Phoenix New Times Tribute to Mary McCann

Jon Gipe/Phoenix New Times archives

 The Bone Mama!

So Long Bone Mama Mary McCann

 

Mary McCann at work.

 

And away went my sister after a two year struggle with Multiple Myeloma. I like to think of death by cancer along the lines of the late comedian Norm MacDonald. He felt saying someone "lost their battle with cancer" was branding the deceased a loser. Norm stated that when the body died, so did the cancer. Hence, the final accounting was more along the lines of a tie. 

Mary McCann tied cancer, packing more life into her years than many. As the Bone Mama, she was the voice of Phoenix radio in the 80s and 90s and ended her years behind the mike playing jazz out of Tacoma, Washington on KNKX. 

God rest your soul and may perpetual line shine upon you, my dearest Mary. 

Here is a link to her memorial page.

AOL Meditation Channel

Mary Pat, my extremely healthy sister, has years of experience as a dj as well as programming old and new radio. She was recently hired by AOL to cobble together a meditation channel. Here is the result. The channel premiered yesterday and I was so relaxed from listening that I forgot to post. So close your third eye and soak in the serenity.

Pacific Northwest Deluge

Photos from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of flooded I-5 near Centralia. We drove through here last week on our way back to LA. There was more green than brown.

Beware the Pineapple

All that northwest Christmas snow is now melting with a vengeance, flooding freeways and isolating the citizenry, including my sister, Mary. She lives outside Olympia near the town of Yelm with her roommate, plus Judy the dog. Below is Mary's sodden dispatch:

"Today Vail Road was closed south of my place where it goes over the Deschutes River and in the other direction up by the turn off into Yelm along Black Hills Road. I had over 4" of rain at my house yesterday! The winds are fierce but we're not even close to getting the worst of it. There are talking heads on the TV saying worst flooding EVER.

I had my first recording session for BirdNote yesterday in Seattle and I was going to stay in town and drop a disc off at McCann's and have dinner with Annie and Paul Soustek but I bolted for the south as soon as I finished the session and it was akin to fleeing Sodom. I did not look back but I heard roads were closing behind me as I monitored the radio. I had to drive the diciest section of I-5 (in the urban area) by Tacoma. They ended up evacuating 7,000 people from the area beside that spot by the time I got to Yelm. They also closed a 20 mile section of I-5 that you had driven through Chehalis/Centralia area, just south of where the alpaca farm is that you passed on the way back to Glendale. They had had terrible flooding just south of there last year. For awhile there was no way to go by road or rail from Seattle to Portland. The back roads were closed or flooded too. Seattle's kind of cut off since all the passes through the Cascades are closed or impassable, closed from snow or avalanche danger. I'm not sure how that rehab is going but I'll get the scoop on the 5:00 news coming up in an hour or so.

A good thing they learned from the devastation last year in these rural spots was to design an emergency plan for evacuation of critters. Last year they lost a dreadful amount of horses and cattle, sheep, goats and alpacas. Pierce County had a plan in place and the critters are fine as they evacuated about 22,000 people out that a way and who knows how many cloven hoofs.

I went to the store, bought 30 lbs of food for [dog] Judy and the fixins for a huge pot of Irish Stew for me and I'm fixing on fixing that up tonight to take me through the weekend. I will not be in a fix unless I lose power before the crock pot is finished. Then I use the burner on my BBQ grill."

Here's a site with road updates and live traffic cams that show dark, empty, watery interstates.

Mary McCann Back on the Air

In keeping with the family tradition of multiple part-time jobs, Mary McCann, has snared another radio gig. Along with djing Sunday afternoons on Seattle oldie station B97.3, Mary's now hosting the show on KPLU. Stream in Saturdays between 1:00 and 6:00 PM PST for jazz and NPR news. (But mostly jazz.)

And keep your eyes open for Friday radio gigs in the Pacific Northwest.