Dona Michelini 8/26/21 Dona Michelini 8/26/21

The Fat Cat Girl

I was to become the “Fat Cat Girl” selling shoes by the same name in the department I had worked at before when I came home, while I was a teenager. I immediately went up to the Radio Station to announce my arrival in Rochester. The station became, once again my family, I would take the elevator to one of the top floors at midtown plaza. One of the first indoor plaza’s in the country. I remember sitting in the studio watching a DJ, looking at him till he invited me in. The enclosed glass room with turntables, I watched him cueing from one song to the next. My learning continued, he and I both wanted to be famous, we both needed to talk about it. This was a time that accessing places like radio stations was so much easier. After all I had faked becoming an Usher backstage for the Gene Pitney Shower of Stars and I pretended with the Hullabaloo All these talks leading to my adventures in England. I pretended I was too and he said I made a fool of him. I couldn’t bear telling him a lie.

All the stories I made in the beginning to live as a young adult. I would talk to Jerry well into the night at the studio about going to California and Hollywood. He went and I did not go to Hollywood. I went to San Francisco. Not the place to become a star. Once again Jerry was a gentleman in my life. Dreaming together and he was Married. I just talked to him, looking and observing what men were about.

Jerry asked me to model with him for the local Newspaper and he dressed as Batman. Fun beginning in my creations of being a local famous character. I would be in my shoe department and a few girls had seen me, asking me for an autograph. Another Dis Jockey asked me to be on his Sock Hop and lip sink. I did it twice. I memorized the “Name Game” by Shirley Ellis and then Marianne Faithful’s “As Tears Go By” That's how I met Bobby Sherman, he was doing a guest spot and sang. We talked and of course I was enamored and probably flirted, he was a star on TV. He asked me to go to his next city, Syracuse. It would be a week with him. How I had the sensibilities or perhaps fear , I said no. I had more fun having the experience than going.

My mother was getting sick of her daughter out to all hours and one night I came home so late she had locked me out. What was I to do? I might have been a bit drunk but I found a chair that lifted me to the window to my bedroom, the window was a bit open and the door was locked from the outside. Too tired to deal with it, I crawled into bed. The next thing I knew my mother was over me screaming with her hands around my neck choking me. I bolted out of the house and down the street to a phone booth calling a friend and screaming beyond consoling. A woman hearing my screams came out to check on me and offered me a place.

Dona Michelini 8/24/21 Dona Michelini 8/24/21

Nancy

A modest repose is resting on the shoulders of an introvert screaming while a gregarious drama within wants attention. A seeker speaks in conflict, naming a creative explosion with a tangential extensions that only a few can follow.

We wait steeped in all that must recreate itself, wanting to be heard not told. Resting in a child's mind. I act one way and the only way to continue in my art is to let go of the monolog and my fear of change. I once wanted to be a star. Now I wish on them.

I’ve gotten to know my loneliness as an inner guru touching how I meditate and focus on words that don’t always make sense. Yet they come together with a grand hand wanting a voice. I have to do this in order to match my insides with my outsides. My poetry comes and goes, the message I give myself can be less than positive. You will walk with me and I know I will get through this while breathing into and releasing my heart's weight. I know I am here, waiting.

Dona Michelini 8/23/21 Dona Michelini 8/23/21

My fall slows my writing.

My unbridled mind is wondering how this current event in my life will go forward. I have fallen on my vacation, where the grounds were beautiful but the terrain was uneven and rustic. Where and when I fell was on the night I got there. The step I took was on a deck like walkway without lighting or markings. It was shorter than a standard step with no lighting on the step at all. Freshly painted as I was told later. No markings on the step. The walkway was painted all one color and the 24 hour cantine was at the end of the level, I was staying 0n a deck like structure. This was more of a second floor cabin structure that it was billed as an Inn and cabin. It was all cabins. A massive trumpet vine covered the rail on the second floor without any visual clues of a step by the rail.

My hip hit the rail and my ribs were compressed causing massive bruising and pain. I had paid a lot of money to be in a one room cabin like structure. While the view was spectacular, the fall caused the trip to be quite spoiled. I stayed in that night to assess my fall. I did not have an x-ray or trip to a hospital? Covid was a constant reminder in a state that now has a mask mandate again.

My hip and ribs have gotten better but I am unable to sleep as I did or move as I did, or walk as I did.

Dona Michelini 8/22/21 Dona Michelini 8/22/21

Tonight’s Song

Within the evenings call I hear you

The crest that lays across my breast

I hear about your story and want to know

My stories are raised within longing

Arms reach for expressions of truth

First there is my tale of wildness

An execution of expressions with trust

Now locked in words and thought

What will be our dance with my life?

Can I be able to hold my veracity in motion?

Dancing old familiar idioms locked in nonsense

Am I real or only hidden in a failsafe modal?

I’m part of my unleashing narrative.

Freely gathering life.

Dona Michelini 8/7/21 Dona Michelini 8/7/21

The Hospital Intonation

Every Voice becomes his

Moments of waiting for the right time

I hear the words that I want

Adventures in illness

With one misstep, a blunder begins

I don’t belong here yet I remember

Still I succumb to process

What delays us and why

Every whisper, every voice

Every face becomes his

I wish for them to be mine

A voice next door and steps go elsewhere

Where is my space in the septic respite

There will be no time for a warm embrace

Only: “I like your sneaker”

words shallow forgiven at once

Inside I laugh, is this the connection

I’m left with his compliment of nothing

Hospital gowns wrap me in undefined fog.

I’m only a number distinguished by my shoes.

Dona Michelini 8/6/21 Dona Michelini 8/6/21

Leftovers a poem

Wounds of loss

What is this

The cry’s in the wind

Is there healing occurring

Outside the lesion

Deep within history of years

Before the connection began

Were we connected

My sections sliced and scared

What has happened within this illusion

Seeing the vestiges of time

What will be kept and what gets throw away

Histories wounds of loss

I have to feel this to find my truth.

Dona Michelini 8/5/21 Dona Michelini 8/5/21

Sailing Home

The Ocean awaited for me singing

Love without strings calls ahead

Somewhere I knew of my possibilities

The dance took me, I found my way

Longing, loving, lusting mark the path

Bathed in sensibilities I said no to charms

I was going home to nest and retreat

Would I remember if I walked this way

Would my feet know I was once there?

Dona Michelini 8/4/21 Dona Michelini 8/4/21

Leaving England

It was time to go back home to the US. My Memories of the Hullabaloos seemed to linger. It seems the guy on the far left of this photo is the one I imagine would have been exactly the kind of guy I would gravitate to at the pub and then being told who he was. This was as close to an English rock group as I would get to. My mother called his kind of eyes, bedroom eyes. Mom told me entirely too much about sexuality. I was more of a sister who was a listening ear for her. She had lost her husband as I imagine it during a time she could have had more romance, she didn’t. Somewhere in my teens, her talking to me stopped. Reality hit that she was telling me too much, so she would try to put reins on what she was saying. I shut down between all the talk. It was not what I wanted to hear from my mother, instinctually Her corporal punishment and enmeshing talk about men lingered and created fear of men for me. Was she trying to frighten me? I think she was looking back at what she missed and wanted to protect me. My late pubescence had so many implications for her. I grew three inches between the ages of 16 and 18. Also as another form of working at making me become regulated Doctors gave me the first form of birth control pills. They just made me sick even though I always complied with whatever my mother wanted and doctors. I never could take the pill after that. This became another form of how I was going to be controlled. Did she think I was going to get pregnant?

Now I was going back to live with my mother and leave the wonderful part of my stay in England. I don’t know who made the arrangements for my passage back across the Atlantic. I was supposed to stay longer and whatever dreamy experience of meeting the Beatles was to be lost. I took a train to London, staying there where I spent the night on the way to sail from Southampton, in the south of England. I remember walking around Trafalgar Square in London, surrounded by pigeons and people. No one helped me when I was off on a bigger ship. Once again I had to draw on my intrepid nature. It was on the RMS Caronia and would sail to Montreal Quebec, England to Canada in 5 days. It had taken me 7 days to get to Liverpool, I had a single bedroom with my own bathtub at the Bow of the Ship. It became off-season and my cabin was upgraded. There were rough waters and the crew had put ropes up between the isles. The only time I got sick was after the morning meal as I made my way to the bow of the ship and my cabin.

A handsome young crew member in a knit crew neck sweater caught me and he escorted me back to my room. Looking quite sickly in the face he no doubt felt sorry. I found out later that crew members loved to chat up young female passengers. I loved being saved and talked to as I was all by myself. After being caught and felt better my favorite part of the trip was to go to the back of the ship and watch the wake. This is where my new friend would find me and he often did.

Dona Michelini 8/3/21 Dona Michelini 8/3/21

Herman Hess

In its origin a poem is something completely unequivocal. It is a discharge,

a call, a cry, a sigh, a gesture, a reaction by which the living soul seeks to defend

itself from or to become aware of an emotion, an experience. In this first

spontaneous most important function no poem can be judged. It speaks first of

all simply to the poet himself, it is his cry, his scream, his dream, his smile, his

whirling fists.

Hermann Hesse

Dona Michelini 8/1/21 Dona Michelini 8/1/21

Verbal stroking

My acquaintance with an insatiable hunger is tugging as if at war with wisdom.

My appetite for understanding becomes connectional

Self discovery with components of reproach.

Deflections in my path create tribunals I cannot overlook

What my heart whispers is: Be still, lodge where care finds pattern

Perception only happens backwards and whatever aches endures

This has to be for a greater healing than any diagnosis surfacing

I believe LIfe have become my muse

Stories create closure when my malady is vague

How do I keep life simple when whatever I have exists in my objective opinion

Am I really remarkable? Is this just my longing to be valued

My art form, a game I play with poetry and verse. Inscriptions unravel what my mind cannot

Searching for an intention. Must I once again linger in this exercise of verbal stroking

Looking for the reward which exists only in the implementation of reverie

My trance has become a tango with a partner who I cannot greet

Predictions complete my comprehension while prose exists in my imagination

My breath exhales waiting for language not found, I inhale and wait for the union

Is this my dance with an unknown future wave? Can questions be proposed?

Opportunity existing in humility and affirmed in happiness?

This may be the reason my heart persuades deliberate word worship.

I don’t presume to know for sure.

Dona Michelini 7/31/21 Dona Michelini 7/31/21

A Hullabaloo

New thought

New actions

Surrounded in pleasure

Spaces opened in a child's eyes

I became a center of attention

Walking toward amusement

I began my introduction

My voice, my accent were enough

Immediately I attracted recognition

We became stars together

Mine was a lie. His was the truth

This didn’t matter in my need

I was having fun at his expense.

Dona Michelini 7/30/21 Dona Michelini 7/30/21

My new family

I later found an air-gram from the Police Station amongst my mother’s belongings when I returned home. They wrote to my mother and informed her of my move from one home to another. I would be living with the Carters until arrangements could be made for me to return to the states. Somehow this was to tell her I was alright and she was to rest assured that I would be taken care of. My poor mother was having her resolve tested and facing fears, I was certainly not thinking of my mother’s feelings.

I had become an eccentric free spirited teen after I turned 18 and entered my senior year in high school. Teenage night clubs began cropping up and I had taken my tenacity into pushing my tired mother to let me go out at night. Once again school became secondary. When I went to school I hung out in the bathroom looking in the mirror complaining about not having color in my cheeks. My pale white English skin was not valued by me. Continually they were pinched for color. I wanted to know about myself by other teens' standards. A slanted form of getting peer approval. How I felt and their acceptance of myself was by their answers. I became the class complainer.

We couldn’t afford the clothing that every other girl in school had, the pinstripe dresses or madras plaid. I took to my sewing machine to copy the styles of the girls in England. I got Mary Quant patterns and made my own dresses. Mod seemed more to my liking, more than the Rockers in England. The Rockers had ruff edges and were dressed in Leather. I had to be different and now I was leaving from a more traditional highly educated home in England. I went to live in a more relaxed family who supported their daughters' more Mod style. This was where I began having fun again.

It was glorious that I was an adult by the age 19 and I could go to pubs with my new friend, Jill. I really only had one boyfriend in my senior year, given my mother’s fits about boys before that and putting a deep and resounding fear of them in me. Her attacks and warnings were about what boys could do to me.

Alan Goldstein was my first boyfriend in all of high school. A nice Jewish boy who was forever kind to me. I would sit on his lap and he would just kiss and kiss me. I ran into him years later and I asked him why he had never tried anything with me,more than kissing? He said I just seemed so afraid. Alan did send me off to England with hickeys all over my neck. What my conservative English family thought didn’t matter to me.

My first experience with a boy in England was sitting in the pub and he put his arms around me and began chewing on my lips. I was amazed by his style of kissing . That was not the tender kiss of my gentle Jewish boy. He literally engulfed my lips with his teeth. They were red and bruised the next day. Make-up helped conceal the redness. I went back and sat with the girls at the Pub as soon as I could. I told them about my experience and they said “oh” we should have warned you. He was cute! So that backed me off from boys in England for a while. I was going to hang out with Jill and explore Fish and Chips at the Bridlington Fair and walk the various streets carrying a square woven basket for our shopping goods. I wish I knew what I bought exactly but I still have a Bullseye black and white brooch which was the Mod thing to wear. Jill made me a rock pin which consisted of pebbles in an artistic format. Mine was square and I would wear that too.

The next night at the Pub, my girlfriends pointed to a long haired guy with bleached blonde hair who I hadn’t seen before. Giggling, they informed me he had been part of the Hullaballoos. I had been backstage with the Gene Pitney shower of stars in Rochester, NY where I found out that the Hullabaloos was joining the show after Rochester NY in Pittsburgh, PA. The girls encouraged me to go talk to him. I saw a story making possibility.

Dona Michelini 7/28/21 Dona Michelini 7/28/21

Hull, England

As I stepped into the night, I had no clear intellect driving me, only pure emotion. I must have known at some level that my new friend Jill and her family would take in. I had gone to dinner there and remembered the long double decker bus ride to her home. They were very relaxed and kind people. Logically thinking back knowing what I do now, I had a bold bravery that encircled my youth. My feminine cyclical as a young woman had only been with me for such a short time. Two years and I was now 19 years old, having not much of an understanding of my moods and proclivities. I had traveled on a ship reaching almost halfway across the world to England.

Most of my childhood was spent in Rochester NY. It was in a sweet loving neighborhood that watched over me as I roamed from house to house. The only time I got a taste of a different culture was on 3 trips to West Virginia. I did have a couple of trips to Glens Falls NY and where my grandfather was and an aunt and uncle. Glens Falls was still in NY, not really much of a culture change. I did have two glorious weeks by myself on trips to West Virginia at age 13. My mother took me to stay at the beginning of my teens as she, I assumed, was beginning to let go of her growing daughter. I had only stopped sleeping with her at age 12. Some of our sleeping together was out of a practical need to rent our front room for extra money. She also probably needed a break and was feeling another layer of having to let me go. It was the only time I had a tan because we went to the pool every day as well as a Baptist Church. I remember going to Church right across the street from my aunt and uncle's house, I had a Northern accent and they had a Southern accent. Their manner was so interesting to me. I would watch my teenage male cousin wondering why he was up to slapping SeaBreeze on his face. There were also lots of teenage boys at church fascinated by how I spoke as well.

There I was sitting in the Bobbies’ officeI was watching again. They called Jill Carter's family whatever went on and they called Jill Carter's parents and they welcomed me into their home. I must have told Jill when I stopped after my Art College in a Department store where she worked. I no doubt told her of my troubles with the family that I was living with. Perhaps I was stalling in my stop on my return to the house because of the tension of my strict living arrangement. I needed an outlet. Department stores were also a comforting place for me. Because it was my part time job since I was 14 and in the summer and after school. Department stores were also my mother’s form of employment as well.

I didn’t know it was alright in this new way of family living to speak up. I thought if I spoke for myself, I would be punished. It was the mid 60’s and freedom of speech and feeling were about to start. The Beatle Revolution was beginning. Whether the Cunliff’s called the Police because their charge left their house. I don’t really know, however my English experiance was about to begin to offer me a better time in a new country and in the city of Kingston upon Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire, England as I was informed.

Dona Michelini 7/27/21 Dona Michelini 7/27/21

RMS Carinthia

Did my mother know she was promoting an adventurous daughter? There were no conscious undertakings. I was on the plank to the ship and she didn’t cry. I would be off to live on it for the next week, sailing across the Atlantic. I don't know if there were centennial hugs goodbye or only my mothers deep holding of self. Her habit was to tightly maintain our home, going to work when I wanted her to stay. Did I cry? I don’t think so. I do know after years of self examination that deep inside me were feelings of longing, resting in the tissues were an adult child wanting to both escape and announce to the world I was off to England on the RMS Carinthia. I didn’t have a clue how I would proceed to another country. My mother knew the family, only a little, she sent me off with the past year and my newly made friend's family. Margaret's new friendship and her college professor father told my mother I must have an Education. An English Art School wouldn’t care if I didn’t have high grades to get into US colleges; I had artistic talent. My mother wanted the best for me.

Walking up the gang plank to the deck, I looked over the rail with a crowd of other passengers. My friend Bonnie was there with my mother and I had spent a lot of time in their home for dinner in a family atmosphere. Bonnie told me years later that my mother, while she waved goodbye, lived at their home for two weeks, grieving my departure. I shared a cabin with my English friend Margaret Cunliff. Soon I would live with her family at their home under a new kind of rule. I had always wanted to have a father but this could never compare with the television fathers. He was a Chemist who had a formula for how his house was to be run. Margaret had twin sisters but I can’t even remember her mother. It was the 60’s and male dominance was paramount. Shoes off at the door, the floor was cold even though the house had central heating. I was informed it was for the Elites to have heat, and he wanted to conserve. At night I was given a hot water bottle to warm my bed and I held on to it dearly as I pulled the covers over my head and fell asleep sharing a room with Margaret. In the morning I woke to see my frosty breath. Whatever fear I had from leaving my home I had no idea of the stern rule of this house compared to my upbringing.

Nothing was like my neighborhood I grew up with. The families were warm and we played together between the houses with great freedom. The home I was now being shown was for raising children who would be off to College and know about structure. I was beginning to feel the tension rising within. When Dr. Cunliffe knocked on the bathroom door because I was running my bathwater too long. We were allowed 3 minutes of letting in the warm, wonderful water run. I longed for a warm bath and it had to stop. I was forced to sit in my thin frightened body to stop the pour in fear. He was pounding on the door. I had to stop my freedom in this three minute rule. I knew I had to change something.

I sat there in about 3 inches of water wondering, while crying. What am I going to do? I was leaving as soon as possible. The possibility was that night. The implication of outcomes or talking it over were not what I understood. I got dressed, yelling with all the emotion of my spirited self. I can see myself demanding my money and passport standing at the door ready to go. Into a dark evening and out of the house I went. No packing. It didn’t matter to me, my magical thinking prevailed. I had made a friend who was more of my liking and temperament and been to her home. I would call her. As I walked down the dark street next to a hedge row, crying and afraid. A police car stopped me and in my wild fear the Bobbies took me back to their station to see what this young American girl was doing.