While many 88 year-old women are living through their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and kvetching about their bursitis and arthritis, Lu Mitchell is far too busy rehearsing with her band, Catch-23, for one of the 75-plus gigs she does each year at such diverse venues as Pocket Sandwich Theater, Uncle Calvin's Coffee House, Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Fiddler's Green Festival in Ireland, or the Temple Emanu-El Couples Club. She also performed recently at Richland College and will be the keynote performer in August at Eastfield College's Senior Fest.
When she isn't performing, she is busy acting as a consultant to emerging coffee houses throughout the metroplex, or cutting a new album; her most recent one, cut in 2000, is "Pocketful of Wry." Her tenth album, due out in August, is entitled "Lost in the Mall Again and Other Good Stuff."
A late bloomer, Lu was 59 when she recorded her first album, "Chant of the Rat Race", in 1983, live at Poor David's pub shortly after her retirement as a corporate secretary at Eastman Kodak.
She felt oppressed by a series of chauvinistic male bosses and harbored a fierce desire to get even without getting fired. What better way to vent her covert hostility than to set it to music? This passive-aggressive desire spawned her first song: "Mary Stuffed Her Boss in the Paper Shredder" ("and he's all strung out today"). Mitchell reminisced: "I wrote many songs at that place. I've never been to a therapist in my life because I've always been able to channel my anger into my music."
In 1957, her music was just a hobby when she met Hermes Nye, a well-known Dallas attorney and folklorist. He liked her style and became her mentor, accompanying her to a music store to purchase her first guitar. She began sharing the stage with him and got hooked on performing. By the early 1960s, she was getting her own bookings at Dallas nightclubs and coffee houses and has never looked back. In 1983 Lu discarded her steno pad and "took up my guitar with a vengeance" full-time. "Finally, I had the chance and the freedom to fulfill my dreams."
She still does an occasional gig at Poor David's Pub, one of her first venues. Club owner David Card once said: " Lu is a warm and generous person; clever and witty; an accomplished entertainer." The word 'generosity' was echoed today in a conversation with former radio and TV talk-show host Alex Burton, who said: "The thing that strikes me most about Lu is her generosity."
On her rising path to success, Lu won the Mesquite Folk Festival Rising Stars competition and the Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk competition. She writes most of her own songs but also sings a number of songs by Tom Lehrer, who is one of her favorite satirists. Some of her drop-dead funny song titles are: "It's So Nice to Have a Live One on the Table," a cutting commentary on over eager surgeons; "Dear Dr. Ruth," a spoof on the diminutive media sex guru, and "The Real Estate Lady" based on Lu's personal encounter with an unscrupulous realtor. There's also "I Want to be a White House Intern" - you just know what that's about -- and "The Great Viagra Sing-a-long." But there's nothing blue about Lu's parodies except maybe the people about whom she writes.
The second edition of her songbook, "Lu Mitchell Singing for Her Sanity," complete with chords, contains more than 60 of her 100-plus songs. Joe Dickinson, owner of Pocket Sandwich Theater, where Lu frequently performs, said: "She is just an unbelievable lady who is a bundle of energy and great creative talent. She has one of the most faithful audiences I've ever seen."
Jac Alder, co-founder and artistic director of Theater Three, where Lu has done several recent benefit performances said: "Lu is perfectly original, but she comes from a school of social satirical songwriting of another era."
Recently DJ Jack Bishop of radio station KAAM has been airing Lu's songs, a real phenomenon in today's proliferation of talk shows.
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