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Like most schools that I attended, students were often grouped by interests that they shared. In high school, populations of students accumulate around extracurricular activities. Band members grouped together with other band players. The newspaper/yearbook students all collected together usually in the journalism teacher’s room. Even our debate team found a cohesiveness. College presented a more organized version of populations in which students were gathered by various majors and minors. In high school and later on in college, I found it very difficult to find a wolf pack which I felt kinship towards, though I spent a little bit of team in each of the above groups. An aspect of my personality always ran ragged against the group’s tenants. For example, I disliked marching instead only wanting to play the music itself. I never had focus enough to do anything meaningful in journalism though I managed through out a couple of articles with photographs which went into the school paper. The

Yesterday, I was perusing an idea for a story, this image of a rag and bone woman, an idea, which like the woman at its core, cunningly refuses to fully reveal itself. The only truly distinct image I visualize is the image of the witch from the movie, the Dark Crystal, an ugly old hag, with rams horns hidden underneath a bird ’s nest of hair, a wrinkled old, gray face, thick lips turned down in a frown, and a set of dark eyes, one open, the other closed, as if she were perpetually in painful thought. The song “Rag and Bone” by the White Stripes gave rise to the idea, a metaphor waiting to be explored, I thought. The image of persons who sought out items of personalty to collect when no one else wanted them appealed to me, essentially rag and bone men and women. The song exemplifies the soulful jaunt that has come to characterize the White Stripes, a simple guitar rift over which Jack White and his eager sidekick, Meg, speak rather than sing, a kind of rhythmic kind of cadence, wavering