More musical interludes

When I’d get exasperated by stupid human behavior, my late bestie would settle me down by saying, “Now, Bethie, don’t get so upset. You know the average IQ is 100.” These days, as I continue to work through my grief at her passing, I find myself missing hearing it from her own lips. I miss it often, because examples are popping up with such great frequency. Oh, there’s the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome, a current version of which is an overemotional assumption that the destruction of the Iranian theocracy’s leaders and warmaking capabilities is a sign we’re losing, and a harbinger of those coming back bigger and badder. Then there’s hysteria over the International Olympic Committee’s imposition of a one-time genetic test qualification for participating in the women’s brackets.

Discouragement is a part of grief, so I don’t need brain-dead opining nudging me further in that direction. And yet, it’s there.

Fortunately, life goes on. I may feel like I’m wandering aimlessly sometimes, but the wandering has been on a path of good music, including a stretch of four days in a row of aimless enjoyment.

The first evening of enjoyment was at the Fillmore Auditorium, where Grahame Lesh had gathered quite an ensemble of Grateful Dead-adjacent musicians for a three-night musical memorial for his dad, Phil Lesh. It was wonderful, especially with the massed guitars and vocals. The cult figure Don Was, who played standup bass with another recently dead Dead, Bobby Weir, was part of the Friday night lineup, as was Tom Petty’s sidekick Benmont Tench.

It was just a tad bittersweet to have Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes taking part. I’d gotten on line early in hopes of getting one of the table seats upstairs, and I did not see my old “show buddy,” a big fan who’d introduced me to that band. He had pushed me away last year, very angrily when I dropped in on him at his shop hoping to assure myself he was all right. I thought of the intense therapy he’d undertaken, and had to conclude, sadly, that maybe he’d gone off the rails.

I still had an excellent time, including happy interactions with other female Deadheads. Some favorite Dawes tracks of mine: A Little Bit of Everything, When My Time Comes, May All Your Favorite Bands Stay Together.

I went in a different direction the following evening, to Berkeley for some Bach: the cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (I had much sorrow) followed by the Ascension Oratorio. I chose a $40 ticket over the $100 one, which meant balcony. When I asked if the church had an elevator, I was told no. Though I said I could handle the stairs, the ticket lady got me a seat on the aisle in the last row. Then another organizer came and told me that row was reserved for a group. When I showed her my new voucher, she went and consulted with her associate, then came back and placed me in the fifth row.

The performers were the Cantata Collective, conducted by the esteemed Nicholas McGegan. I bought their 3-CD set of the St. Matthew’s Passion on my way out, planning to make listening to it part of my Good Friday devotions.

On Sunday afternoon, the Down Home Music Store was throwing a listening party for their new Clifton Chenier centennial box set. It’s on Arhoolie Records, which Smithsonian Folkways took under its wings with the passing of founder and ace ethnomusicologist Chris Strachwitz. Strachwitz had been maneuvered into discovering Clifton Chenier by the latter’s cousin Lightning Hopkins. Louisiana music had featured the button accordion, and Cajun music still does, but Clifton’s daddy bought him a piano accordion, and the rest was Zydeco history. The store is hoping to throw an outdoor screening this summer of quirky documentary filmmaker Les Blank’s story of Zydeco, “J’ai Été Au Bal / I Went to the Dance,” which got a digital remastering a few years ago and is great fun.

On Monday, I nudged my friend into meeting for our weekly lunch an hour earlier so I could get down the hill to the Veterans Memorial in Civic Center for the San Francisco Opera annual meeting. The company’s outlook is bright, and we were treated to some excerpts from confidence-inspiring Merola Program Fellows who could both sing and act. And, there was talk about the upcoming summer 2027 Ring Cycle (yee haw!).

These fun outings made me feel I was returning to the land of the living, and cushioned the average IQ is 100 effect of reading the usually excellent sportswriter Ann Killion freak out over the news that the International Olympics Committee will require a one-time chromosome test for competing in women’s events. Yeah, it was the usual, sad to say. An “overly simplistic” move with “significant negative consequences,” one she claimed “capitulates to political pressure while ignoring complex scientific realities.”

Politically, there’s a claim this test was reinstated to kiss up to President Trump with the 2028 Olympics being held in the States. I think that’s as opposed to the fact that we got this because a woman is in charge for once. Moreover, the policy is anything but simplistic: it will exempt those who flunk but have not gained advantages from testosterone. Coverage I read specifically mentioned Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. And, when I went to the Erin in the Morning blog for the hysterics, I was not disappointed. “The screening … will target not only transgender women [duh!] but also intersex people—including cisgender women who carry a genetic condition that some argue makes them ‘male’ despite having been born with a vagina and uterus, raised as girls, and having lived their entire lives as women,” a few of whom had 46,XY karyotypes yet had given birth with medical assistance.

And so, with a quick web search, I learned about Swyer syndrome: 46,XY people typically with normal vulvas, but underdeveloped gonads and fibrous tissue termed “streak gonads” (boogity boogity?). They typically will not experience puberty without hormone replacement therapy. “The cause is often, but not always, inactivation of the SRY gene, which is responsible for sexual differentiation.”

When such a gene is defective, the indifferent gonads fail to differentiate into testes in an XY fetus. Without testes, no testosterone or anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) is produced. So, this would be another “complex scientific reality” that would actually not be ignored, given that the goal is to keep testosterone-enhanced athletes out of women’s competitions.

“Now, Bethie, don’t get so upset. You know the average IQ is 100.” Were my bestie here, I would reply that the East German embassy was not available for comment.