12 April 2020. Tanya and Dave
Sounds like a backup duo from Muscle Shoals--or maybe the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band--but no, it's Tanya and Dave on the corner of Miramar and Capistrano--in front of Inna's house, on a blustery early spring afternoon. They've lead us in one of Tanya's tongue-in-cheek coronavirus covers--Stay Inside, to be sung along with something by the BeeGee's--except that I missed the BeeGee's, and most of everything else from '70's pop. Well, somewhere in the back of my consciousness there's a brief flash of John Travolta taking a dance pose, one arm in the air (very late Elvis) and then the mirrored disco ball in the office of the last architecture dean at Cal (that didn't last too long). Taxi Driver (1976), of course--that's indelible, for good reason, just like Mean Streets, (1973). When you remember that the Allende Coup was in 1973 (Nixon, the CIA, et al) it throws the rest into perspective--and the mess of our final withdrawal from Saigon (the people clinging to the runners of the last helicopter.) So it's a mixed bag...
But Tanya and Dave (better sound order?) approach this with their inimitable enthusiasm, and one of the other neighbors dances along--and it's certainly not a bad thing to gather together as we seem to be doing--stragglers sometimes (yesterday being so cold), but necessary stragglers. And anyway, I found that I could approximate the organ part in Lean on Me--brought to us by Tanya after Bill Withers died last week. Best way to commemorate, that's for sure--and as I played the rising chords, just like the Hammond B-3 on the record, they got it right away, and suddenly we were all in church--yes, in church, even on the third day of Passover--on a cold early-spring afternoon in Berkeley, and our voices filled out the dusk...
