Now, thirty years later, the original tape of the event has been unearthed by Ed Roseman, a composer and musician now living in Massachusetts.  Edly has cleaned up the recording (slightly) and posted it up on his web site.

It’s not to be mistaken for a high-grade anything.

But the concert, for me, is full of humor and sentiment.  Interestingly, it’s the quiet, melancholy tunes, with the audience momentarily hushed, that touch me the most now.   Still, “Mr. Rogers Does the Puppets Voices” and “New Jersey” and “Just a Bunch of Assholes from Outer Space” are a really nice portrait of where I was, at that time, then.

You can download the concert here.  This will put a folder on your laptop that contains all the tunes, which you can then play right on your iTunes player, or whatever other application you use.  The download will take about five minutes, plus or minus, depending on  your connection speed.  Hope you enjoy.

But there I was in the days after the news, cruising the old clips on Youtube, and finding myself terribly moved. Probably just that old passage of time thing, I guess. But look: there I am in 1965, at my aunt’s house in Potter county, Pennsylvania, and there’s my cousin Dave, about to get drafted, arguing with his dad about serving in Vietnam (he eventually got C.O. status); there’s my cousin Peg playing the guitar and singing, with her long hair hanging down. A few years later I was given that guitar, a Stella. And she also gave me a bunch of P,P, & M 45 singles: Blowin in the Wind; Puff; The Lily of the West, and so on. Years later, that first P, P & M record was the first record I ever bought. I remember it had Lemon Tree on it, and This Train is Bound for Glory. There was something on the liner notes of the record (remember “liner notes?”) about how “maybe innocence is coming back!”

What can I tell you– among the many things I knew back then was that I wanted to be someone like this Mary some day, as idiotic a dream as that seemed. I know 1000s of women, of course, many of them trans, but I am the only person I know who, from the earliest age, dreamed of being a beatnik. When I went through transition, I really did have to pass through the “60s hippie” stage of my fashion and deportment, followed by the “70s hippie” stage, followed by..etc. I think scientists call this process “Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.”

In 1987, I drove from Baltimore to Nova Scotia with a heavy heart, trying, as I used to put it, to “solve the ‘being alive’ problem.” I had a crappy old version of the Warlocks singing “In the Early Morning Rain” on the tape deck, which I listened to, all haunted. “I’m a long way from home, and I miss my loved one so. In the early morning rain, with no place to go…”

Anyhow: here we are, 2009. I’m the one who plays coal mining songs, and protest tunes, on my Oscar Schmidt autoharp now, and I’ve got that long straight hair, right out of 1965. You see this video of young Mary Travers? I look like that now, except, you know, deformed and old. But you could do worse, than to want to spend your life singing songs, and fighting injustice.

Remind me again: What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?

A late breaking Thursday-morning update… alert readers have written to me pointing out that clearly the creature pictured next to me is actually the THING, not the HULK, a distinction so obvious I’m mortified to have failed to comprehend it.  Thing, all rocky;  Hulk, green.  The Times regrets the error ….and to be serious for just a fraction of a second, this THING is actually one of my favorite gentlmen in the world, Ox Freeman, who is a stalwart of SoCo as well as the trans community, and I have tremendous respect for him.  Ox needs no disguise to pull off superhero status, not in my book anyhow. …also, please note the just-arrived photo of Mara Kiesling and herself at the bottom of this page, taken at the NCTE reception. … more photos as they arrive.

Original post: Okay, so I’m back from Atlanta, where the PORCUPINE WOMAN show went just fine. Very different to perform that material for a trans audience. Felt like a home game, as opposed to, say, an away game. A few photos of the whole debacle are now trickling back to me from friends. Above, for instance, observe my dear friend, The Incredible Hulk, who always only wanted to be a girl. To the Hulk, what could I say, but, Man. I know exactly how you feel.

Later, I was drafted at the last second to sub as the co-host of the talent show, a duty I performed at the behest of one Mara Kiesling, head of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Here we are, in the photo below right, on stage together, moments before singing “You are my Sunshine” in two part harmony, with me on autoharp.

Southern Comfort is its own deranged, delightful world, a place where I spend the first ten minutes thinking, whoa, this is really strange, and the rest of the time thinking, Ah, if only the world were like this. There’s a lot of hope, and jubilation, and fear, even, in the air there, and I always leave deeply moved. The most poignant moment for me is always Sunday morning, when I see all those trunks and suitcases going by, being hauled by men (and women) of many sizes, none of whose private selves you might guess at from looking at them. And you realize that in those trunks and suitcases are so much of what these good people value, and is kept secret from the world. What’s the Paul Simon line? “People singing songs, that voices never share.” I feel lucky to live my truth out in the open. But I know that this comes at a price, and I do not expect that everyone need, or even ought, to pay the price that I had to pay, or that my family did. And does. Anyhow. All of this notwithstanding, it’s a gas. And I send my love out to everybody who said hello to me, or who was touched by anything I managed to say, or do, or, uh, sing.

I left SoCo with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” upon my brain– “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” That poem, famously, is the story of a vision of an enchanted place, but which fades when the vision is broken. But were we able to summon back that song of the dulcimer, we might build that dome in air. Those caves of ice.

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For she on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Wednesday, 9 PM….And now, another late breaking photo– here’s Lindsay Nowak, along with herself and her fabulous Oscar Schmidt 21 chord autoharp.