Gittel Fruma

You may never have heard of the mythical album project I have been compiling for the last ten years. That may be because I am also hard at work on the book, finishing what feels like the hundredth revision. Constancy would not be the most applicable adjective here because I can’t seem to consistently work on it or tell anyone about it. Fun fact about thoughts in your head: Other people can’t hear them.

I could tell you a long story about California, Minnesota and Florida which involves a great deal of house-hopping, hopeful waiting and harried striving, but let’s skip all of that and stay in the present.

After a great deal of thought followed by a sudden epiphany, I am going back to the very beginning. As Julie Andrews sang, it’s a very good place to start. Ok, I lied, I’m going back to the past after all.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved singing. She had long, brown hair that would sometimes billow in the wind on the playground while she belted Disney songs at the top of her lungs from the jungle gym. The rabbi’s daughter used to call her Pocahontas, although she always fancied herself more of a Belle. “Madame Gaston, can’t you just see it?”

Every Saturday at the Chabad synagogue, she would sit on the women’s side of the sanctuary and sing the Hebrew prayers. She listened to how her mother would weave her voice through the low hum of the men and try to follow. After her parents’ divorce, she found herself alone in the women’s section and, as a girl over twelve years old, men were not permitted to hear her voice unless she was singing with them. She continued singing her mother’s harmonies and explored new ones.

In high school, while everyone else was obsessed with the latest hits, she preferred jazz and skilled lyricists. She read Chaucer and Gone With the Wind from the front row of her chemistry class until the teacher started lecturing. He told her she could pull up her grade if she read her textbook as much as she read Margaret Mitchell. She didn’t. It was the only C she earned in high school.

She never took chorus, opting instead for the clarinet and drama. After graduating her masters program, she taught herself how to play the piano. She played well enough to record melodies and write chords to the songs she wrote, but she felt clumsy in comparison to when she sang. Like the painter whose unskilled hand cannot translate his mind’s eye to his canvas, I could hear the arrangements in my head, but could not reproduce them on the keys.

While I have not given up hope that a team could come together in Florida, I have decided not to let their current absence be an impediment. Since it all started with my voice, that’s what I’m going back to. I never intended for the LONG awaited EP to be completely vocal, but that is what it will be. Someday, I will find musicians who are as excited about this music and, more importantly, the message, as I am. Until then, I am hard at work. More to come soon. For real this time.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. – Isaiah 43:19 NIV