Laura Veirs a singer-songwriter, mom, teacher and author in Portland, was slated to teach at Stanford April 4-5, then perform at The Mitch, April 6 — all postponed or cancelled due to the pandemic and “shelter in place”.

Laura meanwhile posted a tutorial on her Raven Marching/self-titled Youtube channel for “Galaxies” — now with nearly 2,000 views — and later nine other songs. I meanwhile, partly as a gift to Laura, and plaintiff whelp, send her prompt to some friends and family – -including other Earthwise at the Mitch performers, past and prosective.

Terry, Terry my wife, the artist and front line health care worker, Terry Acebo Davis, suggested Ben down the street. A few weeks elapsed — I had posted the six previous results — but today on our way back from not-the-farmers-market — the farmers-gray-market — we saw Ben and he appeared in rare form, the sun was just right and it was Shabbat, I thought to hit him up.

Ben L. from Palo Alto — not Ben my nephew in Daly City and not Ben in Portland who works with Laura – -and not me — ok, I do have a walk on or cameo, and I’m the camera guy, and I’m the Hal Willner of Downtown North, and a fan of the late great Mal Sharpe, “Man on the Street” — but my middle name is Ben, too, or Bennett and I briefly, when I was 8 signed my papers in Mrs. Todd’s class “Ben The Great”, with his response to Laura Veirs “Galaxies” just the barre chords, strumming pattern and first verse – -its about sadness or loss or people, and fish:

By the way I marked this one “sex” which means “gender” because Ms. Veirs is a woman, w, o, m, a, n, and “austistic” sic because the only time I’ve met her or seen her perform — half a set — was in Austin at SXSW in 2005. Here is her tutorial: it’s actually A minor, C, G, F barre chords: Here is the original which you will note has a very nice video and the song itself, the performance, is very well produced – -she was on Nonesuch for a while the best label for hard to categorize good music. A huge imprimatur. She found me thru Bill Frisell. I will report back if she either agrees to re-schedule – -no sooner than the fall, certainly, or officially passes. She is offering an online version of her songwriting course, or something like it. I guess you could add “actor” to her CV: coda: Here is Sylvie S of SF — clip from the previously posted or published version — I called it the Earthwise Siphonophore Chorus named after a long-tailed sea creature: Edit to add, later that day: i’ve watched Ben’s video 10 times it’s perfect; Rereading the text I realize that “plaintiff whelp” It is probably not the best I can do; I mean parentheses pleading parentheses Howl or yell or utterance parentheses maybe “Plaintive yelp” there was a dog in the scene plus a butterfly