The Great Cosmic Eggbeater

The other day, I had occasion to think of a person I once knew.

Velzoe Brown (b. March 1, 1910) was a friend of my mother’s, and they met through some musical endeavor or other. Velzoe’s instrumental prowess extended to piano, trombone, drums, and flute. She was the daughter of musicians. She traveled as a trombonist with an all-girls jazz band, The Pollyanna Syncopators, in the 1920s, a group she joined when she was just 16 years old. She was a performing musician until the end, which came on May 4th, 2011, when she was 101 years old.

Velzoe was fascinating. In addition to being a walking history book, she was quirky and whimsical and perpetually interested in the people around her. I remember once going to her house and taking home a chunk of snowdrop bulbs my dad had dug out of one of her flower beds in a plastic grocery bag, because I had happened to mention something about liking snowdrops. “Oh, I have some of those somewhere.” And then suddenly there was a shovel and me trying to make sure not to get any dirt on the upholstery in the car. And her house, hoo boy, that was a trip. Her music room was full of books and sheet music (I’m pretty sure I ended up sitting on a pile of sheet music, to be completely honest), and you had to move things around to get at the piano. There was a lifetime of stuff strewn all over the place. In keeping with the Santa Cruz lifestyle, there was a gong you had to ring (the significance likely explained to me at the time, but I was a teenager and you know full well they don’t listen to a damn thing), and a GIANT FUCK OFF GEODE that rivaled anything in the geology exhibit of a natural history museum.

All things considered, middle and high school me thought Velzoe was pretty neat, insofar as old ladies who are friends with one’s mother go. Present day me looks at the life she led and goes, “Holy cow, this was a woman who gave absolutely zero fucks about convention.” In a time when young ladies grew up to become housewives and mothers and not much else, this woman never married or had children, and instead traveled the country as a musician, starting in the 1920s. Prohibition was on. Jazz was new and scandalous. Hemlines were shorter than ever. Velzoe may have been a paragon of virtue, but part of me likes to think she may have spent a little leisure time in a gin mill or two, knocking at the little opening in the back door in an alleyway, saying, “Joe sent me.”

We don’t think about any of this being even remotely abnormal these days. Yes, there’s still an overtone of the antiquated traditions surrounding the assumption of the mantle of adulthood, but for the most part, if a woman decides to run around the country playing rock gigs and not willingly subscribe to the heteronormative narrative, no one really takes issue. (I’m speaking through an admittedly western lens here. I know there are still places where showing your ankle is the basis for a scandal. Unfortunate, but true.) I like to think that for the most part, as a society, we have reached the consensus that going against the norm does not automatically equal rampant hedonism or cultural upheaval or the end of the world as we know it. You can be moral without subscribing to a code set out by religion. You can spread your love around in a way that is respectful to yourself, your partners, and your respective bodies.

You can rock that Goth vibe and still smile at puppies.

The old societal molds are cracked. We’ve cobbled together new ones. We’ll keep doing that until we’re satisfied--and part of me hopes we’re never satisfied. There’s something to be said for the constant pursuit of improvement. As long as we keep tacking on new things--moving them from the ‘taboo’ to the ‘nobody bats an eyelash’ category--we can continue to expand our acceptance. And no, not everything fits everyone. That’s the beauty of humanity. Diversity keeps things interesting. Do we still have a long way to go insofar as achieving an across-the-board understanding of the validity of humanity, with all its quirks and facets? Yes. Have we come a reasonably long way in the pursuit of this? I think so. Some days, does it feel like we’re still living in the Stone Age on this one? Fuck yes. But we’ve made a start.

Sometimes, all you can offer is a pair of lungs and some wicked trombone technique, but if that’s what you’ve got, you can still be the initial drop that starts the ripple. You don’t have to take on the world, only your part of it. So yes, Velzoe Brown defied the conventions of her time, but she did it in a way that reflected nothing but the best of intentions.

Though I’m pretty sure she’s gazing down from the ‘great cosmic eggbeater’ tutting about my liberal application of the f-word...