Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 6 of 6

“News travels fast,” she said. “That’s what I get for betting on Lola Rae to do anything sane.”

“I hear she’s comin’ back,” Cody said.

“Figures. You gonna come see me in my suffering?” she asked.

“I might fall by. Arty said he’s tired of being the only Negro at his nightclub.”

Hackenbush shrugged, but Ross thought it was funny.

“He said that? Hell, Cody, maybe I should come by, too, except lute music gives me hives,” he managed to say between guffaws.

“Laugh it up, cats, at least dinner comes with the gig and you know how good the food is there,” she said on her way out. Eddy was packed up and tapping his foot waiting for her to get with it. They went back to her place; she’d spent part of her afternoon cleaning it up and changing the sheets.
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Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 5 of 6

“How?” Shorty asked. He was a big fan of the willowy, blond dancer, but knew she had certain eccentricities and gave them a wide berth. One of them was that she mauled Hackenbush every chance she got.

“She grabbed my hair at Bart’s Bar and Grill to tell me she liked the way I sang ‘Moonglow’,” Hackenbush said, opening her VW Bug’s door for him. “She could have just told me, but no, she had to bend me nearly backwards to tell me.”

“Well, we are talking about Lola Rae, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Thank God Cody held me up while she did it.” Hackenbush shuddered at the memory. “I might have been snapped like a twig.”

Shorty didn’t comment on Hackenbush’s un-twig-like figure; few twigs of his acquaintance had quite so many curves as she did. He merely smiled, and said he figured Lola was in the Bay Area for good. “She’s knocking them dead up there.”

“Dancing?”

“Of course!”
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Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 4 of 6

Hackenbush was happy; dear God, at last she was happy. All the years of scuffling, starving, working day jobs, suffering, and moments of pure musical bliss, followed by long stretches of creative growth, when all the work paid off and the music was as free and easy as breathing. In all those years, she’d always felt threatened, scared, and watched her back. Shorty was the first person in LA she felt safe enough with to let her guard down and relax a little. And now Eddy: Lordy, did that man make her feel safe and loved. She carried the warmth of his arms through the hours without him. His embrace was the home she thought she’d never find, and she knew it would be there when she got back to him. His love was one of the few things outside of herself she could count on. It was always something to look forward to at the end of the day, there was Eddy Lee, home, and all the peace and love in that.

She had thought that when she found this kind of love, she’d understand all those happy songs. It was not the case. No song could capture what she felt, not even words and music could do it justice. So, she reasoned, either what she had with Eddy was unique or this kind of once-in-a-lifetime love was just bigger than thirty-two bars and a verse could express. Hackenbush now had a better understanding of the dark songs of lost and hopeless love. She felt she knew more about them from her observations of others’ emotional shipwrecks and her own varied and personal experience. She still sang those songs, they were some of the greatest songs ever written; but she now sang them with more hope than tragedy, in an effort to tell her audiences that life is sad, but it might not always be. She kept the message subtle, because she didn’t want to get bashed in the face by some heartbroken poor devil who hated her for her happiness. And Hackenbush could dig it: when she was really down, the last thing she wanted was to hear about somebody else’s joy. It was petty of her, but there it was.
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Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 3 of 6

Shorty was a patient soul and Hackenbush loved him dearly for it. He made her look like a better dancer than she was and made her into a better dancer than she thought she could ever be. So as not to provoke him and because she really was interested in this complicated new dance he’d concocted, she only smoked half her Pall Mall. “Okay, boss, I’m back on the clock,” she said, picking a shred of tobacco off her tongue.

Shorty giggled and turned the metronome back on. He worked them hard for another hour and then they had dinner at a Thai place across from the Samsara School of Oriental Medicine on Third near Rampart.
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Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 2 of 6

“Mabel, there’s still only four beats in that bar,” he said over the metronome.

“I know, Shorty, I know,” she rasped at him. “How about a break? I can’t feel my feet anymore.”

He agreed and she promptly stepped outside for a cigarette. “You might last longer, dear, if you didn’t smoke,” he observed.

“I’d kill people if I didn’t smoke,” she observed back at him.

Since there was no comeback to this, Shorty left her to smoke in peace. He went back inside to look at the exhibit of photos of some landscape he didn’t recognize. Art was the last thing he thought about at the Photography Center; Hackenbush was the first. They’d met there, two years ago: Shorty was dancing two solos in a little revue set to Cole Porter songs and Hackenbush and her baritone ukulele were the majority of the music. The show was produced, directed and choreographed by Gregg Schroedingmeier, now long-gone from the LA dance scene, whose main complaint was that Hackenbush’s voice got more attention than his dancing, his lighting, and everything he could take credit for. Shorty was surprised the egomaniac didn’t take credit for the voice God gave the woman, but Hackenbush’s voice was a thing unto itself. Soft, but powerful in its softness and vulnerable in its strength. Shorty eventually figured out the ukulele, which she could play credibly, was more prop than instrument, even if it went perfectly with her smoky, sultry voice.

After the performance, he’d tracked her down and asked her to dance with him. At first she said no, she didn’t dance, don’t ask her. But he kept asking and eventually, when a paying gig came along, she agreed, and found that not only could she dance, she loved it.

Serialization:
Part 1 of 6

Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective Sample Serialization Part 1 of 6

1984

It wasn’t obvious at first, but Mabel Hackenbush, better known as Dr. Hackenbush, was a well trained and serious musician. She looked younger than her twenty-eight years, and a big pair of black horn-rim glasses took the edge off her steely gaze. Singing with Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra, she appeared to be just another chick singer, albeit one with a better than average voice and phrasing. However, there was more to her than that; not only could she read music, including symphony and opera scores, she could sight-sing, arrange for anything up to a big band, conduct, and even orchestrate. She was one of the finest products of the Grove School of Music, which in its bare-bones, stripped-down, no-frills way produced some of the best composers and arrangers in the industry. She’d done well at Grove in spite of the three strikes against her: she was a vocalist, she didn’t play the piano very well, and she was female. There were no women getting screen credits in film composing in 1984, and only a few in arranging (which was a dying art—Quincy Jones and the marvelous arrangements on the “Thriller” album notwithstanding). There were few female conductors, so Hackenbush was a woman in what was still essentially a man’s world. And she couldn’t have cared less; her goal had been to get the best musical education she could afford as quickly as possible and the mind-numbingly, life-crushing Composition and Arranging Program at Grove only took a year to complete. Thank God for that; after a year of poverty, sleep deprivation and driving to the valley almost every day, she was ready for a new life. After Grove, she managed the music industry by ignoring it. She and her baritone ukulele made themselves welcome in every jazz standards-loving club and lounge in the city. When she hooked up with the dancer Shorty Smith, they became the must-have act at every chic venue and upscale party in the county. Sidemen came and went, but the core act was Dr. Hackenbush and Smith.

Or had been. About a year ago, Eddy Lee, guitar player and frontman of the Eddy Lee Trio asked them to join him, Cody Cole on bass and a cat named Ross on drums, and make it a quartet or quintet, depending on one’s point of view. They’d met one night when Hackenbush was singing serious jazz (she could do that, too) and Eddy was sitting in. It was as close to love at first sight as Hackenbush ever got. Eddy was in love, too; when she joined the band, he changed the name to Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra. Hackenbush figured if that wasn’t love, she didn’t know what was. The drummer and bass player eventually accepted her and Shorty, mainly because Hackenbush and Shorty got them a lot more gigs than they’d been getting as a pure jazz trio. Yeah, the Hackenbush and Shorty shtick was a little goofy, but man, could she sing and, man, could they dance.

Which is what they were doing that very Sunday afternoon at the Los Angeles Photography Center. Shorty was in the money enough to afford ten bucks an hour for three hours on a good floor and plenty of room to trip the light fantastic in. A meticulous choreographer, he didn’t let Mabel get away with being lazy in rehearsals. She was a hesitant dancer until she learned her steps and then she was fine; prone to improvise, but Shorty almost had her out of that bad habit.

Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job sample serialization, part 6 of 6

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Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job sample Serialization, part 5 of 6

For those of you who’d rather read without annotation and commentary, here’s a pdf of these pages more or less.

For those of you who’d like to buy the book, well, here’s where you can do that.

Otherwise, click on the “Continue Reading” link to continue reading.
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Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job sample Serialization, part 4 of 6

For those of you who’d rather read without annotation and commentary, here’s a pdf of these pages more or less.

For those of you who’d like to buy the book, well, here’s where you can do that.

Otherwise, click on the “Continue Reading” link to continue reading.
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Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job sample Serialization, part 3 of 6

For those of you who’d rather read without annotation and commentary, here’s a pdf of these pages more or less.

For those of you who’d like to buy the book, well, here’s where you can do that.

Otherwise, click on the “Continue Reading” link to continue reading.
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