Marriages gone bad. Greek and Roman mythology. Midwinter malaise. These were a handful of many themes in the fifth installment of “Songs and Stories,” organized and hosted by Saul Fussiner and held at Next Door on Humphrey Street — a full Saturday evening of storytelling from Jeni Bonaldo, Marco Rafalà, and Mike Isko, and music from Kriss Santala and Stefany Brown, Shandy Lawson, and Daniel Eugene that packed the pizza place’s back room and turned it into a listening room.
Santala and Brown — two-thirds of the local rock power trio La Tunda — took the stage first. “I’m pumped for this,” Santala said. “Are you ready?” she said to Brown. Brown answered with a squawk from her guitar. “Maybe,” she said.
She sounded ready, as Santala and Brown moved through a set of their original music, trading vocals and instruments effortlessly and keeping the crowd charmed the entire time. Without drummer Andy Beetham, La Tunda’s music took on a different character. The wall of guitar sounded somehow rough and lush at the same time, and the bass provided an almost gentle forward push for Santala’s and Brown’s vocals to float over.
Santala and Brown also used the Next Door stage to try out new material. “I’m scared right now but you probably can’t tell,” Santala half-joked.
“Except that you just told them,” Brown said. The genuine laughter from the audience was one more note in a colorful and varied set.
Jeni Bonaldo then told a story from childhood that spilled over into the world of adults. When she was a girl, her neighborhood congregated at her house in the summertime because they had a pool. “We loved Saturday night because our parents drank funny drinks and laughed way too loud and ignored us,” Bonaldo said. The kids used that chance to get into mischief — but, as it turned out, not as much as the adults did. Bonaldo’s story peeled back the layers of childhood observation as she got a front-row seat to a neighborhood affair between two married people — and her own mother’s facilitation of it. Bonaldo’s house was the place where the couple could meet without their spouses; it was a “safe place” for the affair.
It also became the place where the entire affair unraveled when it was discovered. There was a fight in the driveway, shouting and crying, and Bonaldo realized that “these people didn’t know what they were doing.”
It was the “first time I felt unsafe,” she added. But as her mother pointed out when they talked about it, “what business is it of mine to judge them?”
Novelist Marco Rafalà then read passages from his book, How Fires End, to give a taste of the breadth and depth of his multigenerational story of a Sicilian-American family that moves from the World War II-era Mediterranean to present-day Connecticut. David, 13 years old, hears stories from his grandfather about surviving the war — and his cousins who did not. Salvatore, an adult, muses about the tensions of assimilation, his struggle to learn English as his children slowly leave the Sicilian language behind. And there is family acquaintance Vincenzo, who unearths the mythological connection between Connecticut’s industrial towns and the volcanoes of Sicily that ties the present to the past in deep and subtle ways.
“I have a song but it’s a story too,” Shandy Lawson began, as he launched into his first number, about a man who poisons his wife and the unexpected revenge she’s able to take. Something about the combination of Lawson’s delivery and the mood in the room made the first half of that song humorous, a development Lawson took in stride.
“That wasn’t funny until about two minutes ago,” Lawson quipped, to further laughter. “I have a song about necrophilia that’s a genuine comedy.”
With that, Lawson and the audience together moved through a short set of Lawson’s wry and often heartfelt songs (“I wrote this one about a girl. That’ll happen,” Lawson said to introduce one number). Lawson’s fleet and winning delivery set the stage well for the next storyteller.
Mike Isko explained that the immigrant roots of his family diverged into two camps: people who had come to the United States for almost purely financial reasons, to make money, and people who had come in pursuit of personal and intellectual freedom. On one side was a grandfather who ran a haberdashery in the Bronx.
“Don’t bother your grandfather when he’s making a sale,” Isko recalled his family telling him. And from his grandfather directly, “when someone comes into the store, you don’t let them walk out with just one thing.”
On the other side of his family was a grandfather who ran an Army-Navy store and had saved people from the concentration camps in Lithuania. That grandfather lent out some of his merchandise, insisting to some customers that they not even buy something if they were just going to wear it once; instead, they could just use it and return it.
Isko then explained how these two positions defined his adult life as he sought to balance making a living and following his passions. Medical school seemed like a possibility, “but I hate fluids and smells,” he said. He went to law school thinking he might be a high-power attorney, but instead got involved in immigration and criminal law and became a public defender. He felt like he had balanced his grandfathers’ positions — then learned later that his idealistic grandfather had done the same. Perhaps he had run a store, but money from a wealthy relative was what let him open it in the first place.
The night ended with a stark, scintillating set from Daniel Eugene, who explained that he had bristled at the idea of following the theme of the evening — secrets. “At first I was going to reject it outright and do whatever I wanted,” he said. But instead, he structured his entire set around it, as he wended his way, troubadour-like, through a series of songs about the holidays (“thank you all for bearing with me through what I hope will be the last Christmas song of the holiday season”), Greek mythology, loss and catharsis (“the secret of sadness is happiness. You just have to articulate it well enough”) and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Some were songs from antiquity; others were texts Eugene had set to music, usually sung a cappella. It was an emotional and intimate end to the evening, and the crowded room stayed completely still to hear it all.
“It’s rare to find a listening room like this,” Eugene said. “It’s energizing and intimidating.” Sharing songs and stories, he said, was “one of the most humanizing things we can do.”
The next Songs and Stories at Next Door, 175 Humphrey St., happens on Jan. 25.
