Last night, I saw a legend, a woman of inspiration. I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie performing at the concert and dining venue, Hugh's Room, in downtown Toronto. The room is nice enough, the food not bad, but none of that was the reason I had come and none of that really had my interest. It was all part of passing the minutes until she stepped onto the stage.
   From her first moment up there, to the last whisper of sound from her encore, I saw nothing else but her. She connected immediately with her audience, and held them with the spellbinding combination of her personality and her words. She made the room disappear, and the stage with it. She took away the distance between her and each person there, and sang personally just to them. She worked magic.
   She made her way onto that stage from a trail that has wound its way across 40 years of embodying the music of life. I have loved her music since I first heard it back in the 60's, and if it has changed at all, it is only to take on even richer tones, just as her wonderful voice has done. That voice soared its way last night through classics of her repertoire, such as "Piney Wood Hills" and "Up Where We Belong". It played games with us while it lilted its way through "Cripple Creek". It held her listeners enthralled while she raised it in glorious salute to the Native heritage, punctuating some of her creations with ululating calls that sought out and filled every corner of the room.
   From her song "The Big Ones Get Away" come two lines, "Hey don't the wars come easy / Hey don't the peace come hard" that encapsulate the message she has sought to bring to people for decades. Her song, "The Universal Soldier" comes from her early days, when the Viet Nam war was raging. It was certainly one of the songs that caused her name to appear back then on the White House list of those whose music "deserved to be suppressed". She performed it last night, since it is still so sadly relevant today. The crowd saluted it with long, drawn-out applause.
   "The Universal Soldier" speaks to the issue of just how easily the wars do come, and the fact that the world's shrinking will allow us less and less opportunity to disavow involvement and responsibility. We are all responsible. "His orders come from far away no more / They come from him, and you and me". The song's plaintive ending, "Can't you see? This is not the way we put an end to war" left the crowd's voice momentarily quiet. She didn't abandon her audience in the hopelessness that song seems to suggest, however. She told them instead that our species has already survived thousands of years of struggle simply to stay alive, to "find something to eat before they got eaten" and assured them "we can do this, we can put an end to war".
   She ended her set with a joyfully rousing "Star Walker" that had people clapping along in rhythm and happily tapping their feet on the floorboards. She tried to make that her last song, and then walk off the stage, but she didn't actually leave the room. She couldn't. The tie she had forged between herself and her audience was still alive, still pulsing with the joy of having been in her presence. It needed to be broken gently, the way a mother carefully lays a sleeping baby down in its crib so as not to break the magic spell of its sleep. She did that with her achingly beautiful "Goodnight", moving both me and my other half to tears. After she had caressed the last chord of that song, the audience was able to let her go.
   Buffy Sainte-Marie blows into a room on the breeze of her own joie de vivre and she wafts it out over everyone present. She smiles her way through repartee that spaces out her offerings of tuneful admonitions to take better care of the earth and the people who share it, and audience members come away not even knowing they've just been given a lecture on changing their ways. She is one awesome woman. Her words, her beauty weave a web of gossamer threads about her listeners, a dream-catcher that shimmers with the jewels of her wisdom and wit, and seems deceptively fragile. It is, however, a web strong enough to capture imagination and that is a mighty feat, indeed.