Christine Lavin, 25 show biz years and counting
The girl who grew up the fourth of nine children in the shadow of the Peekskill Military Academy is now celebrating 25 years in showbiz with the release of her 20th solo CD, Cold Pizza for Breakfast (Yellow Tail Records) and a forthcoming memoir, Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha??
"We didn’t know we were poor," Christine Lavin, now 57, told EDGE recently, while cooking and serving up orange ricotta pancakes in her highrise apartment on the Upper West Side. "My parents tried to find one thing special for each of us to do and I took naturally to music."
The problem, Lavin went on to explain, was that she had a piano teacher who hit her hands with a ruler every time she made a mistake. She decided to take up guitar, learning from Laura Weber’s PBS television show. "She couldn’t hit my hands," Lavin deadpanned.
Floundered in college
Lavin was a serious student and graduated high school a year early. "But then I floundered in college, changing my major at least seven times," she said. One potential major was theater but, she said, ’I never got cast in anything."
Eventually, she graduated from SUNY Brockport as an English major.
After graduation, Lavin found herself waitressing and baking bread at the legendary Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, under the wing of owner Lena Spencer. "I wanted to be around musicians and thought I’d be really good at running a coffeehouse myself someday."
However, Lavin was eventually given more opportunities to sing at the club. One night, Don McLean’s manager and ’60s folk singer/guitarist Dave Van Ronk came in separately and both urged Lavin to move to New York.
"I told Dave Van Ronk that I needed to learn to play guitar better and he said, ’I’m a teacher,’" Lavin recalled. "I don’t believe in coincidence, so I thought ’I guess I’m not meant to be in Saratoga.’"
