Op.1: Cookie Segelstein

Cookie Segelstein, violin and viola, Veretski Pass / owner-operator, The Macmama

May 31, 2013

Cookie Segelstein, violin and viola, received her Masters degree in Viola from The Yale School of Music in 1984. [READ COOKIE'S COMPLETE PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY HERE] She is principal violist in Orchestra New England and assistant principal in The New Haven Symphony Orchestra. She is the founder and director of Veretski Pass. Cookie has presented lecture demonstrations and workshops on klezmer fiddling all over the world. She was on the music faculty at Southern Connecticut State University and has been on staff at Centrum's Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Wash. She was featured on the ABC documentary, “A Sacred Noise”, heard on HBO’s“Sex and the City”, appears in the Miramax film, “Everybody’s Fine” starring Robert De Niro, and heard on several recordings including three Veretski Pass recordings. She is also the publisher of "The Music of..." series of klezmer transcriptions. Active as a Holocaust educator and curriculum advisor, she has been a frequent lecturer at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Niantic, CT. Cookie is also an Apple Certified Support Professional, and owns and operates The Macmama. Cookie lives in Berkeley, California. 

I spoke with her by phone in May 2013. This is her story:

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. I lived there till I was 24, because I got my undergraduate degree at University of Missouri at Kansas City. I went to Yale in 1982, and then I lived in Connecticut until 2010. So I lived in Connecticut, what’s that math, 28 years, something like that?

My parents are both Holocaust survivors, and their English was very - it was not used at home when I was little, until whatever became the Jewish Federation, or whatever it was called, sent English teachers to all the survivors. I remember this woman coming to the house and scolding us for not speaking English. I was about 4, I remember her saying [pretends to shout] “Only English in this house!”

We were always around survivors’ kids, so we spoke Yiddish, or in my case Hungarian. And then as we started to enter the American world, we started to speak English, and then we became translators for our parents...

Basically that’s also how I got into music: my father handed me a violin and said “Ok, you’re going to play now. Here. You’re gonna play this” and then he would sing me songs, or tunes, and I’d play them, people would cry, and I would go, “Well this really sucks! I hate this, it’s no fun for anyone! I hate this!” It was evocative of pain...

So I was really forced into music, I didn’t want to do it. And then my violin teacher was another survivor’s kid, who was, you know - I don’t know if you can print this, but - batshit crazy, and scary! And I was like, “Wow, this whole music thing is for, you know, bad dream people.”

I was going to be a veterinarian. I was crazy about animals - I still am. If it was up to me I would be that cat lady, I just wouldn’t weigh 5000 pounds. First I wanted to be a cowgirl, and then when I realized that that was a TV job and not real... Probably at the age of about 8 or 9 - I actually remember getting my first cat for my 8th birthday, I was crazy about that cat. And then going to the veterinarian - and going “Hmm (lightbulb!) maybe this would be a good job.”  

So I was really going to do something with animals. Even into high school -- until I took chemistry in 10th grade, and I went “Ohhhh... yeah I can’t quite do this, this is really hard.” I just couldn’t handle chemistry or math.

So I was playing violin (I started when I was 5) and then in school I joined the little school orchestra in 4th grade. I was also taking classical music lessons at home. I was playing Jewish music at home, and then in my lessons I was playing Onward Christian Soldiers, Bach Minuet and all this stuff. I had a series of violin teachers. Some very nice, some really scary.

And I never considered it as a living, it was just something - I started to enjoy it a little bit in Junior High School, because there was a community of kids in the orchestra that was kind of fun.

In high school we had a really good orchestra conductor who was very, he was kind of the one people went to… He was very cool, a place to - he was a refuge in tough high school years. He said we were gonna have a clinic with the Kansas City Symphony. He needed viola players for the orchestra - I was in 10th grade - and my sister was in the orchestra and she said she would switch to viola because they needed more. And I wasn’t gonna do it, but then she said she wouldn’t do it anymore, she was going to drop out of orchestra, “But would you do it?”

So I said “I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to switch to viola.”

And she just said “Oh I’ll give you Five dollars” [laughs]

So she gave me five dollars, and I said to Mr. Alter, the teacher, “I guess I’ll switch to viola and see what it’s all about,” and I did. And then - I basically played by ear anyway, but - I couldn’t read the viola music and wanted to quit. He said just wait till after the clinic with the symphony, because I was already the strongest player… which wasn’t saying that much.

So the symphony came and they did their clinic, and the viola players were so nice, and they weren’t insane, and they - I remember one guy had a viola that had, like, a lion’s head on the scroll, and of course being the Jewish woman and attracted to bling, I went “OH, cool!” and you know, when he let me play it and it was so - the tone was so much better than what I was led to think...

I started to take lessons from Hugh Brown, who was teaching at the conservatory there, and I started to actually practice. And then the next year I took my bat mitzvah money, which was about $1200, and bought a little Italian viola - or a pretend Italian viola, I don’t remember. My dad helped me with that, and I started to be serious.

My father was a very difficult person, but  I was kind of his favorite, and I said “Well, I think I‘m going into music.”

And he said “You don’t really have the discipline for that,” and I got really upset.

And then when I calmed down and he realized how much he had upset me, he said “Ok, I’ll do whatever you need, I’ll get you whatever you need, I’ll support you in that.”

So I started towards the end of my Junior year kind of realizing that I was going into music. And I didn’t think of applying to other colleges [besides UMKC]. I just, for some reason, because I had to do all that - my parents couldn’t fill out any applications - I was just like, “Well, I’ll just go to UMKC, and study with Hugh Brown,” because I’d already been studying with him. I did that as an undergraduate, and then became, you know, bored. And he was very easy [on me as a teacher].

I was also very involved, by the way, in teaching horseback riding. [laughs] I was the head wrangler at the Jewish Camp, Barney Goodman, which I had been since I was 14.  Plus, I bought a horse when I was, let me think, 16. So I was really into horses.

As a matter of fact my mother went away to Cleveland to visit a friend and while she was gone, I bought that horse. [laughs]

One of the other refugees, he didn’t have any kids and he kinda was our Secret Santa all the time - you know, that’s a funny thing to say as a Jew, but - he kind of like, if there were things our parents wouldn’t help us with, he would say (whispering) “All right, be quiet, here, here’s fifty dollars”. He knew I wanted to get a horse, and he made this deal with me that I would take his mother shopping every Saturday morning. I think she was ethnic Hungarian but had been living in Yugoslavia. I used to pick her up in the morning at about 8:30, take her to the grocery store, waddle through the grocery store with her for about an hour and a half, and then take her home, unpack her groceries... That’s what I did for her, and he then helped me pay for my horse - the winter months for my horse, and he gave me gifts, money for my car, you know... He kind of subsidized my horse thing.

So my mom came home [from Cleveland] and I said “I bought a horse,”

And she said “What do you mean you bought a horse?”

I said “Yeah, I just bought a horse.”

She looked at my father and she said “You let her buy a horse?!”

And he said “Whaddaya mean, ‘LET?’ I can’t -- LET?? She’s a grown woman!”

Of course, I was 16.

So I had this horse and I was supporting it, and then, I mean, I paid for all my own education. My first year of school was $900. I was working, I had a job at Baskin Robbins, and I was house-sitting. I was bringing in money here and there. And then when I went to college I sold the horse to buy a bow for my viola.

It was terribly hard to do, it was really hard. I was teaching horseback riding at this camp but I had my own horse, and this stable charged $25 a month for the summer and $50 in the winter. I bought her barely - they call it greenbroke - she was barely trained. She was 2 years old, a quarter-Arab mare, and I trained her and I was crazy about that horse. I was out there every day.

And then when I needed a viola bow, you know, at that time it was like $350 or something like that and I couldn’t afford it, and there was no way I could go to my parents for it, they didn’t have the money. So I sold her. But she - Arabians tend to be one-man horses.

I sold her to this man, and they called me about two weeks, three weeks later, and said “You’ve gotta come and get your horse because she broke his leg. We think she’s gone crazy...” Because the guy that bought her - see, I never rode her with a saddle. I had a little bareback pad. He put this big saddle on her and she hated it. So he would get on her and she would sit down, with her back leg, and she would sit down and try to roll over to get him off her. So she rolled on his leg.

And so, I went out there, and I whistled and she came, and I rode her all day and I said “I’m gonna buy her back, I can’t stand this.” But my mother had called them and said “Under no circumstances can she buy that horse back!” So I got really upset. That was a very tough decision, and I’m still not sure it was the right decision! [laughs] But that was really hard for me and really painful, and I really missed -- anyway, he said “I’ll keep her, I’ll keep the horse.”

Working in that summer camp, we had to buy and sell horses. Going into the outskirts of Kansas City as a girl, with a black caretaker for the camp, to an auction to buy horses - he would say “You’d better drive, Cookie, ‘cause we’re going into Raytown (Missouri) and I’m gonna get pulled over if I’m driving with a white lady.” So I would drive, but the fact that we were sitting in an auction and I was a woman without a man, you know, bidding on these horses... I had people tell me “This is dangerous, don’t accept a drink from anybody, they’ll spike your drink, they don’t like to see a girl with this much... power...” I mean, I was in my early 20s, I had an expense account of $125, how much trouble could I get into? So I started thinking, you know, this horse business will be frustrating, I don’t think I want to do it.

Raphael Hillyer was coming to do a master class at Lawrence, Kansas University, so my teacher said “You should go and play for him. You’re pretty much, you know, the big fish in a little pond here, you should go play for him.”

I had dropped out of college for half a semester - I had a boyfriend and we were going to go pick fruit on the western slopes of Colorado and live like hippies and take hallucinogenic drugs. But that was just a little way to make my parents insane a little bit. I didn’t actually go, but I did drop out. I kept my private lessons and orchestra but dropped out of class-work for one semester.

So I went to this master class and he beat the shit out of me, and… I decided I should go study with him. He was at Yale, so then I realized I actually should go somewhere else [away from home] to go to graduate school.

I applied to a few places. I applied to Indiana to study with Abe Skernick, and I applied to Cleveland to study with Robert Vernon, and then Yale for Hillyer. And I got into everything but Yale gave me the most money, and Robert Vernon said “You can come here but you have to get a new viola,”

And I remember saying to him, “Well, how the hell do I do that?”

He goes “You’re cute, just get a sponsor!” like it was so easy.

I thought he was a total asshole and I went “I’m not going to study with this guy...”

Anyway, I ended up going to Yale, and Hillyer kicked my ass into gear. I really started practicing in graduate school. And by the way, I had - once I switched over, when I got older, I had stopped playing Jewish Music. When I thought about playing music from my family what ran through my mind was “I hate this, I hate it, hate it, hate it.” And I only came back to that when I had children.

It’s interesting. I always was interested in, like international folk dance stuff, so even when I was in undergraduate college, I played in a small group for international folk dancers, and we did, you know, Balkan, some Hungarian, all these different things. I was always attracted to that. We played for dancers, we played for parties and stuff like that, but I didn’t want to come back to the Jewish stuff. Occasionally there’d be - what was it like, they didn’t call it a Klezmer tune, they would have called it Israeli, it was just part of the pile of music.

The Klezmer revival started happening in the early 80s. I was just starting Yale and I wasn’t really interested, it just went by me. I didn’t even think of it as something I would be interested in, and at home we never called it Klezmer music. “Klezmer” at home meant the musician. So I didn’t hear Klezmer, I heard Yiddish music, or Jewish music, or music from home, things like that. Then when I had kids I thought “Shit, they’re gonna have to find out about my parents. They’re gonna ask questions. I’m gonna have to tell ‘em all of this stuff, I have to present them with their - ‘What did grampa do when he was 21?’ ‘Well,’ [laughs] ‘he was escaping from labor camp!’” [laughs]

I knew I had to present that to them, so I was trying to find a way, that there was something good also in their history. And I just started to get more attracted to it. The Klezmer revival - Emily was born in ‘88 - it was really kind of getting some people interested, gaining some steam, and then I decided to join the synagogue because I wanted my kids to go to Hebrew school, and just because we were in such a Methodist area I wanted them to have somebody who was similar to them.

Somebody at the synagogue said “We’re trying to start a Klezmer band” and I was bartering with them about the membership. Because my husband at the time was Ukranian and not Jewish, and not  too interested in, you know, paying any kind of membership anywhere, I said “I could kind of lead that, I could help with that as part of my - in exchange for my membership.” So I started that!

They said “We want you to go to Klezkamp in the Catskills,” and I said “Oh-Kaaay” and, well, I went there, and I loved it -- and realized that all of this music I’d been growing up with was now very popular with this certain group of people.

I remember I came home to visit my folks, I brought a tune home and said “Dad, listen to this, this is something you taught me but I learned it the right way.” [laughs]

I played him for it and he goes “Oh my God, what’s all this noise??” Cause you know there were all these ornaments and trills and slides and all this shit.

He goes “I can’t even hear the melody - What is this, Greek?” he couldn’t recognize it.

So I go “What-- what I’d been playing at home was what this revival was all about?”

Anyway, so that’s when I kind of started, you know - I actually started interviewing my father, as an informant for the music, and really got a lot of  information from the street, as it were- you know, I kind of put things together. I was interested in it now, and realized that the place he was from had the kind of music that I liked the best.

I became pretty busy in the New York Jewish club date scene, because I could read and I could play by ear, and I could stroll, and I knew all the tunes... You know, and I took showers. I wasn’t like a typical folk musician: I had a tuxedo, I dressed up, I showed up on time, and I... didn’t curse and spit. I shaved my legs, I colored my hair. You know what I mean, I looked normal.

So I was busy during the economic… happy time. In the mid-90s I had three to four a weekend. It was crazy busy. There was a woman in the New Haven Symphony who was also getting interested in this music, and she was the principal flute player. She became a pretty busy contractor for weddings - you know, people were starting to do this kind of live music at their events. They really wanted a Klezmer band. So I would have two on Saturday, one on Sunday, maybe one on Friday night even though the religious people wouldn’t do it on Friday night. There were times I would leave the house Friday at 3 o’clock, come home at midnight, leave Saturday at 7 in the morning, and get home at 1 in the morning only to leave again Sunday morning...

I was making about $1500 a weekend! And this was in the mid-90’s. It was because of the skills of being classically trained but also having the background in, you know, being able to plug into a sound system and play any of the Hassidic  music, all of the dance tunes, and then be able to play Pachelbel Canon for the cocktail hour, and then jump into My Yiddishe Mama  and then the crazy hora set, when they throw the kid, or bride and groom up on a chair. The only thing I didn’t do and still don’t do is Jazz. You know, “me no rock!” [laughs]

It’s interesting because if you gave me a Klezmer tune I’d be varying it right away, but it’s more like Baroque music - you take a melody and you kind of fill in spaces and you change cadences, and it’s not like Jazz where you do a solo over harmonic changes. It’s the opposite: you do the melody and the harmonic changes have to follow the melody. It’s a melodically driven music.

The harmony is secondary, almost like rhythm. If there’s no harmony and the people are just playing open fifths, that’s fine. It’s really about the melody and then the melody is there, usually to serve the dance rhythm. Like Jazz, there are some rhythmic treatments of pushing ahead or pulling back and, you know, kind of making the rhythms a little bit crooked, but I mean, I can do a solo on any of the Yiddish Theater tunes but it’s very tame... My husband is a real jazz head, a real jazz player, and he’s trying to explain it to me and I think... I think I’m just resistant to it. [laughs]

In ‘92, ’93 - pretty much from my early 30s, which is when I started - well, I had my first kid at 30, my second at 33, and I stopped teaching then. I decided I wanted to be home to raise them, and I was only doing playing gigs.

When I got out of college, out of graduate school, I auditioned for the New Haven Symphony, and I got in, and then I was in Orchestra New England, which was a chamber orchestra. Eventually, when positions opened up, I became - I think when my son was like, God, a couple months old - the assistant principal position opened up for New Haven Symphony. I practiced, I auditioned, I got the job. And then I also got the job to be principal of the chamber orchestra, so I was at that since ‘92...  I was doing all the core work for both of those orchestras, plus the club date stuff, plus the casinos opened up, so I had strolling violin gigs. I was really busy playing.

The Symphony got a grant to bring music to the inner city, and the conductor Murray Sidlin said “You know, I think you’d be good to do this,” so I went into three schools in the inner city in the afternoons, and I brought in a music program. But when I had my kids I kind of stopped teaching, I wanted to be home with them, and I was pretty busy working. So I was home during the day and out at night. Which was pretty horrible for my marriage, among other things. So that was probably from the age of 30, kind of, on, when I was busy, really busy.

And then the economy started to tank. There were dips, a crash sometime in ‘87, when I was pregnant, I was just about to be married and pregnant, and the economy took a downturn then. Some of the playing work dipped down, and then started coming back by the early 90s, and that’s when I was super, super busy.

Well, our trio had an agent, MCM out of New York, and they were getting us work and between the Symphony and the chamber orchestra and the strolling gigs and the work from our agent, I was doing pretty well.

Then the Madoff scandal happened, and a lot of the Jewish organizations that were, you know, pooling together to bring us in for residencies all over, even Indiana University, Ohio State, all these colleges... A lot of the Hillel organizations that were usually the bulk of our fee, ‘cause they usually would pool together the anthropology department, the history department, and the Hillel was usually one of the bigger donors, as were some of the local synagogues.

When we came to do residencies we would usually be there for 3 or 4 days, and we would teach, we would do workshops, and then at our concert we would have a spot for the students. This guy, this agent got us maybe between 5 and 8 of those a year. And you know, by the time we came home it was enough, padded with everything else I was doing, to make a - you know, I was not rich by any means, as you can imagine, but it was enough.

But then, when this happened, because a lot of the donors even for the New Haven Symphony and Orchestra New England came out of Fairfield County - well, Fairfield County in Connecticut got killed by Madoff. The city actually lost its pensions fund. So a lot of the donors, of any of the work I was doing, you know, withdrew their money from the endowments of any groups I was in. So the Symphony's services were cut almost in half, the Orchestra New England that I’d, you know, been principal of for almost 30 years, almost went into bankruptcy, and all of a sudden this huge chunk of income got kind of dropped out.

I wasn't teaching - I had stopped teaching because, you know, I didn't have to [laughs], to be frank... And in the end, my daughter, starting to enter college, luckily she was going to the RI School of Design, got a full scholarships, so I was ok - you know, my ex-husband and I were gonna have to pay maybe, with her living expenses, about 12,000 a year which was much better than we thought. Actually he was great about it - he had put money away when they were kids, so that was covered.

But when all of this happened, within about 6 months I noticed we were losing work: my agent would call and say “You know, these three residencies just dropped out” and then one of our European tours, which was going to be pretty much a half of my yearly income - our anchor gig there got canceled. So we had to cancel out on all these tiny, three- or four-hundred euro-a-piece gigs, and I was sitting there going “Oh My God,” and our son is growing... I was really panicking and I knew I could go back to teaching, but -- I enjoy teaching a day or two a week, I don't enjoy teaching 5 or 6 days a week.

So I was helping a friend set up a wireless network, and I was telling her, “I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do. My child support's gonna stop soon.” My ex-husband and I still, and did, have a very good relationship - I did not try to ream him during the divorce, and nobody pulled any funny business... Our settlement was just what everybody needed, and not enough to make him, you know, have to live out of his car. So I just was freaking out: To build up a teaching studio is gonna take me a year or two, and meanwhile my son who is starting to grow three inches a year and, you know, I'm telling him “Get away from the refrigerator, I can no longer feed you!" [laughs]

My friend said “Why don't you do this?”

And I said “Do what?" I didn't know what she was talking about.

And she said "This - you're not a 22 year old anti social geek - you're talking to me in a way I can understand, you're not giving me too much information but you're giving me enough that I feel like I can trust you...”

I had never even thought about computers [as a career], it was just not interesting to me. You know, when I was in 7th grade I remember we had computer class and the computer was in this room, it was the whole room. And you put in these little punch cards and it, you know, it added 6 plus 6, so who cares, you know - that didn’t interest me.

So I started thinking about it, and you know, I have a Masters in Music - I have no mathematics. I have no IT training. But I've always loved gadgets. Everybody always called me “Gidget Gadget,” 'cause if it was silver with lights I had it, and if there was a well written manual, it was like a religious experience for me: I was like, 'Wow, that was written well!'

[A little later] I was at Klez Camp, where we go - where the Jews go between Christmas and New Year’s. It's in the Catskills, it's been there since right when the revival started, I think it's in its 26th year. I've been teaching there for almost 20 years. So I was there, and one of the guys that is kind of one of the musicians but he also - he runs the office, he's also a Mac geek and he's written some books on Filemaker Pro, and I was talking to him about it, and he goes “Well why don't you just take the training, just get certified! And then put your shingle out, and most of the time you're gonna be connecting printers and, you know...”

I started to look into it - I looked up “How do you get certified by Apple?” I found that you just have to take a test, and they offer classes. And I was gonna take a class but the classes were 3 days, and $1500. First of all, I did not have $1500 to spend on a class, and at that time, I was in my late 40s - I don't learn in 3 days, it takes me longer.

So I decided I would buy the materials: the textbook, the certification for the operating system. I studied that, and I also bought the study materials to repair hardware, and soon realized I didn't like that - that's not fun for me, to repair hardware. I can change out a hard drive and memory, and change out almost anything in there, but when you start talking about soldering, I lose interest, I'm not interested in that.

So I decided I was just going to get certified in what's called ACSP - Apple Certified Support Professional - meaning, the only hardware I'm certified to do is to change memory. But I can, you know, wipe your system, I can do anything that has to do with the operating system and software and it'd be certified and I don't void your warranty. So I bought these books, and I bought a spiral notebook and a bunch of pens, and I friggin' studied for 6 weeks, about 4 hours a day.

I'd get up in the morning, I'd go play tennis, or ride my bike, or you know, prepare my kids' dinner, and I would sit down with my coffee or whatever from about 9-11, take little break and then study another 2 hours or so. And I basically wrote out the book - I took notes on the book... I filled up two spiral notebooks. And then I went back, took notes on the summaries. It was really like an intensive course I gave myself for 6 weeks, and my whole family was crackin' up because they were like, [laughing] "Yeah, we're not eatin' really well right now" [laughs] "We’re doing a lot of ‘diner dinners’..."

I signed up for the test, it was $150 or something, I had to drive an hour and a half to Waterbury CT and I walked into this scuzzy building to take this test. It's just me and this guy... and a PC!

And I'm all "What the hell, why am I taking an Apple test on a PC?" and I'm laughing and I said "You're giving me this thing from like, 1989 that I'm supposed to take this test on to be certified?" I think I was at that time taking the 10.4 certification... and so I took the test, and I got a hundred. And I went "oh" and, of course I over studied, I mean, I was like, insane, and he said to me "Are you a musician?, or an artist?"

And I said "I'm a musician."

And he goes "'Cause musicians see patterns - they might not know why something doesn't fit, but a musician will say “Naah, that doesn't fit in with the other ones."

It turned out he had a Masters degree from Juilliard in clarinet. So he said "I have IT training" - his job was he operates this testing center, but he also was an IT consultant and he just started this business.

He said to me "That's great, with your certification, you can now get a logo from Apple that you can put on your business card and on your website that shows that you know [what you’re doing]. And then he gave me this lecture about “Don't expect to make any money, because...the economy's bad - people aren't spending money...”

So I waited about a month. I was like "I can't be good enough, that was too easy, I'm not ready yet..." So I read a whole bunch more stuff, and I read some of the books on repairing hardware, and I was on the internet a lot and I was reading books about hacks... I just couldn't believe that I was really ready.

Then I finally started to advertise. The place I was living was right outside New Haven, Connecticut, about 15 minutes. It was a suburb, kind of like a mixture of North Berkeley and Piedmont. So there were some, you know, some of us apartment dwellers, and some wicked rich people. So I decided, “You know what, I don't need to go into New Haven, I don't want to go into a place where I'm going to worry walking into a house... I want to serve the nice rich ladies.”

So I advertised in the Shoreline Times, because it was right on the Long Island Sound and there were a lot of people. I got my first client: she was the niece of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who had an affair with Virginia Wolfe... She was in her late 80s and she called me to come over because she was writing a book -- and she had an antique Macbook and probably needed something new.

And then her daughter called me and tried to make sure I was not going to, you know, be a con woman. So she and her daughter became my first two clients, and I was really busy with them, because I refitted -- they had all this old equipment, and they had, you know, two versions of Microsoft Word between two computers and one couldn't talk to the other, and so they, these were folks that were comfortable with money and I - and very sweet people, I still actually keep in touch with them, I still do remote support for them. And we went shopping with their credit card, and I went - “That was really fun.”

So I decided "That's my clientele" - people who really are kind of digiphobic, that need to be able to use their Macs. And then I advertised in a little Seniors’ newspaper, and then I started getting clients who wanted help installing Skype so they could speak to their grandkids, and that was most of my work: helping people over the age of 65 with their digital life.

I made some recommendations about network stuff, like if they were on AT&T and needed to be on something faster, I would help them call Comcast. I had a couple of times when AT&T was giving them the runaround and I'd get on the phone and get all kind of Sheriff Dillan from Gunsmoke on 'em, and all, "Now, Lookie here, you're taking advantage of seniors! And I'm gonna report you, and come down there, and blah blah blah…" It became kind of this business serving people either too old or too intimidated to go into the Apple store which was an hour away.

Or - “I think somebody's hacking into my computer.” “Why do you think somebody's hacking into your computer?” “Because I get emails that I didn't ask for.” “Okay, well, [laughs], you're still on yahoo? Well, I'll tell you what...”

You know, so it's stuff like that, or setting a backup system. I'm very big on that, looking at somebody's situation, saying “Here's what I recommend” and that kind of stuff. Printers, wireless network problems, extending networks, email issues… That's pretty much what I deal with, with my clients.

There was nobody on the shoreline that did what I did, so I was pretty busy! But it wasn't so busy that - I still had whatever music work I was doing - it didn't interfere. It doesn't now either.

So that's what it was, and I kept my certification up - I still have to do 10.8. I need to take the certification test for Mountain Lion, I haven't done that yet. Around here [Bay Area] a lot of the computer geeks, they're not certified, they just know stuff. One guy that kind of - I call him my mentor - he said “You don't need to be certified - what, do you need to be certified to hook up a printer?" But I prefer to just have that [certification], it does calm some people down...

If somebody says they need something really complicated, ‘cause I'm almost 55 I say “No I don't do that” - I won't take on something I know I can't do, or that's gonna be too challenging. I'm very upfront about what I can do and what I can't do. For instance, Patty Heller wanted this whole sound system and I said “I really don't do sound systems” -- 'cause I don't listen to music! [laughs] If I'm not playing music, I don't wanna hear it! Unless I'm studying it, or go to a concert, I wanna hear one tune, and then I'm like “That was so amazing, I'm gonna leave now and go have ice cream...”

So that's it. I teach 2 and a half days a week, I do MacMama about three days a week, and then whatever gigs come by, and that's pretty much how it was on the East Coast, except I wasn't teaching and I was playing a whole lot more.

When I graduated in ‘84, I worked my way up, and I was, you know, I was top tier, I was doing everything. When I moved here in 2010, I actually did a leave of absence, because I wasn't sure, but... my whole classical life has completely changed. I was really very, very busy, but, you know, I'm not willing to sit on the highway at this age, I'm just too old. [laughs]

The difficult part [of my relocation] was that there was no competition for me out there. Here, there is so much competition - but the niche that I attract are the, you know, some of the folks from Marin County, how would I put it, how some women have in-home businesses, a lot of times they don't want a geek in the house. They want someone that is like them. So it took me a little while to build up my clientele, but I get a lot of word of mouth, and the biggest exposure for me, the best ads have been the Piedmont Post.

It's a small paper run by this wonderful guy, Gray Cathrall - I trade IT with him: I fix his stuff, he runs my ads for free, and then I write a monthly “Dear MacMama” column on his Senior page. So that's really what gets me the most business. I don't get the college students, I'm not for them and they're not for me. I get their grandparents. So, you know, I get somebody when their kids buy them a Mac, and they start asking their kids questions, and their kids are like “Oh my God, Mom, call somebody!” -- well, I'm that person!

I have one patient -- oh, patient - I have one customer who had a stroke, and he's very hard to understand - he goes “[unintelligible high-pitched whimpering]” but I know when I sit down in front of his computer, I can see whatever the issue is... He's a person who's done a lot in his life - he's very intelligent, very smart, and just because he can't use his voice, his wife says he gets treated like an idiot, but his IQ's probably off the charts.

Part of it is maybe because I had immigrant parents, so I always had to negotiate the world for them, it's kind of second nature for me to have someone who doesn't understand something and I can present it to them in a way that will not overwhelm them but will allow them to do what they have to do. That's what I market - one woman said “You should name your business The Daughter I Wish I Had” [laughs] - but that's kind of, you know...

I would say that right now, music plus teaching is half my income and MacMama is the other half. I'm actually making more out here [than back East] on MacMama because even though there's so much competition, the niche that I fill is kind of new territory.

Older people - people in my generation who, you know, really were in their late 20s, early thirties when we started really kind of counting on computers and really using them and being curious about them… I think what happens as you get older is you get more easily frustrated. What I worry about is as technology gets more complicated, am I going to be able to keep up with it? And I have a feeling that my life as MacMama is gonna probably have to morph into something else.

I mean, I’ve had the experience when my daughter was having trouble with getting onto a network, so I was working on my daughter’s computer, and her boyfriend was having some trouble with his own computer and she - just in watching me use the mouse and the trackpad and do what I was doing, it was frustrating to her because I’m slower. You know, I don’t go boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. I go methodically.

Her boyfriend was looking all over and he couldn’t fix it and so he closed his computer and walked away. Well, I just did the things that I knew, and I knew there was nothing really wrong with the network, there was just some setting that was goofy, so I deleted all her network settings and started over, and it worked. But it took me - I didn’t think it was taking me a long time, but it drove her crazy to watch me do it - it probably took me 15 minutes. But for her, because her attention span was - it’s either fixed or I’m not gonna do it... They’re just so used to doing and fixing things so quickly.

My clientele is most likely very rarely going to be much younger than me, and so as I get older I may start going too slow for, you know, to fix stuff. So I fully intend to have to, at some point in my life, either take in more students or just figure something out - remake myself. I mean, in Berkeley, shit, I could call myself a life coach and probably get enough people to [laughs] you know... I mean, I call myself the “iLife Coach for the Digiphobic!” I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ll do something. I think that one of the lessons I’ve tried to teach my kids is that you have to remake yourself a few times in your life, and that’s ok! You know, you’re one thing now and something else comes up, and you just have to do something else. That’s the deal!

My current husband, we actually met when we were brought in to teach a workshop in Albuquerque in 2002, and because we were both kind of well-known in the Jewish music scene, they said “Oh can you guys put on a concert?” and, you know, things happened that led to right now, but... He was a Mac person, I wasn’t - I was on a PC.

I still was the one who could always fix stuff at home on the computer, but he was telling me all about the Mac and he said “You should really think about getting a Mac” and he had a little Powerbook... so I switched over and I got an iMac. Then, you know, fixing problems was 6 steps less on the Mac. So I started just reading about it, and then I really became, like, a geek. Not like a person who doesn’t wash their hair, but, I was so interested in the whole architecture of the operating system. I was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I’m really reading this magazine right now... Huh!”

So that’s when I just - I really enjoyed using the Mac and then my kids were kinda coming up and we would - I would get little software for them, and it was just fun, and it was so clean, and I switched over from Finale to Sibelius, which seemed very sexy, and user-friendly.

So that’s kinda when my interest got piqued, but I never considered doing it for a living, because you know like I said, I don’t have an IT background, I don’t have a math degree, I don’t have a science degree. Basically, I had studied something where I’d never have to write a paper, ‘cause, you know, yuck!

Yeah, no, I never would have thought that I would do it at all. So the fact that I actually did this - if you would have told me 10 years ago, I’d say You’re crazy! I know how to do stuff, but I could never do this... So it was kind of a surprise to me that I did it, and I enjoy it, and you know, very few times do I say “Oh my god, that was a horrible day” - I usually feel pretty good at the end. There’ve been a couple of times when I haven’t solved a problem and it bothers me and bothers me and bothers me and I keep worrying about it, but I mostly really do enjoy the work that I do.

I like to talk to people, I like to be a problem solver. I like to interact with people personally, just like when you’re teaching, but... you know, and I love it when someone says, “I need a laser printer, and I want something that’s black.” I go, “Okay! Let’s go shopping!” and we go online and I go “Well, if we get at B&H, you know, you don’t have to pay tax. “Um, well, I don’t like to buy things from -- let’s just buy it from Apple and pay more money” and I go “Ok, well now we’re really shopping.” So, you know, that’s really fun for me. That would be my next job, a professional shopper - I’d go “You can NOT wear those shoes with those pants.” I’d be so good because I’m so opinionated. [laughs]

And setting up an office the way I like to do it, very cleanly and telling people “Put your documents in documents, and put your pictures in pictures, keep your desktop clean...” You know when somebody goes “Ok, I want you to organize my computer,” then I’m just happy as a pig in shit. You don’t have to print that, but...

I do work in the command line a little bit, but the thing is, anything I can’t do, I can find on Google in a split second, and if I, for instance, if I want to know where a hidden file is because I have a feeling there is some extension causing a problem, I type into Google “Where is the preference file for...” and - if people used Google I would never get a job. There is so much available online. I started to study some more command line stuff and programming, and at five seconds I went “Nah, not for me, definitely not for me.” I just like the people part of it, and solving problems. That’s why, you know, if I get too old for this, I’ll do some other kind of in-house something, I don’t know, I’ll make something up.

If technology went by me so quickly, went over my head, like in the next ten years or so, I would have no qualms about going back to school, getting a social workers degree and putting out a shingle as a, you know, musical ensemble therapist. [laughs]

Our group, when we do workshops, we do a class called “Bandstand 911.” It’s solving problems on the bandstand, ‘cause you get these Klezmer bands that are made up of deeply developed - or much too quiet - personalities, and there’s usually some battle that goes on musically and some people wanna play by ear, but others... So we get hired, I don’t want to say a lot - when the economy was better, we were brought in a lot to do that workshop. People really liked that ‘cause we would teach people how to lead a dance, how to work with the dance leader, how to call tunes, how to indicate to your group that you’re switching tunes by having little code, licks that you do... You know, “Who’s the leader, the piano player or the violinist? Well, guess what, the violinist can use the instrument to give cues...” You know, that kind of thing.

I was really- and still am, I love animals… My kids used to call me a “serial pet collector,” ‘cause something would come to the door hungry and I’d say “Oh look! We just got a new cat! We have a bird! I bought a horse!...” I’d be so happy on a ranch, working with animals all day and then playing tunes at night! And cooking! That would be like, you know - my string quartet folk music dude ranch would be the perfect thing for me. And our kids could support us, Goddamm! [laughs]

I don’t think this will be my job forever, I don’t think it can. It’s like with music, you know, as we get older, we get replaced by younger, faster, cheaper people, and then we hope our kids are making enough money that they can build us a room with a southern exposure. I told my daughter, “You better give me a big window, ‘cause if you give me a dark room you’re not gonna be happy.” [laughs]