FAQs - MAGIC MAMA Eco-Edu-tainer

The Cat Hat Story

Once there was a really ugly pair of orange velour bell bottoms. They were made in the 1960's and had a nice shirt to match. After I graduated from college in Minnesota, I did some teaching and exploring in Northern California. One day, I walked into a little vintage shop in the base of an old water tower in Mendocino. There were two items that jumped off the wall and grabbed me. One was the funky skirt I often wear during my performances, the other was the two-piece orange velour get-up. I loved the shirt but the trousers just didn't cut it. Years later, when my daughter was a toddler, I was making star-shaped dolls out of velour and decided to make her one using the orange bell bottoms. I cut the trousers and began to make a bag for the doll, my daughter put the used-to-be-trousers almost-a-bag on her head. I looked at her and thought, "Actually, that would be really cute if we just puckered up the corners and made ears!" I whipped a few quick stitches, used some felt from the doll making project to line the ears, stuffed some bells inside to help them stand up and - ta da! The Cat Hat was born! It was too big for my daughter, so I wore it. Soon afterward, a friend asked me to make another one for someone she knew who was going through chemotherapy. I had more and more similar requests which led me to create a tag for the hats and start a small business...

Magic Mama - The Name

The first tag I created for the Cat Hats was a little story book. In the story, I described the transformation of the trousers into the hat, referring to the Cat as an important animal ally for anyone on a journey with cancer. (The Cat is said to have 9 lives and always lands on its feet.) Wanting to remain anonymous in the story, I named myself "Magic Mama" and it stuck, along with the Cat Hat image.

I like to explain to my audiences that Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will. When we change the way we think, we are being magicians. There is no "trickery" involved, nor sleight-of-hand. One could say that I do sleight-of-foot with my looper and perhaps sleight-of-mind by way of encouraging a shift in consciousness. Having had people in the audience who expected to see me pull a rabbit out of a hat, I added a "magic hat" to my theatrical set. You'll have to come to a performance to see what I pull out of it!

Red, White, and Blue Matriotism

My performances are as much visual as musical. The painting that usually hangs behind me is an acrylic rendition of a watercolor I painted in 2003 (published in 2005 by Mother Tongue Ink). After the World Trade Center Tragedy, I kept seeing all these big shiny SUVs and Hummers around the suburbs with American Flag stickers that said things like "God Bless America" and "These Colors Don't Run." I felt like Patriotism had become completely off-balance and somehow I needed to reclaim the color scheme as something more Universal. The banner image is of a Great Cosmic Mother holding the Whole Earth. The moon completes a full cycle around the border. No matter where you are on the Earth, you will see the moon in the same phase as everyone else on the planet. This Red, White and Blue image says "Bless everyone! No Borders, No Boundaries, Bless Everyone, No Exceptions!" The original blood offerings came naturally through women's bodies, guided by the cycles of the moon. In balanced times, there was no sacrificial killing, only the natural shedding of blood. My Matriotism painting is a call to find balance and healing in (and for) the world.

Super Duper Alley Looper

I perform with many instruments, the primary being my guitar, looper and microphone. The looper is a little box that I operate with my feet which allows me to record tracks live and instantly play them back. I can then add layers to that first track and build to a full band sound. I call it "organic" because I never use prerecorded sounds, everything happens in real time, live, and everything is acoustic.

Looping and Writing a Song...

I originally bought the looper to use as a sketch pad. I "hear" so many different instruments and parts in my head all at the same time, the looper allows me to focus on one at a time and put them together in layers. When I wrote Wacky Jacket Jenkins (more commonly known as the cheese puff song) I really heard a Louisiana Jazz quartet going on in my head. While the looper gives me more possibilities in some ways, it is restricting in others. My set up is really quite simple and I loop most of my instruments using the microphone. Once an original loop is set I can add things but the delete function can only remove the most recent addition. I prefer to rely as little as possible on the electronics and put more attention into playing a wide variety of acoustic instruments. Of course, many of my songs cannot be performed without the looper, like Go Barefoot for example. I would have to teach the audience how to sing four other parts so I could sing the verses!

People often ask about the inspiration for my songs. Where do they come from? How do I start? What's my process?

There are as many answers to these questions as songs I have written! Often I feel like I am really just an antenna and I hear things that translate into sound waves created by whatever I happen to be holding at the time. Everything has a song; melodies find me. I can hear most clearly when I am grounded and immersed in Nature. Songs come to me through activities like gardening, hiking to a creek, picking berries, doing yoga in the sand, paddling a boat, watching ocean waves. The repetitive tasks involved in raising children and maintaining a household also lend themselves to rhythms and lyrics. Sometimes it's the words that start a song rolling, sometimes it's a particular rhythm that arrives as I am picking peas or digging a hole to plant something in. Sometimes it's the sound of an object in motion that catches my attention, like tapping on the lid of a partially full canning jar or zipping winter coats. Once a song begins itself, I often focus on finding ways to communicate and incorporate certain environmental and social "lessons" into it, giving it more purpose and positive power. Words create their own rhythms as well, we like to play with language and make up new words when old ones no longer serve us. "Joyward" is a holistic replacement for the 2-dimensional, linear "forward." "Pantsantbant" is another example. My son said this one day when he was about 2 years old. At the time, he also happened to be wearing his trousers (pants) inside out and backwards so the tag was flapping in the front. Now, whenever anyone is wearing any article of clothing inside out or backwards we simply say it's "Pantsantbant" and it became part of the rhythm track for the song "Spata-fatty Hatchula" (also known as my baby rap) which is about a day in the life of a mama and baby. When I was pregnant with my son, we lived in Mendocino, CA and I would walk along the Coastal Headlands everyday, drumming on my belly as I went. This rhythm of creation set the stage for the rest of the song, an entire album and it seems, the medicine of my life. I may have always had a bit of magic, but I wouldn't be mama without my kids. They are certainly the source of much of my inspiration, my loyal crew and loves of my life! What kind of world will we create for their children's children to inherit? I choose clean air, clean water, fresh and vital food, healthy and loving communities, and still-wild places. It will take a world of villages committed to conserving and preserving Earth's resources for this to become reality. I cannot do it alone, nor do I wish to - join me, joyfully, in song and dance and celebration of the beauty and abundance of this Miracle of Earth! May it be so!