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Song Stories, Quiet StoriesMake Mine a Musical Memory Author: Carolyn Murset
Episodes 1-7 tell the back story of Tales of Tila, a one-woman historic musical set in Taos, New Mexico, USA through the first half of the 20th century. The Great War. The Spanish Flu Epidemic. The Great Depression. World War 2. The secret city of Los Alamos, NM during the creation of the atomic bomb. Tila Trujillo was the first in her family and the first in Taos to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church), (the LDS Church). These stories and songs tell of her daily joy, sorrow, and triumph in navigating life and Hispanic Culture in the village of Taos. Get your Spanglish on! Episodes 8 and on explore the stories behind songs by Carolyn Murset and other songwriting friends. Language: en-us Genres: Christianity, History, Religion & Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Earth Mom :| 23
Thursday, 10 June, 2021
Hello! And welcome! You’re listening to Song Stories, Quiet Stories podcast episode 23, Earth Mom. I’m your long lost host, Carolyn Murset. Today is Blue Can Recycling Day in my little town in southwest Utah. I look forward to this every other Thursday morning event that began here just a few years ago, so much that I wonder why I haven’t had my picture taken beside that royal blue 43 inch high polyethylene hinged bin. Wouldn’t it be cool if it were made from recycled materials? My environmentally conscious, almost tree-hugging inclination began with a fire. In 1969, the Taos New Mexico Plaza Movie Theatre caught fire. This was the place where on Saturday afternoons, my dad would drop me and a sibling or two off at the southwest corner of Taos Plaza, the town square, with enough money to buy a movie ticket to watch scary movies and to share a bag of popcorn. This is where we watched Edgar Allen Poe’s the Raven, starring Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, and the Pit and the Pendulum, also starring Vincent Price. Some of my adult issues could be explained by my watching these terrifying classics as an impressionable child. Anyway. Because of that Thanksgiving Day fire, we Taosenos were deprived of a movie theater experience, unless we drove to Santa Fe or even Albuquerque, but our family only drove there to buy supplies for my dad’s plumbing and heating business. So my ambitious dad’s solution, as the leader of our local church congregation, was to rent old films and turn our chapel’s cultural hall into a Friday night theater. I’m assuming my dad was the leader then because during his lifetime, he had the responsibility of leading our congregation five different times, either as Branch President, or as Bishop. We’re Mormons, members of the Cgurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Customarily in the early days of going to the movies, before the featured film began, the audience first watched a short film or a cartoon. During World War 2, the short film was a newsreel to keep the audience up to date on the events of the war. Watching the world events unfold as moving images provided a more reel experience (yeah, that was a pun) than reading about them in the newspaper or listening to them on the radio. Not everyone had a radio, or had access to a newspaper back then. I was a young teen when I attended the church hall movie theater, which had the best concession stand. People attending brought homemade treats for the bake sale to pay for the movie rental? and I still remember Mrs. Labrum’s double decker fudge.Sigh. Again and anyway, my dad also rented short films to project onto the church hall movie screen that hung from the ceiling above the stage, until you somehow grabbed that metal loop and pulled it down. One film that made such an impression on my 13 year old mind was of a family (who were actors trying to prove a point, and with me, they did.) living at an urban landfill. Their home had walls, and window openings but no roof. They lived among the piles and piles of trash. That impression of the disturbing images didn’t translate into action until a decade later when I was married and a young mother. My first effort was waddling with my good sport of a husband to a fabric store on Center Street, Provo, Utah (and there were three of those stores, just on that street) to buy diaper flannel. Once home, we folded and zig zagged the edges of the fabric and made an impressive stack of diapers, that we’d later fold into kite shape before placing our clean bottomed baby on top. Then with two large diaper safety pins, we’d fasten the diaper snuggly around our baby’s bottom, and then cover the diaper with vinyl diaper covering with elasticized leg openings and waist, and hope the diaper would stay dry longer that a few minutes. Disposable diapers were a new invention in 1979, when our first child was born, and they had no elastic around the legs and waist.
