Women's Voices: I never made promises lightly

Romantic relationships take you a lot of places, don’t they? Well, they’re supposed to, I guess. I mean—you’re supposed to grow and learn, even when the relationship goes to hell, either in a conflagration of Wagnerian proportions or in a slow fade into boredom.

One of mine went through several of the explosive ends before it finally, truly died a cold, dusty, boring death.

Well, you know the romance is gone when your last words to him are, “Just grow the hell up.” And you deliver them via email.

(Yes, it would have been more dramatic if I’d done it via IM or text, but this is a guy who in 2002 still hadn’t moved up to a Windows-based word processing program for writing the Great American Screenplay that he’d been working on for the 20 years I knew him.)

However, he did introduce me to Eva Cassidy, and for that I am very grateful indeed. She is definitely one of the Voices I listen to when I need anything from consolation to inspiration. She had an extraordinary gift for interpreting everything from “Over the Rainbow” to “Time After Time” to “Imagine” to “People Get Ready”. (Oh, hell—name a song; she either did or would have nailed it.) Her range just knocks me out, and she displays exceptional power; all the more so when you consider how young she was when she died—barely 33.

If you held a gun to my head and ordered me to name a favorite, most of the time I’d probably say, “Fields of Gold”. It’s certainly my favorite version of that song, including the ones by Sting himself and by Mary Black. Cassidy just delivers it without flourishes or drama, and it stuns me every time I listen to it.

You’re going to hear more from her over this month. She's one of the Voices closest to my heart.