Odds' Blog

Hi-

I've enjoyed Odds Bodkin magic since seeing him as part of Wellspring...and still find the talent amazing!

My Mom had multi-infarct dementia which left her unable to concentrate on things for any length of time, TV, movies, only seemed to frustrate her or were unable to hold her attention. Music had been a long time love, and occasionally, she would find some she enjoyed enough to stay focused for a while.

Last Christmas we were bringing her with us to my daughters for the holiday and frequently long rides in the car were a challenge. Looking at ways to keep the hour long trip comfortable was going to be interesting. We put "Winter Cherries" in and she sat completely involved in the story, her face literally beamed. The rest of the stories on the tape were of some interest, but nothing held her focus like Sir Clegus!

You gave her the best gift of the entire holiday season, and I owe you our heartfelt thanks. I realize the holidays were a half a year ago, but your email reminded me I planned to write--it was on my "To Do" list...I just kept trying to get there...

Thank you again--for all of your magic!!
(Name Withheld for Privacy)

Join Odds for the new StoryBlast! concert on June 12th, 7:00 pm at the Chautauqua Theater

in Boulder, CO. The Runaway Horse on 12-string guitar. The Elf of Springtime (on Celtic harp). Other stories and the new Electric Three Little Pigs, the hottest song story on the planet. Odds will wail on his Gibson SG electric guitar and midi stomp drum for the grand singalong finale to the fabulous evening of stories and songs. For ticket information call 303-952-1632!

Odds will give three performances May 19th and 20th at the Storytelling Festival of Carolina in Lauringburg, NC! Fans and friends in the south, stop on by!

    My wife Mil and I walked out along the bog this past autumn. A shaft of light lit up an incandescent cloud of gnats, hovering in what looked like mindless flight above the orangish dirt of the path.
    "Once I was sitting in the Duke Gardens by myself, and I witnessed a metaorganism," I said to her.
She urged me to continue, so I did. "Just like that cloud there, they were just flying around. But then they grouped themselves, within about a second, into three perfect hovering columns." I gestured with my hands. "About three feet tall and ten inches wide. Like perfect geometric cylinders."

Lots has been happening! If you'd like to read about recent goings on, please use the link below

Remember back in the 90's when everybody was talking about having "peak
experiences"? Those runners' highs, those scaling-of-Everest moments of
immense accomplishment? The ones that lift your spirit right out of the day-to-day
messing around that we Americans do to make money and up into some sort of
troposphere of happiness? Remember that?

The children's caretakers were all black, all women, and all overweight. I'd gone to 117th Street in Harlem and stood there, a blond, skinny white kid, and led them down the hot tiles to 110th Street, to Central Park. It was a sweltering day. The caretakers were not enjoying themselves overly much, I could tell, because it was a long walk, and the children, all multiple-handicapped, rode in wheelchairs. The caretakers had to push them.

I wrote The Takeover Before Christmas, a doggerel rhyme, years ago. I even recorded it, prematurely, it turns out, with a rather tawdry musical setting. Oh well, don't we wish we could change the past sometimes.

A California Crank is a lowly plastic swivel for rotating the tuning heads on guitars. Since twelve-string guitars sprout twelve such heads, without a crank the poor soul stringing them must laboriously turn them--in the case of any guitar player who doesn't like playing on rusted strings--with his or her fingertips.

Day 1

I'm in the storyteller's cottage. It's nighttime, and warm outside. No breeze. I'm a pilgrim to the Mecca of storytelling, Jonesborough, Tennessee. And as any pilgrim is, I'm wide-eyed, in my case at the soft beauty of the Tennessee hills and hollows, lying in the haze, betopped by houses of all various kinds, from the meanest of trailers to the finest of McMansions.

It arrived in a tall, corrugated cardboard shipping box that was almost as tall as I am. The UPS deliveryman had rung the bell, and I'd lifted the third floor window (one of the few new windows in my otherwise ancient house in New Hampshire) and told him to leave it outside the door. It was drizzling. I knew I'd have to go downstairs immediately to get it out of the weather.

I arrived in time to be trapped by a seemingly endless line of BMW's and Town
and Country minivans. They inched their way laboriously past the immense old
multi-storey school, dropping off children.

I was Bronxville, New York, an affluent Westchester County neighborhood where
what were once hollows and glades in woods now boasted immense and impressive
homes, buried in good landscaping.

I glimpsed my wife and manager Mil outside the hall, working with Sue Petersen and the other moms. My super-ugly iridescent cobalt tropical shirt-- the one that sets off airport security alarms all by itself-- had begun to moisten as my clothes invariably do when I'm warming up 12-strings. Mil thinks this shirt should be burned, but I like it. Soon enough I'd have to put on my stage black. I was still wearing shorts. Tuning guitars. Checking the sound system. Why put on hot clothes too soon? After all, this was Florida.

"We’ve decided not to bring in the twenty maximum security inmates," I’d been told. Still, as the fourteen to seventeen year olds entered, they walked as if in straight jackets, arms folded across their chests. A security measure, I sadly assumed. Poor kids.

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.