FORWARD>Yiddish Special Section>Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 2, 2007

Among the Jewish immigrants who arrived in America at the turn of the past century, most brought little in the way of material riches. Nonetheless, Cantor David Tillman said, “they brought with them tremendous culture.”

Sitting in the tiny Temple Judea Museum, located in suburban Philadelphia’s Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Tillman motioned to the Yiddish playbills, theater posters, sheet music and LP sleeves that were on display in the glass cases. The millions of immigrants who crowded into New York City’s Lower East Side 100 years ago “had no money, so they couldn’t go to Carnegie Hall,” Tillman continued. “And even if they could have gone, they wouldn’t have understood any of it. Yiddish theater was their way of acculturation.”

This musical and theatrical heritage is on display through March 25 in the museum’s current exhibit Molly Picon, Fridl Braur and a Mishpocha of Yiddish Music, which marks the debut of the Eugene and Marie Buxton Collection of Jewish Music and the Performing Arts.

“Music is central to the Bible,” the museum’s director and curator, Rita Rosen Poley, told the Forward. “Music is central to who we are as Jews. I don’t want [Yiddish music] to be an artifact. I want people to come in here and use it.”

So, when Tillman and his friend and colleague Cantor Jack Kessler, music director for the band Klingon Klezmer, came in to browse the collection, Poley lovingly opened one of the cases and handed them a pile of handwritten sheet music by Israeli composer Gabriel Grad. The two men pored over the yellowing pile of inked and red pencil-scrawled paper, occasionally bursting into a niggun and banging the table. “Look at this,” Tillman said. “It’s a duet, for piano and tenor, and —” he squinted at the Yiddish, “—psanteran. Piano.”

The museum occupies some 400 mauve-carpeted square feet in the synagogue’s grand, airy lobby. Its offerings began as two private collections in the 1940s and ’50s: Rabbi Meyer Lasker of nearby Temple Judea and Rabbi Bertram Korn of Keneseth Israel were avid collectors of Jewish ceremonial items and artwork. After World War II, they traveled to Europe to rescue the remaining Jewish artifacts. When Temple Judea closed in 1984, the two collections were merged and, with a $150,000 endowment, the Temple Judea Museum was founded. Its collection now includes some 1,500 objects, two of which are the second-oldest American ketubah, dating from the 1700s, and a British circumcision set from the 1800s. Poley, a spunky redheaded grandmother and veteran art administrator, is the museum’s second professional director and its sole employee.

Two years ago, Marie Buxton, a Kneseth Israel congregant, donated $10,000 to begin a special collection for the museum, focusing on music and the performing arts. Poley used the gift to make the collection’s first acquisition — on eBay. At the time, she had never heard of Gabriel Grad, a Lithuanian-born musician and composer who founded a conservatory in Tel Aviv in 1925. But when she saw a collection of his papers available on eBay for $90, she thought she’d take a chance. The items that arrived were not just the handwritten sheet music and notes, but also his passport and those of his wife and son, insurance documents and a 1927 Certificate of Naturalization from the Government of Palestine. The collection was off to a promising start, and Poley still had more than $9,900 on hand.

From there, Poley went on to acquire a similar collection of papers and handwritten notes from Yiddish composer Michl Gilbert (who wrote the Yiddish words to “I Have a Little Dreidel”), original playbills from three stage productions starring legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon (“A Majority of One,” “Milk and Honey” and “How To Be a Jewish Mother”), photographs, vinyl records, sheet music, books, broadsides, and programs and announcements for events in early Palestine (two programs announce the opening of Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater, in 1917). Many of the items were acquired on eBay for just $4 or $5. One songsheet, which features an art-nouveau-style drawing of a plump woman, is for the Yiddish song “Kolumbus, Ich Hob Tsav Dir Gor Nit,” or, “Columbus, You Have Done Me No Good.” An accompanying sign explains that the song was probably inspired by Gershon Rosenzweig’s 1894 novel, “Talmud Yankee” — “one of many satiric literary expressions of discontent with life in America… A Klug Tzu Columbus, [or] ‘A curse upon Columbus,’ was another phrase frequently used by Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants.”

About half the items in the current exhibition were purchased with Buxton’s original gift; Poley estimates that the Buxton collection now contains almost 300 items. Additional items, such as shofars, handmade Purim groggers and other decorative objects, were selected from the museum’s existing collection. And still others were donated by congregants. “I turn nothing down,” Poley said of the private donations, “because I don’t know how they’ll turn out or what they’ll be.”

One of the museum’s most enthusiastic supporters is a congregant who works as an antiques dealer (he is the reason that the museum owns the ketubah; he heard about it through the antiques grapevine, flew down to Pittsburgh to buy it, brought it home and donated it to the museum). Poley recalls one day when the dealer’s wife came in with a huge box of books. “She said, ‘Here, Rita, have this. My husband found it — he doesn’t even know where it came from’!” Inside the box, Poley discovered handwritten music by Aaron Friedmann, high music director of Berlin’s Royal Academy of Art. Friedmann served as chief cantor of Berlin’s Old Synagogue from 1882 until 1923.

Another congregant saw an invitation to the current exhibit and called the museum. “I got your invitation — you want some records?” he asked Poley. On display from his collection are the 1961 album “Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites” (an accompanying sign explains that Francis learned Yiddish when she got her start as a young performer at Grossinger’s, a Catskills resort) and an album by 1940s Yiddish radio personality Shaindele.

Chana Mlotek, music archivist of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, said a collection like the one on display at the Temple Judea Museum is very important. “Yiddish cultural life in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s is a culture of our American heritage, and [an exhibition like this] is a symbol of that culture,” she told the Forward. Physical representations of Yiddish music and theater, she said, are like “a window to our cultural treasures.”

The only problem with the museum is that it may be too small to showcase all the collection’s items. Between her knack for finding hidden treasures, and congregants’ donations of their own prized possessions, Poley said, “I could have filled a space three times the size of this place.”

Rhode Island Monthly>A Dollar and a Dream

A Dollar and a Dream

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006

Bruno Barata is pacing. A chubby but compact boy, Barata can’t seem to stand still. “If you get nervous,” says theater instructor Karen Carpenter, “just take a minute and reconnect with Willie.”

Barata, thirteen, is auditioning to be part of the incoming fall 2006 freshman class at Pawtucket’s Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For his audition, he has chosen to perform one of Willie Loman’s monologues from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “A pretty mature choice for an eighth grader,” says Carpenter.

When he’s done, Carpenter hands him a packet of paper. It’s a monologue from Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door. Barata is supposed to do a cold reading of a monologue by Jack Palmer, the caretaker at a home for developmentally disabled men. “This is what we call direct address, so talk directly to the audience and just enjoy it,” says Carpenter.

He tries to enjoy it. He really does. But he’s just so nervous. So the lines come out sounding not like Jack Palmer, but like a nervous teenager reading them off the page. Carpenter takes a different tack. “Let me ask you a question,” she says. And she makes Barata hunt through the monologue for some details, to help him get to know Jack Palmer.

“How long has he been working there?” (Eight months.)

“How many men live there?” (Seventeen.)

“How old are they?” (Adults.)

“When he says ‘escapades,’ what does he mean?” Barata looks through the script and starts to describe some of the antics of the house’s residents. The meaning of the words suddenly sinks in. He giggles. “Yes!” exclaims Carpenter. “Those are the escapades! Enjoy them!”

Aside from playing improvisation games with his cousins, watching the ABC comedy-improvisation show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and generally making people laugh, Barata has had no training that would bring him closer to his goal of being an actor and comedian. But, he says, “I get a feeling when I do it. It just feels right.” He has been meticulous about preparing his audition, calling the school several times to confirm the date and time and to field help in choosing his monologue. That enthusiasm, says Carpenter, “that’s the biggest thing.”

Equal parts Fame! and Lean on Me, the Pawtucket public school opened last fall with aspirations to be a competitive conservatory-style school that feeds into such prestigious institutions as Berklee and Julliard. Admission is by audition only, and, in addition to their academic classes, students are subject to a rigorous curriculum in their chosen artistic specialty. At the same time, the school is part of an inner-city school system whose two other high schools — Tolman and Shea — face corrective action, with consistently low test scores and dropout rates above 30 percent. The result of these competing atmospheres is that the school is very much like its students: it has talent and commitment, ambition and drive, but few material resources and little formal training.

The Walsh School was the brainchild of Pawtucket Public Schools superintendent Hans Dellith. The year was 2000. Members of the Gamm Theatre company, having outgrown their quarters in Providence, hatched the idea of turning the empty Pawtucket Armory into a center for the arts, with themselves as lead tenants. Seth Handy, then the president of the Gamm’s board, approached Dellith about collaborations between the potential new arts center and the Pawtucket School Department: perhaps the Gamm could stage plays in the schools, or the kids could come over to the Armory to work with the artists? Dellith took it up a notch. Perhaps Pawtucket needed an arts high school. “I’d go to school productions, and I’d see a tremendous amount of talent with the students,” says Dellith, who has headed the school department for nine years.” I came up with the idea that maybe what we should do is broaden our horizons and start thinking about what we could do for students in terms of training them.”

The newly established Pawtucket Armory Association negotiated with the city to buy the hulking castle on Exchange Street for $1 and a promise to perform extensive renovations and reinvent the building as the Arts Exchange. A school for the performing and visual arts was to be one of the building’s first tenants.

If Dellith conceived the Walsh School, then its midwife was an affable and energetic Pawtucket native named Donna Jeffrey. Jeffrey, fifty-five, is a classical guitarist and renaissance lute player who began teaching music in the Pawtucket public schools thirty-two years ago. Jeffrey talks about the arts like a physician talks about medicine. When asked why the arts are important, she replies with another question: “Why is breathing important?” Over the years, she followed whatever career path afforded her as much time as possible with students. Early on in her career, for instance, when the budget for her elementary music education program was slashed, “I went from seeing kids twice, three times a week to seeing them every other week,” she says. “And what teacher can teach anything once every other week?” She responded by creating after-school musical productions that kids could participate in, singing, dancing and acting in Disney stories and other favorites like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That way, she says, she could “see them not only in music class but also get them after school.” When a high school job became available, the lure of daily music classes was too strong to pass up. “Imagine what I could do if I saw them every day!” she recalls thinking. And so she left for Shea High School, where she taught for eleven years, during which time she created a steel drum ensemble and taught guitar and chorus classes.

Hans Dellith knew a dedicated arts educator when he saw one, so he tapped into Jeffrey’s enthusiasm and experience when the arts high school was in its early stages. She started attending meetings. Then, when a real school began to take shape, she cut her schedule at Shea back to half-time in order to coordinate the nuts and bolts of bringing it into the world: writing curricula, drafting budgets, creating guidelines for hiring, auditions and admissions, and working with architects and construction teams to turn the second and third floors of the armory into classrooms and studios. All along, however, she planned to usher the school into existence and then return to her steel drums. To head the new school, she says, “I wanted a person who was a principal, who had a degree in fine arts, who had experience as an administrator and in the arts. I didn’t want the job.”

But then came June 2005. The Pawtucket city council had been level-funding the school department for more than a decade, so the city had long relied on the state’s yearly increases in contributions. In an economy where costs are always increasing, level-funding is the practical equivalent of slashing funds. When the state announced that it too was level-funding the Pawtucket schools, suddenly the school committee faced $8 million in deficits. The arts school — along with any other expenditure deemed not absolutely necessary — was on the chopping block. In the end, the school eked into existence when Jeffrey, Dellith and others slashed its budget from $1.5 million to $559,000. One of the cuts was the principal’s job, to be replaced by a lower-paid school coordinator. Jeffrey recalls thinking to herself, “If they’re not going to get someone in here who has more experience and knowledge of this than me, then I will go for the job.”

The former deputy superintendent of schools, a much-beloved woman named Jackie Walsh, had died of cancer the previous fall. She had always been an advocate for the arts. Dellith and Jeffrey agreed that naming a new school after her would be a fitting tribute. And so the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts opened its doors on August 31, 2005, with Donna Jeffrey at its helm. It had admitted its first freshmen class the previous spring, and the plan was to add a class each year so that the school would have four classes by 2009.

Looking back, it seems to have been the obvious next step for Jeffrey. From every other week, to after school, to every day, she has finally settled in a school where more than three hours a day are dedicated to the arts. “Even in schools that have wonderful music and art programs, kids usually only have one — maybe if they’re lucky, two — classes a day in the arts,” she says. “These kids are living and breathing it all day long.”

And even if they don’t ultimately pursue a degree at a conservatory or a career in the arts, Jeffrey is sure that the school’s curriculum provides a solid enough foundation for students to follow their hearts, wherever they lead.

“I want to be a dancer,” says fifteen-year-old Walsh student Iesha Bemway. She pauses to consider her options. “Or singer. Or actor.”

“Yeah,” chimes in Keisha Fordham, fourteen, also a student. “Cause you always have to have a backup plan, in case things don’t work out.”

Tall, slim and muscular, Bemway has an angular jaw and a big, toothy smile. She and her friends are finishing their lunch in a noisy tall-ceilinged makeshift lunchroom before heading back to class. Zuleika Castro is a dance major at Walsh like Bemway, but she has other career plans. “I want to go to business school,” she says, noting that what she has learned at the Walsh School will help her when she gets there. “In dance, you got to follow all the rules, and trust me, there’s a lot of rules. And you got to take this stuff serious. And if I can take dance serious, I can take that into the business world.”

The Walsh School’s thirty-one students — nine boys and twenty-two girls — start up the armory’s big stone steps around 7:45 a.m., trudging sneakers and boots over the giant anchor mosaic at the top of the landing. Five are music majors, four study theater, ten dance, and twelve focus on visual art. About half receive free or reduced lunch. Those who live outside Pawtucket must pay $15,000 per year tuition; there are only two students who do so, one from Burrillville and one from Central Falls. The school occupies the second and third floors of the armory, and the renovations have lent the space the feeling of both a school and a place with history. The walls are painted in bright yellows and whites. The little bank of lockers is blue. Most classrooms have high ceilings, at least one wall of exposed brick and tall windows.

The students gather in the room on the second floor that serves as classroom, studio and cafeteria for breakfast and the pledge of allegiance. From 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m., they take the usual range of academic subjects. At 2:00 p.m., while giant yellow buses begin pulling up to the curb next door at Tolman High School to take the students home for the day, work at the Walsh School is just beginning. First the students take a crossover class; a music student, for instance, can take a visual art class, or a dancer can take theater. Then they have three hours of class in their chosen major. The three hours are broken up into blocks, which might include theory, exercises and practice.

Nancy Rosenberg, a working composer with the demeanor of a hip mom, is equally comfortable discussing the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly as the hip-hop duo Outkast. Pairing students with working artists was one of the goals of the school, and this is reflected in the teaching staff. Karen Carpenter, the theater teacher, is in the company at the Gamm. Tovah Bodner, the dance teacher, directs her own dance company called the Robin’s Egg. And Chris Kane, the visual art teacher, is a sculptor who runs the metals foundry at the Steelyard, an industrial art center in Providence.

When auditions for the school were first planned, sight-reading — performing a piece of music by looking at it, without preparation — was to be one of the requirements for the music majors. But in order to sight-read, students have to know how to read music. Many of the auditioning students sang in their church choirs or with their friends, but few had had formal training. The audition criteria were quickly adapted.

“I don’t care if they sight-read,” says music teacher Nancy Rosenberg. “I’ll teach them to sight-read. I am less interested in what training they’ve received before they arrive than in raw talent and commitment.”

It’s a good thing that the students, for the most part, are starting from scratch. It’s a good thing, too, that they have the dedication required to stick it out despite tough circumstances. Because a student who is already a musical impresario might find the resources at the Walsh School to be somewhat lacking. For instance, when the class studies music theory, Rosenberg pulls out a giant cardboard keyboard, with Velcro dots marking the notes they’re discussing. It’s a far cry from the school where she previously taught, the Boston Arts Academy, a public school much like what the Walsh School aspires to be. It has a full recording studio, every imaginable musical instrument and five music faculty. Comparing the two schools is like “apples and oranges,” says Rosenberg. The Walsh School, on the other hand, has five synthesizers, a battered upright piano and a lengthy wish list:

Drum set with cymbals: $2,000.
Grand piano for performances: $9,000.
Two baby grand pianos: $7,000 each.
Electric guitar, amplifier and case: $800.

That’s only part of the wish list, and that’s only for music. Under “general equipment,” the list even includes twenty cases of Xerox paper and twenty bottles of Wite-Out. “We’ve been living on next to nothing,” says Jeffrey. Aside from the teachers’ salaries and the lease, which the school department pays, “everything has been donated or bought by me,” she says. However, “it’s more important that we’re open than that we have everything we need.”

While Bruno Barata is downstairs pacing during his audition, a handful of other eighth graders wait upstairs for their turn. Marc Tiberius has been acting in after-school programs at Slater Middle School. He had planned to go to Shea High School, until he heard about this school. “I was really excited to find out there was a school for acting,” he says. His dad is excited, too. “I would have killed to have a school like this,” he says.

Jeffrey and Dellith had hoped that each of the admitted classes would have one hundred students, with the number of students topping out at 400 in 2009. However, the numbers have been disappointing so far. Last year, sixty-five auditioned, forty-five were accepted, and thirty-three came (two have since left). This year’s auditions have yielded roughly the same results. They blame the low numbers on the fact that the school’s fate has been so uncertain. In August of last year, just weeks before the school was scheduled to open, Jeffrey was forced to send a letter to the families of newly admitted students warning that the school might not open after all. And though it did finally happen, the construction wasn’t finished in the Armory yet, so the students had to spend the first few weeks in the old Registry Building. Dellith still can’t promise that the school will survive past its infancy, though he says he will continue to fight to keep it open. “These parents are the pioneers,” acknowledges Jeffrey. “There are a lot of families that would have liked to send their kids here, but they were afraid to take the chance. And I feel sad for them.”

The school’s small size, however, has had a positive consequence: family atmosphere. “We see this small group of students every day,” says biology teacher Julia Goulet. “We get a better idea of what their day is going like, and what might be going on in their lives that might be interfering with their schoolwork. It’s a luxury to have the classes be small and manageable.”

What’s more, that the students are committed to their art contributes to a unique atmosphere. “In many other schools,” says Spanish teacher Kayla Campbell, “kids have no interest in school at all. These kids have an interest in being here.” Goulet, who taught at Tolman High School for thirty-five years, says the biggest difference she sees is in attendance. Walsh boasts an attendance rate of 96 percent, at least 10 percent higher than attendance at other Pawtucket public schools. “They want to be here,” she says. “They are here every day.”

Hans Dellith can’t dance.

He says that he has not two, but three left feet. But he knows the power of dancing. “What distinguishes us from the animal world are things like art, philosophy, music, dance, theater,” he says. “All the things that really make us human, these things are very important.” He recalls a day that he visited Tovah Bodner’s class; his dedication to art education was redoubled by what he saw there. “I’m watching this student do a dance routine, and I’m watching the intensity of her performance,” he says. “I’ve never seen that type of intensity in a math class, in an English class, in a phys-ed class, or anywhere else.”

At a time when budgets are being slashed at public schools around the country, the arts are usually the first to go. Nancy Rosenberg herself used to teach music at Feinstein High School in Providence, until her position was cut. “I became a professional musician studying music in the public schools,” she says. “That’s almost impossible right now.” She likens teaching art in a public school to the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein a besieged Jim Carrey must chase after his memories as they are being eliminated. “I feel like I’m running around as the music programs are disappearing underneath me,” says Rosenberg. “People don’t understand what is at stake when you do that.”

Unfortunately, Rosenberg was more correct than she could have known in February. Over the summer, she was laid off from the Walsh School due to cutbacks in the city’s school department, and replaced by a music teacher with seniority in the Pawtucket public schools, as per union policy.

Every student, whether or not he possesses natural artistic talent, deserves a chance to study art, “the opportunity to be exposed to a musical way of thinking,” in Rosenberg’s words. And while the Walsh School offers art education only to those students who are talented and dedicated enough to audition, be accepted and work hard, it marks a resounding commitment to the arts by a beleaguered public school system that could have said “not now.”

It’s been worth every minute, says Donna Jeffrey, to help the students work toward their goals. “I want them to choose the field they’re happy in,” she says. “I want them to go off and light the world on fire in whatever area is their love.”

MS.>National>XX-Rated Rockers

XX-Rated Rockers
Women Play It Loud at Ladies' Rock Camp

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Summer 2006

“Drums are supposed to be loud!” It’s the first day of Ladies Rock Camp, and the three of us in the beginning drum class are tapping timidly at our snare drums. Our instructor, Shawna, is trying to dissuade us from this un-rock-’n’-roll approach. “Go ahead and hit them!” she tells us. “Hard!”

Ladies Rock Camp (LRC) is the grown-up version of, and a fundraiser for, the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls (www.girlsrockcamp.org), a 5-year-old Portland-based nonprofit that seeks to enhance girls’ self-esteem through music. The girls attend for a full week each summer, but we ladies—38 women ranging in age from 24 to 61—had only a weekend in May to live out our rock-star fantasies.

After two hours of instrument instruction on Friday, it was time for band formation. Around the room hung signs naming musical genres: Indie Rock. Punk. Hip-Hop/Soul. We gravitated toward our genre of choice, then coalesced into bands. That is, everyone else did. As the lonely volunteer under the “Country” sign, I hoped fellow campers would know I was thinking of indie country-rocker Neko Case, not chart-topper Faith Hill. Finally, along came one kindred spirit, an aspiring bassist and fellow journalist, who suggested adding the prefix “alt-” to the sign. Then others found us: a pharmacist (guitar), database engineer (lead vocals) and software development engineer (guitar and drums). We called ourselves Dry County, and together wrote two songs with as many country images as we could muster: pickup trucks, whiskey, porches, mamas, dogs and railroad tracks.

“The story of women in rock ’n’ roll is a story of struggle,” singer-songwriter and Portland State University professor Sarah Dougher told us at a Saturday workshop. Witness, she said, Big Mama Thornton’s saucy, swinging 1953 version of Hound Dog,” then compare it to the rhythmically simpler, decidedly more vanilla rendition that made Elvis a household name three years later. “To say Elvis ‘stole’ Big Mama Thornton’s song is not correct,” said Dougher. To say Big Mama Thornton was the victim of racism and sexism in the music industry is correct.”

During the rest of the weekend, we practiced until our voices cracked and our arms ached. (“This blister,” said Becca, our bass player, holding her pointer finger aloft, “is a badge of honor!”) No matter that most of us had never picked up our instruments before Friday: On Sunday afternoon, Dry County and nine other camper bands performed original songs before a packed crowd at the Portland club Nocturnal. Between ticket and merchandise sales, camp tuition and camper donations, the weekend raised some $10,000 for the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls.

At the showcase, I met family members of my fellow campers. “Your wife rocks,” I told several. “Your mom rocks,” I told others. Whether we returned home as guitar aficionados or simply women who had learned to make some noise, that night we were rock stars, every one.

ADVOCATE>Music>Hurricane Doria

Hurricane Doria
Singer-songwriter Doria Roberts—lesbian force of nature—rocks this summer with performance, a new CD, and her own pride festival, Queerstock

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July 18, 2006

As the name of her record label indicates, folk rocker Doria Roberts brings thunder and lightning wherever she goes. In April, Hurricane Doria Records released the 34-year-old singer songwriter’s sixth album, Woman Dangerous. And June marked the 11th anniversary of Queerstock, the loose-knit festival that historically has piggybacked on pride events nationwide. Put together each year like a potluck with various musicians in different cities, Queerstock offers an edgier alternative to what some call the overly commercial lineups at many pride festivals.

Queerstock originated in 1995 at a gay hangout area on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River known as “Judy Garland Park,” where Roberts and a bunch of guitarists plugged in and made some noise. Moving to Atlanta in 1996, Roberts has single-handedly organized Queerstock since.

Her new record marks a return for Roberts: Starting in 2003 she cut her touring by at least half and took a break from making records. Her many years of activism were starting to wear her down, and the constant identity-shuffling she was subject to as a gay female African-American musician was causing her to lose perspective.

“I’d play at the women’s festival [where] it was more important for me to be a woman. I’d play a jazz festival where the audience was predominantly black…Or I would play gay pride, and then I’d be gay,” says Roberts. “I just couldn’t be Doria.” The lead track on Woman Dangerous, “Simple Life,” is an anthem for Roberts’s return, a paean to being yourself and not making apologies. “I’ve played the victim too long / and I have paid some dues,” sings Roberts in her clear-throated and fierce tenor, “But I have packed all my bags / And I am looking for something new.” For a musician who’s appeared in as many protest rallies as concert halls, Roberts’s new record is decidedly personal. The songs offer intimate details and domestic scenes, such as Roberts drinking coffee at 5 a.m. with her girlfriend. Roberts says that the album is, finally, “where I get to be me.”

Meanwhile, Queerstock, which has a tour tentatively scheduled for this fall, is “the longest relationship I’ve had,” Roberts jokes, attributing the festival’s longevity, in part, to its mission. As its motto goes, “start enjoying what you’ve been fighting for.”

As for Roberts, look for her on stage at this summer’s Gay Games. Listen to her lovely guitar playing, and get a sense, most of all, of the new resolve with which she returns to the scene. “Let’s see what Doria Roberts looking the world in the eye as a whole person looks like,” she says. “Pretty much, I’m not to be messed with, in any way.”

ADVOCATE>Music>Girls' Rock Rules!

Girls' Rock Rules!
Young or old, expert or beginner, any woman with music in her heart is welcome to make big noise at Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 9, 2006

“Are you ready to rock?” asks a small voice. A girl no older than 10 and no bigger than a bass guitar steps up to the microphone, looks nervously down at her notes, and proceeds to screech her lungs out. Welcome to Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to “eradicate all the limiting myths about music and gender that make girls afraid to speak up, sing out, and make noise,” according to its founders. Three years ago, the organization launched a new program that’s both a fundraiser for the camp and an opportunity for women to rock out, too. Ladies Rock Camp gives women of all ages and all experience levels the opportunity to take lessons in guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals, or drums, participate in workshops such as “Rock ‘n’ Roll in Everyday Life,” form bands, and perform together. This year’s camp will be held May 5-7 at camp headquarters in northeast Portland. Participants in past years have ranged in age from a 19-year-old who graduated from the Girls’ camp to a 61-year-old whose kids signed her up “because they think she rocks,” according to organizing committee member Alexa Weinstein. “Even if you play music, and even if you play music with women, this is special,” says Weinstein, who plays with the Portland-based band Wind Up Birds and was herself a camper last year. Even someone who has never picked up an instrument before should expect to perform at the Sunday afternoon showcase. “The good thing about rock and roll,” says Weinstein, “is if something is raw and sloppy, that’s cool.”

The organizing committee and the campers are a mix of queer and straight women, according to program coordinator STS, a self-described “big flaming dyke” who played drums as part of the homocore duo The Haggard. “The queer women of Portland, they are a part of a politically activist community,” says STS, “and the expression of a lot of our political beliefs is making music the medium for self-esteem and learning about who you are and your identity and valuing yourself.”

“If there’s a woman out there who’s like, ‘that sounds like fun, but I couldn’t do that, that’s for cooler people,’” Weinstein has a message for you. “It is for you. Anyone who dreams of it, who thinks it sounds wonderful. She belongs at camp.”