The last time we wrote was in June, and life has continued to bring changes since then. Karen’s mom passed away at the end of July. We spent the last days of her life with her, then with family after her death. We had a great tour of Montana with the Journey of Hope to abolish the death penalty, and joined thousands of others at the gates of Fort Benning, GA to close the School of the Americas. Charlie did a tour with Anne Feeney on the way down to the SOA. We celebrated the Peoples Music Network in our own Western MA area. And we have a new brochure to promote our musical history workshops.

In July we attended the 75th anniversary gathering of the Catholic Worker

We spent 10 days traveling across Montana with the Journey of Hope from Violence to healing. The Journey was sponsored and spectacularly organized by the state ACLU through a coalition of various organizations.

A measure to end capital punishment passed the GOP-controlled Montana Senate, but the House Judiciary Committee voted 10-8 against the ban. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to bring the bill back this year. We remain committed and hopeful. When New Mexico recently banned the death penalty this month, it became the second state after New Jersey to do so (other states have temporary moratoriums) since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Fourteen other states do not impose capital punishment. Is yours one of them?

Charlie traveled southward with Anne Feeney

A poignant note to this year’s protest was that its founder, Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois, was facing excommunication as the protest began.

--poster by Reid Freeman Jenkins

Father Roy served in Bolivia, was himself captured and tortured, and has selflessly fostered one of the most inspirational and diverse social movements in this country to close the SOA. He had the audacity to co-celebrate a Mass in August with a newly ordained woman priest, Janice Sevre–Duszynska. The Vatican gave him 30 days to recant his actions, and though he was crushed and “nauseated” by the threat of excommunication, his conscience prevailed. As he said, “The priesthood is God’s calling” and is open to all human beings. Janice herself spent 6 months in jail as a prisoner of conscience after being arrested at an SOA protest. We were blessed to sing at a mass led by Janice during the SOA weekend.

Next day we sang for the Ignatian Family Teach-in for Justice. We were amazed and inspired to walk into a hall at 8AM Saturday morning and find thousands of High School and College students, many of whom had traveled all night, assembled and attentive, determined to end the U.S. connection to torture and injustice. Inspiring!

As always, the SOA Watch musicians’ collective brought together a wonderful group of kindred spirits.

On our way home we stopped in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving and got to visit our beloved friend, Reggie Harris, who is recovering from liver transplant surgery.

With a new year turning and a new president-elect moving from Chicago to DC, Charlie joined other activists on the chilly streets of the Windy City at Camp Hope. Just a block away from the Obama family home.

The last weekend in January we were just eight miles from home in Greenfield, MA for the Peoples Music Network annual winter gathering. We shared the stage with many talented performers, including David Rovics, Tom Neilson and local choruses.

Charlie has been celebrating 30 years of same-time-next-year touring, most notably in the 3 cities where he maintains an unbroken string of annual appearances: New York City (at the Peoples’ Voice Café), Tucson and St Louis. Our southwest tour this year included a day to explore Arizona’s beautiful Red Rock State Park with our perennial host and long-time musical co-conspirator, Ted Warmbrand.

To make 30+ years of our recordings ever more accessible we’ve added albums previously only available on LP to our download site, including two Bright Morning Star records and Charlie’s early LP/cassettes.

In our efforts to spend more time at home, we are actively promoting here in the Northeast six workshops that combine Powerpoint images, song and dramatic readings to explore various social movements in U.S. history. These hour long programs cover civil rights, labor, nonviolence, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Sixties and offer an interactive and entertaining way to engage audiences in a U.S. history we can be proud of. We’ve enjoyed presenting them in schools, campuses, libraries, churches & union halls. Check out our brochure and let us know if you want to bring them to your area.

AND, we were honored to learn that Pete Seeger is including our version of his song, “Sacco’s Letter to his Son” on his teaching CD’s that will accompany the revised version of his musical autobiography, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, available from Sing Out! and soon on this website.

My mom’s illness has had center stage in my life for the past 2 ½ years, and now her death at the end of July occupies that space. While I was very blessed to be at her side the last 12 days of her life and the moment she took her last breath, it was hard to see her suffering. She developed a strong case of shingles, had a stroke, could no longer swallow so stopped eating and drinking for eight days, and stopped speaking but was still conscious.

I designed a memorial service for her that went well, and wrote and read a eulogy for her. True to her style, she had written something years ago to be read at her own funeral, thanking and honoring her family and friends for the gifts their presence gave her in her life. I gathered a dozen friends back home and did a mini-memorial where I also got to share some of my feelings about accompanying her and losing her. One of my friends said, “She sounds like a remarkable woman,” and while that is not a characterization anyone had ever offered about my mom, I came to see that what made her remarkable was not her “list of accomplishments,” but the fact that she always prioritized relationships and was generous with her time, advice, listening ear and caring.

That is a model I strive to follow in my own life, and I’ve had opportunities to do that recently with two friends dealing with cancer, one whose partner died suddenly from a heart attack and one who recently had twin baby girls. Conventional wisdom says it takes at least a year to begin to heal from the loss of a parent, and my fragile emotional state was testimony to that wisdom. I do feel as though I’ve turned a corner and am beginning to make space for joy in my life again. We will have the unveiling of my mom’s gravestone in mid-June, and my nephew has just announced that he is getting married in early October. I know I will miss my mom at that event.

When I began to re-enter the larger world after her death, I got to do some interesting things. I did Spanish interpreting at an international meeting on Fair Trade and at another international meeting on racial politics in the Americas since the 2001 Durban conference on racism. I offered a weekend training for community interpreters in New York City who are organizing domestic workers and immigrant workers. In March I attended a weekend workshop on interpreting for social justice at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee, to learn more about their philosophy and methods for doing this work. I’m translating a trainer’s manual to teach people with mental illness how to create their own treatment plans. And after a year’s leave of absence from touring with Charlie due to my mom’s illness, I joined him on our winter and spring tours.

Most exciting is the fact that in mid-January 2009, Charlie and I moved into our own home. Since I left home in 1974 I have been a renter and a nomad, living in dozens of places over the years. My nesting instincts were pretty high when I met Charlie, and they were put on hold when I became his traveling duo partner. Now, ten years later, the nesting instinct can no longer be denied and I seek the simple pleasures of having a garden, painting a wall lavender if I feel like it, and receiving company (that means you!) in an actual guest room. We purchased a small home on ½ acre of land.

We are among the lucky few who can benefit from this economic downturn which favored us as low income people with no stock investments or debt who have some savings to put into a lower priced home. We received so much moral support and encouragement from our friends here in Franklin County. From the first box out to the last chair in the move took exactly 5 hours, due to the many hands and generous hearts of these friends. One sweet surprise was coming home from the legal closing process to find those two sweeties Kate Stevens and John Hoffman waiting with a sumptuous picnic and a loving cup.

Now that I have a place to host meetings, I’ve started up a monthly Jewish women’s group with local women who like me, are seeking a spiritual home and a place to share study and ritual. We have met three times and it is a wonderful gathering of an eclectic group.

After 30 years of touring it feels quite luxurious to be staying home more. I’m so grateful to have the Traveling Musician’s Union pension and now (gasp!) Social Security. I‘ve learned enough about the LAST great depression to know how much I benefit now from the reforms that working people struggled and won for us back then. May we leave a similar legacy for the generation that’s coming. If the Federal Government pays back what it’s borrowed from Social Security that will remain viable (big IF). A good way to restore that endangered species known as The Pension would be to actively support the Employees Free Choice Act.

It feels doubly luxurious to have a wonderful home to stay home IN! Tom & Pat, high school sweethearts, built this house by renovating a 19th century barn when they married back in the 60’s. Tom was an outdoorsman and the home he and his father built (right down to felling trees and taking them to the local lumber mill) feels like a camp or lodge and that seems right, here in the foothills of the Berkshires. It’s built upside down, bedrooms downstairs, one open living space upstairs, with wonderful views of the hills on the east and west sides of the Deerfield River, which runs through our village.

Jamie & Jessica, happily married now, are settling into life in Brooklyn. Here’s a picture I snapped from their roof, midtown Manhattan’s off to the left.

Rumor has it they just might stay as their Cobble Hill neighborhood feels more and more like home. Jess is at the Bank Street School getting a Masters in Special Ed and working full time as a teacher in Bedford Stuyvesant. Jamie is lawyering in Manhattan. Both jobs have their challenges and rewards. Like Erica Levine (the eponymous heroine in the Bob Blue song) (I’ve always wanted to use that word) and her beau Lou, they tend to be happy more often than not. Since their 1st wedding anniversary coincides with our 10th, we seized upon that May weekend for a housewarming/anniversary party.

And Nell is finishing her Masters in Art Therapy and entering the world of work. Along the way she found time to perform in a fund raising presentation of the Vagina Monologues. Every one was great and Nell was outstanding.

Though we’re “growing up and slowing down” I can’t imagine not touring. The annual show may turn into the bi- or tri- annual show but just getting to see all of you is reason enough to keep my frequent flyer status. I have a deep sense of having a nationwide family and I feel blessed to have been able to maintain contacts with so many of you as I enter my 4th decade on the road. Our last tour (PA & OH) featured a great visit with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lou Ginocchio. We go back to college years in the ‘60s (majoring in beer and protest) and my life is sweeter for having this lifelong friendship.

He and his partner Deborah hosted us most generously at their Cincinnati home, including a spring romp through Lou’s favorite cemetery. Who could ask for more?

So if we’re not the perennials we used to be we’re still thinking of you and of ways to come visit. Got any ideas? Let us know.