Banana Bread with Brian Eno & Mary Pratt

It's March Break and the kids are home from school, so I'm not out busking today.

Instead, I've been obsessing about my upcoming concert on April 2nd.

This is a show we're putting together ourselves at a nearby community centre. It's family-friendly and comfortable, much like a large house concert but in a larger space.

In order to put on the show, I've needed to book the two-person band, rehearse with them, arrange the sound system and person to operate it, decorate the space, publicize the event through my mailing list and local media and arrange for refreshments. In addition, we're offering some incentives for early rsvps (an exclusive promo cd), new audience members (a welcome package) and people who already own my recordings (a free dessert).

Today I found myself looking at my "to-do" list and completely panicking.

To make matters worse, it's a beautiful spring today (8 degrees above zero) and I'd like to be out singing. Instead, I find myself at home, juggling playdates for the kids and trying unsuccessfully to write copy for posters to be put on poles around the neighborhood (before the anti-postering bylaw is passed) as the computer keeps crashing.

Finally I give up and decide to make banana bread for the show.

This is, I realize, something women have been doing for generations. Like me, my mother and grandmother probably had long to-do lists of things they would have preferred to be doing, but ended up making banana bread, a simple, foolproof recipe that can be accomplished even if one is constantly interrupted.

In order to calm myself down, I put on Brian Eno's "Music For Airports" , a soothing ambient CD. And I set myself to work, measuring sugar and flour and baking powder, mashing shortening and bananas.

While I mashed, I remembered a song I wrote several years ago (which I don't think I actually had time to finish) called "Mary Paints the World". It was inspired by Mary Pratt, the painter who chose as her subject matter the "ordinary" stuff of daily life: the oranges in the bowl on the kitchen table, the laundry hanging on the line, the fish thawing in aluminum foil on the countertop. She had four children, and was married to Christopher Pratt, a (then) more-famous artist. At one point, if I remember correctly, a teacher at the art school they were both attending told her to give up painting because there could only be one famous artist in a couple and it wasn't going to be her.

I remember some of the lyrics of my song: "and if you were Mary, you would find the beauty in the ordinary, you would take your life and hold it to the light". Although I've never written a song about foil-wrapped fish (or banana bread for that matter), it's turned out that I feel most comfortable with songs that wrap themselves around "small" or seemingly ordinary things.

Sometimes, on days like today, I feel so snowed under by the thousands of tiny details of life, I can't appreciate any one of them (much less celebrate it in a new song). So I rely on other artists who can illuminate the little things instead of tripping over them.

Brian Eno's "Music For Airports" offers another inspirational take on small and slow-moving things. In this CD, Eno takes very small musical changes and repeats and layers them to create something larger, something moving and meaningful. The compositions have a poignant, searching quality...and yet are soothing and calm. I think the music would, in fact, be terrific in an airport, a place where tiny humans are moving great distances. (I bought the album several years ago in an effort to calm down the school lunchroom. Sadly, the school administration didn't see the value of it.)

As I've been writing this, the banana bread has been baking away. Will anyone come to the show and eat it? Will the posters be allowed on the poles?

Perhaps more important, can I remember that song?