Kory

Kory. Yes, she could arrive late--one of those wonderful liabilities--and she was classically beautiful--womanly is probably the right word. Una mexicana. And once you met Kory you never forgot her! Her presence--whether in a song (Lola Beltran's Sufriendo a solas), in her own strong and tender voice--or one of her remarkable stories (always drawn from the heart of life) Kory seemed bound to bring out the most--the most in anything. Totalmente... Like the cross-the-United States bike trip, just after graduation, all the way to NYC (which she found wanting!), or the way she listened to Chavela--in the middle of the night, when she needed to. Or her captivating stories of family. As if the events she'd lived herself--even the things she learned by listening--had a fatal element (in the sense of absoluteness.) There's too much--I can't begin to tell them here, not even to sort out which might be the most important... Like the minute film-script description once, of the inside of her mother's worn refrigerator, where out of one-time poverty her mother had saved the most tiny scraps of food--enumerated--in El Monte, a suburb of LA, where she'd grown up, in that same house, with 25 people (the number varied) because her dear pastor father took them in. Or that she'd lived in a van in front of Lothlorien for a year, when UC managed to reneg on some important financial help. (Claire told me this.) Sharing showers and the occasional meal. She came up smiling, that broad Kory smile. Dubo! 

Or the drawing she made of her father's face, on a visit here--sleeping...


Went to Argentina once--she told me after--in part to see what and why the place meant so much to me. We'd done the songs together. (And she's a great adventuress, in any case--or is it a wanderer?) but Buenos Aires had suffered a chemical spill and the air was terrible--this being emblematic--¿Viste? ¿Viste? so she headed south, to Patagonia--rougher, less pretentious, more welcoming--and then finally to Bolivia, where she told me she truly felt at home. I think it's because the people who lived there were forever--that is, their ancestors came from the place, Kory felt it. Like Gloria Anzaldúa (whom she urged me to read) there's a wall within the wall--a home inside the home...

And I did the México class a year later.  Kory of course being the inspiration...
___

The picture above, from 2012, the Songs & Places: International Edition. We're in the hallway outside Room 170--there was no space left inside, Kory had arrived late--but when I stepped out the door to see her work, I was amazed, of course--this altar, the intense, muted colors--and how much she'd been able to share of the essence of her own Kory world...


.