Each Day is Valentine's Day

[A quilt by Elizabeth Caldwell Talford Scott.]

Today was an amazing day. I knew that it would be, but at the same time I was not looking forward to it. Today I went to the funeral of Elizabeth Caldwell Talford Scott, the mother of Joyce J. Scott. You always hear people saying that they don't want their funeral to be sad, they want it to be a celebration. But for all those good intentions, I have never been to a funeral that truly was a celebration. Until today.

The chapel at the Joseph Brown Funeral Home practically vibrated with all the creative energy and talent that was assembled in that room, too many names to even drop, the Who's Who of the Baltimore art scene and beyond, faces I recognized from MICA, the BMA, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and The Creative Alliance. Many of these friends of Joyce had known her mother for many years, some had known her their whole life. They spoke lovingly of memories of Elizabeth, all of which of course also included Joyce. Lorraine Whittlesey, Joyce's collaborative partner in Ebony & Irony, played the organ before and during the service. Aissatou Bey-Gracia and Kay Lawal Muhammed (Joyce's other half in The Thunder Thigh Revue) gave a spoken word performance of "Ode to Mama Lizzie," a poem by Joyce for her mother. George Ciscle, Dr. Leslie King-Hammond, Oletha Devane, Ellen Burchenal, and Linda DePalma gave their remembrances of Elizabeth, as did Kweisi Mfume, just three days after he spoke at William Donald Schaeffer's funeral.

I learned a lot about Mama Lizzie today that made me wish even more so that I could have really known her. By the time I met her in 2008 she was in need of 24-hour care, and could only communicate with Joyce and a few who knew her best and took care of her. This was at the time that I had asked Joyce to take a role in "Smalltimore". Though Joyce wanted to do it, it meant less time with her mother, and having to make arrangements for her care during the many hours Joyce would be on the set. To my eternal gratitude, Joyce worked it out and was able to take the role. Not many people know this, but originally the character's name was Mrs. Wainwright. The character is a wealthy, eccentric, widowed artist, and I thought "Wainwright" sounded like a rich name, and it was also the last name of a close friend. But I wanted to do something to show Joyce how honored I was that she took the role, and something to honor her mother, for the sacrifice, so I told Joyce that I would like to change the character's name to Mrs. Talford. So that is how that came to be.

I learned today that Elizabeth Caldwell Talford Scott has had her artwork exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art; has taught workshops at The Smithsonian Museum; and had received the Women's Caucus for Honor Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Visual Arts. I learned more than I had already known about the sacrifices she had made for Joyce, learned more about the passions she instilled in Joyce, and learned about the ones that didn't take, such as cooking and gardening.

I flashed back to a recent event, Joyce speaking at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum shortly after the opening of the group show, "Material Girls," a current exhibit at the museum in which Joyce has several pieces. Before she started to talk that day, she first broke into song, which Joyce is prone to do at any given moment. "There'll be one child born..." she sang, "to carry on..." She sang the whole song. Her audience was so rapt that other than her voice you could have heard a pin drop. I wrote about that day a few posts earlier in this blog, and I mentioned that I became emotional several times during her talk, but especially during this song. Before that, I didn't know exactly what she was going to be talking about that day. When she sang it, I knew that she was about to talk about her mother. And, knowing her mother's age and health, I flashed forward to the day that was closer than we could have known at the time - the day that Joyce would have to say goodbye to her mother.

Joyce appeared to be very strong and calm today. It truly felt as if this vibration of love, respect, admiration, and joy, was helping Joyce to lift her mother's spirit to the sky. My own strength came and went, as I felt her pain, and thought of my own loss eight years ago when I was with my Dad for the last five weeks of his very short life. The service was flowing gently through the scheduled songs and speakers. About halfway through the program, I believe it was after Leslie and Oletha spoke, Joyce, unscripted, began to sing. She stayed in her seat in the front row, looking straight ahead, and sang, "My Funny Valentine," from beginning to end. No one moved a muscle. I heard someone whisper that it had been one of Elizabeth's favorite songs. One by one, people, myself included, wiped a tear, then two, then three, trying to be discreet, wishing we had Joyce's strength, wishing we could be as strong as her, for her.

"Don't change a hair for me. Not if you care for me. Stay, Funny Valentine, stay...
Each day is Valentine's Day..."

Finally, on the last two words, Joyce's voice broke.
As did my heart.

And others who refuse to admit,
That life without magnanimous love ain't worth spit.
That Mama Lizzy and her contemporaries will bust the universe and wax
Contrary,
She's the silver horizon between dusk and dawn.

~ from "Ode to Mama Lizzie"
by Joyce J. Scott

The Winds of Change

This photo is of a wind farm at the top of a mountain on Route 30 in Pennsylvania. I have traveled this road countless times, though it is only in the last few years that the wind farm appeared. Growing up in Pennsylvania, we would take Route 30 through the Laurel Highlands to come down to D.C. to visit my Grandmother. Now, starting in the opposite direction, I take this road from Baltimore to visit my Mother in Pennsylvania. Along this same road, also known as the Lincoln Highway, is a bison farm. That wasn't there when I was little either, at least not that I can remember, and I think I would remember seeing a field of big woolly bison. There is also the remnants of a magical place called Storybook Forest, now closed, that we used to go to when I was very young. You could walk through Snow White's house, and the shoe from the nursery rhyme, "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe..." At Bald Knob Summit, the highest point and most winding stretch of road on the trip, is a scenic lookout where you can see seven counties, on a clear day. Just past that used to be an amazing hotel that was built to look like a giant ship, it looked like the real thing, perched right on top of the mountain. We never went inside of it, but it was one of the markers that my brother and I always got excited about seeing on the way to Grandma's. It burned to the ground a long time ago. Not far from there, in tiny Shanksville, is a sign directing travelers to the Flight 93 Memorial, where that jet crashed on 9/11. I have stopped there a couple times, though I haven't been there since the memorial actually went up, so I don't know what it looks like. When I went there, it was just a big, grassy field, and you could kind of see where the earth had been carved by the wreckage. It reminded me of the field I saw in Lockerbie, Scotland. Two friends of mine were killed on Pan Am 103, that exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. I went to see Lockerbie for myself about 15 years later. There, too, the earth, though scarred, had healed itself.

At the top of Laurel Mountain on Route 30, about 45 minutes away from where I grew up, is the dilapidated remains of a restaurant that my Father owned when I was in high school. By then my parents were divorced, and my brother and I spent many weekends up there. I really loved that place, and would dream of when I was all grown up and would inherit the business from my Dad. The jukebox had had John Cougar Mellancamp and Toni Basil. Dad would let us play the video poker machine if no one was in the bar. It is a pretty isolated spot, and a lot of the clientele were bikers, including some Pagans. They were always nice to us, though, and I remember teaching one of them how to play the arcade game Ladybug. And the cook grew pot back in the woods behind the building.

It is funny to me now, thinking so far back, that at that time I thought that that place, and that business, was my future. I did go on to work in and manage restaurants for awhile, and so did my brother. It had never occurred to me, regardless of my love for writing and drawing, that growing up to be an artist of any sort was a viable option. It took me most of my life, and it took Baltimore, to show me that it was not only an option, but a moral imperative.

Today I spent the afternoon at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African-American Art, filming Joyce J. Scott, who is the subject of a documentary I am working on, giving a talk. (by the way, do yourself a favor and go to see the exhibit there called "Material Girls" that just opened; Joyce has 6 pieces in this exhibit, plus several pieces in the museum's permanent collection) Steve Yeager was kind enough to come with me and operate the camera. Joyce spoke for almost an hour, showing slides of her work, and of her family, and talking about how she evolved as an artist. She joked that she was an artist "in vitro", and claimed to have put her signature on her placenta when she popped out, so her parents could sell it and make some money. Everyone laughed, of course, and so did I, but I also knew she was perfectly serious. Joyce has been an artist all of her life, it is all she has ever been or wanted to be. She is probably the most gifted person I have ever met. And as she put it, when someone asked her about being an artist at the talk today, she is, "the right person for the job."

As I listened, and laughed, from time to time I found myself getting very emotional. I try to make sure that at all times, I appreciate what I have, where I am in life, and the company that I keep. And here I was, at 2:36 pm on February 19th, in a wonderful museum in my favorite city in the world, making a movie about this amazing woman who has agreed to let me spend the next year finding out everything I can about her. Have I mentioned that Joyce has two pieces of her work in the Smithsonian? Have I mentioned that my camera man, Steve Yeager, is a Sundance Award-winning director? And have I mentioned, most importantly, that they are both my friends? Sometimes I just can't believe how lucky and blessed I am, and today was one of those days.

It was one of those, "If you told me five years ago, that I would be..." moments. I have those once in awhile. But it was more than that. It hasn't even been three years since I made my first film. I didn't realize, when I was making "Smalltimore", that it would change my life forever. But it did. I learned a lot about Joyce today that I didn't know, and I realized that one year from now, I will once again have transformed. There is no way that this project is NOT going to change me, significantly. I don't know how it is going to change me, exactly, but I believe it will be for the better. Change is almost always for the better. I am glad that I am not afraid of change anymore.

My Dad's restaurant has been empty for many years now. The roof is caving in, windows are broken, and a collection of abandoned vehicles are rusting in the overgrown parking lot. It makes me a little sad when I see it. I wish it were a place where I could stop in and have a beer, introduce myself to the proprieter and reminisce a little. But, maybe it is better this way.