Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books,
and Songbooks by clicking here, or by going to ianwhitcomb.com

LETTER FROM LOTUSLAND
March 2010

When I settle down here in our back yard Library — which is really a well-built shed — I achieve a certain degree of repose, a little peace, or perhaps just a respite from the bustle of the day. In here, surrounded by brown walls and cedar wood and shelves full of my books, including 1950s British comics and The Western Film Annual and Boys’ Cinema and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Annual, I can for a short while be free from the temptation to multi-task.

Free from the ceaseless hopping, say, from my daily journal where, in the Office, (another shed, set between the Big House and the Library), I’d been writing about my new Print On Demand book (“Letters From Lotusland”, the 502 page paperback with the smashing photos, the book that you all, of course, have a copy of), writing about the frustration of not getting an immediate, or even daily or sometimes even weekly, response to my importunate e-mail pleadings to my East Coast publisher, a one-man operation called Mungo Jerry.

I’m scribbling frantically in indecipherable gel-ink pen courtesy of Uni-ball’s Impact with the Bold Vibrant line when I decide to give Mungo a call and find out why I can’t hack into his lulu.com account and order more copies of my book. I need to have lots of copies of the book around me to feel I am immortal in the company of my paper children. Just as the boxes of CDs in the garage are also my family too. Safety in numbers, in plastic and paper and jam-packed cardboard boxes.

But Mungo Jerry is only available as a cheerful message apologizing, as always, for not being there in person and welcoming me and the world to his theatres and workshops. So, determined to pursue Mungo by other means, I invade Regina’s office in order to mouse up the letters I’ve received recently and to scroll back to when I last heard from Mungo Jerry. Yes, he was apologizing, weeks back, for being buried in mountains of snow and how he’s cut off from civilization — no service on his laptop-- and how the shoot he’s on has been held up too so that he can’t get back to Philly to direct the free verse drama or attend to some puppetry………

Once upon a time, in my ignorance, I thought he was a full-time publisher.

I write back to his last letter begging, pleading, crying in print for him to give me the password so that I can buy more of my children. Send! And off it goes with a whoosh noise provided by Apple. An Apple door creaks. Someone has written to me and I must read it. But before that I can’t resist going through Firefox so that I can see if any new videos of me have been posted on YouTube………

Some time later I’m back at my Journal. Or am I? No! Before returning I’d been misdirected to the piano in the living room because I’d glanced at the open sheet music there: “Forgotten Dreams”, a clever little jewel by Leroy Anderson. I just had to see if I could work out the cunning descending lines that make this tune more than a trifle. Only a few well-placed notes -- not clogging us with tetrachords and ambiguous diatonics…

Wait a minute! That was a bit of technical jargon that W.S Gilbert had thrown at Arthur Sullivan at their first meeting. G&S! I must return to my G&S research after writing the journal because there’s a special concert of their work at this year’s Oregon Festival Of American Music and I’m in it. What do they have to do with American Music? Well, I’m told they were Holy Grail for such heroes of the Great American Songbook as Lorenz Hart and Yip Harburg and even Johnny (“Goody Goody”) Mercer.

I left England partly to get away from rigid rumpety-tumpety stuff like “The Mikado” and “HMS Pinafore” — the sort of respectable genteel musical comedy approved of by my betters when I was growing up and longing to flee to the land of tight jeans and Elvis, of Frankie Laine cracking his whip. I shudder to think how I’ll manage to get my mouth round those pitter-patter tongue-twisters without expiring from loathing or lack of breath.

Away from the piano! Onward out the back door, up the concrete steps, onto the spongy African grass, and into the Office to finish off the journal:

“Sunday—Feb 14: Janet Klein gig at the Coffee Gallery down the street and round the corner. She always cheers me up. Tonight she wore a chocolate box dress. Looked like soft candy for sale. She hopped off stage during one of our instrumental breaks and skipped from table to table, spreading joy among the punters like a sprite. We had an SRO house. I drank Jack Daniels from a flask. Felt fully recovered. When I momentarily forgot the right chords during a hot jazz interlude Dan W, the jamming trombonist, muttered even as he blew blue notes, “C’mon man! Get with it!” Quite a technical feat. However, every accordion solo I was given was answered with heavy clapping. In fact the accordion applause became a “bit” in the show. Must be because a few months back, at another gig, I complained about how accordions never get applause due to their not being accepted as jazz instruments.

In stage patter with Janet I found myself telling how my aged mother had had such a good life what with her gin and ciggies and salted potato crisps that at the end her doctors at the nursing home encouraged her to indulge. They reasoned that she’d not got that long before Leaving The Building. And I told of how when we asked the doctors what had caused her death they replied, like a Gilbert & Sullivan chorus: “Everything!”

I was rewarded with laughs but immediately felt rotten. This was not my real sweet mother. This was a comic monster I’d created for my act, for cheap laughs.

When I arrived home I found that once again I’d left the front door wide open. For hours. Luckily there were no signs of intruders. Lucky that Regina is away baby-sitting her Goldman Sachs brother’s teenage children while he and his wife vacation up in Mammoth at their winter lodge.”

At last the journal entry is finished — well, I simply stopped writing -- and I’m in the Library at the very rear of the back garden, where used to be a wasteland. And, as I said at the top of this Letter, I’m in a state of repose among browns and cedar. Leaning to the left of my expanding office chair, peeking round the computer screen, I can see greenery -- trees and bushes and shrubs; a garden shed and a rustic seat that needs to be sat upon. Rollo stands like a noble stag eyeing errant squirrels in the maple tree; pretty soon he’ll go into his bark. Acting as backdrop to this pastoral setting is a fence draped with thick vines. Not so many years ago this wooden fence was the only barrier between us and the evil Iranian woman. But it couldn’t block out her imprecations. Now all is calm…….

 Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books,
and Songbooks by clicking here, or by going to ianwhitcomb.com