Evening at Elmer's

Elmer’s labels itself as a General Store—it says it proudly in big letters out front, Elmer’s General Store—but it’s a lot more than that in it’s mixture of ye olde tyme small town and Modern Big City influence in these hill towns of Western Mass. We spent last evening there at a musical venue supporting our friend Jo, a folk/blues singer who lives in our town and whose son (we’ll call him Lilo) is in Li’l T’s Kindergarten class. Jo and her partner Kay are one of many lesbian couples in town, brought here in part due to the fact that this is one of the few states where same sex marriage is recognized, but mainly because they really like the area, as we do. And one of the things we all love about this area, outside of the people, is places like Elmer’s.

Elmer’s serves breakfast, and in the evening hours has coffee house type musical performances with local musicians. But the way the place is set up, it’s almost like they can’t handle success. There was a large crowd there last evening, and we needed to pull in extra chairs from a side room as every small table was filled. The coffee bar was hopping, and Jo had to stop a couple of songs so she wasn’t competing with the cappuccino maker's FROSSHHHHH. At another point, she had to delay a song to allow kids by to get at the penny candy jars (now 10, 15 and 25¢ candy for the millenium) she’d set up in front of.

The environment is a hodgepodge of small town and big city. It feels like an old fashioned general store, with wooden floors and an open plan and a cash register behind a brightly painted wooden counter. But the items for sale tend toward the organic, or to be made by local artisans/craftspeople. No shovels or seed or Domino’s five-pound bags of sugar, but plenty of Blue Agave organic cactus sweetener. "4.5x sweeter than sugar, so you use less!" (Okay, seriously, the stuff is pretty good, but how do you measure 4.5 times sweeter?) And there’s a little sign in one corner reminding breakfast patrons that the menu is limited so that they can get a breakfast to everyone expeditiously—so no three egg white omelet requests, if you please. But count on the fact that the eggs will be from local hens, likely laid the day before. The walls are decorated with framed artwork from local artists, each with a tiny tag at the lower right with the price and artist, and in sum total representing an extremely eclectic mix from primitive to realistic. Yet all of them seem to "go" with the setting.

And last evening, the mix in the room was just as eclectic. There were lots of kids there from our town and the town that Elmers is in, from Lilo’s class and from Big T’s class, so everybody had someone to hang out with. Me, I came for the music. She writes some damn good songs.

Jo’s sexual orientation isn’t really relevant to our relationship, or this story, except that it flavors her songs. One of my favorites of those that she wrote, which I know also is a favorite of Kay, is “Annette”, a funny love ballad on her love affair with Annette Funicello of the Mouseketeers. I love that song. I’ve only heard it three times, so I can’t quote it here, but take my word for it, it’s touching and hilarious at the same time. She writes a lot of her own songs, which is, I think, one of the motivations for people to become accomplished musicians—to write songs about stuff they want to talk about. Which ties into Marcus’s Theory of Musical Relevance in Songwriting (tm): If you’re lucky, you hit a set of lyrics that stick in someones head, and thereby become a part of their mental landscape. Become part of enough landscapes, and you influence culture. And if you’re skillful, you do this without the person, or the culture, even being aware of this goal. Of course, this power can be used for good or evil, as evidenced by how many of us, even now, can quote five words of the Macarena. Shudder.

I developed this theory as I used to write songs in high school. Mostly love songs. I still remember them, as I used to practice them, though I never learned to read or write music. I’d write the tune in my head, and then on paper, and I had pretty good pitch in an empty bathroom or attic. But not knowing music is a crippling detriment to a songwriter, and I never shared the songs with anyone. Eventually I gave up singing as a career goal (your loss, American Idol blooper reel…), but not writing songs. I now just call them poems. I still love reading poetry, mostly classic stuff. Romantic stuff. Stuff written by people who were dead before I was born. Sometimes I still wish I played something beside the harmonica, and that I could read music. And that I could fly and time travel, but that’s another story. Maybe two.

Anyway, the evening went late for us. With the kids bedtime at 9, late only means it went until 9:30 before we turned into pumpkins and turned to hit the icy roads home. Jo’s last song was the one Carol Burnette used to sing at the end of her show. Leaving to the strums of “So Glad We Had This Time Together", I went out to warm the car while everybody else bundled up inside and prepared to face the dark cold. That left me outside, alone, looking up at a nearly starless sky lit by the few streetlights on Main Street in the town of which Elmer’s is a hub. It’s a nice old town. It’s a dark old night. It’s a quiet street, even at 9:30. It’s a good place to be.

And not even a bottle of organic Blue Cactus syrup could make it any sweeter.