Sometimes moments in our lives appear ordinary while we are living them. Only years later, flipping back through day-by-day journals that tracked the turning points of life, do we recognize those moments as beginnings: a song heard in childhood, a door opened by a stranger, or a conversation that stayed for decades.
Creativity often begins this way for me—with a quiet recognition. Something calls. Something inside us listens. And if we are fortunate, we follow.
The first time music made me cry, I was a little girl sitting on the floor working on a puzzle. I don’t remember the puzzle. I remember the sound.
An old jazz song came through the radio in our front room: “Rotation” by Herb Alpert. I believe he was playing the flugelhorn, an instrument whose sound seemed to me like warm, liquid light. The sound surrounded me with something I could not explain then and still struggle to fully describe now. It feels round, as the composition title suggests, but also golden—almost like a galaxy made of sound.
I was a child who knew nothing about jazz history, composition, or technique. I only knew that something had reached me. When the song ended, I ran to the telephone.
This was no small decision. The telephone in our home was practically a bat phone—not touched casually, and never dialed unless there was a real emergency. My mother was a beloved and busy beautician, and calling her at work was reserved for something important.
But this felt important.
“Mom,” I said, “you have to take me to the record store. I need this song.”
I imagine there was a pause. “What?”
“I need the vinyl record.”
And somehow, my mother understood. That night, she found a store that carried the record, and I walked out holding the 45 of “Rotation.” I played it over and over. Today, I smile at the urgency of that little girl. But I also recognize something sacred in it: before I knew what an artistic voice was, I knew what it felt like to encounter one.
Years later, my father gave me a guitar. My fingers were too small to wrap around the neck properly, so he taught me an Elvis tune that I could only play with one determined index finger. I couldn’t form chords. I couldn’t play the way I imagined musicians played. But I could keep rhythm. That little finger moved across the strings with complete confidence, like the little engine that believed it could.
Eventually, my hands grew. I taught myself to play properly and later studied Flamenco guitar. Music was my first artistic expression—preceding images, filmmaking, and even the vocabulary to name the creative life I was moving toward.
Music was already there. It was a language I spoke, not necessarily in the same way a composer or performer speaks it, but in the way a person recognizes a place they have never been before.
Years later, that pull toward music led me to a tiny jazz club in Chicago called the Gold Star Sardine Bar. I wasn’t looking for another job because I needed the money; I was looking for an environment where music mattered. I wanted to be close to it.
The room itself felt like part of the performance. It was small, intimate, almost impossibly so—a true sardine can of a space filled with devoted jazz listeners. The lighting was dim, with the main source of illumination coming from the stage light above the piano, drums, and a double bass.
I sat at the bar beside the owner, introduced myself, and explained why I wanted to work there. He listened quietly. I figured I could serve cocktails—a job only two women had at the club. How hard could it be to carry drinks through a super-crowded, tiny jazz spot? 😂
Younger me, who didn't like alcohol and still really doesn't care for it, had no clue that drink service was a whole specialized skill set—and definitely not one I possessed!
The silence stretched long enough for me to wonder if I had already been turned down. Then he reached for a cocktail napkin, wrote something on it, and handed it to me.
“Walk up there to the microphone and read this.”
On that napkin were the words that introduced the evening’s performance. Before I could process what was happening, I was walking onto the stage, and reading the English introduction into the mic.
When I finished, an older woman stepped beside me and repeated it in French. That was how the Gold Star Sardine Bar transported its guests. I was barely into my twenties, and suddenly I crossed the threshold into the heart of the world I had been searching for.
When I stepped down from the microphone, the owner looked at me.
“You’re hired. You start tonight.”
That napkin changed my life.
Night after night, I stood before a room full of strangers and introduced one of the finest jazz trios in the world, led by Patricia Barber. Between sets, we would occasionally talk in the back hallway. They were brief conversations—small moments.
One evening, I asked Patricia if she would play my favorite of her compositions.
She smiled. “You really love the ethereal, don’t you? But the crowd wants the classics. I’ll think about it.”
That night, she played a song that would linger for years. I remember sitting there with tears welling up in my eyes.
There are pieces of music we admire, and then there are pieces that quietly take up residence within us. “Romanesque” became one of those pieces for me. I couldn’t explain why it affected me so deeply. It seemed to slow time itself, carrying longing without despair and tenderness without sentimentality.
When I listened, I saw images—emotional landscapes. The music felt painterly. The space between the notes mattered as much as the notes themselves: the restraint, the precision, the breath. Long ahead of my formal introduction to filmmaking, I was already responding to the elements that would eventually shape my visual language: atmosphere, rhythm, silence, and the invisible emotional architecture beneath a story.
When Patricia walked onto the Gold Star stage, I remember feeling as though she entered into an intimate embrace with the piano and microphone. Her lips stayed close to the mic; she barely moved. Yet the sound that emerged pierced through any armor you might have entered wearing. She didn’t perform outwardly as much as she seemed to disappear into the music. It felt almost sacred to witness—like watching someone completely surrendered to something they loved. That intimacy stayed with me.
Years later, when I began writing my first professional short film, Mama Said, I returned to “Romanesque” again and again. I didn’t choose the music because it fit the film; it felt more like the music had been quietly preparing me to make it. Its tempo became part of the emotional rhythm of the screenplay, and the spaces between the notes shaped the spaces between scenes. The composition became part of the film’s invisible foundation.
When my cinematographer, Matthew J. Siegel, arrived for production, I played him the piece before we shot a single frame.
“This,” I told him, “is how you and I are going to dance for the next three days.”
And we did.
Now, I inner-stand that music was, in a way, teaching me how to see well ahead of my desire to make films.
It taught me that sometimes emotion whispers. It waits inside a pause. It arrives through a sound that finds us ahead of any conscious search.
I was a child who heard a song on the radio and ran to buy the record. There was a father who placed a guitar in his daughter’s hands. A jazz musician created a composition that quietly became part of another artist’s creative vocabulary.
Years later, that artist followed the thread without a map, yet guided entirely by a quiet recognition of the way home.
Faith and Science
