Impropod Podcast

Ep29 Twice struck by lightning & Bishop Desmond Tutu’s chair - Sandy Kennedy

[object Object]

Luke 00:00:08 Welcome to another episode of the Improv Pod podcast. My guest today is Sandy Kennedy. So how would you describe yourself?

Sandy 00:00:15 I feel more like I'm a teacher, but I am also a carer. I love human beings and I love old people, but I also loved teaching young people to.

Luke 00:00:24 All of them.

Sandy 00:00:25 Pretty much. There's always a possibility of finding the good in everyone.

Luke 00:00:30 okay. So I'm going to play you a piece of music. It's completely improvised, and I'd like you to tell me what it makes you think of. So that can be anything that comes into your mind.

Speaker 3 00:00:40 Great.

Sandy 00:01:37 I find myself strangely on the side of the Himalayas in a rhododendron woods every now and again, glimpsing out these massive mountains scapes, beautiful, spacious, elevated feeling, then getting tangled in amongst the branches again and coming out again. These beautiful flowers of the rhododendrons. I've never been there, but that's what came to me.

Luke 00:02:03 Is it interesting how specific that is? If you don't know if you've heard Pete's podcast, he was talking about the Himalayas climbing the mountain.

Sandy 00:02:10 I watched a video years ago by a friend in Hungary, Hungarian friend who had been there, and maybe something of his photographic imagery came up okay.

Luke 00:02:21 And he's taken pictures of the Himalayas.

Sandy 00:02:23 Videos, very atmospheric.

Luke 00:02:26 And there's something about what I played which conjured that. Yes. Okay. And you don't remember the soundtrack to these videos?

Sandy 00:02:33 There wasn't one. It was silent.

Luke 00:02:34 Oh, okay. Interesting. And rhododendron, specifically.

Sandy 00:02:37 Where I went to school, were lots of big rhododendron bushes that we used to play in and amongst. So I do have that experience of my own, but this was very specifically in the Himalayas. I've also read books of people who walked in them. So I have an internal picture.

Luke 00:02:59 So I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind. Give me a thing. You like something that happened to you? What are they I'm going to do is I'm going to break down the story into sections and improvise a soundtrack to it.

Sandy 00:03:09 Many years ago in Johannesburg, the father of my children took me on a job he had to Bishop Desmond Tutu's house in Soweto.

Sandy 00:03:19 His son was getting married and he wanted some new tarmac, driveway and fibre fencing, which is what my then partner was selling. So we went to his house and knocked on the door and the servant let us in, and his wife was sprawled out in traditional African dress with a glass of wine on her hand like a beautiful portrait and said, welcome, welcome. This was in the days of apartheid. Still, my brother in law was there too, and he sat down in this very smart chair and the wife said, oh, you be careful. That is Desmond Tutu chair. You do not sit in there. So he said, oh, I'll stay here until he comes then. Oh, okay. There was this music of Miles Davis playing, and the servant ran out with the slippers and brought in Desmond Tutu from his internal garage, and he came in and Liam had got off the chair by then, and Desmond sat down and he said, ho ho, who's been sitting in my chair? It was great fun.

Sandy 00:04:14 Anyway, we had a lovely, fun meeting, despite the business. That was my memory.

Luke 00:04:19 And what was this place like where he lived?

Sandy 00:04:20 Soweto is full of, single story concrete, very basic bungalows. So Desmond Tutu, his house was pretty much like that. All the windows had bars on them. His were curly and decorated. He had great big external gates that closed. So there's a little bit of an internal courtyard. It was basic, but well turned out.

Luke 00:04:41 Can you tell me a bit about what Soweto was like?

Sandy 00:04:44 I had worked there with a friend who had a project helping educate people into growing their own vegetables, and how simple that could be for them, so they didn't have to depend so much on buying food. I was white, everybody else was black. Pretty much. I was looked at as a curiosity, but also with a little bit of suspicion. Every Monday morning you come in the big trucks taking out dead bodies from fights over the weekend, tribal fights mostly.

Sandy 00:05:10 A lot of the people who lived there were set into different job types because you couldn't mix the tribes, so all the vendor did the rubbish collection. As far as I remember, I really learnt the meaning of fear there, not being afraid of anybody so much as just fear, as an element that lived very strongly going on all the time. And there was a certain amount of shame and guilt being white as well. There was nothing I could do about it. It was interesting.

Luke 00:05:38 Okay, so I'm gonna try and get a sense of the vibe of the place. Nothing's happening. And then you go to this guy's house to try and get some miles in there, and then the chair. We'll see how that goes.

Sandy 00:07:32 The lightness of Desmond Tutu has come out beautifully. He's such a beautiful, warm light being, and my optimism and the beauty and the lightness of the Africans, too. And then came the darkness and the tension that also lives there. Could it been even more dark, intense, the sort of deep underlying sounds? The last time my then husband was there, he looked behind him, saw a mob chasing after him, and he drove off really quickly.

Sandy 00:07:59 He saw massive flames right behind his car. They'd thrown a petrol bomb after him and it just missed him. That was the last time he went there.

Luke 00:08:07 Did you get the sense of Miles Davis coming through?

Speaker 3 00:08:10 Yes.

Luke 00:08:11 I listened to a lot of Miles, but I have an uneducated idea.

Sandy 00:08:15 I definitely brought an atmosphere into that moment.

Luke 00:08:27 So do you have another story?

Sandy 00:08:29 I can talk about my second lightning strike. When I was 28. I was struck by lightning leaning against the steel kitchen sink and thinking, oh, why did my parents always tell me to turn off appliances? No one ever gets struck. This was in England. And boom! As if a direct universal response bam! The chimney burst apart, bricks flying past the window, and I was shot across the room as lightning came through the water that was running through the sink and through me, right across the room. My son standing there watching with his thumb in his mouth. But the second time was when I was 49 and I was just leaning against the sink watching the rain, and there was no thunder or anything.

Sandy 00:09:11 Just lightning suddenly struck the house. Boom. And it threw me across the room. It lifted me off the floor, so I hit the wall and slid downward. We were driving to France that afternoon, sitting in the front passenger seat. It was as though every oncoming car would come through me. I had no idea where I was placed in space or where these cars were going. I felt that they were going to merge with me. It wasn't even like an external physical thing. It was like I was somewhere in space and they were in somewhere in space, and I didn't know if they were going to come through me. A weird feeling horrible, actually. Only recently have I completely recovered with a bit of help from a wonderful lady locally. My first lightning strike. I had a tattoo from that where the lightning struck me on my hip. It was a point in the middle with nine wiggly lines coming out radiating out from that point. The full width of the circle was probably about six inches.

Sandy 00:10:09 Unfortunately, it didn't stay.

Luke 00:10:11 I'm going to condense the time down a bit. The sense of something much bigger is out there. Then this weird spatial awareness change. Then this process of healing.

Sandy 00:13:09 That was powerfully moving, but something to do with speaking things that are so dramatic or interesting or engaged with me, and then hearing music that's related to that. It's like it's being seen on a different level. I could hear the raindrops. I could feel the distorted, fractured energy after being struck by lightning. At one point I wanted to burst into tears and I thought, come on.

Luke 00:13:32 I was going to have this very fast paced, quite discordant stuff for the lightning strike. And as I was playing it, I was imagining the way that the electricity expands. In a weird way, it's like a fork. I tried to get some sort of element of passing of time in between those two seconds, and then went for the same thing, but slightly different. Imagine you're in a different space. Different things are happening in your life.

Luke 00:13:56 It's really quite heavy but discordant descending pattern.

Sandy 00:14:00 It brought up just how this coordinated I felt, and yet had to carry on and identify as Sandy the teacher and carry on being that person. And yet had all of this disparate energy flying about in me. I loved the merging. The soft merging you started with felt just like everything.

Luke 00:14:19 Joining together on that section. I was playing with the sense of space, literally on the piano, messing with your perception of space and the way that you have an idea of how a melody should work, but then you can completely change it around. It's quite a nice melody, but then if you're just playing with the octaves, you. And then add some sort of discordance in there, just slowly making it weirder.

Sandy 00:15:12 And all of those disparate notes going up and down. They're like, where am I? Is this me or am I in that? All those kind of questions.

Luke 00:15:19 It's interesting. I mean, they're just notes in different places. That's all they are.

Luke 00:15:23 But that has this hook on your sense of reality. You have a sense of understanding the world. It's quite hard to explain, really. So what did you get out of this podcast?

Sandy 00:15:40 It's really interesting to talk about these things, but also then the questions you ask bring me into a place of surprise. I'm talking about things that I haven't thought about before that opens up, and then the music comes into that and opens up still more layers and more aspects and takes it into a different dimension.

Luke 00:15:59 Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Sandy 00:16:00 Thank you to.

Luke 00:16:01 Luke. Join us next time for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening.