Call Me Bess

When I was in college, my best friend and I took an Introduction to Jazz class.  It was a welcomed break from the conservative sciences of Physical Therapy's core curriculum, and the diversity of students was terrifyingly more interesting, in a good way. Wild hair, nose rings, drumsticks tapping us on our shoulders.  This was how the other half of the campus lived and I loved it.

We learned to sit in a room with headphones and count the beats to Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Coltrane. Carlene was a quicker study because of her high school band days.  My high school days of soccer was no match.  I shouldn't have quit  piano when I was nine, but there I was, engrossed in the rhythm of sound...was it a trumpet or trombone?  And then there were the great ladies of jazz--Ella, Lena, Bessie.  For an entire semester we became them.  Carlene took Lena, Maureen took Ella, and I took Bessie.  We crooned our hearts out, karoke-style in our dorm rooms, studying of course.

Carlene, never stopped calling me Bessie, eventually shortened to Bess.  She even named her daughter after me...Tess ( it rhymed with Bess). When Michael heard her call me Bess, he immediately caught on...yes, Bess is your name.  He had a favorite Nana Bess, and now he had me.

Michael and Carlene are the only two that use that name...the two people that know my most intimate self, but I'm ready to share, to open the name up to the creative world.  Christine, I'm sorry to say, doesn't have a poetic sound, and being a lover and writer of poetry, it just won't do.  I've tried.  I've submitted a few pieces of poetry and exhibited under my given name, but it doesn't resonate with my emerging poetic self. Bess is singing in my ears...Love, oh love, oh careless love/ You fly through my head like wine.