I was a one-​girl band in the mid-​1960s. My par­ents some­how pro­cured an entire “band” which could be strapped to one’s chest and hung over shoul­ders. The front con­tained a wash­board with a scrub brush, a floogle horn-​type assem­blage, lots of cym­bals, , a bicy­cle horn, spoons and the rear assem­bly could be acti­vated with a lever. I don’t remem­ber what all was included, just how won­der­ful the entire ensem­ble sounded to my seven-​year-​old ears.

My daugh­ter likes to remind me (as my mother once did) that I was born to enter­tain my par­ents. Being one of those late-​in-​life babies with a sis­ter ten years my senior, my par­ents were post-​war pleas­ant folks. We all know that every child has a dif­fer­ent set of par­ents. Per­son­al­i­ties and stress change over time. This is prob­a­bly rarely more appar­ent than with my par­ents with me ver­sus with my sis­ter Ann. She born in Nor­folk in 1943 in an Army hos­pi­tal while my par­ents both served the US dur­ing WWII. Daddy worked over-​seeing the load­ing of lib­erty ships while Mom worked for Army per­son­nel, inter­view­ing women who came to Vir­ginia to work in the ship­yards. I have a cas­sette tape right here in front of me — it con­tains about an hour of Mom talk­ing about her WWII job as a civil­ian in the Army employ. Daddy wanted to vol­un­teer but rejec­tion fol­lowed his request due to asthma. He waited for the draft and entered the ser­vice within a few months of try­ing to get in on his own.

Ann — born in to the post-​Pearl Har­bor mêlée, deliv­ered by Army docs home to the states for a brief respite from war-​time duties. Me — born into an era of new promise and a world changed for­ever… a time of promise not fear.

Okay, to con­sider any era fear­less could be fod­der for crit­i­cism but in this dis­cus­sion, it’s rel­e­vant to note the dis­par­ity between 1940s War and 1950s Peace. All communist-​menace con­spir­a­cies aside, all social­ist agen­das removed, Korean con­flict and the com­ing Viet Nam débâ­cle put to the back of the queue for now. It’s a rel­a­tive dis­cus­sion — as in — com­pare 1954 hous­ing boom to our Great Depres­sion Eco­nomic Funk. By 1960s, we hid under our desks for tor­nado drills, not atomic bomb threats.

So of course my par­ents pur­chased a one-​girl-​band for me. Per­haps the assem­blage set the tone for my life-​long obses­sion with cou­pling dis­parate objects through uncon­ven­tional means. My strange affec­tion for re-​direction of phys­i­cal forms. Assem­blag­ists, it seems, acquire their skills over decades of study… lit­eral for­ma­tions cre­ated by intense mod­i­fi­ca­tion of orig­i­nal forms. Lin­ear trans­for­ma­tions derived from cir­cu­lar pat­terns cre­ate intel­lec­tual dialogs requir­ing phys­i­cal trans­po­si­tions of the viewer. Or patron. Or casual observer.

To observe art? Such action can be pas­sive, aggres­sive, oblique — it is a deter­mi­na­tion to attach some rea­son or mean­ing to what is placed before the observer. Right? It appears that every­one tries to insert some level of under­stand­ing (or mis­un­der­stand­ing) to the object. What do you mean by that? What is the artist seek­ing to con­vey? Or is the artist con­vey­ing noth­ing, a Dada bit of mis­con­strued phys­i­cal jargon?

It mat­ters not.

Mean­while, the one-​girl-​band — long dis­carded — lives on in my memory.

And I assem­ble what­ever is at hand to cre­ate my own inner music.

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