An Attempt to Explain this Year's Card - "Down the Rabbit Hole"

This past summer, I was lying on the floor after my yoga class (on Zoom) and thinking about the many wonderful tunes I play that were composed by people I know, or by my contemporaries, and it occurred to me to wonder how many were composed by women. I got up off the floor and counted them up. Over 100 of the tunes in my repertoire are contemporary - of those, at that time, only 4 were composed by women.

Talk about a wake-up call. I immediately made it my business to add tunes by women to my repertoire, and I have found some dandies. I dug through piles of tunes and reached out to other players. Friends started sharing tunes that they knew of that were composed by women, and now I have a wonderful and growing set of really good tunes - playable, danceable, shareable tunes - written by women in New England, Quebec, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the UK, the South, the West...

I spent weeks muttering to myself and trying out tunes and emailing people. During this same time, I bought a cheap cassette-to-digital player and began to reclaim the music from old cassette tapes that I have collected. A lot of them are in poor shape; the sound quality is poor; some run fast and slow but never consistently; but I discovered some gems I had forgotten about and that sent me down more paths. I began to think of these projects as rabbit holes so that is the theme of my 2021 card.

That doesn't fully explain the card, however.

On an episode of the Michelle Obama podcast with guest Michele Norris, one comment stuck in my brain. There is an entire TV channel dedicated to men stuffing a ball through a hoop, but little or no recognition for the feats that women do every day. I can't give prizes, but I can at least make some trading cards to honor the women who have been mentors to me, or influenced me in some way. I started out with fiddlers and immediately realized there are others in my life who should also be acknowledged. There are seven trading cards in Down the Rabbit Hole and nine more in the "Card Catalog of Honor." This selection is obscure and very personal. I hope you enjoy it in the spirit that it is offered. From the bottom of one of my many rabbit holes I wish you...

Happy Holidays!