 Good afternoon. Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. I'm Ken Birdness and I'm coming to you from Haleiva out at the North Shore. Today we have a great show coming for you. Our guest is Cherie Magnus and she was with us back in May and she told us in May about the joy of dance and I'm really happy to have her back because we're going to take it in a different direction today. Welcome to the show, Cherie. Thank you so much. So happy to be here in Los Angeles where it's cooking. Well here it's about ready to storm. I don't know how we're both going to do but hopefully the gods will be with us and make us feel okay for the next hour. That first show in May was just, I think it certainly made me feel the joy that you've felt in dancing and I think it made the audience feel the same thing too. And you wrote three books about it, this great trilogy that took us through your life with dance and it was wonderful and then all of a sudden there's a fourth book which is much different. It's not non-fiction, it's fiction and it's not about dance, it's about climate change and in it are two very different interesting heroes and it's just a wonderful book and during the last show we mentioned it briefly at the end of the last show and I was hoping that might be a good place to start, Cherie, just to pick it up and for you to tell us a little bit more about that fourth wonderful book about Lincoln and Rachmaninoff walking into a bar. Oh yes, well it brought me a great deal of joy to write it and the idea came to me kind of midway through the pandemic like three years ago and you know we were all doing a lot of fantasy then because we had to just stay inside and couldn't live our lives fully as we were used to and so I was thinking a lot, well I always think a lot but somehow I mean Rachmaninoff has always been my favorite composer, I love all the Russians, but Sergei Rachmaninoff is number one to me and Abraham Lincoln has been my hero my whole life. So I was thinking about both of those men for some reason and then the thought occurred to me well what do they have in common because they were both very very tall and they were both depressed and so I started researching and found out all the things they have in common and the more I found out about them the more that I wanted to they were still my heroes but I wanted to put them in a story and I thought wow my goodness if anybody can save us can save the world from climate change it can be these iconic heroes and since I live in California and Los Angeles and we have such beautiful nature and countryside and cliffside and beachside here I pictured that they were going to ride in a Lincoln Continental starting an angels flight in downtown LA driving north and along the way meeting the ghosts of indigenous peoples archangels getting their mission from God and yeah so the more I thought about it the more I researched it the more fun I had with the fantasy and I ended up writing this novella. Wow it was a wonderful read I can tell the audience that for sure. Oh thank you. Cherie is a librarian and she did a lot of research for this and I'll rock Mononof and Lincoln are favorites of mine as well. There was a lot I learned in this book that she brought to me not only about the facts of their life but Cherie you made them come to life you gave them a personality with the way they talked and the way they interacted and it was like okay they sort of came off the page and they were people and that was the wonderful thing about the book. That was my goal Ken because I tried to use as many of their own words as possible later on in the story they meet Ulysses S Grant and so he comes into the story and he has a lot to say also but I use their own words from their letters and their speeches and I like to think that the characters were alive on the page you know that that was their true personalities coming out even if those events never happened in terms of going up highway one and in a Lincoln Continental. So you certainly succeeded that was for sure and that's the wonders of library we had the joy of libraries on a number of months ago and it's one of my favorite places and interestingly enough there's a lot of books being written about libraries now libraries is a central focus and to be honest with you the library the local library that I volunteer at over at Wailua is not only a place to find books but it's a place to think it's a place to imagine it's a place to walk in and people know your name and it's like a second home and libraries are are magical and you certainly use that magic to to bring these two people to life and it was it was a wonderful trip so tell us about the trip especially the Blue Continental now there's a famous there's a car that I love so and that must have been fun writing in that at least through your your main character who's sort of well I hope they had fun um there's a front of the car that they they all write in and they pick up a couple of people along the way yeah I thought the Lincoln has to write in a Lincoln right yeah exactly exactly well I would like to say too that um because the first three books were memoir nonfiction every single word had to be true um maybe a conversation was remembered but the essence of it was true the events were true maybe I changed a few names but it's all true now when you're writing fiction and especially if it's fantasy you can just put whatever you want it's so liberating it's so joyful can exactly and I had never written fiction before and I love the freedom of it hey I want they can do this or they can do that it doesn't matter it's all you know it also makes a point so I had a great deal of fun it kind of saved me from the depression I had the funk that I was in during the pandemic years so well I think that's the real key I think that and that's what we're hoping to do on on all my shows is to get people out of that dark space that the pandemic uh COVID and all the other things that are depressing us today from the war to certainly climate change uh into everything the mass shootings uh and people need to get out of that they need to find that freedom um and that's the subtitle of our show today is the uh you know is the magic of a free imagination and your book freed my imagination as it did yours and I hope the certainly uh when the audience reads it they should feel their imagination being freed as well uh it's just a wonderful way to to do that the fiction has always been one of my key favorites because it allows us to go beyond the depressing into the hopeful and I'm a hopeful type of person and your book certainly may be hopeful oh well I I I mean it did feel hopeful to me to write that it wasn't dueling gloom so I hope other people I mean maybe it's not the perfect answer um but it's one way to approach it you know um Rachmaninoff really believed in the power of music and Lincoln did too and Lincoln had such a way to work with people he could get people to work together you know even people on a posi or the north and said eventually they work together and I think if they were around today they knew the trouble that we were in they could do something to help but there's all kinds of ways to help and we can't just say oh well what can I do I'm just one person I'm nobody everybody can do something and if we all do something then maybe we can save the world I don't know and I think we do it by example and I think your example of letting your imagination go and and thinking not negatively about climate change like you say not thinking that this is a problem we can't solve but let's think about it and let's think about it differently and that's what imagination does it gives us a different perspective a different idea tell us about the joy you've built when you were along with your characters traveling down that that highway going north and seeing things and hoping about the the future with new music and new words to go to that music to inspire people well I do believe that music can change people music can change the world we spoke last time about the power of music in my personal life so that's not to say it doesn't have power across across the world you know it's how we harness it but fantasy fantasy thinking about what I go to the LA Phil at Disney Hall and I'm sitting there listening to Stravinsky or whatever is being played I'm in another world I'm fantasizing you know because fantasy you can escape you can find solace you can reflect on different things is inspiring and liberates our minds it opens our minds to other possibilities and it also unites us in a community and I even though I don't especially read a lot of fantasy myself you know because today in the library fantasy is extremely popular but it's fantasy of zombies and dragons and witches and things like that and so but there's all kinds of fantasy and I think it's very healthy I know the first book that I remember reading and I read very early and enjoyed reading first my first reading was comic books and little Lulu and Scrooge McDuck and stuff but the one my first real book was Ozma of Oz no that's I mean no that's pure fantasy of course but I became obsessed and I collected all the 14 original Oz books at home you know I knew every character by heart and that was the the start of my love of those worlds and then when I went to the bookmobile I got ready to pick books and the lilac fairy book and all that but then as I matured I didn't read fantasy so much anymore right I know you you're a real fan of fantasy movies aren't you? Well fantasy books and I started the same place you did you know not with Ozma of Oz but with the Wizard of Oz the first book in the series and and I too have the whole set in fact I used to belong to the Wizard of Oz club which was an international club and so yeah it's uh and they took us places that we never thought we'd go not only the first one which was of course the most popular but the the road to Oz which Tiff started out with and wound up at the end of the book to be Ozma at the end of the land of Oz which was the second book and it was an amazing journey through Oz and opened up opened me up to so many different thoughts and fantasies um I can tell you a very embarrassing story now that you mentioned it about the L.I.R. the LA Philharmonic uh when I was young um to give you an idea of the fantasy that I got into uh which was very early on and although I lived in the valley uh they had a special program that would bust be bust kids into the L.I. Philharmonic for a matinee performance and especially for the kids in this city schools in Los Angeles so I did that first when I was in the fifth grade and took the travel from the valley into the L.I. Philharmonic and we that was the first symphony I attended at in fifth grade and uh it was a wonderful experience so I and my friends are sitting in a row I'm on the aisle seat and uh I close my eyes and I let the music flow through me and I imagine things that the music brings and one of my compatriots says hey bernice is sleeping you know wake him up and I said no no you got it wrong I'm not sleeping but what you do if you close your eyes you can put a fantastic story you can unfold guided by the music that you're hearing and they said oh really so they all tried it so I'm sitting there and all my friends there was about five of them were sitting there with their eyes closed listening to the music and unbeknownst to us uh LA Times photographer was there photographing the audience and took our picture and uh wrote a story for the LA Times about uh the L.I. Philharmonic's uh you know work with young children introducing music to young children they still do and they showed lots of pictures of children just looking wrapped at the the symphony and just getting into it you know and and then they came to us ours was the last picture and it showed us with the eyes closed and there was a caption that had all z's in it like oh these kids are bored they're sleeping through the thing you know and I was you know I was flabbergast I was saying no we weren't sleeping we were imagining but they the photographer of course didn't ask us what we were doing they just assumed we were sleeping it was a good shot yeah and it made a good story but uh you know it's not true that was a little non-fiction a little fantasy in their story because we weren't sleeping we were and it was beautiful music you know I was just sitting in that uh the civic auditorium at that time you're just listening to the L.I. Philharmonic was incredible yeah I'm so grateful you see who I'm wearing here here's dude him out he's leaving us yeah so um um the first classical piece that I remember hearing I don't know if I mentioned it before but um I had a record called Sparky's Magic Piano it was an album 78 you know 78 right I don't know how many there are three or four of them in in a folder yeah and so it was about a little boy who had a magic piano he wanted to practice piano and so his piano said okay you don't have to worry about practicing I'll play for you so he takes the piano on tour and then he does all these amazing performances and then the piano decides not to play anymore so what I remember mostly is and there were a lot of different excerpts of classical pieces on there but I remember Rachmaninoff played in C sharp minor I was five years old and I just you know it just uh shone a light on me and started me off my journey my Rachmaninoff journey or as I call him Rocky yeah Rocky I like it they've already used that title in a different kind of movie but yeah I like the well it's Rocky with an eye yeah yeah and he certainly uh you know he certainly scored a knockout with a lot of his uh you know his pieces just incredible stuff but do you know what his music was considered hacked Hackney uh in the mid-century and um he was out of favor they didn't want to program his music at the symphony and they wanted him to write for movies which he refused to do and so they hired other people to write similar music but uh now he's completely back in favor and every season has Rachmaninoff and as a matter of fact next week is Rachmaninoff playing at the Hollywood Bowl and uh yeah so I guess if you wait long enough if you don't die too soon you know you can get your fame and fortune eventually yeah and even if you die uh that you know you can come back and uh you know like yeah and save the world be famous yeah save the world and he and Lincoln got along you know once they got to know each other yeah I can imagine they were both outliers they were both different and you know and I I certainly related to that because I was an outlier in school you know uh so was I yeah and I think that's why we uh had such a good time together because uh you know it wasn't that I didn't like the people in the other you know in the in-group I didn't you know the athletes and all that other sort of you know the stuff the people with money and people with power and uh all that sort of stuff the people who were in it was just that I was okay just being with everybody and that's what my folks taught me and my mother taught me started reading to me when I was an infant and started playing music on you know on there 78 rpm a little phonograph uh to me and she didn't do a lot of uh kid stuff though she did a lot of adult stuff I started with you know for one of the first authors I remember is Oscar Wilde not usually not usually a kid so he did the yeah any poetry is poetry and just uh just wonderful stuff so but they played a classical music from the beginning and the first time I heard a classical piece was when I was about three or four and I didn't understand it but I just it made me soar it was uh Edvard Grieg uh in the pier against wheat and he was playing uh in the hall of the mountain king and uh when that piece started and uh it starts slow and then builds up and gets build it up and and then to this thunderous climax and you know and I can just remember feeling joy but not understanding at all and then by the time you know like when you talked about about five years old I knew that by then I had heard the story and knew the story and had built my own story I had decided that I would be the person who tackled to go into the mountain and tackle the troll king and save the damsel you know and uh that's what I was doing at five years old and the music just carried me right through it that's wonderful yeah it made me you know it music makes me soar and uh and rock not enough makes me want to feel in love you know what he said he said music is everything music is love yeah and I certainly felt it you know if I wanted to uh you know be romantic with a lady that I was dating I couldn't rock not enough you know nothing like it you know just uh wow funny sorry yeah rock bottom up yeah I don't know if you take a look at the second or third symphony you know the movements in there some of that stuff are the most beautiful pieces that he was a great melody writer great yeah writer yeah so so nobody ever tried to seduce you with the classical music nope well they took me to concerts and that was the death yeah speaking of which the first time I heard rock not enough live was LA Philharmonic was at the shrine auditorium I was 17 years old and they were doing what they called uh uh the concert where they play first and then they have dancing afterwards um oh I can't remember what they what what that kind of an evening is they don't do them anymore but one of the pieces they played at the shrine auditorium was uh Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff yeah I said oh my god oh my god what is that so yeah then I heard it a hundred times in movies you know is a very favorite love theme in all kinds of different movies but he did it he did quite a memorable job when he wrote that he made Paganini you know famous yeah but you know something really interesting about him and I I learned I mean I knew a lot about both men but now I know a lot more because of all the research I did but once he escaped from Russia and he came to the United States he only wrote one piece so he had all those decades here when he played all his concerts he had to make a lot of money to pay for his caviar and his Russian lifestyle but he didn't compose he wasn't inspired until the year before he died and he composed symphonic dances but all the other pieces he composed in Russia or Rome or Switzerland so we just didn't inspire him here you know he was rushing to the core he wanted to go home he wanted to be buried there and he wasn't allowed to be so he had a very sad life and so did Lincoln actually with all of his success he still has a sad life and so they talked about together about their regrets yeah along with Ulysses Grant's regrets too so I guess we all have those after we die we can look back and regret but that's alongside the alongside regrets are also joys and it's psychologically it's much easier to remember the negative than it is the positive it takes work to go back in and remember those wonderful times like you were talking about it you know and we you know it's not easy it's easy to go back and think of things that we did wrong or things that we regret but it is you know but it's worth the time and speaking of time we're sort of running out of time here and you know I wanted to talk a little bit about you know what you might recommend for the audience to be inspired to open up their imagination and and hope that's one of the things we really push in this show is hope for the future and hope for itself so any last any last thoughts on that we certainly we certainly covered our talked about music giving us hope whatever some of the other things that gave you hope when you look back and started opening up your imagination of the possibilities of traveling down in that blue Lincoln well I think that we have to look we can't just look for big things we have to look for little things we have to see the little things that come across our past every single day that we can make a difference by doing by being kind to some homeless person by shutting off the water when we brush our teeth just recycling our stuff and voting I think voting for the right person is very important and to make sure once that we have our candidate elected we keep after them and make sure that they're following through with their campaign promises because we need big things done with big powerful people and lots of money but we also need little things done by the little people like you and me I mean when you think about it the world really doesn't need oil we don't need oil but we need water ultimately we need water yeah so it comes down to the basics doesn't it it does and unfortunately uh if there's any time discrepancy if we say to ourselves well you know we'll deal with that later you know which we've been doing for a long time yeah uh we we're going to wind up in a place that's untenable and uh that's why what you're saying is the place to start and the place to be a role model for people is to do the small things that help so that everybody gets together and does those small things and then it becomes a much much bigger yes exactly so well said yeah well thank you so much for being with us uh Cherie it's just so good being with you and uh it's fun yeah and smiling and laughing and uh and I think that's a key thing to to deal with all this stuff is to uh to sit back and let things let the laughs come and let the imagination open up and uh and life will be much better for us and a lot of people around us too so thank you again and find your find our happy place yes whether it's the library whether it's uh disney hall with ellie someone might whatever it is find a happy place for you and go there and fantasize about how you can make the world a better place absolutely and libraries are a great place and and thanks not only for being with us but being a librarian and helping people find that magic in the library I love it every day thank you and thanks to all the people at think tech of white jay and pailey and michael and carol and ash and all those people uh we really appreciate your help and support in this as well and especially we want to thank the people in the audience here who tuned in and been with us and spent some time with us because we've enjoyed being in your living room wherever you're at uh and I hope that to see you in two weeks uh back at the same time same uh day and uh we're gonna have a topic that I think you'll enjoy a lot because it's gonna be on the joy of hiking here in Hawaii hope to see you then thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii if you like what we do please click the like and subscribe button on youtube you can also follow us on facebook instagram and linkedin check out our website think tech hawaii.com mahalo