In the fall of 1978, I began driving the seventeen miles from the communal Sufi house in Petaluma, CA to Sebastopol every Sunday morning, over winding country roads through Sonoma County’s peaceful bucolic scenery, to meet with eleven other singers and our director for the Sufi Choir, Allaudin (Bill) Mathieu. He had a music studio housing his grand piano with [...]

[Photo: Sufi house Petaluma, CA, residents, Francine in center, late 1970's] In 1975 or 76 I visited my close friend Lani and her husband at their lovely large old house in the country in Mendocino County. Lani had always been interested in mysticism and esoteric studies, and had been initiated into western Sufism, a mystical aspect of Islam, and given [...]

After high school I enrolled at San Jose State College (now University) where I had a tuition scholarship which was not worth much given the low price of state school tuition at that time. I could have gone to Stanford (youthful mistake in judgement), but San Jose had the best commercial art department I could find. (Photo: Francine graduates in [...]

I want to back up a bit. In my last blog about middle school music, I said we’d move on to high school and rock and roll. (Photo: Mighty Mouse of American Bandstand) But my relationship with rock and roll, as I mentioned in Part I, began when I was seven or eight years old. I started listening to it [...]

My awkward pre-teen and early teen years were spent at Gray Avenue Elementary, grades six through eight, which no one referred to as middle school in 1959 to 1962, or even into the later sixties in our small California Central Valley town. (Photo: me at 13, before 8th grade graduation dance, with my mom. I wasn't happy about what the [...]

(Photo is insecure Francine at 12) During the time I was taking piano lessons while practicing at neighbors’ homes (mid-to-late 1950‘s; see prior post), I was also trying to orchestrate little shows that I and the kids on our block might eventually put on for our parents and other children. I was partly inspired by the shows the children put [...]

Kindergarten, I'm far left second row My mother had a pretty voice and sang to me when I was a toddler. My dad whistled all the time, often “Anchors Aweigh”—he’d been in the US Navy in World War II—and had good pitch and a cheerful disposition. His father called him “The Canary.” We also had a record player [...]

Here’s my last, and long, post about our trip in September 2025. In Scotland, they call a meandering lazy drive a “dauner.” We set off on one of those on our Sunday in Edinburgh, and it was a gorgeous sunny clear (and cool) day. We’d been braving a bit of rain now and then on our entire trip, and Edinburgh [...]