Madeleine & Jillene

Not long ago, Kevin Lageman gave me a copy of Madeleine Peyroux's Careless Love, and I finally got around to popping into the CD player and listening to it. I'm totally floored.

I'm not the hippest of cats (regardless of what Kevin says about my loving Conor Oberst's lastest solo project!), so I've known in a very general way that MP's been on a lot of people's radars, but it was as though the whole "isn't she great?" buzz was really just so much noise in the back of my head.

From the opening notes of the first song, though, I nearly fell off my chair. It's almost as though Billie Holiday had recorded an album in a magical alternative universe in which she never touched drugs or alcohol, and had full control of her amazing musical instrument. And Madeleine Peyroux's only in her early 30s! I've only recently read that she was 22 when she first broke out in 1996, and all I can wonder is, "Where the hell was I for this?!?"

She just knocks me out. And now I feel obliged to try to find a copy of her first album, Dreamland.

I just found out recently about the passing of a really delightful lady I'd met through my connections at The Arden and City Theatre, Jilline Ringle. I didn't know Jilline that well -- having really on met her on about three or four occasions -- but she was one of those people who grab everyone around them and (in a purely metaphorical sense) hug them to her bosom.

I'm so sad to see her go, which is a measure of the effect she had on me in the brief time I knew her. She'd been fighting cancer for quite some time, and it finally dragged her down.

She was intimidating to me when I first met her. She towered over me, after all, and she glowed like the heart of the sun -- her vivaciousness was nuclear. But from the first time I heard her great, booming laugh, and she (the first of many times, this time not-so-metaphorically) grabbed me and hugged the living hell out of me, I was helplessly in her thrall.

It's that much more a shock that someone who was such a boiling pot of joy could just suddenly be gone, I guess. Thing is, Jilline herself would have none of this moping around. She'd give us all a great big kick in the pants and tell us to shuddup and get back on stage.

So here's some love for Jilline. I hope Mondo Mangia is selling out wherever she is.