I
can see why my mother named her record label Cassandra, after the
beautiful woman to whom Apollo promised the gift of prophesy in return
for sexual favors. He gave her the gift of accurately foretelling the
future, she refused his advances, and he left her with the gift but
cursed her with never being believed.
I
ran across this song the other day. I had written it in 2002 in
reaction to a newspaper article about an administration report on
adapting to global warming which pointed out the supposed up side as
well as the down side to climate change. Reading the second half of the
second verse was a bit creepy, since that seems to be more or less
what’s happening to New Orleans, but I had no idea it would happen so
soon.
HOT STUFF
Global warming is good for you
You can catch dengue fever instead of the flu,
But don’t let that worry you one iota,
Just think of growing oranges in Minnesota.
Chorus: Global warming is hot stuff!
If you don’t like it, that’s tough.
Coal and oil, can’t get enough,
Global warming is hot stuff!
We’ll lose some fine coastal habitat
But the coasts always voted Democrat,
Losing New Orleans won’t be a pity,
We can build a nice amusement park and call it Jazz City.
The snow pack is getting thinner each year
But who needs water when we’ve got beer!
Take the word of this administration,
We’re leaders now in global warming adaptation.
Global warming is good for us!
We said it was just scientists making a fuss;
Now we admit it’s a real condition
But hey, you know it’s just too late to cut emissions.
© 2002 by Nancy Schimmel
Here are some folks out there actively doing something, women barefoot solar engineers, on YouTube, sent in by Kathie Flood.
Today
I’m reading my mother’s manuscript that is part autobiography, part
journal. Here’s May 3, 1973, when she was a few months younger
than I am now:
I
moved around today and successfully avoided the typewriter until
evening. I had a haircut, I shopped for a coat and for a sharpening
steel, I went to the bank and to the fix-it shop to pick up the paper
cutter, I slept, I wrote two letters. I answered the phone from
Minneapolis--do I mind appearing on TV? and from Fresno--will I do a
telephone interview for the Bee? I don’t mind and I will.
I’d
no more than got up from the bed than the street flute player, the
young woman with the grey crystal eyes, knocked at the door. I had
invited her to stop in and see me. We had tea, we talked, she played a
piece from Mozart’s Orfeo for me on the flute and I sang her three
songs.
Ruth
has neatly cleared my desk so that I can get to the writing. It is a
pleasure to see it cleared. But it is too late in the day to work on the
manuscript and tomorrow morning I have a tentative appointment with a
singer I’ve never met. I have to do the phone interview, and I have to
go to the dentist at 11:30. In the afternoon I will want to sleep and
the day is gone.
And so go my
days, naps and dentist and the occasional interview and visit and
blogging about the book not getting done--as she wrote in her journal
about her book not getting done. And when she was the age I am now she got the same response when people found out her age that I do:
4/7/74:
Charlie
and Ellen were there [at a show for the Women’s Library]. He wants to
arrange for me to go to Japan again. I was glad he saw me work with an
audience. Later he looked at my biographical sheet and whistled.
“Seventy-three! Impossible.”
Good
genes. And no, at this point I can’t figure out who Charles and Ellen
were. I so wish I had read more than just parts of the manuscript when
Malvina was alive and I could have asked her questions.
© 2008 by Nancy Schimmel
1 Comment 
Kristin Lems/*
Nancy,
that's a FANTASTIC song about global warming - please, I beg you,
record it and upload to youtube so we can get it around!!
Friday, December 18, 2009 - 11:11 PM
Friday, June 27, 2008
CASSANDRA
