Friday Music Series Presents: Maggie Paxson’s Bomb Shelter Cafe
Maggie Paxson is the author of The Plateau (Riverhead Books, 2019), in French, On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur (Editions Payot), which received the 2020 American Library in Paris Book Award for the “moral urgency of the questions it poses, for its ambitious efforts to connect France’s past to its present, for its big heart, poetic writing and genre-defying structure.” The Plateau was described by Oprah magazine as “radiant” and by the Washington Post as “a loving combination of personal memoir, historical investigation, and philosophical meditation.” A writer, anthropologist, and performer, Paxson is also the author of Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (Woodrow Wilson Center/Indiana University Press, 2005), a study of magic, ritual, and social memory in the rural Russian north. Her essays have appeared in TIME, Washington Post Magazine, Wilson Quarterly, and Aeon. Fluent in Russian and French, she has worked in rural communities in northern Russia, the Caucasus, and upland France. Paxson holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from McGill University, and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in anthropology, both from the University of Montreal. She performs as a singer with the Imperial Palms Orchestra, one of the East Coast’s leading big bands, featuring music of the 1920s through the 1940s. She has also launched a series of participatory events that she calls “Bomb Shelter Cafés,” inspired by the music and collective art of embattled communities during the Second World War. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, writer and historian Charles King.
Maggie Paxson’s Bomb Shelter Café is a participatory, sing-along event weaving together the songs of the 1920s to the 1940s with stories of survival and transcendence in troubled times. Evoking moments when creating collective beauty was itself an act of resistance, the Bomb Shelter Café provides participants an opportunity to contribute immediately to tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Following along from printed lyrics in English, French, Italian, and other languages, participants have joined Maggie in raising their voices for hope at public venues such as the storied Joe’s Pub in New York, the renowned George Eastman Museum, bookstores, public libraries, and private homes from Washington, DC, to rural France.