by Pamela Holm
Because the night.
My phone rang and Linda Kelly’s name glowed on the screen. Lifting it to my ear, I dragged it through a spiderweb that wrapped around my hand, and stuck to my face.
“Season of the Witch” Linda said. “Do you want to write something on the theme Season of the Witch, for the new issue of Haight Street Voice?”
I laugh while wiping spiderweb goo off my face. It’s 10PM and I’m halfway up a tree in my backyard, picking apples by the light of the moon. “Sure,” I say. How can I NOT write about Season of the Witch.
I’m picking apples because I leave town first thing in the morning, and by the time I return the apples with likely have fallen to the ground and gone bad. I’m leaving town to see Patti Smith at Pappy & Harriets in Pioneertown in the Hi desert, near Joshua Tree, where I live half the time.
I was in high school when Patti Smith first came on the scene and chased folk music off my playlist. She was raw and elemental and tossed buckets of reality onto the 1960s ethos, that had lingered well into the ‘70s. Now, more than forty years later, on a warm desert night under a skyful of stars, she is still working her magic.
With words strung like beads, deliberate, contrasting, Patti Smith cast a spell on the audience. All of us, stone still, eyes forward, hearts open and entranced by the skinny figure in black rags with tangled braids, who looked as if she’d run through a forest on the way to the stage. Even the desert wind was tamed into a warm breeze.
Throughout the night, Patti laughed and told stories with a grounded humility, yet appeared to see past the audience, past the earth’s curvature, and into the realm of the spirits. Song after song was in memorium or celebration of departed lovers, friends, heroes, and all utterly devoid of sadness or melancholy. She even tricked us into thinking that a song about a dead woman washing up on the shore, was a happy tune, and effortlessly convinced 900 strangers into singing happy birthday to her dead husband.
Moth wings caught the stage light and flickered overhead like shooting stars, and there was no question that Patti Smith is now and has always been, season after season, a witch. I only wish I’d thought to bring her some apples.
Pamela Holm is an SF- and desert-based writer, author, and playwright. A wonderfully wise witch with words! pamela.l.holm@gmail.com.
