My dear childhood friend Susan recently sent me letters that I had sent her years ago, written in my mid-teens and twenties, a box full of them. The correspondence details experiences while away on high school vacations, my first explorations of and eventual move to San Francisco, first dates and intimate encounters, falling in love, my obsessions and aspirations. I’ve read only a few and I don’t recognize myself at all, or actually remember much of what I wrote about. I don’t even have any cells left in my body from that time–who was this person? I’m slowly cracking open these narrative chestnuts and unraveling the mystery of this strangely unrecognizable person who was me–or, who is me?
Much of the memories of my childhood are not memories at all. When I say that I remember something from my childhood, I’m actually saying that I remember the picture of it, from my dad’s slide shows. His slides begin in 1951 with my parents’ honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and their first few years in Germany when dad was stationed there as part of the occupying forces after WWII. The documentation continues through the births of my siblings, their childhoods, my childhood, up though my graduation from high school in 1984 and beyond. I and my brother Mark picking blackberries. Me snuggled on the couch with Sue. Our dog Zachary. My actual memories are a bit hazy, and are more associated with sensation: the feel of my dad’s mustache, going into convulsions with a 103 degree fever, the silent dark warmth before a tornado, kissing Kim on the trampoline…
On my first visit to Europe in 1988, I didn’t take any pictures. I wanted nothing clouding or mitigating my experience, nothing between me and my rendezvous with history, seeing Titians, da Vincis, Caravaggios with my own eyes, walking the streets that Atget walked, strolling along a canal that Rembrandt tossed pistachio shells into. I wanted those experiences to be in my head, only in my head. And I suppose that they are–somewhere in there–just not very accessible anymore. Now I take pictures of every pie I bake, every work of art I see, everyone I love, everywhere I go. My memories are now timestamped and embedded with GPS information. I couldn’t tell you if something happened 5 years ago or 20 without a picture of it.
Yet here are my own words, written to my best friend and confidante with no restraint, handwritten with no editing, nothing between brain and pen. I don’t remember seeing Psycho for the first time. Oh wait, I do. On TV, in 6th grade. And there was a commercial break in the middle of the shower scene, could you imagine? Anyway, I don’t remember what it was like to be the sum of only a few years of experience, with so much ahead of me, encountering so much that was new. I shared all of it with Susan. Reading these letters is probably going to be a lot like seeing Psycho the second time, years later, in the theater, Hitchcock’s vision suddenly and shockingly complete.
Me & Davide, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, June 2003
My friend Davide was found dead yesterday, the cause as of yet unknown. He lived in New York, and I don’t know any of his friends there, so details have trickled down to me through a meandering stream of distantly connected acquaintances and lovers. I met Davide in Paris in 2003. He was in his late-20s at the time, very much into skateboarder culture and the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai. He had the physical posture and world-weariness of someone significantly older, his head bobbing up and down as he spoke, shoulders slumped forward. We bonded instantly over the films of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s “Kids.”
He was born in Modena, Italy, “where balsamic vinegar comes from,” he told me, unironically, his own sweetly acerbic manner gradually revealed over the course of our friendship. I adored Davide. He didn’t know his father. His mother, with whom he had a very close relationship, committed suicide a few years ago. His depressing family history, the depressing emo pop culture he immersed himself in, his depressing demeanor, were all components of a very stylish and sophisticated character who would have starred alongside Monica Vitti in an early 60s Antonioni film.
When he moved to the States, he stayed with me for a few months, while he found work and a place to live. We shared an interest in the same type of guy: middle-aged, furry, bearded, husky. While I engaged with a few of these same guys in very complicated emotionally-draining exchanges, Davide bedded them all. I was in awe, he followed his desires with no dawdling between attraction and connection. He had a few more serious relationships, complicated and demanding in ways that his ephemeral connections were effortless.
I’ve seen Davide only a few times over the years since he moved to New York, and was looking forward to his visit here in February next year, to hear of his latest loves and frustrations, to talk about film and music and art. He was my Italian brother, someone with a shared experience and intimacy that bridged great gaps in time together. I speak a little Italian, far from fluent, but Davide would sometimes lapse into gusts of Italian, me looking at him with that deer-in-headlights look, the momentary lapse in communication indicative of a deeper understanding of how we were connected. Part of me has known that this was his destiny, that he just wouldn’t be here at some point, but as one of his great loves Tim said of his tenebrous facade, “It just seemed like part of his charm.” And now Davide’s gone, my sad little brother lost forever.
BC’s family visited last week, so we all went to Alcatraz, the former maximum-security prison located on a rocky wind-swept island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It was my umpteenth time to visit—the first time the weather wasn’t windy, cold and damp, but actually sunny and pleasantly mild. We watched the Clint Eastwood flick, Escape from Alcatraz, the night before, filmed on location on the island. The film is based on an actual escape in June 1962 by inmates Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin. They made papier maché sculptures of their heads and placed them in their beds to fool the guards, while they scrambled to uncertain freedom through an unused utility corridor, down to the water, and across the frigid bay on a raft made of bound-together rain coats—to who knows where. They were never heard from again.
Shortly after the prison closed, Bay Area Native Americans lobbied to have the island developed into a Native American school and cultural center. After a few unsuccessful attempts to occupy the island, activists eventually succeeded in late 1969, representing Indians of all tribes, claiming that Alcatraz was theirs by right of discovery. They offered to buy the island from the federal government for $24 in glass beads and red cloth (the price paid to the Indians for Manhattan). The Nixon administration let things sort of work themselves out, and after the accidental death of organizer Richard Oakes’ stepdaughter, falling to her death from a prison stairwell, things deteriorated fairly rapidly, with the eventual arrival of armed federal marshals, who removed the few remaining holdouts. There is still graffiti on structures around the island from the time of the occupation.
My favorite part of the visit was the audio tour, which is a marvel of storytelling and sound effects. You’re guided through the main prison by several former inmates, who describe life in the prison during their time there, as well as the history of the island. The sounds animate the experience with a sense of being there with the inmates decades ago, bars clanking shut, guard whistles going off, voices grumbling, seagulls ka-ka-ka-ing…
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: What do you mean? Do you think something else happened to her, that she’s not dead?
CHRIS: No no, I’m not saying that… but, actually, I hadn’t thought of that. Great. More content for my already richly and imaginatively anxious dream life. I guess I’m saying that I don’t really have words for what I’m feeling. Of course I know that mom is dead, her ashes rest in an urn on my desk. Disbelief is perhaps something easier to relate to. I can’t relate to her not being here, to hearing her giggle in my head, to seeing her smile so clearly, to feeling my head in her lap. There’s a disconnect between what’s happening in my head and… well, what’s happening in my head. How can she seem so alive and present and not be here? And dad, too… and Sue. A third of my inner family, just gone.
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: This is life. Death’s an inevitable part of it.
CHRIS (rolls eyes): I remember when my grandfather died. I didn’t really know him, my grandparents lived in Chicago and I grew up in Alabama, and we had visited only a few times that I could remember. Aunt Joan called to say that he had died. I was maybe 10 or 11. I hadn’t experienced death before, and I just burst into tears. He wasn’t even a part of my life, but the idea of him suddenly not being around to even get to know wasn’t something that I had even thought about. He was always just, there. But dead? It was the first time I’d experienced real loss. When Manny died, I was only 27. I spent a year in deep mourning, but my goal was to get on with my life, and I knew I’d be okay, that I’d learn to live with his absence, that it would get easier. My grief was my job. But I had my whole life ahead of me, so many possibilities, maybe even another great or even greater love. Now, with mom’s death, it feels like the slow slide to the grave. I’m six of seven kids. Will I have to go through this again? And again and again and again and again and again?
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Well, yes… but…
CHRIS: But what? I’ll get used to it? I’ll live and enjoy every day as if it’s my last? And my sister’s last? And my brother’s last? And my other sisters’? And my other brother’s? And Big Chrissy’s? d’Auggie’s? Zoobie’s? I’m really not sure I can handle it.
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Chris, you have handled it. You did learn to live with Manny’s death. Remember at the time you really didn’t know if you’d ever feel even happy again, if you’d ever love again? And yet you did.
CHRIS (interrupts): Oh no… and Bob? I hadn’t even thought of that, Bob will die, too, the other great love of my life, my mentor, my guide… how could I live without him there… here?
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Bob is married to someone else, he’s happy, he’s a published author, accomplished, content, he’s had a good life, you’ll always have the memories of your time together…
CHRIS (interrupts again): Okay, don’t even go there. Mom told me many times in her final months that she’d never forget what I did for her, moving her in with me for her last year, taking care of her. I remember responding, jokingly, “Mom, you’ll be dead, how will you remember? When is this future time that we’ll be sipping a glass of wine together, reminiscing about these days that you’ll never forget? I appreciate what you’re saying, and this has been the greatest experience of my life, to spend these final days with you. I feel your gratitude now, and I am very grateful, too, for this time together.”
PAUSE
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (lowering their heads and raising their eyes and bushy eyebrows above their glasses)
CHRIS: Oh. Right.
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Yes. You’re absolutely right. You’re still alive. Your siblings, dogs, Chrissy, Bob and all you friends…
CHRIS (interrupts again, shrieking): And my friends! I forgot about them, too, they’re all going to die!!
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: Chris, focus… Your mom is gone. But those final days were among the finest you spent with her—you just said so—a really special time made all the more special and urgent by their impermanence. You’re at an age where death is going to be more prevalent…
CHRIS (interrupts again): But I lived through the AIDS crisis, when so many of my friends, boyfriends, my partner, fellow artists, all those gray faced men in my neighborhood carting around their oxygen tanks, they all died, so quickly. And Augustine, my sweet beautiful Augustine. If I hadn’t seen an acquaintance in 3 weeks, I’d be afraid to ask how he was, afraid that he, too, would be dead. I actually haven’t asked John West if his former lover, Chris, whom I last saw in 1993, smiling, still young, so vibrant and alive, but with that telltale gray skin… is he, is he dead, too?
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (collectively, but quietly, and somewhat sympathetically, sighing): That was an insanely painful time, and you made it through. Just as now, just as what you were saying. You learned to live with death at a very early age and experienced more death than anyone should at that age.
CHORUS ABRUPTLY STARTS TO CRY
CHRIS: Sheesh, guys, brace up. I’m the one who’s supposed to be crying.
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (sniffling, then sobbing loudly, cathartically): But we are you, we’re in your head, and we were there, we remember. How did you do it? How did we do it?? Don’t you remember Jesse Helms, the Moral Majority, all those people who didn’t care if you or your friends died, who called you names, who wouldn’t let your friend go to his own lover’s funeral???
CHRIS: Okay, guys, really, get it together. Listen… to the sound… of my soothing voice. And I’m paying for this session, remember? But see what I’m saying? It’s not as easy as just accepting that we’re strong, that death is inevitable, that we should live every day like it’s our last, carpe diem and all that shit.
CHORUS OF THERAPISTS (finally pulling it together): Helen Reddy said all that needs to be said here:
Oh yes I am wise But it’s wisdom born of pain Yes, I’ve paid the price But look how much I gained If I have to, I can do anything I am strong (strong!) I am invincible (invincible!)…
SCENE FADES TO BLACK AS MUSIC SWELLS AND IS ABRUPTLY CUT OFF BEFORE HELEN CAN EXCLAIM LOUDLY AND PROUDLY “I AM WOMAN,” WHICH WOULD LEND AN AIR OF GENDER DYSPHORIA—NOT ENTIRELY WITHOUT ITS PLACE, BUT HERE, MAYBE IT WOULD GET A LITTLE CONFUSING
Many different helpers and social workers and hospice people and nurses and bathers helped me and my siblings care for my parents in their final years in Alabama, but two were there the entire time, two angels of mercy and comfort: Vanessa and Constance.
Vanessa was the elder of the two, her years of experience and compassion evident in her sweet smile and easy self-assurance. Constance was my age, which I couldn’t believe, I thought she was in her 20s, with her pink scrubs, multiple piercings, gold teeth, towering hairpieces and sassy attitude.
Dad adored them, these two beautiful women fussing over him 4 hours a day. Once, while the bandages on his foot abscess were being changed, he looked lovingly at mom, seated nearby, and said “I. Looove you. I’ve always. Loved. You.” She didn’t hear him, but the sincerity and affection on his face moved me to tears. Mom was his only love, his companion for nearly 70 years.
A challenge for any long-term health care worker is integrating him-or-herself into the surrounding family dynamic. Constance and Vanessa knew what they were doing, and they were very good at it and didn’t need any direction or instruction. Yet, every few weeks they had to deal with a sibling shift change, each of us with our own ideas about our parents’ care. They would graciously listen to each of us, “Yes, Miss Carol,” “Yes, Mister Chris,” and then go about doing things their own way. Constance clashed a bit with mom, who resented having people take charge of the house and dad’s care. I had to pull mom aside one day and scold her. “For 4 hours a day we get a break, from people we trust completely, is it really important how Constance folds the clothes?” Once while trying to decide on a movie, mom blurted out “I hate Barbara Eden,” her contempt for even magical helpers like genies in bottles perplexingly evident. We all eventually learned to sit back and let them do their jobs, giving us instruction rather than the other way around.
It took me about 20 minutes to change my dad the first time, huffing and puffing, not able to get things lined up, my poor dad rolling this way and that. “You’re. Working. Very. Hard,” my dad observed. “Well, you changed a lot of diapers, with 7 kids, I’m happy to repay the favor,” I said, drenched in sweat. He replied, haltingly, “I. Never. Changed. Your. Diaper.”
Under Constance’s tutelage, I was able to change his diaper and the sheets in 3 minutes.
On one of my visits, around election time, I dealt with Alabama’s byzantine absentee voter ballot restrictions, wanting my parents’ votes to be counted. Doug Jones was running for the Senate seat left open by departing Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who vacated the office to become US Attorney General under President Trump. Jones ran against a far-right fundamentalist homophobe white nationalist, Roy Moore. Doug Jones had prosecuted two KKK terrorists who in 1963 bombed the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, killing 4 little girls. Jones won the election, with a scant 50% of the vote. Moore, who had been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with teenagers (he preyed on girls at the Gadsden Mall back when my brother Mark and I spent weekends pacing the mall with our junior high buddies!) received 48% of the vote. Vanessa and Constance were also eager to get their votes in, and indeed, the turnout of women of color was one of the decisive factors in Jones’ victory. In Constance’s neighborhood, physical roadblocks were erected and detours created, making it difficult to get to the correct polling place, which had also at the last minute been changed without advanced notification.
Doug Jones was eventually unseated, 3 years after taking office, by football hero Tommy Tuberville, who went on to join Republican nationalists in trying to overturn President Biden’s lawful election. Tuberville was elected by a 20% margin, the football player chosen over the civil rights hero .
Vanessa and Constance are my heroes, not only for the love and support that they gave my parents and my family, but for trying to make change where change doesn’t come with any degree of swiftness.
I haven’t felt like writing for a while now. Life just keeps getting in the way, creating a kind of inertia that has propelled me forward with no real need for comment. From 2016-19 I traveled back and forth to Alabama, taking turns with my siblings caring for our parents. Dad died in 2018, after a few years of slowly fading away. I fed him, changed his diaper, occasionally made him smile. Suddenly he was gone, with no grand moment of connection or revelation, just not there anymore. We cleaned out the house after his death, sold it, and moved mom to San Francisco, to spend her last 9 months with me. (More about mom in an upcoming post.)
I started dating Hughshka around this time. It didn’t work out. He eventually split for the EU and a significantly younger heartthrob. He left so many burning bridges behind, I was in awe of his incendiary commitment and steadfast determination to obliterate any emotional baggage. We were woefully mismatched, the only thing uniting us our mutual desire for companionship. I fell into a deep depression after mom’s death, and stumbled into a seemingly bottomless sadness after the Hughshka split. I went to my friend David’s in Inverness for the weekend, sobbing, saying that I needed a companion, that I wasn’t meant to be alone, that I would always feel like half of something without someone else by my side.
Driving back home to San Francisco, my emotional exchange with David played back in my head. I called my friend Jon with a revelation–I didn’t want to be that person. Dependant on someone else for my happiness? Someone else to make me feel complete? I did not want to be that person. But, frankly, I didn’t know how, or didn’t think I knew how, as so much of my energy over the 17 years since leaving Bob has been directed at this one goal. I was devastated by my mom’s death, almost a year to the day after my dad’s, a few years after the death of my sister. I had friends and family, but after the loss of a third of my inner family the depth of my loneliness was overwhelming. I was finally alone, motherless, fatherless, the family home sold, tetherless.
And now, almost two years later, a sense of contentment has settled over me. All of the previously perceived missteps since leaving Bob (Dean, Chris, Nemr, Stavros, etc…) I see now as really wonderful experiences, my former lovers now my closest confidantes and buddies. The intimacy that we share as friends is easy in a way that was so much more convoluted, weighted and difficult as boyfriends. Perhaps my blog readers never thought they’d ever hear these words stumble from my lips, but I’m actually quite happy being alone.
So in the coming days I’ll update you with some stories of my adventures over the past few years, and try to keep you updated on my current escapades. Thanks for sticking around, gentle readers.
Bob came to visit. He’s living in Sweden now, with his Catalan husband, but spent a few weeks here promoting his new book of collected essays and short pieces. I’m in there a little, a nice essay he wrote about my Out of Breath installation, and several essays written while everyone else was fighting for marriage equality and we were breaking up.
He stayed here, in the bed that we shared for 12 or so years, while I slept on the sofa in my office. After he left I woke up the next morning, groggily jumping up to make his tea, momentarily still a couple. We had so easily slipped into our old domestic routines over the length of his visit, I was genuinely discombobulated by his absence. So in the span of, say, 30 seconds, I went from semi-consciously thinking we were still together to reliving in fast motion every detail of our breakup, and just burst into tears.
Bob taught me how to integrate my own desires and narratives into my art, how to transform personal experience into something aesthetic. Other than Busby Berkeley, he’s influenced the direction and content of my art more than anyone else.
Stavros, meanwhile, has a new boyfriend. I’ll be traveling around Greece with them in September, and shooting images for my new project, Stavros at His Bath. I’ll tell you more about that project as it develops.
Being boyfriendless is actually going very well. I have puppies now. I’ve been dating and meeting guys, but my relationship with Bob set such a high standard, I find that I’m so picky. And guys my age are so busy all the time, maybe I’ll wait until I’m in my 60s to find someone to settle down and share ailments with.
Friends of my niece Megan threw her a going away camping party in Guerneville a few weeks ago. Megan’s moving to Indonesia to marry her boyfriend of many years, Garna. My sister June and I drove up to spend the day with them at their campsite, envisioning toasted marshmallows and bonding around a campfire. When we got to the abandoned campsite, Megan sent me a text saying that they were at the beach in town and to join them there. I did bring sunscreen, but despite driving up to spend the day on the river, the image of that campfire bonding experience somehow didn’t include engaging with the river in any way, and I brought neither swim trunks, towel, hat, flip flops… nothing beachy. June neither. At the beach, Megan was alone, moodily contemplating her big move. Her friends had paddled upstream in their inflatable devices to do mushrooms. I felt so middle-aged, nervously envisioning what the psychedelic experience of drowning might be like, their smiling corpses soon floating back downstream to us.
My immediate concern was how to get comfortable on that hot rocky beach. Megan generously offered us a few inches of her towel to share, but I found a piece of plastic in my car that we used to separate our sweating bodies from the toasty beach, and my shoes and socks as pillows. Our conversation shifted between Megan’s plans, delivered from her comfy towel, Megan elegantly attired in her one-piece suit and wide-brimmed hat, and whether June and I should swim in our undies. Finally we just said we couldn’t take it anymore, sweatily kissed dear Megan goodbye, and headed to Safeway for electrolytes.
In the parking lot a nasty domestic encounter quickly escalated into a public spectacle. One stringy haired lady was duking it out nastily with another stringy-haired lady over some sad sack of a guy. Stringy hairs were pulled, halter tops ripped, sunglasses went flying, and at one point one of the stringy haired ladies–I surmised that she was the jilted lover–pointed at the poor sad sack’s package and screamed at the other stringy haired lady “That particular part of his anatomy is mine. Mine! Mine!!! You can’t have it, you multiple expletives deleted!” I really wanted to stay and see how this all resolved itself. I didn’t think that the injured former lover’s tactics seemed potentially very productive. Instead of bruised ribs and restraining orders, did she imagine some other possible outcome? “You know, my stringy haired darling, you’re right, this particular anatomical area is indeed yours—as is my heart. It not only brings a smile to my face to see you beating my lover and screaming at the top of your lungs in front of all these Safeway shoppers, it kind of turns me on… let’s go back to your place and make mad passionate love.”
Around that time, an article in the Chronicle appeared, detailing reasons to make Guerneville a vacation destination. Guerneville is indeed still kicking. And so are its ladies.
I watched an episode of Louie that I downloaded the other day here in Athens. At one point Louie mentions never having experienced the death of a loved one. Louie is a few years younger than I, and I immediately envied that cluelessly blissful loss-less state. My lover died when I was 28, then my best friends, countless other friends and compadres, ex-lovers, beloved neighbors, then my sister…. How did he, or his character, avoid the death of a loved one?
My super-nicest-guy-in-the-world cousin Hans was killed last week, hit by a car while riding his bike. We had been wine tasting a few weeks before in the Russian River, just a few days before I left for Greece. At a dinner at a winery after our day of tasting, he lapsed into his usual I-love-you-man brosexual tipsiness. His wife, my cousin Vicki, was obviously annoyed, eying him across the table with a glare that betrayed a familiar annoyance, a scene perhaps repeated, but which she lovingly tolerated, like the rest of us. His nature was so easy-going, so open and friendly and loving… those qualities became amplified by the fantastic wines they introduced me to that day. If in semi-consciousness we reveal more of ourselves, Hans confirmed what we already knew. Everyone understood this about him as soon as they met him, that he was a good person, and that he loved being alive.
The guy who ran him over left the scene, turning himself in a few days later saying it was a horrible accident, that he thought he had hit a deer. I’ve been fortunate in being able to say goodbye to most of my loved ones, frequently sharing their last breaths… but Hans was just forgotten on the side of the road. There’s no real sense of closure, no sense of a life that was ready to end, just a tragedy and a profound absence that we have to puzzle and grieve through. Vicki had found her ideal mate, the balance in their relationship pitched to delightful perfection. Because someone else was momentarily distracted, her life is forever changed.
When someone dies, people apologize, they offer condolences, they ask if there’s anything they can do… These kinds of statements mean so little to me, revealing a detachment from the anger, grief, frustration and helplessness that we’re feeling. I can only say that I’m sad, so very sad. Death is a part of life, and we learn to live with it. But not Louie, not yet anyway, and I hope his character always remains in that state.
Bob had me over to watch Babette’s Feast. He made beer bread soup, taking inspiration from a culinary corner of the film that isn’t the one that usually inspires such activity. He took some liberties with the recipe in the film (beer, water and bread), including the addition of pureed fresh peas, which provided some much needed vegetable matter as well as a not entirely pleasant green tint that brought to mind scenes from The Exorcist more so than Babette’s Feast. I brought over some plundered Pliny the Elder beer from a visit last week to the Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa. The beers there are lip-smackingly delicious, covering the entire breadth of tastebud sensation, from sweet caramel to sour cherry. After dinner and the movie, we went to Oddball Cinema on Capp to check out the evening’s show of vintage erotic films. One film from 1970 was a filmic equivalent of the sexual experience—lots of blurry red body parts, hair, and panting—and came the closest to creating a sensual and erotic atmosphere. But generally, the films were the stuff of stag parties in the 1950s and 60s, mostly titillation, except for a disturbing screwball comedy porn flick from the silent era starring a trio of scantily clad beach beauties, a horny little dude, and a goat. Another prescient silent film depicted the developing medium of television as a potential means of bringing topless women into the homes of frustrated adolescents.
David and I went to see Morgan James at the Venetian Room. She’s a young singer with a powerful voice who idolizes Nina Simone, one of the great song-stylists of the 20th Century, and while singing her tunes, channels instead that high-pitched Broadway belting style that is about as far as one can get from Nina Simone. She did deliver a few amazingly forceful interpretations of jazz standards that went slightly beyond her Jazzy Little Mermaid voice into the realm of soulful interpretation. I really should have taken notes, because I can’t for the life of me recall the particular songs, but if you like that kind of powerful high decibel singing free of burdensome emotional content, she’s the singer for you!
