Odds' Blog

My friend Roy Stevens drove me into San Francisco Sunday. I'm performing here in Modesto for a couple of weeks, and Sunday was my only day off. Roy had a rehearsal with Jonathan Khuner, a conductor for the Berkeley Opera and San Francisco Opera. Roy is an international opera singer, a heldentenor (a heroic tenor, ideally suited for singing Wagnerian Opera, which he does wonderfully, along with his wife, Annalisa), and was preparing to spend four hours rehearsing moments from Siegfried and Gotterdamerung with Jonathan at the piano.

It was eighteen degrees tonight, balmy feeling by comparison. I sat outside in my robe, boots, fleece tunic, fleece jacket, gray hat with flaps and some new gloves. I've snowblown a little path up from the driveway and out across the back yard to my lawn chair. It's green and most people sit on theirs in summer, but mine is still out there. I shook the snow off it today. Felt wonderfully warm.

Blacklisted.

"He should be blacklisted, that Odds Bodkin," she had said, the storyteller Gerry had met many years ago, when he and I had started working together. At least that's what Gerry told me, sitting there in his recording studio the other day. After all these years he'd told me.

I had come to pick up the final CD masters-a golden one, bound for our audio manufacturer, and a white one, same data--for us to listen to and give the final ok on The Harper and The King: The Story of Young David, our next release.

"She really said that," I responded.

"She sure did."