Rachel Jayson: I Want The Thing

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lies, shoes, grief and mixtapes.

we recorded this episode in my home in woodstock back in September 2019. like the best long-yarn conversations with good friends, it roams across an ocean of emotions. we share war wounds from the mainstream media, Rachel talks about what it means to be ‘Dapper Q’, the church of LL Bean and the joy of finding music that’s as angry as you are.

Episode 18 of The Art of Asking Everything: Rachel Jayson: I Want The Thing is out now wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s a link to all the places you can get and subscribe to the podcast: https://linktr.ee/AskingEverything

 

Show notes:

Description 

Amanda Palmer presents an intimate conversation with Rachel Jayson, recorded September 10, 2019 in Woodstock, NY.

Rachel Jayson is musician, educator and fashion designer. She is the violist in two bands: Jaggery and Walter Sickert & the ARmy of BRoken TOys. She also teaches music and conducts two award-winning orchestras at Lexington High School outside of Boston. You can also find her slinging funky footwear at John Fluevog Shoes or designing and making her own clothing creations in her spare time.

CREDITS:

This has been the Art of Asking Everything Podcast.

Thank you very, very much to my guest, Rachel Jayson. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram, her Instagram is beautiful. You can visit armyoftoys.com and jaggery.org if you wanna check out either of her bands.

And as you might have noticed, we played some wonderful music in this episode. Very specifically, Russian Sailor’s Dance from the Russian ballet The Red Poppy, composed by Reinhold Glière, Serenade for Strings by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Nimrod Variation, which you are listening to right now, composed by Edward Elgar, part of his larger work The Enigma Variations.

The engineer for this interview was Jimmy Garver. For all of the music you heard in this episode, you can go to amandapalmer.net/podcast.

It was produced by FannieCo, and lots of thanks as usual to my incredible team. Hayley Rosenblum, who makes so many things possible with the podcast and the Patreon. We couldn’t do this without her. My assistant Michael McComiskey, who makes sure all the emails get answered and the trains run on time. Our UK Merch Queen Alex Knight, who’s also helping transcribe all of these conversations so they are accessible to everyone, thank you Alex. Kelly Welles has been helping us with cuts and snips and social medias. And my manager Jordan Verzar in Sydney helps bring us all together. Thank you to my whole team.

And last but not least, this whole podcast wouldn’t be possible without all of my patrons. They make it possible for this podcast to have no ads, no sponsors, no censorship, no bullshit, we are just making the media and putting it out there. So thank you to my high level patrons: Simon Oliver, St. Alexander, Birdie Black, Ruth Ann Harnisch, Leela Cosgrove, and Robert W. Perkins, thank you so much all of you guys, for helping me do this.

Everyone else, please go to Patreon, become a supporting member, this will give you access to the posts as they go out, and also live chats, and I’m gonna do one with Rachel, so I hope you listen to that too. And usually the podcast comes out on a Tuesday, the live cast comes out shortly after that if we do one.

The Patreon is also full of all sorts of other goodness, it’s a fantastic community, so please, even if it’s just for a dollar, join up.

Meanwhile, thank you so much, everyone. Signing off, this is Amanda Fucking Palmer, keep on asking everything.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Amanda 00:40

This is The Art of Asking. I am Amanda Fucking Palmer. I wanna talk for a second about what this podcast is. I mean, I called it The Art of Asking Everything for a very good reason – because it meant I could literally do anything, talk about anything, take it anywhere, talk to anyone, talk to myself, which I like doing. I could decide that I wanted to do a podcast about my journey to an ashram in India, and kind of the title would fit, it’s a nice, broad title for a podcast, it contains all of the things.

 

And last week I started stretching the boundaries a little bit, I had a long conversation about life and meaning with my therapist, Wayne Muller. But also, Wayne is a bestselling writer, and he’s a speaker, and he’s used to doing these sorts of interviews in the course of his daily life. 

 

For this episode, I am finally delving into a big reason that I wanted to start a podcast, which is to eventually meld and blur the “famous” people that I know and meet, with my actual, real friends, and also my patrons, and my normal community, many of whom are more interesting, and sometimes smarter, than a lot of the “famous” people that I meet. 

 

And this brings us to Rachel Jayson, she’s one of them. I met Rachel because we were both in bands in Boston. She was, and still is, a viola player in my housemate Mali Sastry’s band Jaggery, and Mali, by the way, would be another incredible friend to have on. She has deep knowledge. And when I moved to upstate New York, she and I had babies right around the same time. And that started to sort of bond us together. And also, before the babies, she and her wife had borrowed me and Neil’s rental house in Cambridge to get married in, when I was living in Cambridge to take my friend Anthony to chemo, long story there, just read my book.

 

Anyway, Rachel and her wife and their baby Asa started visiting me and Neil, and staying at our new house in Woodstock. And now here’s the weird coincidence: at the time, Rachel’s wife was working as a firefighter in my old hometown, Lexington. And at the same time, Rachel got a job teaching orchestra at my old high school, Lexington High. So we were all clearly, weirdly, karmically linked.

 

Rachel and I recorded this conversation at our old house in Woodstock in Neil’s writing cabin, in September 2019. Remember September 2019? With an engineer named Jimmy Garver.

 

And here’s a bit more official bio for Rachel: she is a musician, an educator, and a fashion designer. She is a violist in two art-rock bands, both of them from Boston, Jaggery, Mali’s band, and another band called Walter Sickert and the ARmy of BRoken TOys, who are like a big, loud, crazy, theatrical outfit. You should check out both of those bands, they’re great. And she teaches music and conducts two award-winning orchestras at Lexington High School. And I love this, she has designed footwear for John Fluevog shoes, one of my favourite shoes to put on my feet, and she makes her own clothing. And her Instagram feed is worth following, even if you’re not into clothes and shoes, because I don’t normally follow any clothes stuff, but Rachel makes clothes art. She is just a style genius, and her posts are always really beautiful, because she blends the personal and the fashion.

 

So we sat down, and we had a good old-fashioned yarn. Fake news headlines, racism, postpartum anxiety, what it’s like to teach kids about punk and mixtapes, what it’s like to lose a mentor to a sudden death, we just talked and talked. The conversation doesn’t even start, by the way, with a ‘Hello, Rachel’ and a welcome, we just dive right in, and we start the conversation with a story, and a question I ask Rachel about something that had just happened to her, that I could easily relate to. It was a story about what it feels like to be misrepresented by the media.

 

Let’s do it. Everyone: Rachel Jayson.

 

I originally met Rachel through friends in the Boston music scene. She was playing in a band with my housemate, Mali, from the Cloud Club, and she’s now teaching music at my alma matter, Lexington High School, we have all these friends in common, we have children about the same age. One of the things that I wanted to do with this podcast is just interview my friends and family, along with random climate scientists that I met at TED, and have it not just be a podcast about someone who’s got a book being published this week, but also a podcast about my interesting friends who are interesting.

 

I’d love to start this podcast off with having you tell the story of what happened when the Boston Globe reached out to you, and asked if they could cover a day in your life.

 

Rachel 06:10

I don’t have a lot of individual experience  with the media. I’ve played in rock bands for a long time, my band ARmy of BRoken TOys has done lots of stuff in the Boston area, but when we’re interviewed, we’re interviewed as a herd. Lots of us, we have lots of things to say, and that’s very different from somebody kind of shining a spotlight on you.

 

The parent of one of my students at Lexington High School reached out to me, and said ‘I write for the businesses section in the Boston Globe, and I would like to write a day in the life podcast, here’s an example,’ and the example that she sent me was a day in the life of an undertaker. Which was totally fascinating! Like, what the actual, on the ground, minute to minute looks like, if this is your job. 

 

I’m like, this is fantastic! People are gonna learn that as a mother, your day starts super early, and I have this whole experience with my two year old before I go off to school, and then they’re gonna find out that as a music educator, as an artistry director, approximately 75% of my job is moving chairs, then the other 25% is making really amazing music with hundreds of awesome students, and I get to talk about my music appreciation class, where I get to teach pop music to kids who don’t know anything, and I get to use Beyonce and The Beatles as examples! And this is gonna be so rad, and then I’m gonna talk about how I go to band practice afterwards, and I get to make my own art with my peers, and this is gonna be this great day in the life piece! So cool, I’m so honoured!

 

And she asked me because she had seen me at a big  town-wide orchestra concert. So, I teach high school, but this is a concert combined with the middle and elementary schools, and I think her child was in one of the younger grades. And she thought to reach out to me after seeing me at a concert with hundreds of other people.

 

Amanda 07:57

Why do you think she chose you?

 

Rachel 07:58

I take up a lot of space, visually. And so, even in a gym with four other conductors, and 200, 300, maybe 400 students performing, it was a big concert, I still take up a lot of space, so even though I’m not particularly tall, I’m probably 5’4 and a half, I usually wear very tall shoes, I’ll wear fairly dramatic clothing, so even though I was probably wearing all black for this concert, I think maybe I was wearing a pair of red boots.

 

Amanda 08:28

And this is not par for the course in Lexington, Massachusetts.

 

Rachel 08:31

No, it’s not par for the course in Lexington.

 

Amanda 08:33

Land of L.L.Bean

 

Rachel 08:34

Yeah, it is land of L.L.Bean, I… 

 

Amanda 08:37

Bless, but…

 

Rachel 08:38

Yeah, yeah. Bought my hiking boots there. My wife tricked me into buying hiking boots! I did go into an L.L.Bean, it was a wild experience. The best part of walking into L.L.Bean was looking at the line to the register, and seeing everybody in the line wearing L.L.Bean, holding L.L.Bean that looked exactly like the L.L.Bean that they were wearing.

 

Amanda 08:59

It’s like a church of bland uniformity. But practicality! I was raised by a woman who was clad in the L.L.Bean catalogue. And my mom had no brand loyalty, she was just like, these clothes are well-made and practical, and gosh darn it, they work. And like, that’s such a fucking New England approach to clothing.

 

Rachel 09:22

It’s a fact, I mean, I wear clothes cos they work, but also because they are beautiful and wonderful, and my way to make my personal art piece. So I also have long dreadlocks, and usually I wear bright lipstick, I have some visible tattoos, and so I think, even from a distance during a concert, this parent thought, hey, I wonder what that person’s day is like.

 

She said, ‘Can I write a day in the life piece?’ And we had an hour and a half long interview, it was a phone interview. The conversation veered pretty quickly off into other areas of my life that I was happy to talk about, but I was really just taken aback that they even came up. So very early in the conversation, she said, ‘well, I read an article about your clothing that you make, can you talk about the clothing that you make?’ And I often make myself pieces of clothing that are kind of whacky or bright or big, or sometimes I make clothing out of other things like umbrellas, or plastic bags, or whatever I have around that I feel like. And she really wanted to hear about that. I’m like, yeah, this is something I do for fun, it’s like a creative outlet. 

 

And then I went back to talking about my day, like oh, so at 7:45 I do this and that. And she’s like, ‘I see you work at this shoe store, can you talk about the shoe store, what attracts you to it?’ I’m like oh yeah, I still work occasionally at John Fluevog shoes, it’s kind of a whacky shoe store, and I spent a long time there. And still, the conversation kept pulling away from my day job, and what I thought the interview was about, to all of these other elements.

 

She said, ‘I read an article’ – she was referencing an interview that I did with an amazing queer blog called DapperQ, and DapperQ is more about masculine-of-centre fashion.

 

Amanda 10:59

Wait, what do you mean by masculine-of-centre fashion?

 

Rachel 11:02

As in like, a space that’s not particularly for queer femme fashion, they focus on suiting for bodies that are maybe not male bodies, that’s where their slant happens to be. Dapper clothing, so dapper in the traditional sense is usually a masculine-defined word. And so while this blog reflects people of all genders, the clothing and the aesthetic of the blog tends to lean what I would call masculine-of-centre. And they wanted to broaden that, and so they started an awesome side project called Hi, Femme!, and they wanted to basically include this femme wing of the queer community, and say we wanna shine a light on these people as well.

 

And so, DapperQ had reached out to me about doing an interview about my fashion sense. In that, I talk about the complexities of being African American in a city that is still pretty segregated, and what it means to take up space visually, and how I move through the world, and all these things. And one of the things that I said in that article was, I teach at a school that doesn’t have many other African Americans on faculty, in fact I think maybe there’s one other Black person on faculty, and so I understand that the students are interacting with me, and I may be the only African American adult that they interact with that day, and that’s a responsibility.

 

Amanda 12:24

And to clarify, for people listening, cos you know Lexington and I know Lexington, how many Black kids are actually attending this school?

 

Rachel 12:32

Not many. Lexington also still participates in a program called the METCO program, which essentially buses Boston students that are usually minority out to suburbs, various suburbs, so Lexington has been participating in this program for decades, so a lot of the African Americans, certainly not all in the student population, but a lot of the African Americans in Lexington school population actually live in Boston. It’s not many, and it’s even fewer in the orchestra program, unfortunately.

 

So, in the DapperQ article, I spoke about that part of my identity, and the intersectionality of being a woman and being African American, and being in front of an audience. The Boston Globe interviewer asked me about that, and I was so confused, because I was really happy with the way I’d put it in that other interview! 

 

Amanda 13:17

And also, what did it have to do about your day?

 

Rachel 13:19

Right! Which was confusing! So I was like, oh yeah, you know, I’m happy to answer that. So she read my quote back to me, and she says, ‘what do you mean by that?’ And I was like, oh, I meant what I said… It’s kind of like I’m a proxy for other African Americans, because I’m the only one that they interact with. And I summed up what I said.

 

So, we finished the interview, I get off the phone, I talk to my wife, I’m like, wow, that was not what I expected, but, you know what? It’s gonna be fine. I sent the Globe a bunch of pictures of me for them to use, but they sent a photographer. The photographer comes to my orchestra rehearsals, takes a glorious picture of me, fantastic. 

 

And then, a little while later, in the business section, on page 4, the article comes out. And it’s titled ‘In The Classroom, She’s A Proxy For All African Americans.’ That’s the title of my day in the life, cutesy rundown of my job. And my heart just sank. 

 

And I read, I saw it online first, it dropped online. And there were some factual inaccuracies which were very scary, where it’s like, that’s not how that happened, oh my goodness, things about where I went to school, or how I got the job that I got, that just didn’t translate directly. So I immediately contacted the writer, and was like, can you please fix this, this, and this? Mistakes happen, it’s totally fine. 

 

But the article read like this odd, kind of cut-together, not quite highlights of my life, it was just kind of this watered down Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, of some things that make me me. It was like a laundry list of some things that I do. It wasn’t about me being an African American teacher, and it wasn’t a day in the life, and it wasn’t a nuanced picture of me. I felt like it was trying to be all three of these things, and it didn’t end up as any of them. 

 

I avoided posting it for a little while, sharing it with my community, this is such an honour, this is the Boston Globe! I needed to figure out what I felt about it.

 

What really made it stick out was when they tweeted about the article, which I was surprised about, because why would the Boston Globe tweet about a third page business section line? The business section was like, ‘Rachel Jayson is a creative music teacher, something something, blah blah blah. Read about it here!’ And then it links to the article. And whatever the tweet was would have been… 

 

Amanda 15:54

A great headline.

 

Rachel 15:54

A really flattering and wonderful headline. And so I shared that. And felt weird. And my students were coming up to me the next day in class, and they were saying, ‘Miss Jayson! We saw you in the Globe!’ And they could see that I wasn’t beaming, didn’t lean in and be excited about that. And I just said to them, you read it, what did you think? And they were like, ‘that was a weird article.’

 

Amanda 16:19

That must have been kind of a relief.

 

Rachel 16:21

Oh, super validating! And I just love my students so much, and this was with my chamber orchestra, so these are my juniors and seniors, and I was like, I’d love to hear your opinions, cos it wasn’t what I expected, was how I left it, and I wanted to be cordial and neutral, because it’s not up to them to process me trying to process this. And one of my violists, she was sitting in the front row, Eunice, said, ‘They kind of commodified you.’ And I was like…

 

Amanda 16:48

I love that a high school student was smart enough to say that

 

Rachel 16:51

Yeah! And I was like…

 

Amanda 16:52

The kids are alright!

 

Rachel 16:53

Yeah, they’re alright. It’s like, yeah. That’s… a great way to put that. And I just kind of let that hang. And I had a couple more nuanced conversations with students after that, but that’s… She put in words what I was struggling with, which is weird that it felt like this article was trying to be these three things, and wasn’t any of those things. And I felt sad, because it felt like this odd representation. To me, it felt like, ‘Look! Lexington has… a Black teacher! Who does stuff!’ 

 

Some of the comments, I mean… Oh, never read the comments. But some of the comments on the online article were a little dicey, and a little like, ‘Oh, it’s nice to see Lexington has hired a Black!’ Some really wild language. 

 

MUSIC BREAK – Feeding The Dark

 

Amanda 17:47

As someone who’s been on the receiving end of really cruelly-assembled media journalist… God how do I wanna say that… As someone who has been on the receiving end of, oh my God, I was so naive, I just trusted that this journalist had my best interest in mind, wanted to share about my band, wanted to do this, wanted to do that, and then having to open the paper two weeks later going, oh my God, actually, this journalist didn’t even like me to begin with, and they had it out for me, and oh, media is more complicated than I thought! 

 

Especially in the situation that you’re in in Lexington, as a Black person who is in the vast minority, in the faculty and in the school, and knowing that the intention of that writer, slash the business section of the Boston Globe, slash the Boston Globe, is probably somewhere in the right place, we should be talking about diversity, if there is a Black teacher in Lexington, that’s something we should be covering, what do you think they could have done right, to not get it so wrong?

 

Rachel 18:54

So one thing that I learned in the process was that it is likely the person who chose the title of the article, which I can’t even remember, did I say it? 

 

Amanda 19:02

Yeah. The terrible title?

 

Rachel 19:03

Yes.

 

Amanda 19:03

Oh yeah.

 

Rachel 19:04

Okay. So it is likely that the person who wrote the title was not the person who interviewed me and wrote my article, that it was a separate job, so that was my big media lesson, was wow, somebody else put those things together.

 

I think it is a symptom of a larger problem, that the title that was chosen was evocative, the title that was chosen would attract people to the article, but it wasn’t the article that was there. And so I think one thing that they could have done to get it right was write the article they wanted. If they wanted to interview me specifically because I was an African American teacher in a majority-not-Black district, doing unusual things, and it is very unusual to be an African American classical musician first, that puts me in a minority. I’m in a minority as a conductor that’s African American, I’ve conducted at Symphony Hall. Standing on stage at Symphony Hall, I remember thinking, I wonder how many Black people have conducted on this stage. And I wonder how many Black females have conducted on this stage. I wonder how many queer Black females have conducted on this stage. 

 

Amanda 20:11

Probably not a lot.

 

Rachel 20:12

Probably not a lot! If you’re out there, say hi! Let’s get coffee!

 

So I know I take up this space that there are not a lot of people in. If they wanted to talk to me about those facets of my identity, ask me about those facets of my identity, and I will speak to them, hopefully with some grace, and definitely with a little more detail and depth than what was able to be shown in an article that was supposed to be about my day to day. 

 

So I think the Globe should have written the article that they wanted. If they wanted the kind of clickbait-y title of, ‘We’re the Boston Globe and we’re talking about a race issue!’ Great, get people talking about race, but let’s have a conversation about race. If you want a day to day on a music teacher, I’m happy to do that too.

 

Amanda 20:52

If the Boston Globe had access to you, there’s 20 articles that they could write.

 

I had a similar experience with the Boston Globe that broke my fucking heart. I did Cabaret at the American Repertory Theater. I had always wanted to do a really big theatre production with my director-drama-teacher-mentor, Steven Bogart, who had been my shining light in high school, he taught me everything I knew about theatre, a lot that I know about art, just a huge influence on me. And when I was in my 20s, I stayed connected with him, and I did little theatre projects with him, and I always wanted to work with him, and then the American Repertory Theater, which is a big deal theatre in Boston, invited me to do a show. I asked if Steven Bogart could be the director, they hired him, we did this really gorgeous 42-show run of Cabaret, in which I played the Emcee, Bogart directed it, was a total genius. 

 

And if you don’t know anything about Cabaret, it’s a show about the rise of Nazism and anti-semitism in Germany. It’s a really, for a musical, it’s pretty fucking heavy. It also has a theme of sexism, feminism, and abortion, along with the racism and nationalism. It’s an incredible musical, ones of my favourites.

 

And the Boston Globe came to the theatre during tech week to interview us. We did a long, heavy interview, felt really well-researched, really good. They had sent a photographer, I went into the dress-up room and grabbed a pair of heels and a bra and did a slapdash Cabaret outfit. Bogart sat there in his jeans and t-shirt and director’s cap. They took a photo of us side by side at a table. 

 

At the top of the arts section in the Boston Globe, the title was ‘Hot For Teacher.’ With a photo of me, wearing a bra and heels in my Cabaret outfit, next to my high school drama teacher, 20 years after graduating high school. And I could not fucking believe it. And I especially couldn’t believe that the Boston Globe, which is supposed to be this semi-conservative-liberal voice of reason, totally tasteful, the Boston Globe is the tasteful newspaper. It is not the National Enquirer, it is not the kind of place you would ever expect to see a headline like that, that was so sensationalistic, and also not fucking at all about anything in the article.

 

Rachel 23:27

It was a good article!

 

Amanda 23:29

It was a really good, nuanced article, about drama, Bogart as my mentor, and Cabaret, and a piece of art that’s about the Holocaust, and oh my God… And if it weren’t bad enough I had to look at it, I saw it came out online, I was really excited to go buy the paper, and I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe this. And then Steven Bogart called me, and said that his wife was literally in tears at their kitchen table, looking at how we were represented. And this was her husband! In his 50s! That title, those three words, have so much darkness embedded in them, and when you say ‘hot for teacher’, even though it’s a reference to a funny song from the 80s or whatever, it’s incredibly dark, when you think about it.

 

The fact that the person writing the clickbait-y headlines doesn’t even talk, necessarily, to the journalist who did the interview with you, who doesn’t even talk with the photographer who shows up, and their only assignment is get some cool pictures of Rachel Jaysen at her job, all of these things are a product of a kind of desperate, flailing media, or a media that just doesn’t know how to do its job well.

 

Did that experience of being torn apart, and slightly misrepresented in a mashed up article with a bad headline in the Boston Globe, did it change the way you read media?

 

Rachel 24:50

I don’t pay as much attention to the headlines. That’s one thing. If I see a couple of words in a headline that I’m interested in, I’ll read the exposition of the article.

 

And just acknowledging that there is such a disconnect was a wake up call. You know that these things are being designed to be consumed, whether it’s consuming information, or consuming entertainment, or somewhere in between, and newspapers do kind of straddle that line, it was a real wake up call. This is designed to make you look at it. And the person who chose that headline read this whole article, and picked the one line that they thought that people would click on and connect with.

 

Amanda 25:31

And that’s unfortunately real. 

 

Rachel 25:34

Yes.

 

Amanda 25:34

And these newspapers are ad and sponsor driven.

 

Rachel 25:38

It was odd to be asked to be featured in that article, because I was working at the high school, the other orchestra director of the high school, Janet Haas, had been there for 30 years, and was my mentor teacher, and a lot of the things that you talk about with Bogart, I had a similar relationship with Janet, I did my student teaching with her, we had worked side by side for the last decade, and I didn’t think anything of it, of the article, I was like, oh, this is weird, why was I asked? I didn’t see the writing on the wall that like, hey, maybe they asked you because you looked interesting. It was just like, ooh, somebody’s interested in my job! 

 

And the morning the photographer showed up, I had this heartbreaking conversation with Janet, with my colleague, who I just spent every day learning from her. She was like, what’s that photographer doing here? We didn’t talk about this, I didn’t know. I was like oh, you know, they’re coming to take pictures of my ensemble and me for this article. And she had this look on her face, and she’s a very stoic person, somehow warm and stoic at the same time. And she looked just a little wounded in a way that I hadn’t seen. 

 

In that moment, I realised, this is a legacy teacher, she’s given her whole heart and soul to this program, she built it from nothing. Why is the Globe talking to me? Why aren’t they recognising her and her excellent teaching? The article is supposed to be about excellence in the music classroom, I’m surrounded by that, so why did they choose me? 

 

And so that moment was really humbling for me, that was when the pictures were taken, so the article hadn’t been printed yet, and that’s when I started to kind of worry about the way that things were going, and why I was asked.

 

MUSIC BREAK – Intermission Is Relative

 

Amanda 27:20

It’s tragic, because you could totally see the intention somewhere is good. The intention of the Boston Globe to say ‘Hey, we should shine a light on diversity’. 

 

Speaking of Lexington, the fact that you are literally, physically teaching in the place that I got a lot of my own weird sideways music education is not nothing. And I actually don’t talk, really ever, about the musical journey that I took for the four years that I was at Lexington High School. It was a pretty weird one. And sometimes I feel guilty, because I talk about Steven Bogart, my drama teacher, a lot. I don’t talk as much about Jeffrey Leonard, who was my jazz teacher, I was in jazz improv class for 3 years in Lexington High School. I don’t talk that much about the influence that being in high school musicals had on me, although it was huge. I don’t talk a lot about the fact that for my entire junior year, I was in a music independent study that I created myself, because I tried to drop out of school, and it was my parents’ bribe, along with Jeffrey Leonard to keep me in school, that I was allowed to just spend two periods a day “composing” in the practice room.

 

And all of that stuff is pretty weird and unique. I have a real love/hate relationship with the place, because I look at it now, and in retrospect, I was given an insane amount of freedom, I was incredibly privileged, I had access to all sorts of music and sounds and teachings and instruments. There were pianos everywhere, there were practice rooms everywhere, I could eat my lunch in the practice rooms and write songs, which I did a lot, cos I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I was scared.

 

My first song that I wrote that was really good, that I wrote when I was 15, I wrote and finished up in a practice room in Lexington High School, and the first person who heard it was Jeffrey Leonard.

 

Rachel 29:29

I bet that piano is still there.

 

Amanda 29:31

That piano is probably still there. And that song is called Slide, and it’s on the Dresden Dolls’ first record.

 

Rachel 29;35

That’s amazing!

 

Amanda 29:37

And I can see all that, and yet when I was there, I really hated it. I just was so deeply unhappy. I couldn’t stand high school. I couldn’t stand anything. I just wanted to leave. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone. I was a really, really angsty, uncomfortable, unhappy teenager. And that’s where I was. In these same halls that you’re teaching in now. 

 

I have always felt, ever since leaving high school, since the day I left high school, I have felt a sympathetic resonance with all high school kids, because I don’t know if I can save them or help them, but I feel such a heavy duty sympathy, empathy, tragedy, connection with them, because I will never forget those four years of my life being the hardest.

 

Rachel 30:32

Yeah, they’re formative, they’re frightening, they’re this period of intense, social anxiety development, explosion, no feelings are big enough to capture what you’re feeling. I feel like my job as a music teacher is to help students articulate in some way some tiny portion of that experience. And whether it’s like you’re gonna come to my orchestra class and you’re gonna play really loud and aggressive, and that’s gonna feel really good, or if you’re gonna play really calm and peaceful, and it’s the only peace that you’re gonna have that day, or I’m gonna play a System Of A Down song for my music appreciation class, and we’re gonna talk about song form, and you’re gonna have your mind blown, cos you didn’t know that music could sound like that.

 

My whole job is just, how can I make music a tool? And whether it’s a tool for now, a tool for later, just how can I make this available? How can I make this art available?

 

Amanda 31:28

I remember, you were staying here at my house, and you were grading papers. Do you remember that? And I picked one of them up, and my head exploded.

 

Rachel 31:44

That was my music appreciation class.

 

Amanda 31:45

Your music appreciation class!

 

Rachel 31:46

It’s called Mixtape Anatomy…

 

Amanda 31:47

Mixtape Anatomy! And I literally, my brain exploded, because I forget what exactly the question was, you would probably know it, but it was basically a question about cassettes.

 

Rachel 31:59

Yes! History of recorded music. That’s a stressful test for that class.

 

Amanda 32:02

No, but something about the way the question was phrased led me to understand that this generation of kids didn’t really fully understand what a cassette was until they were taught by a teacher. And I was like, (gasps) ahhhh, this is crazy! How can you not know what a cassette is?! Everybody knows what a cass- oh, wait, no, everybody doesn’t, these kids are 14!

 

Rachel 32:26

Not even close. And so, there are a lot of funny and amazing things about that class. That particular question I think on that test was comparing 8-tracks to cassettes, and why…

 

Amanda 32:38

Yes! Yes!

 

Rachel 32:39

Why did one medium win out over the other, and what could cassettes do that 8-tracks couldn’t? So which one was around for longer, which one won that war?

 

Amanda 32:48

Which one survived?

 

Rachel 32:49

And why? And the idea of the answer is 8-tracks are a separate and ridiculous thing, look up the history of 8-tracks if you don’t know it, thank you American Auto industry, cos they’re the only reason that that medium got off the ground.

 

Amanda 33:01

Cos you could play it in a car.

 

Rachel 33:03

Cos they wanted something portable that could be played in a car, and the technology was ready just a hair before cassette tapes were in the 60s. But cassettes, you can rewind, which you can’t do on an 8-track, which is hilarious. And cassettes, you could record them yourself, and you could record off the radio, and you could make a copy! You could make a mixtape!

 

And so it allowed music to all of a sudden become very flexible, for you to pick and choose what you wanted to hear, and for you to pass it to your friends, like what an amazing tool! 

 

There were also really neat side effects to cassettes, as an aside. Like, cassette tapes allowed a lot of western music to make it behind the iron curtain, cos it was so flexible and portable, so even as CDs were slowly coming into being in the 80s, cassettes were still the dominant force, it was like, either vinyl or cassettes, because that’s how the music can get around.

 

That whole unit in the class is amazing. I start from wax cylinders, and then here’s a 78, here’s a vinyl record, here’s how it works, blah blah blah. We go all the way through MP3s. Later on in that same test, I ask, what is Napster? Add how did you use it? And one of my favourites…

 

Amanda 34:09

What was Napster, and how did you use it!

 

Rachel 34:11

What was Napster! It’s important! And it’s hard to explain.

 

Amanda 34:13

And this happened before you existed.

 

Rachel 34:14

Yes!

 

Amanda 34:14

Oh my God.

 

Rachel 34:14

And I’m coming into the first time where I have no students who were born when 9/11 happened, and that’s wild. 

 

One of my favourite answers to that Napster question was, Napster is a technology that aids you in taking naps. Students need to be taught!

 

Amanda 34:30

Wow.

 

Rachel 34:31

And even just the concept of mixtapes, as a finite pool of music, in a set order, that you chose, is a wild concept, because the motion of building a playlist is so much like throwing something into an endless bucket. They’re like oh, I want this mood, I’m gonna throw this piece in there. And students don’t think about order, and flow, and…

 

Amanda 34:55

Amount of space between each song.

 

Rachel 34:57

These are key factors. And that’s something that I got to teach. I got to teach it in this class, I got to assign it as projects. The last project for that class is an autobiographical mixtape.

 

Amanda 35:07

Wow.

 

Rachel 35:08

Where I ask them, they have to make 12 inch album art.

 

MUSIC BREAK – I Don’t Have This Shit Figured Out

 

Amanda 35:14

Tell me a little bit, and everyone who’s listening, a little bit about, not just where and how you grew up, but what your high school, and your experience of high school, was like?

 

Rachel 35:27

I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is just north of Washington, DC, and I went to Gaithersburg High School, which is about half way up the country, so it’s a big school system. So basically I was within the DC metro system, I could take the train downtown.

 

I stayed busy. I did not like being at home, I did not get along with my mom or my stepdad. I did not wanna spend any time in my McMansion, middle class house. So I did everything I could. When I figured out in middle school that if I did a play, I could be after school, and I could just stay there after jazz band, cool. I’m in.

 

So when I got to high school, I played field hockey, and lacrosse, I did all of the theatre productions, I was a string player, and I learned every instrument, and when I got to high school, I played violin and piano, and when I left, I also played viola, cello, and bass, cos I was like, what do you need? Great, I’ll do it.

 

Amanda 36:26

Wow.

 

Rachel 36:26

How else can I stay after school, can I be in the marching band? I don’t play a marching instrument. Colour guard? Oh, yeah.

 

Amanda 32:32

Why didn’t you wanna go home? 

 

Rachel 32:33

I hated being there. My house was really isolating, I fought with my parents constantly, I just hated it, and I wanted to be around people, I was so social. And nobody played outside in my neighbourhood, the houses were slightly too far apart, it was like new development, mid-90s, peak…

 

Amanda 36:54

Peak McMansion?

 

Rachel 36:55

McMansion. Which was confusing, cos I was like, this is a big house. Are we… rich? No? It was confusing. 

 

Amanda 37:05

And were you the only child?

 

Rachel 37:06

I have two older step-siblings who were largely out of the house, they’re 5 and 8 years older than me, they couldn’t have cared less, cos they were way far away in their life. And so, it was just really isolating. I wanted to be around friends, I wanted to be around my friends’ families. 

 

And I figured out that music was an awesome escape. I could do all of these activities, and I could be doing something that I liked and loved, I could connect with other people, and so I just did everything.

 

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was taking six music classes and English. It was like, I don’t think I have a great voice, but I can read really accurately, can I be in the choir? What about this other choir? What if I just play piano for the choir? What if I just help these other people learn their parts for the choir for credit? Okay.

 

So I was like a TA, like I did everything I could think of just to cram music into every possible corner, just to take up the space. 

 

Amanda 38:00

And what were you listening to in high school?

 

Rachel 38:03

Oh, man. When I went into high school, I was listening to lots of classical music. And then I came out of classical music, into peak late 90s Total Request Live, MTV, but as angry and crazy as I could get. So it was like, Limp Bizkit! And Eminem!

 

Amanda 38:28

No!

 

Rachel 38:29

Oh, yeah! And I was like…

 

Amanda 38:31

You liked Limp Bizkit?

 

Rachel 38:32

Oh yeah! Just because I wanted something that was…

 

Amanda 38:34

I’m not judging.

 

Rachel 38:36

Oh, you can judge away. 

 

Amanda 38:37

I’m not judging.

 

Rachel 38:38

Man, Significant Other? That album, yes! Korn, yeah!

 

Amanda 38:42

Wow!

 

Rachel 38:42

I was angry! And these people were angry!

 

Amanda 38:43

You were 90s!

 

Rachel 38:44

Oh, I was super 90s. Super late 90s, super early 2000s, super nu-metal. And then I was just so happy to hear somebody that was as angry as I felt. 

 

Amanda 38:56

Can relate. You get a high five. Yes.

 

Rachel 38:59

And so that was like my gateway. And because my older siblings, my older brother listened to lots of like, 90s gangsta rap, obscure stuff like Onyx, and then like, my step-sister listened to Mariah Carey, and New Kids On The Block, so I had this taste of pop, and I was like, eh… And then I found all this angry music that felt very, ironically, real to me.

 

Amanda 39:24

Yeah. I’m not saying Limp Bizkit isn’t real! It’s real.

 

Rachel 39:26

It is real for my 14 year old self. 

 

And then it was through friends, and through amazing mixtapes and mix CDs made by my friends for me, that my knowledge and my appetite for music just exploded. All of a sudden I wanted to listen to everything. So it wasn’t just nu-metal, I’m like, who else is angry? Who else is weird?

 

When I graduated from high school, I had a roommate who loved the music video for Radiohead’s song Just, which is from The Bends. And I remember watching that music video, actually I feel like music videos were largely responsible for a lot of the music I had access to, cos I sat in the basement and I watched MTV. I watched MTV. And that was during, right at the edge where MTV was like, we still play music videos! But also, here’s a bunch of reality TV, but then also we play music videos!

 

So I watched this Radiohead music video, and was like, wow, these guys are angry in a different way. Also this video is blowing my teenage mind. The video features a guy walking through a city, and people…

 

Amanda 40:38

All lying down?

 

Rachel 40:39

Slowly start lying down.

 

Amanda 40:39

I’ve seen it. It’s so beautiful.

 

Rachel 40:42

And then there are some words exchanged at the end of the video, and there’s this huge mystery about what words are being said. And I just thought this was so profound and amazing, but also, it introduced me to Radiohead. 

 

So then, I got to move backwards and forwards through Radiohead. And then, from there, found all of trip-hop music, and Portishead, and all of my darkness and my anger could be filtered through all of these other, more tense feelings. And then, my metal expanded, and my rap expanded, and just, my world blew up, because of people handing me things, because I would get in a car, I remember getting in a car with a friend, and an Aesop Rock song was playing. And I was so blown, I was like, people can use words like this?! What’s even happening?! 

 

And it’s such a great rabbit hole to go down. And everything was, who are they working with? Oh, they were in this band?! Oh, they were in this band?! Oh, they listen to this band?! Everything kind of filtered out and up, and I couldn’t get enough. I would hate asking people what music they listened to, because everyone would say, ‘oh, everything, except for rap and country, and five other genres, and classical, and jazz…’ And I was like, I actually want everything. I just wanna eat it. How could I get close to it? How does it work? I was so fascinated.

 

Amanda 42:04

You said last night, when you started teaching, you were still really young. You went to Lexington High School when you were 23?

 

Rachel 42:12

Yes.

 

Amanda 42:13

Barely out of high school yourself.

 

Rachel 42:15

Yes.

 

Amanda 42:16

What did that feel like? What did it feel like to be so close in age to the people that you were teaching?

 

Rachel 42:22

I understood the job I had to do, and I didn’t want to be my students’ friends. I think I was really selfish. So at 23, I had clawed my way through school, and grad school, and I got my degrees from Boston Conservatory, so I have an undergrad in viola performance, and a Masters in education, and I smashed them together as tight as I could so I would get the fewest student loans possible, so I was like, I’m getting in the classroom! 

 

I did my student teaching at Lexington, with Janet Haas, and then got hired for this tiny sliver of a job. Super part time, just working with one of the orchestras. And so, I came in, freshly graduated from college, but really humbled by being able to be in this amazing place, and feeling like I’m a guest here, and I have work to do, and I’m here to do that work. 

 

It was kind of the difference between, so I took a year off between high school and when I started college at Howard University. So I started in Howard, and finished in Boston. The difference between my attitude stepping into a classroom after taking a year off and not knowing if I was gonna go to college, and how I would go to college if that worked, the difference between my mentality and my posture, and the space that I took up, and the students around me who had just graduated from high school, we were only a year apart, or some of them were my same age, but it felt like 13th grade to them, and for me, it was a whole different game, it felt like the stakes were super high. And so, my first year in Lexington, my first couple of years in Lexington, it felt like the stakes were super high. I was there to do a job, I’m here to prepare my music, how can I help my colleague, I’m doing the work. And so I did…

 

Amanda 44:04

Well, and you needed to be taken seriously.

 

Rachel 44:06

Yes! And so I took up a lot of space, and I was really careful. I would come in and I would ask Janet, is this too much? And I’d be wearing a knee-length skirt. And Janet’s like, you’re fine.

 

I was hyperconscious of the way I would present, of the amount of space I would take up, of the type of language I would use. And because in the beginning I was only teaching orchestra, I didn’t have a reason to connect with my students about the music that they were listening to. Even though I wanted to have those conversations, I basically closed that part of myself off. And it wasn’t until a few years later, when I was teaching at Lexington full time, that I would keep these tiny gates open. 

 

So my birthday’s in September, and I say to my ensembles at the beginning of every year, that all I want for my birthday is a mix CD. And it’s amazing that as the years went on, students were having a harder and harder time making a mix CD! Because in order to make a mix CD, they had to find a computer with an optical drive. Then they had to figure out where to get a blank CD. It was just like a whole production. But the students that were willing to do it got to share a part of themselves with me, and the trade that I made with my students, that I still make with my students, is if you make me a mix CD at any point that’s not my birthday, I’ll make you one back. And so I have musical penpals. 

 

And every once in a while I’ll come in, and on my desk there’ll be a CD waiting for me. There’s one student that I really love who graduated several years ago, who continued to make me CDs, and she would always wrap her CDs in old maps, or in printed copies of maps.

 

Amanda 45:45

What is the best musical discovery that you have made through one of those mix CDs?

 

Rachel 44:50

Oh, man. Through a mix CD from a student?

 

Amanda 44:54

Yeah.

 

Rachel 45:55

Brockhampton. Do you know who Brockhampton is?

 

So I love these guys because they are breaking the concept of what it means to be a band. They have reclaimed the word, early 2000s word boyband, which in the early 2000s, late 90s, would have been an auditioned, curated group of guys performing together. So Brockhampton is essentially a music collective, there are a bunch of them. And they’re sort of rap-y, sort of pop-y, but one of the people is only a producer, and one of the people only does graphics and design, so they’re a boy band, but not everybody plays an instrument, because they’re all part of the art block.

 

Amanda 46:38

They’re a trans-media posse!

 

Rachel 46:40

Yes! And a student put a Brockhampton song called Sweet on a mix CD for me, and I loved it, I loved the energy, I loved that they didn’t take themselves too seriously, that they were out there making exactly the art that they wanted, and that their weird shape allowed them to be very flexible, and kind of make art in all sorts of venues, and if Brockhampton wants to release a t-shirt, they can.

 

MUSIC BREAK – You’d Think I’d Shot Their Children

 

Amanda 47:19

I wanted to ask you something more personal, because you talked about your mom, and your stepdad. Where was your dad?

 

Rachel 47:26

My dad died when I was one. He died when I was a baby. And it has been the anxiety of my life, trying to put together what that even means. My mom never talked about my dad. My dad sounded like he was awesome, I knew the Cliff Notes, which was like, your dad went to MIT and Harvard, he was a doctor, he did his residency I think in Philadelphia, and he and my mom had just moved to the DC area. He got a job working at I think Georgetown hospital, and my mom got a teaching job, she was a lifelong teacher, and they had the dream, he had convinced her, let’s have a baby, she was like, heck no, he was like, let’s do it! They do it, they have me, they’ve got a house, everything’s awesome, and then I’m like 13 months old, and he goes to a conference in Chicago, a medical conference in Chicago, and he dies in his sleep, from a pulmonary embolism, at age 32.

 

Amanda 48:25

Oh my god.

 

Rachel 48:28

Blood clot in the lungs, in his sleep, and everything is taken away. So my mom gets a knock on the door from a police officer, and she has a one-year-old, and the police officer says, your husband is dead. And the whole…

 

Amanda 48:40

Every mother’s worst nightmare.

 

Rachel 48:42

Yeah, it’s just…

 

Amanda 48:43

I mean, among… 

 

Rachel 48:44

There are so many, there are so many worst nightmares.

 

Amanda 48:46

That’s a bad one.

 

Rachel 48:48

And so, there are a lot of things about my mother that I understand in the context of, she did what she had to do. So we were alone until I was 5, she met my stepfather and re-married. I didn’t get it, he was much older, he was 18 years older than her. Not that my 5-year-old self could understand their love, but as an adult, I was like, oh. She did what she had to do. She went for security, and family.

 

Amanda 49:12

So now that you have a 2-year-old, have you ever had moments of reflection, where you find yourself holding Asa and thinking, oh my God, what would I feel like right now if I got that knock on the door?

 

Rachel 49:27

Yes.

 

Amanda 49:29

What did my mother emotionally have to traverse when that happened?

 

Rachel 49:32

Yes. And what’s more wild is that my wife is a firefighter, and so it literally could happen, because she has a job where she can die. My mom had me when she was 30. I had my son when I was 31. My parents met in Boston when they were 20. I met my wife in Boston when I was 24. They spent their courting days walking across the Mass Ave bridge, around MIT. My condo was three blocks from MIT, and I spent a lot of time going across that bridge with my wife. My mom met her best friend working in a shoe shop. I met all my best friends working in a shoe shop. 

 

So there are all these really weird parallels. And I was convinced that the universe was gonna kill my wife at age 31. And I spoke this anxiety to her out loud, I was like, I’m really afraid that something awful’s gonna happen, because this is it. We both have a job, we just got a house, we have the kid, it’s coming. And I think this is a fear that lots of people have, of ‘things are too good right now, something’s gonna go wrong.’ But, having all of these eerie parallels, and I’m not particularly religious, or particularly spiritual, but it felt like the universe was organising, and that things were maybe not going my way. 

 

So there are definitely, I spent a lot of time holding Asa, and saying, oh my God, what if? Oh my God.

 

Amanda 50:52

Just out of a kind of resonant superstition… Yeah. And also, you’ve told me that you went through some legit postpartum.

 

Rachel 51:02

Oh, for sure. For me, it was postpartum anxiety. And for me it didn’t manifest until I went back to work. So my son was born in February, I took off that spring semester, and then I went back in the fall. So what a privilege to be able to spend six months at home. 

 

And I went back in the fall, and it just felt like I was choking, all the time. And I felt like my executive function had just disappeared. So it felt like there was a tower of blocks with everything I was supposed to do, and somebody had just smashed the blocks over. So I could pick up the block that said ‘make a list of what you need to do,’ but then I couldn’t move forward. It’s like, I knew the steps that I used to do, and I would try and do them, and I just couldn’t. It’s like I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I wasn’t eating, I lost a ton of weight in a really unhealthy way. I wasn’t making eye contact with anyone, I wasn’t even speaking in full sentences, I would just sit and watch my kid on the floor, and be like, I’m engaging! He’s playing with blocks! Look at those blocks! And my wife would come in and be like, ‘what are you doing?’ It was really hard, and I totally refused to get help, which is also not like me.

 

It felt so internal, my anxiety felt so internal, I don’t know that I connected it with the fears of something’s gonna go wrong, because I was too busy trying to catch the parts of my life that were going wrong.

 

Amanda 52:31

What got you out?

 

Rachel 52:33

My wife is quite amazing, and after months of saying ‘go see a doctor, go see a doctor,’ and me just shrivelling, and this is not… I’m the kind of person where if I want the thing, I go get the thing. If I want the thing, I’m gonna ask the people around me who have the thing, how did you get that thing? I want that. I’m not somebody who’s usually too proud to take help. If the help gets me the thing I want, I want the thing. 

 

Amanda 52:58

That’s a pretty healthy attitude, just saying. Even your expression of the attitude sounds pretty fucking healthy to me!

 

Rachel 53:04

So like, that’s how I’ve gotten lots of things. I think I was talking the other day, I wanted to pay off my student loans by the time I was 30, so I asked everyone around me, how did you pay off your student loans by the time you were 30? How’d you get that thing? And I heard a variety of ‘ha, those student loans are absolutely still there!’, or ‘Grandma or Aunt June or whoever came in and helped me out,’ or ‘I’m lucky enough to not have loans,’ or ‘I’m just throwing away aimlessly.’ I found one friend, Karen Akunowicz, who’s an amazing chef in Boston, Karen was like, ‘I worked very hard, and worked a million jobs, and paid off my student loans by the time I was 30,’ and I was like, that! I want that! So I’m gonna do that! And that’s exactly what I did, I worked a million jobs, and paid off my student loans.

 

But in this case, what was most confusing, and it’s like I can watch myself from the outside and see it, was I saw that something needed to change, and I was unable to change it. I was going to school, and trying to do my job, and not succeeding, and not thriving, and hating it, and I knew I shouldn’t hate my job. Because I love all parts of my job. 

 

And there are some external factors that were making my job very hard; my long term boss, Jeff Leonard, who you brought up earlier, had retired, so I knew there was gonna be transition, and transition in leadership, that’s always hard, all the people around me were also going through transition, cos Jeff had left. I knew that there were some external factors that wasn’t entirely me, but I also understood that I was really broken. And I couldn’t ask for help. And when people offered help, I couldn’t reach out and take it. That was the most confusing and scary thing, is coming home and going to sleep at 4pm, just missing chunks of my life, and I can’t imagine how lonely my wife felt during that time. Because I was blank. I was not engaging with anybody, or anything, I was just trying to get through.

 

Amanda 54:58

And you had a teeny baby.

 

Rachel 55:00

And I had a teeny baby. And then, just before Asa’s first birthday, my best friends were pregnant, and my friend Jonny delivered, and had a very hard delivery, and the baby, Juno, suffered a lot of trauma, and lived to be six days old, and passed away. And spending time in the NICU with all of my best friends, being in a hospital with all of my best friends, and looking around and saying, we’re not supposed to be here for 50 years. I’ll see you in the hospital in decades. But instead, being around this immense tragedy, it’s like, I didn’t think, if you had asked me Christmas of that year, could you be any worse? I would have said no. It felt like the bottom dropped out of the bottom. 

 

And after Juno died, before Asa’s birthday, I remember just breaking down at school, and a colleague of mine was like, ‘You’re gonna be okay, here’s my doctor. Here’s a doctor that is holistic, that will help you, just go and see a doctor. I will take your kid. I will come to your house and watch your kid, and Claire will take you to the doctor, and we will do it today.’ And it was like, I needed an entire intervention. 

 

And eventually, that was it, and I catatonically was dragged to the doctor’s office, and got help, and slowly crawled my way out, and spent the rest of the year crawling.

 

And then, this fall, this fall that just happened, the school year that just went through, this is my first school year after that, that I actually feel like I’m thriving and able to teach.

 

So this year I came back stronger, and more stable, and started the year strong, excited. And things roll on and on, and I’d known that my colleague, Janet, was close to retirement. I think I asked her flat out last year, when I was having such a hard time, I was like, Janet, are you retiring this year? And she was like, ‘no, I’m going to retire at the end of next year.’ And that was the first time in 10 years, cos I ask her every year, I’m like, when are you going out, with this year’s kindergartners? Okay! You know, like when they graduate from high school. And last year, she said, ‘next year’s gonna be my last year.’ She was 59, and she would have been teaching in Lexington for 32 years, it would have been.

 

Amanda 57:27

Wow, yeah. So she had done a long time.

 

Rachel 57:30

She had absolutely done a long time, and built just a dynasty, an amazing programme, quite exceptional. 

 

So while I was at my lowest, Janet held me up. We always had a mentor-student relationship. We were colleagues, and super respectful. We had super different viewpoints on politics, and religion, and we were always able, because we saw each other as artistic and teaching peers on one level, we were able to have really great conflicted conversations. And there was always this mentor-student relationship. I was always learning from her. And I actually would look around, and she was much lighter, and kind of loving with some of my other colleagues. And I would look at that and be like, man, I’m not jealous, it’s so wonderful to see her so warm and connected, but I actually don’t want that. I love our relationship. I’m able to learn so much, we learn from each other, this is really great.

 

And so, she held me up, and I got to have this amazing conversation at the end of two years ago, clawing my way out, saying, Janet, thank you, thank you for holding me up. And she looked at me and she said, ‘People held me up when I needed it.’ I’m so glad I was able to thank her out loud for that.

 

So going into this year, I knew that Janet was gonna retire, so everything was the last thing, and I was trying to suck out all of the institutional knowledge. Like, Janet, where do you get this base item repaired? Janet, where do you order this obscure piece of music? All these little questions that you take for granted that that person knows the answer to. I started looking at Janet’s programming for her ensembles, and she’s programming insane pieces. (Music underscore – Russian Sailor’s Dance by Reinhold Glière)

 

I work with the oldest kids, the smallest ensemble and the most advanced ensemble, and Janet was working with the middle orchestra, and she’s programming these really intense pieces, and I’m like, wow. She’s programming her last year. If you’re gonna go out, you’re gonna go out with a bang!

 

Amanda 59:27

Go out with a bang, yeah!

 

Rachel 59:30

It’s like, you’re gonna do all of the huge hits, Russian Sailors’ Dance by Glière, which is like this crazy, loud, full orchestra piece. (Music underscore – Serence for Strings by Pyotr Tchaikovsky) Tchaikovsky’s String Serenade, all these huge pieces. (Music underscore – Nimrod Variation by Edward Elgar) And Nimrod, from The Enigma Variations, by Edward Elgar, which is just this heavy, beautiful, symphonic piece. If you haven’t heard it, it’s slow and sonorous, and beautiful harmonies, only about four minutes long. 

 

All this stuff is on Janet’s desk! And I’m like, you’re doing that?! I’m supposed to be doing that with the other ensembles, okay! This is your last year, you’re gonna do whatever you want. And you’re Janet, so you’re gonna do whatever you want, cos that’s how you roll.

 

Janet is notoriously independent. One morning in December, she was setting up chairs for her ensemble, cos as I said, 75% of the job is just chairs. And she couldn’t form the word, she was calling out to my colleague, Jason, he’s the choral director. And she was saying I need three. I need three. And Jason’s like, ‘Woah, one, Janet never asks for help, so something weird is happening. And two, she can’t think of the word chair. Something’s really happening.’ And Jason went and got the school nurses, and Janet was taken to the hospital. She had a couple seizures, she was put in a medically induced coma, which was very scary. And we didn’t know, we didn’t know what was happening.

 

My colleague, who’s 59, and springy, and an ice skater, and a gardener, and just an avid musician, who never stops moving, who works in all of the buildings in Lexington, she taught in every single building, every year. And here she is, incapacitated. And it was horrifying. So we took her ensembles that day. I went to go see her in the hospital that day, and it was horrifying, and I cried a bunch, because it was just tubes and beeps and quiet, and I hated it.

 

And the next day, I told my boss that I wanted to rehearse, we have a concert coming up the next week, so this is December, and I told my boss that I wanted to take her ensemble, and conduct them at the concert. It’s like, I know these pieces, I need to conduct this programme. And those kids, we were in rehearsal that morning, and we were rehearsing Nimrod from The Enigma Variations, and I told them this story, which is one of my favourite teaching memories, which is at a winter orchestra concert many years ago, that’s the big concert that I referenced earlier with like, hundreds and hundreds of kids, elementary through high school, you always programme your hotshot movie music, to convince the young kids that music is awesome, and that they should stay. So we always programmed the most fun stuff for that concert, and Janet had programmed Nimrod, this sensitive, delicate, sombre, beautiful piece, for the winter orchestra concert? I’m gonna play Hoedown Rodeo by Copland, and trick everybody into being a viola player! That’s my plan! And Janet, she was just such a master educator. She turned towards all of the little kids, and this is a concert in the round, so people everywhere, so she has her back to the audience, she looks at all the 4th graders, and her whole voice and demeanour changed. And she got just so soft, and looking right at them, and only them, she goes, ‘I want you to think of something very slow, and very beautiful, like a sunrise, or a sunset, that you wait a long time for… and finally it’s there, and then as soon as it’s there, it’s gone.’

 

(Music underscore – Nimrod Variation by Edward Elgar)

 

And every 4th grader, and this is a concert with a lot of ambient noise, every 4th grader had huge eyes, and they’re all waiting for the next line in the story. And instead, out of that silence, she starts the piece, and the piece starts with this one single note. And then it flips.

 

If anyone has ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, do you know this children’s book? There’s a chapter about playing the sunrise, that’s so beautiful, that made me think of this piece, and the story about Janet. And all the kids stayed silent through the whole thing. And then after the piece, cos it ends kind of as it begins, just kind of glistening, there was total silence. And then applause. And I thought, oh my goodness, what a beautiful moment, what an amazing teaching experience, what a gentle guiding of listening. She didn’t give them a bunch of musical elements to listen for, she just said, ‘Here’s the experience that I wanna curate for you.’

 

And I told this story to Janet’s students on this Friday morning, while I know that Janet is lying in a medically induced coma, which is very scary. They play the shit out of that piece. They played the shit out of it, and I cried like a baby.

 

Amanda 64:48

The same piece?

 

Rachel 64:49

Same piece. And Janet just happened to have programmed it. It happened to be the thing that we were rehearsing. And they played so well, and the kids are so concerned, and all we knew at this point was Janet’s in the hospital. 

 

That afternoon, I went to go see her in the hospital. Her husband, Eric, was there with me, and I had brought some cookies that I had stayed up late making, because I didn’t know what to do the night before, I was so worried, I just baked cookies at 2 in the morning. I told Eric, I was like, it’s so quiet here. I hate this. Has Janet woken up yet? Has she wiggled? And he’s like, ‘oh, she wiggled a little bit earlier, still waiting.’ It was so quiet here, I hate this, it’s like a din of news channel in the background, and then all these beeps and machines, and exhaling and inhaling and exhaling, mechanically. 

 

And I pulled out my phone, and I’m down really low, talking to Janet, I’m like, Janet, your students were so wonderful in rehearsal today, and we talked about you, and I told them this story, I told them this story about Nimrod, and I was like, here, it’s too quiet here, I’m gonna play you this piece, and I’m sorry about the phone speaker, but I think Elgar would forgive us. (Music underscore – Nimrod Variation by Edward Elgar)

 

And I played it, from my phone, whatever recording came up on the search first, and I told her, as the song was playing, the story of her kids, and the story of me telling her kids the story of her. And I’m crying, and Eric’s crying, and Janet nods. She’s nodding. She’s nodding and nodding and nodding, and I’m like, oh my God, she’s moving, this is the first time I’ve seen her move, and it was this one glimmer of hope, of this is gonna be alright, maybe she’s gonna be alright, she’s still in there, she knows the piece, and she’s nodding really emphatically, and I’m like, yes, this is amazing.

 

And then afterwards, I said, okay Janet, I was up late last night, I made you these cookies, I know the nurse would be really mad if I tried to feed them to you, so let’s try our old trick, cos this would happen when I would bake other stuff, she couldn’t have too many sweets. I would bake something and bring it in, and I’d say, Janet, I made cookies, and she’d say, ‘Can I smell them?’ 

 

And so I said, I think the nurses would be really mad if I tried to cram a cookie in your mouth now, but I’m gonna hold the cookies right underneath your nose, so you can smell them. I put them under her nose, and she raised her eyebrows. She raised both eyebrows, which was very exciting, because they had thought she had had a stroke, and so I was really concerned, like oh my gosh, what if she’s paralysed on one side? And so seeing her raise both eyebrows, and the joy, the tiny bit of joy that was in her face from those chocolate cookies, was like, she’s gonna be alright! And then Eric, martyr that he is, ate the cookies for her. That was his job, was eating all the snacks. 

 

It was this wonderful moment of hope, of sharing, and of music, and I still hate that hospitals are so quiet, and that it was such an ordeal to get anything that would play music, like I brought all these speakers, and was like, Eric, can I set these up? And Eric’s like, ‘too much.’ It’s like, okay, I’ll take the speakers back.

 

It was a tiny glimmer of hope. And after that, Janet got better, and then got much worse, very fast. And it turns out that it was really late stage cancer in her brain, complicated by diabetes and life and everything. And she passed away in early January, it was 32 or 33 days from the day that she got sick. And she was 59, waiting to retire. But not waiting to retire, she wasn’t one of those teachers phoning it in at the end, she was a teacher running harder and faster and stronger than she ever had, and she was gonna run that way until the end. 

 

Amanda 68:55

Wow.

 

MUSIC BREAK – Nimrod Variation by Edward Elgar

 

Rachel 69:08

Yeah, the end was pretty painful. Obviously it’s painful when you know that somebody’s going to die, and the morning that Janet was going to pass away, Eric sent a text message and said, we think this is it, things are not looking good, we think she has a couple hours. And I was driving to work, and I got that text message sitting at a red light, I was like, Eric’s texting me, it’s 7 in the morning, what’s going on? I immediately started sobbing, I called my boss, and my department secretary, the secretary is trying to get me to calm down so she can understand what I’m saying, and what I’m saying is I’m going to the hospital. 

 

And what was really amazing was, I went to the hospital. The other string teachers came to the hospital. The music teachers all came to the hospital. And so I don’t really know what the classes looked like on that Tuesday, because half of the music teachers in Lexington walked out of their classrooms to come and be with Janet. And so it was this amazing, odd reunion, and it was funny, and sad, and quiet, and loud, and there was just a lot of love, and a lot of reverence in the room. And we all had to go to work the next day.

 

And I was at the hospital until that afternoon, when it was time to say goodbye, and let Janet have family time, and we kind of knew that that was the last time we were gonna see her. And all of us said, what do we tell our students? What can we tell our students? And the whole time, the students, we just told them, she’s sick. She’s coming back. She’s sick. She’ll be back. And Janet was saying, I’m sick, but I’m coming back! I’m sick, but I am coming back! Until she couldn’t talk anymore, she was talking about how soon she was gonna be back in the classroom. So no one really knew anything. A couple of us knew some. The students knew that their teacher had been gone for a month. 

 

We went to school on Wednesday morning, and were told, don’t say anything, because we need to organise how the information is disseminated. They have their systems in place for this, there’s a whole team of people that meets up. Administration, and guidance counsellors, and school social workers, and the nurses, like all of the people who you would expect. 

 

But the solution that they arrived at, which they didn’t arrive at until late in the day, was that they were gonna send an email home at 4pm. I think I got an email around my lunch time, so like 11am, that said definitively, she’s passed away. I had to teach the rest of the day. And I’m looking at these students who have had continuous relationships with this woman since they were 9 years old, because of the structure of her job many of them had had her as a teacher consistently since they were 9. And I’m looking at these, and the students know that something is very wrong. They can see it in the faculty’s faces, and especially in the music classes, where all of the music students are having the same experience, they can absolutely pick up. They know that something is really wrong. So that was a really painful day, and I know that I said words about music theory, but I don’t know that anything got taught. I think I had to reteach that lesson on second inversion triads, cos it was not getting there.

 

So the students got an email at 4pm, and then the next day, we were given a one paragraph announcement to read in our first period class. The announcement was Janet Haas, who taught at Lexington for X number of years has passed away suddenly, we are super sad, it was just kind of a one paragraph, very…

 

Amanda 72:47

Stock.

 

Rachel 72:48

Yes. But what is stock for that? How often do you have the unfortunate experience of having a faculty member pass away? This is so awful. And it just didn’t cut it. And there was no space. There was no space for processing, and there was no time. And I mean, one thing in Lexington is that it moves at an incredible pace. But one thing that I gave myself and my students that day was a lot of space. 

 

So I had orchestra first block, and was looking at 100 of Janet and I’s shared students, it’s an ensemble that we taught together. Very close to the beginning of that day. I guess, oh my God, I had to see all the orchestras that day, so I ended up having that conversation three times. And essentially, I read the piece of paper, and I got to the end, and I said, that doesn’t really cut it, does it? And I spent another 20 minutes, 25 minutes, just talking about what she meant, and acknowledging all of the different ways that they might feel, that they may feel a lot, or a little, that they may be sad that their friends are sad, that they may be sad in three weeks, or in three months, or three years, and it’s not linear, and it’s not organised, and I’m trying to draw on my very, fortunately limited, experience of grief, which was mostly poor baby Juno dying almost a year exactly before. And what I learned is that you don’t understand it, and that it comes in waves, and that it’s not organised, and that it’s easier when you share it with other people. And so, I asked my students to be kind to each other, and I asked them to lean on each other, and to acknowledge that other people might need to lean on them. 

 

And in some of the classes, we played a little bit of music, in my chamber orchestra we played the very beginning, we had been working on Dvořák’s New World Symphony, and we played just the opening couple of bars of the second movement, which is Largo, which is sometimes called Going Home. There was music where there could be music, and sometimes I just let it be silence, let students have time. 

 

And then Friday was back to business. And two weeks later it was concerts. And then it was more concerts, and more classes, and more, and we go, and we go, and we go, and we roll on, and we roll on, and we roll on. And it just felt so surreal. Because all of these students had gone through this trauma. And I said that to Janet’s ensemble many times over the course of the year, it’s like, you are going through an exceptional year. This is trauma. This is a wild circumstance, and it’s not normal. It is gonna feel like chaos. And it was never acknowledged in groups. 

 

And I think one of my colleagues who stepped in for Janet long term, and is now in her job, she was working with Janet’s sixth-grade orchestra, so these were Janet’s kids, they’re 11 years old, and she took the whole class period that Friday, the next time she saw them, to just talk to the kids, who had a ton of questions about losing their teacher. To just talk to the kids about, you know, here’s what happened, in kid-friendly language, or I’m gonna acknowledge what you’re feeling. And she got a lot of pushback from the administration, because they’re like, we really think it’s better for the kids to get back to business. They need the structure.

 

Amanda 76:14

No, no, no, no, no, no!

 

Rachel 76:16

I don’t know what the right answer was. But I certainly needed to have some acknowledgement with my students, and I know that my colleague needed that, and I definitely know that the students needed that, and I absolutely know that she’s acting within the best interest of the students. But it was so heartbreaking to hear that she wasn’t supported in that particular decision. Life rolls on and on, and there was no time to process. 

 

The biggest growth of this year for me, I grew in a bunch of ways, but the biggest growth for me was learning to be vulnerable in front of my students, and continuing the process of grief, and showing my students that grief is not linear. Things like, hey guys, I don’t have that music photocopied, because I think that music was on Janet’s computer, and to be quite honest, I’m stalling, and it makes me really sad when I think about it. Just to be very honest. I’m still being professional, and I’m still leading them to make music, but I also think it’s important for them to see, I miss my friend, and I miss my colleague.

 

Amanda 77:21

Have you cried in front of your students?

 

Rachel 77:23

Oh, man, this year? Absolutely! So many times!

 

Amanda 77:27

And how do you ride the line between showing them that it’s okay to be human, and vulnerable, and grieve, and knowing that you also have to hold it together and be the professional adult?

 

Rachel 77:40

I think some of it is posture, and some of it is already built trust. So they know me as a teacher, as a provider of music. I would like to hope that you build some sort of rapport, and some sort of cred up, of, here are the values that I bring, and here’s the information that I bring, and I’m solid enough that you can lean on me if you need to. 

 

Often this year, I was crying while doing something else. So when I was giving this impromptu eulogy to Janet, tears were streaming down my face, but I’m still talking the same way that I’m talking to you. When I cried while conducting Nimrod, my mascara was a hot mess, very upset that no one said anything that my make up was running, but I conducted. I went on. And I think I said something to the audience, I think I told the audience at that December concert when Janet was in the hospital, I told them the same story about the little ones, and thinking of a sunrise. And so many parents were like, wow, I’ve heard that piece a million times and I never thought of it that way, that’s wonderful. And then I proceeded to cry like a baby, while conducting, but it rolls on and on.

 

In terms of losing myself, really being overwhelmed with emotion, that happened once this year. And I don’t know that I handled it well, and it felt like a moment of weakness, so even though I can cry, and I can articulate my emotions to my students, still the one absolutely vulnerable moment, I felt like I was weak and a bad teacher. 

 

The last class for Mixtape Anatomy for the spring semester was on the morning of Janet’s memorial service. The memorial service was in June, even though she had passed away in January. I was taking a group of students to perform, so a group of current students and some alumni, to perform at her memorial, at a church in Boston. 

 

Little backstory, we had had these couple of rehearsals, and at the beginning of these extra rehearsals after school, I started by saying, do you guys just wanna share a memory about Janet? And it ended up being this amazing, almost therapy session, for myself included, that I really needed, which is just to be in a space where other people loved this person the way that I loved this person, and could share funny things, silly things, serious things about them, and just live in that energy. So we would start, I think we spent three quarters of the first rehearsal just talking, and ran a couple of pieces.

 

So it was the day of taking these students to the memorial service. It’s like it was finally real. And maybe it’s because all the concerts this year were over, and the AP exam was over, and all the big tests are over, so finally there was less to distract me. That morning, I was a wreck. I was just on the floor in front of my desk, sobbing. And my coworkers are holding me, and they’re asking, ‘Do you need anything?’, and I’m saying no, I’ve gotta go to class, I’ve gotta teach, and I’m wiping tears off my face, and I stomp through the band room, and I stomp across the quad, and I’m gasping for air, and I fall down on the ground again, and I’m just sobbing. I’m sobbing. The dean of the foreign language building comes out, ‘Are you okay?’ No, I’m not okay, Janet’s memorial is today, and I’m just losing my stuff, and I have to go into this class, and I have to say, I’m so sorry, I can’t teach you. My boss is really proactive, and he’d already sent a sub down to my room, cos at this point I was like, 10 minutes late to class, cos I’d just been staying outside crying, and it’s like, I stumbled into this room, and my eyes are totally red, and I’m barely keeping myself standing, and I said to my students, I’m so sorry. You know I lost this colleague. And these are students that aren’t necessarily in the music department, so they didn’t have the same connection. Unfortunately, there were only about six kids left in this class, cos they were mostly seniors, and it was after the seniors had left, so these poor six kids get this teacher that is just totally broken and crumpled in front of them, and I said to them, her memorial service is today, and I thought that I could teach you today, but I can’t, and I’m so sorry. And I just… I’m sobbing.

 

So that day, it didn’t feel bad to be out of control, it just felt like feeling, and it felt like, there’s no control to be had, this is just what’s happening. And I was so grateful to my colleagues who were so gentle and kind with me that day, to the people who had to do all of my teaching, because I was a mess. I was a mess. And I had never been a mess like that.

 

Amanda 82:17

I told you about a memory I had of my beloved French teacher, Gigi, who was going through a massive life upheaval heartbreak. And I was 18, I think I was a singer in high school, and I remember going into her classroom during a down period, and she was sobbing and broken down. And I look back at my whole high school experience, and I think of all the impressions that I have of all the teachers, all the geometry, and all the physics, and all the Latin, and all the French, and all the jazz improv, and all the home ec, and physical education, and all of the fucking bullshit that they taught us, and I think you cannot understand how priceless it was to walk into a space like that, with a grown up teacher adult, being so vulnerable, and then not shuffling her papers and hiding her tears and saying, ‘Oh, Amanda, how can I help you, do you need to talk about that test?’ And instead she looked at me, and she said, ‘I’m so heartbroken. I’m falling apart here, I don’t know what to say.’

 

And I was like, oh… You trust me. You trust me enough to cry in front of me. That is the most embiggening, most empowering thing an adult in this high school has ever done for me. And they’ve tried to do a lot, and they’ve given us a lot of tests, and they’ve made a lot of lists, and they’ve bought a lot of overhead projectors. This is teaching me, and giving me more, collectively, than almost all of these teachers combined. This shared vulnerability and human moment. 

 

And looking at how we educate our kids, how insane is it that we’re so bad at taking care of each other? And that, with all of the hours and work and effort and buildings and infrastructure and parking lots that go into making a space of educating kids, there’s so little thought given to just how we are together, and how the tribe works and functions together? And an episode like this, where, guess what? The real world still fucking happens. People die. Teachers lose spouses, get ill, lose babies, and still have to get up in front of the class and teach. And how insane is it that it’s become so compartmentalised, that everyone is supposed to be keeping it together all the time? We’re not supposed to be keeping it together all the time, grief is real!

 

Rachel 85:04

That means a lot, and when you told me that anecdote about your teacher, it was so humbling that you’ve carried that memory, because I think about what my students went through this past year, I hope that some sentence that I’ve said to them, some little part of the experience, has at all helped. And just knowing that that could potentially live on as a moment for them is really…

 

Amanda 85:33

I cannot imagine that it won’t.

 

MUSIC BREAK – Nimrod Variation by Edward Elgar

 

Amanda 85:38

This is Amanda Palmer, you are listening to The Art of Asking Everything podcast. 

 

Thank you very, very much to my guest, Rachel Jayson. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram, her Instagram is beautiful. You can visit jaggery.org and armyoftoys.com if you wanna check out either of her bands. 

 

And as you might have noticed, we played some wonderful music in this episode. Very specifically, Russian Sailor’s Dance from the Russian ballet The Red Poppy, composed by Reinhold Glière, Serenade for Strings by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Nimrod Variation, which you are listening to right now, composed by Edward Elgar, part of his larger work The Enigma Variations.

 

The engineer for this interview was Jimmy Garver. For all of the music you heard in this episode, you can go to amandapalmer.net/podcast

 

It was produced by FannieCo, and lots of thanks as usual to my incredible team. Hayley Rosenblum, who makes so many things possible with the podcast and the Patreon. We couldn’t do this without her. My assistant Michael McComiskey, who makes sure all the emails get answered and the trains run on time. Our UK Merch Queen Alex Knight, who’s also helping transcribe all of these conversations so they are accessible to everyone, thank you Alex. Kelly Welles has been helping us with cuts and snips and social medias. And my manager Jordan Verzar in Sydney helps bring us all together. Thank you to my whole team.

 

And last but not least, this whole podcast wouldn’t be possible without all of my patrons. They make it possible for this podcast to have no ads, no sponsors, no censorship, no bullshit, we are just making the media and putting it out there. So thank you to my high level patrons: Simon Oliver, St. Alexander, Birdie Black, Ruth Ann Harnisch, Leela Cosgrove, and Robert W. Perkins, thank you so much all of you guys, for helping me do this.

 

Everyone else, please go to Patreon, become a supporting member, this will give you access to the posts as they go out, and also live chats, and I’m gonna do one with Rachel, so I hope you listen to that too. And usually the podcast comes out on a Tuesday, the live cast comes out shortly after that if we do one.

 

The Patreon is also full of all sorts of other goodness, it’s a fantastic community, so please, even if it’s just for a dollar, join up. 

 

Meanwhile, thank you so much, everyone. Signing off, this is Amanda Fucking Palmer, keep on asking everything.