When you’re occasionally an insomniac and doing Internet “research” for your “work” you sometimes chance upon something really important, like dear Vivian Connell’s final blogpost One Last Time (http://bit.ly/ViOneLastTime) including a few video highlights like this one:
This is powerful stuff(http://bit.ly/ViOneLastTime) to be set aside for sometime when you don’t mind being sad, inspired, uplifted, sad. And I think it will be appreciated all over again by the many people who knew and loved Vivian (“Vi” to many). Hard to believe it’s already been two years in real time– she was an amazing person and this reads like a great outline for a biographer someday.
May God bless Vivian and her family in Chapel Hill, and may God bless the rest of her family and friends, and the causes she held near and dear, especially to wit: public education, equity and a functioning system of government to ensure them.
And since it’s Vivian who loved music and a good sad tune as a matter of course, I have a couple of a ideas for a soundtrack for this one, strangely by the same artist Aimee Mann on Lost I n Space:
“Invisible Ink” (“it’s hard to keep straight, perspective is everything”)
“That’s How I Knew This Story Would Break Your Heart” (“So, like a ghost in the snow, I’m getting ready to go, ‘Cause baby that’s all I know –How to open the door”)
“Its’ Not” (“I keep going round and round on the same old circuit, A wire travels underground to a vacant lot, Where something I can’t see interrupts the current, And shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot, And from behind the screen it can look so perfect, But it’s not”)
And because it’s Vivian and I’m lucky enough to be alive, she’d want it to end with an early lost classic of the hometown band we first met over and its title, meant ironically of course (I think):
All Right Right Friends, the original recording from the early 80s (I know you say, maybe someday”)
BERTIS DOWNS 