new town school

I had just graduated from college, living with Claude in Lake Zurich, searching for a job in Chicago. In the meantime, I started working for Manpower temp agency - putting in time at the local "KaVo for Dental Excellence." All day I sat in a windowless room in the back of a KaVo Clave repair warehouse, entering information from small cards, over and over. I was surrounded by metalheads who went to my high school and other KaVo lifers.

After about three months, Kit found a really strange ad in the Chicago Reader. It said something about "Music school searching for person knowledgeable in child development. No music experience necessary." Well. Ok.

It was March and I took a train downtown from the suburbs. The Old Town School of Folk Music. The school was located in a beautiful old building in Lincoln Park, nestled between fancy boutiques and grimy coffee shops. The lobby smelled like old wood and the floors creaked. I interviewed with a woman in a large room shared by three people - huge wooden desks fit into it like puzzle pieces next to the built in glass cabinets, guitars hanging from hooks on the wall. I got the job, but not an office of my own. My file cabinet was a box on the floor next to me and I used an ancient laptop set up on a table behind me.

Musicians were all around me...playing guitar in the front office, carrying fiddles under their arms as they looked for an available room, dragging drums into the corner space. Four people shared the room in the front of the school, two people shared a closet in the middle, another two in the tiny room next to me. Nailing down schedules of folk musicians was not easy...they are notoriously non-committal. But the space, the people, the feeling was amazing. I took guitar and fiddle...my teachers were flaky and gray and rumpled and without a plan. Sometimes they brought a paper with tab for us to play, sometimes they merely had an idea in their head. I have hours of cassettes with fiddle tunes and a dusty, broken fiddle in my closet.

Which brings me to the present. There is a music school called the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I can walk there from my apartment in ten minutes. The guy at the front desk has a beard five inches past his chin and a huge, furry dog named Pirate that wanders around and leans against people. I signed up for a banjo class, walked there on the first night with a thermos full of hot tea, set up a rickety music stand and squeezed myself into a space next to a bunch of other Brooklynites. The teacher slid into his spot, hair like a sea of wild, native grass, and started plucking out a banjo tune. In an instant, I felt a familiar, old wood feeling. It's my new old town school.