Cindy Stodola Pomerleau
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LOL (Little Old Lady)

I am an essayist, memoirist, and blogger. I'm also 81 years old, which makes me older than around 97% of the U.S. population. A little wine helps.

My name is Cindy Stodola Pom​erleau and this is my author's blog. Watch f​or news about my current work, previews of work-in-progress, what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, what's going on around me, and probably an occasional shout-out to my cat.

CONNIE CONVERSE (1924-????)

4/30/2023

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Connie Converse, or Elizabeth Eaton Converse as her parents named her, was born on August 3, 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire. She dropped out of Mount Holyoke College after two years and moved to New York City in hopes of launching a musical career. But despite (or perhaps because of) being a pioneer singer-songwriter who wrote hauntingly beautiful and unusually intelligent folksongs and art songs, she never managed to get a foothold in New York--unlike Bob Dylan, who had far better luck doing something similar not long after. 

In 1961, discouraged and depressed, she moved to Ann Arbor, where her younger brother Philip Converse was a prominent political scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and ended up with a job writing and editing for the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Then, in 1972, the journal was auctioned off to Yale without her knowledge, and at around the same time she was informed that she needed major surgery.

Finally, in 1974, after writing letters to her relatives stating her intentions to try and make a new life for herself somewhere else and asking them not to look for her, she drove off in her little Volkswagen--and was never seen or heard from again. 

Her work briefly came to public attention in 2004, when the graphic artist Gene Deitch, a longtime supporter of her work, played some of it on the radio; this led to a search for more of her music, which turned up in a  filing cabinet in Ann Arbor, followed by the release of a 17-song album in 2009. But except for this little flurry of activity, she and her work have otherwise remained largely unknown. 

That is about to change. The 100th anniversary of her birth and the 50th anniversary of her disappearance are coming up in 2024 and are already being marked by some long-overdue recognition for her work:
  • A beautiful, sensitive piece entitled "The Art of Disappearance," by Hanif Abdurraqib, including a strikingly evocative illustration, was published in the New York Times Magazine on August 11 (updated August 17), 2022.
  • The opera singer Julia Bullock delivered a stunning performance of a Converse song, One by One, accompanied by her husband Christian Reif on piano, in her debut solo album released in late 2022.
  • In Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X, published on March 21, Connie Converse is portrayed as having been X’s lesbian lover and music partner. Lacey resolves the unanswered question of Connie's fate by writing a fictional ending for her.
  • A major biography by Howard Fishman, To Anyone Who Ever Asks, was published on May 2.
  • The Connie Converse story (though unnecessarily evasive about what little is known about her disappearance) made the front page of the New York Times on May 8.
  • An article by Eve Silberman is featured in the May edition of the Ann Arbor Observer (a reminder that the Connie Converse story is in part an Ann Arbor story).
  • Ronnie Kuller, a Chicago-based composer and arranger, is collaborating with the singer Emmy Bean on an ambitious orchestral arrangement and vocal performance called Her Only Light, devoted entirely to Connie Converse and her songs, to be presented next fall at the Steppenwolf Theater. After that, they are planning to take the show on tour, including fulfillment of their dream of bringing Connie Converse back to Ann Arbor, the town that at first provided her with solace and refuge when she so badly needed them but ultimately led to disillusionment and despair.

My daughter Julie is assisting Kuller and Bean with their project and helping them spread the word. She is the one who introduced me to Connie Converse. A sampler of their program will be premiered on May 19, both live in Chicago and online. (To purchase tickets click here.)


[originally published April 30, 2023; updated periodically as the Connie Converse story continues to unfold]

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ED KOREN R.I.P.

4/18/2023

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Ed Koren as I remember him (undated photo)
I read Ed Koren’s obituary in the New York Times with sadness—the kind of sadness that’s only slightly tempered by the realization that he was not felled in midflight but lived a long and full life. (He died on April 14, 2023, at the age of 87. He never stopped cartooning, however, so who knows what the world has lost by his death?)

Even if you don’t recognize the name, you will instantly recognize his wonderful New Yorker cartoons featuring what my husband always refers to as “furry alligators.” He tried for the most part to remain above passing political controversies, focusing instead on au courant topics like fitness fads, electronic gadgetry, and pop psychology. He poked fun at contemporary relationships but steered clear of sex. “Animals are gentle and funny,” he said. Disguising his subjects as animals allowed him to avoid exposing their anger or bitterness and instead portray them with affection for their foibles. “I’m the kind of American middle-class folk I like to draw,” he wryly admitted.

His furry alligator cartoons emerged organically from his experience of daily life. “Within his comfort zone,” wrote a critic in 2010, “Mr. Koren can be funny, psychologically acute and philosophically provocative. He has a pitch-perfect feel for gag lines, and with his scribbly draftsmanship has forged one of the most distinctive styles in cartooning.” As noted in his obituary, “He found subjects everywhere. Walking in the woods in California, he was passed by a jogger, who called out: ‘Working on my quads!’ ‘There’s a cartoon,’ Mr. Koren said.”

I knew Ed only briefly and slightly, from our days as summer residents of Vermont, where our circle of friends overlapped with his, meaning that we occasionally found ourselves in his company at dinner parties and small gatherings. I remember him vividly because—well, because he was Ed Koren, the famous cartoonist. He would likely be able to place my husband, who has a talent for engaging a wide variety of people in conversation on a wide variety of topics. He might even remember me as well, if only because I was one of those passers-by in his quotidian existence who inadvertently evoked the comment, “There’s a cartoon.”

Only later, while thumbing through a book of his work, did I learn that I had been immortalized in an Ed Koren cartoon published in the New Yorker on April 22, 1974. The moment I saw it I was teleported back to that dreamy summer evening in Brookfield, Vermont, sitting around a picnic table with Ed and others eating corn-on-the-cob that had been growing in the field only an hour before, and shushing one of my daughters who was clamoring for dessert, “No more carbohydrates until you finish your protein.” Pitch-perfect indeed—it was an exact quotation.

​But what is even more remarkable was that although there I was, with my long curly hair and glasses, I had been transmogrified into a mom in her suburban Philadelphia kitchen, standing near a refrigerator festooned with a couple of  alphabets' worth of plastic letters, cheerfully telling her grumpy daughter, “No more carbohydrates until you finish your protein.” (The New Yorker Cartoon Bank thinks the child is a boy, but I know better.) It was an entirely accurate rendition of our kitchen—except that (and here’s the creepy part) Ed had never once visited our home in Philadelphia, he knew us only in our Vermont incarnation.
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    About Cindy

    Look for my "official" bio on the  About Me tab. Or stay right here and learn about five things most people don't know about me: 1) I collect women's smoking artifacts. (See my virtual museum, Domesticating the Cigarette) 2) I am a licensed ham, call sign W2AXO. 3) I am a proud Februarian who keeps a list of 28 (and occasionally 29) reasons why this much maligned month is actually the best one of the year. 4) I am a compulsive Wikipedia editor; whenever I stumble across a factual or grammatical error, I'm on it. 5) I am a true Short Sleeper and do just fine on 3-5 hours of sleep per night. This is my super-power!

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