Saturday, September 26, 2009

What We're Listening to This Morning


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Sunday, April 06, 2008

Interactive Sunday: Another Bachelor Girl Weekend

One of the best parts of up picking up vintage LPs at the Community Thrift Store (besides the fact that an often pristine LP costs little more or less than a single track on iTunes and sounds so much better), is that they often come with interesting back stories.
That was the case today with my finds of a few Mystic Moods Orchestra, Michel Legrand and Les Baxter LPs that were scattered throughout the bins. Only after I got home did I notice that there was a rubber stamp imprint letting me know that these had once been the property of one "MISS LORA DIRENZO 1526 6TH ST". Although it was not clarified which city that address was from, I feel strongly that Miss Direnzo was at this intersection of Sixth and Avenue B. What you think?

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So who was this Lora? A quick search revealed that there was a Lora DiRenzo who graduated from high school in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1946, and a woman of the same name who published a now out of print book of photographs of unknown topics. If she's still around, she'd be around 79 or 80. Did she stay forever a miss? How did her record collection make it all the way to the Pacific? Did she lose interest in the exotica of Les Baxter (best known for arranging the early records Yma Sumac and regaining hipster status in recent years through frequent samplings on Thievery Corporation albums) or does she also have them uploaded in her iPod? Was the woman with amber tinted white hair talking to herself as she ambled up Valencia pushing a shopping cart?

I prefer to believe that Lora is still out there somewhere, still hip and with it eight decades on, sometimes thinking back to her swinging bachelor girl days in 1950s Manhattan when she'd just come back from Haiti photographing traditional voodoo ceremonies. I picture her putting on a track like "Sway (Quien Era)" from Caribbean Moonlight while having a getting-ready-to-go martini before heading out with some friends to hear Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins play at some smoky downtown club until her eyes made contact with some charming yet slightly dodgy guy in a black turtleneck who'd just arrived from Lima.

What's your story on Lora?

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