reveals even more about her and alludes to the amazing legacy taking root in South Beach. Deborah is the daughter of the late Hyam Plutzik, a poet nominated for the Pulitzer shortly before his untimely death in 1962. She is a diva of ideas and is as passionate about education as she is about the arts and sees the Betsy as a place where ideas prosper with practice, life embraces art, and hospitality extends beyond the check-out date.

Deborah and I dined on Lincoln Avenue, at Da Leo Trattoria, the oldest Italian Restaurant in South Beach, where we talked about writing, art, music, our families, and our dogs. In between these topics, Deborah shared more about the philanthropic plans for the Betsy, which include the creation of a writer’s room at the Betsy and a writer in residence program to help writers birth literary projects. To commemorate Veteran's Day in November, the Betsy is bringing the Lennon Bus to South Beach for a school and community-wide tribute and educational outreach.

I promised to keep in touch with Deborah and herald news of the Betsy’s innovative ideas and philanthropic endeavors. The writer in residence program may not be fully operational as yet, but that didn’t keep me from writing while residing at the Betsy.

Clar de Lune, Susan Boyle and My Mother

My novel, THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER, yes, the one I'm still revising, draws much from my childhood. My father really was a sword swallower and my mother was a closet chanteuse who played piano and sang with a voice that rivaled the divas of her day. In fact, when I hear Susan Boyle, I think of my mother. She had that kind of voice, but zero confidence.

The photo at right is my mother playing and singing with my younger sister, Angie, who inherited Mom's voice and musical abilities. Sadly, Angie passed away from melanoma in 1990 at the age of 29. My mother has been gone since 2003.

Some of my fondest memories of my mother are when she played piano and sang. My Mother's Day tribute this year is a short excerpt from THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER, all of which is true to the point of memoir, rather than fiction.

Enjoy.

We returned from school that day to the sound of Mama pounding out “Clar de
Lune” on the piano. Mama’s piano playing was a barometer to her moods. When she
played and sang sad love songs, she was irritable. When she played upbeat show
tunes, we pretended we were the Lennon Sisters and joined in for fun rounds of
musical togetherness. Sometimes she played hymns, especially for Uncle Teddy,
who insisted she sing “How Great Thou Art” every time he saw her. But when she
played from her big, brown classical music book, she channeled the tension of
her life into the music, because when she closed the piano lid and stepped away,
her face was always relaxed and her voice as soft as a kitten.

After dinner that night, Aunt Cissy’s boyfriend, Ernest, pointed to the piano in the parlor adjacent to the living room. “Anyone play piano?”

My little sister jumped up, ran to the piano and began plunking out the right hand side of “Heart and Soul.” She turned and asked me to play the two-handed left side. I was not about to play this kiddy song in front of Ernest, so I declined, saying I couldn’t sit on the piano bench with a broken leg.

Aunt Cissy stuck her head into the room and said, “Ask Edie. She plays and sings just like Rosemary Clooney.”

Mama rolled her eyes, but I could tell she liked the remark. She had a repertoire of songs she would sing and play in the evenings when Daddy was gone out to wherever it was that he liked more than home.

“Really?” said Ernest, looking to Mama with more than a little interest. “Oh, please play something.”

“Play ‘Moon River,’” said Aunt Cissy. “That’s one of my favorites.”

Mama groaned and then opened up the piano bench and dug through a bunch of sheet music. With an “ah ha,” she pulled out a warn folio and spread it across the piano.

I loved it when Mama played and sang. When she put her hands to the piano keys her face changed. The harsh lines around her eyes softened and her shoulders relaxed enough to let her arms flow up and down the keyboard.

She could imitate the sound of just about any singer I’d ever heard. Sometimes Daddy would hang around after supper and ask her to sing for him. Her music soothed whatever it was that drove him away.

“Play Unforgettable,’” he’d say, standing behind her, close enough to touch, but never touching.

Other times Daddy would recline in his chair and smoke, blowing smoke rings inside smoke rings while we ran around trying to catch them. Mama would play through her repertoire of pop songs while Daddy let us crawl over him. Those were memories I cherished. That was the Daddy I remembered, the Mama I wanted.

Seeing Mama unwind at the piano now lit a flicker of something I couldn’t wrap my heart and mind across.

From THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER, copyright 2009 by Carolyn Burns Bass

In honor of National Poetry Month: A Poem

I was silenced too long by the sound of my own
heartbeat.
Joy in living and grief in the passing of love.
I always knew I would write stories,
but I dwelt
in the glow of a thirty-year literary pregnancy.
Labor came on without warning.
The stories I stored through a thirty year gestation
now speak through the silence, that heartbeat
of fear, of failure, of success.
I wish sometimes for the old stillness,
but then I know, labor
once started must finish.

--started 9/22/06, finished (for now) 4/11/09

Everyone Has a Story to Tell

Several years ago I wrote and self-published a guidebook to help ordinary people write their lifestories. I used this guidebook, WRITE FROM THE HEART, in the classes I taught in memoir writing through our city adult education program. For the last month I've used my morning writing time to revise that guidebook and am publishing it once again.

WRITE FROM THE HEART is not a book on how to write a bestselling memoir, it’s not intended for people who want to be the next Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris. It’s for people like my mother, comfortable with words and writing, but unsure of where to begin, how to organize, and how far to go. My mother loved telling family stories and when she died, those stories went with her. This book is for people like her.

I have another plan for this book. For several years I’ve wanted to help seniors connect through the global village, which means putting them behind web-connected computers. My master plan begins here. I’m working on a plan to teach computer skills to seniors and then move them into writing their lifestories.

I’ll be talking a bit more about WRITE FROM THE HEART and my master plan to connect seniors to the world wide web next Monday on Black Authors Network (BAN) blogtalk radio, hosted by Ella Curry.

Your next thought if you know me is, but Carolyn is not black. True. I have no African heritage, but I have connections to the African-American community. Even if I didn’t, the message of WRITE FROM THE HEART is colorblind. There is no racial twist, no gender or sexuality preference, and no religious slant. It's all about storytelling and the self-discovery that happens when a person sits down to compose one's thoughts in writing.

If you’d like to stop by and listen in, here’s when and where to go:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Black-Author-Network
Show time: promptly at 7pm-9pm EST

On childhood faith: Remembering Ash Wednesday

It’s Fat Tuesday. A day of worldwide gluttony and pursuit of pleasure before Ash Wednesday and the season of lent. Growing up in a very diverse neighborhood in SoCal, many of my friends at school were of Mexican heritage, which also meant Catholic. They went to catechism. They came to school every year on Ash Wednesday with a smudge on their forehead, a secret symbol for an exclusive club. Until my mother went through her revival of religion when I was in high school, my family worshipped the TV and observed nothing but commercialism at Christmas and Easter.

In those days we were simply protestant. Shortly after my parents split up, my mother dragged us to a church within walking distance of our apartment in Pomona. A small, A-shaped sanctuary housed the Gospel Tabernacle. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a Pentecostal church of roof-raising proportions. Prior to attending the Gospel Tabernacle, I’d only been to church once. I was about five and all I remember was a man standing in front talking, talking, talking, my mother trying to listen, my two sisters and I fidgeting on the hard wooden pews. My Daddy picked us up afterward and I asked him why he didn’t come with us. He said, “Oh, I don’t believe in that Mickey Mouse stuff.”

That church certainly wasn’t Disneyland, not that I’d ever been, even though we could see the Disneyland fireworks every summer night from the front yard of our house in Santa Ana. Still, I wondered what Mickey Mouse had to do with church. So when the music and the singing began at the Gospel Tabernacle, the voices would cry out across the room like animated voices from a Saturday afternoon cartoon. Rounds of “hal=le-luuuuuuuu-jahs” lifted over the singing, while “Praise you, Jeeeee-sus” filled the space in between songs. Gospel Tabernacle wasn’t a placid Mickey Mouse church like the one in Santa Ana, it was a wild ride through the jungles of joy where Tarzan was expected to show at any time.

Yes. Tarzan. I really didn’t know what Tarzan had to do with church, but surely as my name was Carolyn, I heard it loud and clear over the top of the praise fest, “The king is coming! Tar-zaaaaaan is coming!” I looked around, expecting to see a wild man in a leopard loincloth swing before the faces of the faithful. When Tarzan never appeared, I chalked it up to another cartoon fantasy, as if the lady who called out for Tarzan preferred a wild human god to a talking mouse.

Years later, at a roof-rocking church in Laguna Beach, I heard about the swinging king coming again. It wasn’t Tarzan. It was Hosanna: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

So anyway. We stopped going to the Gospel Tabernacle after only a few weeks and didn’t go to church again for years afterwards. I listened to my Catholic friends talk about catechism as if it were a secret club and I wished for an invitation that never came. They bragged about the fancy white dresses they wore for their first communion and primped up the fanciness when they made their confirmation. On Fat Tuesday they feasted on ham sandwiches and Hostess chocolate cupcakes, because they knew there’d be no meat for 40 days and they were giving up chocolate for lent. They would go to mass on Wednesday morning before school to receive the secret mark of the sacred.

When I was nine, I asked my mom if we could go to mass in the morning before school to get ashed. Her eyes shot forth in horror like I’d just asked if I could go to school naked.

“We are not Catholic,” she said. “That’s all hocus pocus stuff.”

I took my faith into my own hands that year, showing up in Mrs. Vargas’s fourth grade class with a great big smudge across my forehead. Several of my friends remarked that they didn’t know I was Catholic and they didn’t see me at mass that morning. I told them I went to a different parish with my dad—a boldfaced lie. In truth, I had my own private mass on the way to school. I reached into the barbeque grill beside our front door for a fingertip of ash and smeared it on my forehead.

I spent the day feeling like an insider, one of the Smudged for Jesus crowd. Knowing I couldn’t give up chocolate, I gave up TV for lent and expected to observe it. As the day wore on, I became oblivious to the smudge on my forehead. Upon returning home, my mom looked at me with wary eyes and asked what was on my face.

“Oh this?” I said, running my finger across the smudge on my forehead. “It’s my ashes.”

My mom's face went hard. “I told you we are not Catholic. Where did you get that?”

“Not in church. It’s from the barbeque. I put it on myself.”

My mom threw her pointing finger toward the bathroom. “Get in there and wash your face this minute.”

I slumped off to the bathroom and stared at myself, just as I had in the bathroom mirror at school. I licked my finger and wiped the smudge around until it faded into my skin. It was no longer visible, but I knew it was still there. My ash Wednesday was a rebellious act of faith and it was mine alone.

Okay then, the 25 random things

Back in early January, the "25 Random Things About Me" was "16 Random Things." Like a game of virtual telephone tag, the list grew from 16 to 25. I've been tagged a few more times since the meme morphed to 25, so rather than rehash more random things, I will add 9 more to my previous list of 16.

Nine new random things:

1. I am an expert secret keeper. For some reason people confide things in me; things I would rather not know, but often it's just because they need to talk about it. Athough I am not always the best listener--I frequently interrupt with questions and comments--I never let it past my lips again.

2. In stressful settings, I tend to blurt out my opinions with emphatic pitch that is often misconstrued as harsh. If I've done this to you, it's not about you. It's about me and a fault I'm working to overcome.

3. We have a pet cemetary in the wayback of our property. Graves include one bunny, three dogs, three cats, a rooster, a hen, and a lizard. I love animals and would have a pet rescue if I could afford it.

4. In third grade I swiped some matches from our babysitter and took off with my best friend Stewart Crump to see if it fires were really *that* easy to start. We holed up in the babysitter's garage and flicked match after match, but couldn't get the place to burn. I got called home and dang, wouldn't you know that while I was home, Stewart got the garage to burn.

5. More about fire. When I was young we were so poor we used to drive up to the baseline of the mountains to watch the annual forest fires in the nearby mountains. Cheap entertainment.

6. More cheap entertainment. Back in the days when we were poor, gas was cheap. When there was nothing else to do we would hop in the car and go for a ride. Oh yeah. Loved it when we parked in a motel parking lot outside Disneyland to watch the fireworks.

7. I am fiercely protective of my mornings. I get up early to write for the first three hours. This is typically my fiction writing time and my family knows to give me a wide berth. I love them for it. After writing time is over, I'll all about my work in the travel and motivation business.

8. My father died in 1989, my mother died in 2003, my younger sister died in 1990. I miss each one of them more than ever. Time changes grief, but it never goes away.

9. I love people. As a journalist and travel consultant, I meet amazing people all over the world. I am tagging a zillion people in this note from other countries. We are a global village.

The original list of 16 Random Things

1. I was born in East LA and have lived within a 50 mile radius of my birthplace for all but three years of my life, when I lived in Iwakuni, Japan during 1987-1990.

2. I ate my first oyster from a half-shell only a month ago, at a restaurant in Ventura, California called The Watermark.

3. My first grade teacher tied me to my chair because I wiggled, squirmed, and "visited with my neighbor" too much. I think I had A.D.D. before it was an official disorder. Despite this awkward incident, she was my favorite teacher for many years.

4. I hated math growing up because of the repetition. I mean, I got it the first time (1+1=2, 2+2=4), so why did we have to do pages and pages of silly math problems? I eventually turned off my brain when the teach said to pull out the math books.

5. I wanted to marry a Beatle when I was a little girl--Paul, the cute one, of course. I still get tingly when I see pictures of him with his peg-legged pants and that funny shaped guitar he used to play. Now that I'm older, I get tingly when I listen to John's lyrics.

6. I fell in love with Shakespeare because my English teacher, Mr. Mann, taught the bard with literary romance and passion. I can hear him introduce our first play, "MacBeth," saying how he envied us that we would be hearing Shakespeare for the first time.

7. I wanted to be a stewardess back in the day when it was still a politically correct term. Back in that day, however, there were height requirements. I was too short.

8. Also back in the day, I was editor of my HS yearbook. My travel careers advisor read a poem I'd written and told me, "Why do you want to be a stewardess? You should be a writer." Wish I could find him and say thank you.

9. Pertinent to numbers 7 and 8, I did become a writer and now travel the world writing about beautiful places, friendly faces, and lasting traces.

10. The pinnacle of my life was the birth of my first child. Then the birth of my second. My children are now old enough to teach me things.

11. I've loved every era of my kids' lives, from breastfeeding to packing them up and dropping them off at university.

12. My daughty is scary smart, headed for a PhD in English Lit, and my son has a photographic memory and is looking to be a Naval officer.

13. Both of my kids friended me on Facebook of their own choice. Many of their friends have as well. This pleases me.

14. I wrote my first novel when I was 43. It's still not published and I hit the mid-century mark last year with a second yet-unpublished novel behind me.

15. My husby helps with housework, thinks I'm a great cook, keeps my car washed, and generally indulges my whims. He looks really good in a flight suit, too. I think I'll keep him.

16. Did I say I love animals? In addition to my two doglets, Tank (a Jack Russell) and Buck (a beagador), I have a pet chicken named Rosie who roams my backyard and pecks on the backdoor windows, plus three more hens in a coop in the wayback of our property.

Here's to a Fine 2009

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Even as a young girl I remember thinking that New Year’s resolutions were silly, that if there was something you wanted or needed to do, why wait for the new year to make it happen.

So this year I will continue doing what I’ve been doing pretty much all of my life: Getting up in the morning and going to bed at night.

Boring, huh?

It’s the in between things that define the quality of a person’s life. He’s a glimpse at what I do in between the rising and setting of my days.

I wake early without an alarm clock—thanks to all of the years I had to get up at 6 to get my kids ready for the school bus by 7. My husby works nights and sleeps until about 10 am, my daughty is away at university and my son exercises his post-high-school-afternoon-college habit to sleep until noon. This gives me blissful silence every morning to court the muse.

Make coffee—I used to prep it to automatically brew so it was ready when I got up, but I found the new coffeemakers hold too much moisture in the system and it gives the coffee a musky flavor. Fresh brewed is best.

Yoga, or not—I do yoga to the rhythm of the coffee brewing. I usually have two dogs vying for my attention while I’m reaching and stretching.

Lie on the sofa with laptop and dogs—I’ve written both of my novels in jammies, laying on my sofa with dogs curled at my feet and laptop where it belongs: in my lap. Just like now.

Morning pages—My friend MJ Chapman gave me a copy of THE ARTIST’S WAY last year for Christmas and one of the practices is called “Morning Pages.” I left behind hardbound journals a long time ago, so my morning writing is in a Word doc, formatted into a table with date and comment fields. I don’t journal my feelings/emotions and such, but list things I have to accomplish that day. This helps me clear the clutter from my mind so that I can move on to my next morning activity.

Personal writing—This is my favorite time of day. Personal writing is whatever I’m working on that doesn’t yet have a paycheck or deadline attached. If I’m writing an article for the newspaper or a magazine, that’s not personal writing and I do it during my working hours. My blog and fiction fall into this writing cycle.

Socialize—I absolutely love working from home, but it can be very lonely for a chatterbox like me. Facebook and my online writer’s groups are like watering holes that offer camaraderie and comedy. After I’ve finished my personal writing, I open Facebook and email and the work day begins.

Get dressed—Sometime after I’ve yakked at my virtual watering holes and am on my third cup of coffee, I meander back to the bedroom where BassMan has finally awaken. He’s often grumbly in the morning, so I slink around him without my usual prattle. My career attire begins with jeans and a sweater in the winter and a skort and t-shirt in the spring, summer and fall.

Commute to the desktop—I love my work. My commute is from my bedroom to my office. I have one main client that keeps me busy with interesting projects, professional education opportunities, events to coordinate, correspondence with uber-professional people, and opportunities to visit beautiful places. I keep my virtual watering holes open most of the day when I’m working, unless I’m utterly slammed with a deadline.

Travel—Last year I stayed in 29 hotels for a total of 64 nights, 11 of those hotels were in Mexico. My favorite? Hacienda Puerta Campeche, a blissfully beautiful boutique hotel in the colonial city of Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico. If I’m not traveling or writing about travel, I am planning my next trip. Next Monday I’m off to Palm Springs to review the recently reopened and restored legend, The Riviera Hotel and Spa.

Eat, pray, love and read—All things in moderation. Favorite food continues to be pizza in various mutations of the traditional stuff. I pray for peace, for safety to my friends and loved ones, for understanding, and I am not afraid to pray for patience. My husby, kids and dogs are the center of my love life, yet I love my virtual friends as much as my in-the-skin friends. Read? I love books as much as I love food. My favorite book this year wasn’t Ann Patchett’s RUN (as much as I had hoped), but a quiet book SALVATION by Lucia Nevai, published by Tin House Books, a terrific indie press.

After all the other stuff-I take my dogs Tank and Buck to the off-leash park where they frisk and frolic with their buddies when they’re not chasing balls or Frisbees. Then I cook dinner, read, maybe watch some TV, and I'm in bed by 10.

Reading all of this makes me tired. Maybe I’ll add a nap to the routine.

So anyway. Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Do you keep them? What are the highlights of your days?