I haven’t had time to write anything new to share, but I found this scrap of a story while going through some old papers. I wrote it ages ago, back when I was falling off barstools in pubs a lot. Enjoy — lk
The Ginger Woman
c. Lisa Kaiser 2023
“A pint of plain is your only man.”—Flann O’Brien
Oh the games I’ve played on Dublin afternoons as the innocent abroad stumbling into the black stuff, the life force, the ritual of the pint. Maurice showed me how that first night. First it’s admired while it partitions into pure black and white sectors: then stiffen your back for the long cold drink, raise it to your mouth, and plunge your upper lip into the cushion of foam. Come up for air and let the froth stick on your lip, shake and suck a bit, then scrape it off with your hand or teeth. Contemplate life and hauntings and burdens while the rings mark time down the glass.
It’s always the same story. Donal’s intellect, the lorry driver’s isolation, Leo’s smugness, Jack’s accusations. The castle’s cook and the bachelors from Cork. Tom and Ben polluted again. Even your man Maguire, the sap.
Then one day Jimmy broke my heart.
In Hell’s Kitchen now, I leave a lipstick crescent on my drink’s crown and remember. They start off sweet and turn bitter, best left a little undrunk and undone.
It’s hard to overstate just how much Chrissie Hynde has influenced me. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had I not studied, scrutinized, analyzed, and ultimately loved The Pretenders from an early age—too early, actually, but I can’t take that back now.
Let me set the scene: Nowheresville, Wisconsin. Roughly 1980, but it felt very 1970s. I was a good kid, Type A with constant anxiety about doing the right thing, excelling in school, staying out of trouble. I was obsessed with ballet, most especially Mikhail Baryshnikov, plus reading, music, and getting straight As.
That would blow up spectacularly quite soon. (See Reviving Ophelia for clues.)
If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that I was raised on 70s music, from lite pop on AM radio to the sexual politics of Fleetwood Mac to the sophistication of Carly Simon, which I discovered in my older brothers’ and sisters’ record collections. On my own I listened to kid-friendly fare, such as John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, Andy Gibb, a little disco-era Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer thrown in too. The Grease soundtrack loomed large in my life.
Enter New Wave and punk. I thumbed through my sister’s collection of first albums from a lot of fantastic artists: Elvis Costello, The Police, Blondie, The Clash. And I am here to tell you that a lot of this transfixed me as I truly struggled to comprehend what the hell was going on. If I was too young to process “Dreams,” then “Roxanne” truly blew my mind.
And then my brother brought home the first Pretenders album. Seriously? It’s 2023 and I am still discovering new sounds and ideas buried within. So imagine little me, the good kid, trying to make sense of it.
Let’s start with the album cover. It’s a classic. Many have attempted it, but none have matched its spare challenge to the world. Chrissie. Chrissie! I thought that you had to look like Olivia Newton-John or Debby Boone to succeed—a bland, hormoneless Barbie of a pop star. Even Debbie Harry died her hair blonde (at least some of it) to both assimilate into and mock conventional ideas of beauty.
Chrissie Hynde did not give a shit. She was punk—but also had a shag haircut, which was decidedly uncool unless you were Chrissie. She wore leather, she snarled, she bore a hole into your brain with her feline eyes. She wanted your attention, but she was not going to make the first move. You were going to have to fight her first.
And oh my god she was American. Midwestern. You cannot get less cool than Ohio. OK, Wisconsin, true, but Ohio is a close second.
So you can understand why I was transfixed. Representation matters. This was a woman who didn’t look like a pop star and didn’t give a crap about following a fad. She was simply being herself.
On to the music. I still listen to this album often—like, at least once a week—and I still find new things in it. It baffled me then and it baffles me still. It’s a sui generis album, totally. Like, what is it? It doesn’t fit into any genre, although it was marketed as New Wave or punk, simply because it was released in 1979 and there was no other label for it. It was New Wave because it was English and had melodies. It was punk, but not the kind of punk that The Clash or Sex Pistols were pumping out. The Pretenders actually crafted songs with hooks and melodies and layers. (So many layers!) But, yeah, “Precious” is punk, “Tattooed Love Boys” is punk, “The Phone Call” and “The Wait” are… I’m not sure what. “Lovers of Today” and “Mystery Achievement” are rock. “Kid” is… “Kid” is Chrissie’s response to “Stop Your Sobbing,” I guess.
And “Brass in Pocket” is in a category of its own with its finger-popping swagger, inscrutable lyrics, clear demands, and lingering wistfulness. Chrissie wanted to be seen, but she wasn’t relying on her looks. She was daring you to look a little deeper, past the haircut and snarl and cat eyes.
Well, all of this rattled around in my brain then, and rattles around in my brain even still. Chrissie Hynde showed me that it was okay not to be a girly girl, you could make controversial choices and still survive, you could be one of the guys but not one of the guys (“No, I’ll never be like a man in a man’s world”). It was a hard but useful lesson for me to learn when I was a pre-teen. I found the way forward and kept chasing it. I’m still chasing it. Thank you, Chrissie.
I’m stunned but I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to hear the news of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I was just a casual observer of her personal travails, but after the loss of her precious son it seemed clear that she would have a tough time grieving him. I don’t know the cause of her death; I can only hope that she knew how beloved and special she was before she passed, and I hope her passing was painless, like falling asleep in the arms of a lover. Or should I say in the arms of a loving mother, since she explored motherhood so searingly in her music—the tenderness of being a mother, even to someone else’s child, but also the ugly parts of motherhood too.
For those who were too young to be there when Sinead came into our consciousness, she was like no one else. Now, of course, her look is iconic and no one bats an eye at a young woman who refuses to play the gender game. Of course she played with her looks over the years, but way back when, Sinead was utterly original, the clashing and merging of the buzz cut and elfin ears, squared shoulders and pixie dream girl eyes and lashes, and breathy lilt punctured by a howl.
I was a fan back then, of course, and then faded away. I think her music dredged up too many rough emotions I didn’t want to deal with. Sinead would have dealt with it, would have spat out a curse if necessary. She was brave like that, even when it didn’t serve her well. When she ripped up the picture of the pope I was aghast; later, I understood, and admired her nerve.
I came back to Sinead during the pandemic. I was picky about my musical choices because my brain was overloaded. I ended up listening to brilliant singers who soothed and awakened me. I went back and rediscovered Kate Bush, Bjork, and Sinead O’Connor, and heard them, really heard them as an adult, and allowed them to challenge me, these misunderstood mavericks. These women reminded me why music matters, why art matters.
One of Sinead’s songs seared right through me: “Thank You for Hearing Me.” I cannot listen to it without shivering and dissolving into sobs. I don’t want to know what inspired it but my god she really puts everything on the line, with a great beat. I listened to it endlessly during the pandemic, one of those songs that you have to listen to a second or third time before you move on, a song that’s at the end of a playlist because nothing can follow it.
After thanking a partner for loving her, she ends her chant with “Thank you for breaking my heart, thank you for tearing me apart. Now I’m a strong, strong heart. Thank you for breaking my heart.” I can’t even type those words without shivering now.
I made my then-partner listen to it after our cat died last summer, when we were preparing to take the kitty’s lifeless body away for cremation. “Please, one more song,” I sobbed, knowing how idiotic my request was but not caring. “He knows it. We listened to it every day.” Thankfully, my guy indulged me, and I cried and cried into an already wet tissue as Sinead’s voice rose from a whisper to full strength, explaining all of the beauty and pain of loving someone and what it feels like when that same love is rejected—and then transforms you. It’s a gift if you have the right perspective.
Who else but Sinead could create that?
And now Sinead is breaking our hearts. Her life was a gift to us. I hope she knew that. I really do.
You know how you’re at a party, and some loudmouth is making a scene, grabbing everyone’s attention, and probably isn’t even that interesting? There’s the rest of the folks, now turned into the audience, putting up with them. And then there’s someone in the corner, observing, who’s got great stories to tell, if you’ll only pull up a chair and chat and listen.
That’s how I think of the dearly departed Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac.
Don’t get me wrong—I love me some Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. But Christine McVie surely had more interesting tales to tell than them, even if she would never truly become the center of attention.
Think about it. A classically trained pianist turned blues piano player and singer in the 1960s, when nice girls (including the Dickensian named Christine Perfect!) didn’t mix with such a rough and indelicate crowd. She’s in a band—Chicken Shack. She meets a guy in another band, a huge one—John McVie in Fleetwood Mac, then led by Peter Green, and at the top of their game. She marries John, ditches Chicken Shack, and gives a Peter Green-less Fleetwood Mac a fresh injection of creativity. She held her own—and then some. You have got to respect that.
Yes, Fleetwood Mac went on to become even more successful when the two Californians joined. And, yes, I tend to skip over Christine’s songs when I play their albums. And, yes again, I would pull my chair over to Christine’s corner at any party and be thoroughly charmed, amused, and entertained—and forget about the peacocks vying for the spotlight. I truly respect Christine’s rule breaking and dignity. Rest in peace, rest in peace.
You can check out anytime you like… but you can never leave…
Sunday school was scheduled for Monday evenings when I was a kid, possibly to give moms a break on laundry day. For whatever reason, I went to CCD—which stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (thanks, Google!)—on Monday nights during the school year and for a few weeks every summer.
Not much sunk in, of course.
Except for one lifelong lesson. If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it taboo. Not only socially taboo, but bad for your mental and physical health, soul, and reputation. Friends, you know what I’m talking about: That taboo was rock ‘n roll.
During the most profound CCD lesson of my life—I’m not overstating this—an earnest teenager with an acoustic guitar came in to warn us of the grave danger posed by The Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Now, I was just a kid, but I knew this radio-friendly hit wasn’t the work of the devil. Yes, Joe Walsh played like a demon, and looked like he was possessed by one, too. Yes, the whole thing was creepy, but it was creepy in a good way. “Hotel California” wasn’t even raunchy and creepy, like Jimmy Page at times, or campy and creepy, like KISS or Alice Cooper. “Hotel California” was sleek and aspirational, sexy and beguiling. Maybe that was the danger it posed.
Back to the CCD classroom. The earnest teenager was too terrified to strum a few chords of the devil-infused “Hotel California” on his acoustic six-string. He didn’t need to, because most of us knew the song by heart, and those who didn’t were hopeless. The teen warned us to shun the song when we heard it. Just listening to it could invite the devil into our lives. Not just the devil, but sex and drugs, too.
Mind you, he was talking to a room of eight-year-olds!
So of course I went home and pulled the album from my brother’s record collection. My palms didn’t singe on contact with the cardboard and vinyl, nor did froth appear on my lips. My head stayed firmly screwed onto my neck. I didn’t know how to make the turntable spin backwards, but even if I did I doubted that Don Henley would have said anything more sinister than “Buy this album.” Frankly, “The Planet of the Apes” was far more terrifying, and you could find those images plastered on lunchboxes and T-shirts.
Suddenly, a song that seemed pretty and slick on the radio among other pretty and slick radio hits turned into something much more powerful and subversive now that it was taboo and sinful. And I liked it.
Who doesn’t love Rumours? It’s impossible to resist. The artsy-fartsy cover with Mick Fleetwood’s dangling balls and Stevie Nicks’ feathered hair and showy cape. And the freewheelin’ California vibe of the rest of the band, just chilling out, some grass and white wine and whatever else you have just out of the camera’s range.
I picked up on the coolness and realness of this as a kid. It was just a much-cooler version of what I was seeing on TV. The drama and sexual politics of Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham was a hippie version of daytime soap operas that I watched every afternoon with my mom. I couldn’t figure out why, for example, Mary Anderson and Chris Kositchek on Days of Our Lives couldn’t be together when they were so clearly meant to be together (class differences, then he hit her with his car when he got Amanda pregnant, but I digress).
Stevie and Lindsey were similarly star-crossed but far more hip or with-it, and they had more thrilling explanations for why they couldn’t be together (“packing up, shaking up’s all you want to do” vs. “playin’”). Even better, they replayed their drama every time you dropped the needle on “Second Hand News,” which led into “Dreams,” and you know the rest. They got stuck in that mess for years—even Tusk couldn’t get them out of it—and they’re still stuck in it, decades later. And who can resist that?
In my mind, Rumours bisected the 70s. Before, women were singers singing someone else’s songs, and therefore weren’t taken seriously. After Rumours, women were part of the damn band. They were rich and glamorous, and they played around as much as the men, maybe more. Yes, Stevie and Lindsey and John and Christine (RIP) were couples (then separated) but the Fleetwood Mac women had more successful solo careers and took the lead on more of the band’s singles than their partners. You can dismiss Stevie Nicks for her shawls and lace, New Age witchiness, braying-goat voice, and some of her more tragic hairstyles, but she’s the draw, still. No one needed to explain that to me as a kid. Rumours has aged well—it really has! Give it a listen again and just try to resist.
Most folks can point to a teacher who inspired them as they grew from child to adult, a mentor who saw something special in them that set them apart from the crowd. Sometimes they have books dedicated to them in suitably purple prose, or you hear these shout-outs during awards ceremonies, when the winner gets really teary and sappy and their trembling hand flutters to their throat as they thank some elderly drama teacher who gave them their start in a juvenile version of Our Town.
I can’t say that any teacher inspired me or had a positive impact on my development as a writer.
That said, I did have teachers, but the lessons I learned weren’t taught in the classroom.
I had my siblings’ record collections.
I can say definitively that Carly Simon was my very greatest English teacher. When I stumbled across her “Best of” album, from 1975, I was captivated. I’d never seen anyone like her or heard anyone with that voice—frankly, I’d never even heard the name “Carly” before. The whole package was intriguing, and of course her marriage to James Taylor just completed the picture (and confirms my theory that female singers and musicians back then were typically partnered up with another musician).
And then there were Carly Simon’s lyrics. Of course, as part of the Simon family, of the Simon & Schuster publishing house, Carly’s lyrics were not going to be of the moon-June-bloom variety. Nope, they dealt with adult matters, explored complex feelings, and used vocabulary that sent me straight to the dictionary. Yes, I was that child nerd who read the liner notes and then looked up the definitions of the words Carly was giving life to.
Take, for example, probably her best-known song, “You’re So Vain.” Hum along with me as we stumble over these mature words: “yacht,” which of course she rhymed to “apricot,” and “gavotte,” all in the opening lines. Add to my vocabulary homework the terms “naïve,” “Saratoga,” “Lear jet,” “Nova Scotia,” and “total eclipse of the sun.” Whew! My mind reeled at the story she was telling.
Then comes a whopper—“vain.” I wasn’t sure if it was a put down, a bit of praise, or a sin. (Remember—I grew up Polish Catholic, and vanity was a sin.) Like, Carly was hot for this guy in the song, but she was criticizing him the whole time, and then Mick Jagger joined in and it sounded like they were having a good laugh about it all, so what the heck was my childish brain supposed to do with all of this swagger?
I thought about it… and kept listening… and dreamed up my own stories over clouds in my coffee.
I often feel sorry for kids these days. I grew up in the 70s, when we weren’t marinating in mass media. TV wasn’t on 24 hours a day; reruns were a disappointment. You actually went outside and played, and you learned to entertain yourself. My friends and I invented characters, intricate plotlines, and sets and costumes. A lot of kids had imaginary friends. We knew how to create something out of nothing, no problem. We were storytellers, or “content creators” in today’s terminology.
Since we had a lot of time to fill, our minds were allowed to wander. My favorite daydream time was during my family’s weekly trips to my grandma’s house, 20 to 30 minutes away, depending on which route we took. There certainly was a lot of fighting and fussing in the station wagon. But there was a lot of peace, too. We usually listened to AM radio, soft rock that was unthreatening, soothing, and sappy. Cringey.
I listened and I heard. The stories told in these songs were more enlightening than any Grimm’s fairytale. (I could never figure out what lesson I was supposed to take away from those things.)
But 70s soft rock spoke to me.
She ran calling Wildfire.
Don’t it make my brown eyes blue.
Sara, smile.
You fill up my senses like a night in the forest.
I listened and I learned. I imagined the singers and their muses. I developed plot points connecting the origins of the song to how they played out, and beyond. I puzzled over some very adult themes, far more adult than my elementary school brain could comprehend. I get it now.
And sometimes I cringe, but doesn’t John Denver sort of hit you right in the solar plexus sometimes? Don’t you want to walk right into one of his stories, clad in flannel with your shoulders warm from the sunshine, and hang out for a while? I sure do. Still.
Hi, I’m Lisa Kaiser. You know—Lisa Kaiser the Writer. Thanks for coming to my blog! I’m going to use this space to explore issues like writing, procrastinating about writing, and feeling better after having written something. The age-old worries that every scribbler, chiseler, and scribe has felt when confronting a blank page or stone tablet. Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to write a happy ending for all.
Folks often ask my why and how I became a writer. I can’t say I was always driven to do so. I loved stories, but so does every kid. I wanted to be a poet, though, and was able to publish two poems (age 7) in the local newspaper. And I wrote a journal of our family vacation in Florida on a memo pad, so I guess a slight talent for observing and reporting was already bubbling up to the surface. But I can’t say that I was encouraged to keep writing—and certainly not to become a professional writer. I was told that “writing is the most egotistical act one can undertake.” And as a nice Catholic girl, I knew that pursuing anything smacking of ego was going to land me in the confessional for a long, long time.
So that was that.
Fast forward to a recession and a lack of opportunities, and a love of taking photos that needed captions, and the realization that if other people could do it, so could I. Egotistical, sure. But at this point I no longer feared darkening the door of a confessional.
I promise that my future blog posts will not be so egotistical. Thanks for reading!
