Former Riot Grrrl Nomy Lamm lends her voice to Promising Notes music series
While others are working for a better world by protesting, painting murals and making phone calls, Nomy Lamm is relishing the beauty that’s already here.
In a music video for the social-distancing-friendly music series Promising Notes — put together by the Olympia Downtown Alliance, Octapas Cafe and the City of Olympia’s Artists on Board project — the singer-songwriter-activist is surrounded by plants, flowers and animals as she sings in the garden of the northeast Olympia home she shares with her partner, Lisa Ganser.
“We are beauty,” Lamm sings over a looped backdrop of her own vocals and body percussion. “We bless, we bestow/We transgress, and we grow.”
“My deep calling — what I dedicate myself to — is beauty and liberation,” she told The Olympian. “I find so much beauty in my life and my body and my interactions and the world that I create. … As a performer, I get to germinate a reality and transfer it to other people. I wanted to transfer the reality of my deep awe for the beauty of this life and the tenderness and sweetness of it and also the complicatedness of it.”
Beauty is a theme for her, she said: Her band — a trio with guitarist Sam Gray and drummer Ben Lucal — is also called The Beauty.
Lamm’s video is one of 11 online as part of Promising Notes, and there are more videos to be posted on YouTube.
Octapas co-owner Jamie Brayshaw curated the series, inviting an eclectic assortment of local musicians — including The Lowest Pair, Eleanor Murray and Vince Brown — plus comedian Sam Miller to participate.
“Nomy performed with The Beauty at Octapas back in January,” Brayshaw told The Olympian. “Their show was beautiful and powerful.”
Brayshaw, who went to elementary school with Lamm’s younger siblings, said she has long admired the former Riot Grrrl’s fierce, passionate activism.
In 1997, Lamm, then 21 and a student at The Evergreen State College, was named one of Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year “for inspiring a new generation of feminists to fight back against fat oppression.”
“In a pink prom dress, with the words “No Fat Chicks” scrawled across her chest, she is glamour, humor and rebellion,” Anastasia Higginbotham wrote in the Ms. article.
These days, Lamm — who favors flowered dresses and bright lipstick that draws attention to her lip piercing — is still glamorous and humorous, but maybe less about rebelling than practicing deep acceptance while inspiring change.
She teaches voice lessons and coaches private clients, leads a choir, writes and makes art, including “Golden Dreams of Olam Haba,” a day planner she created with fellow Kohenet/Hebrew priestess Rebekah Erev. She is the creative director of and a performer with Sins Invalid, a performance project focused on disability justice.
And then there’s her music, which ranges from the soothing yet uplifting “Beauty” to the hard-edged “Watch the Police,” recorded with The Beauty in 2018.
“Don’t let them get away with it,” she sings. “They’ll behave better/If they know they’re not alone.”
She rarely attends protests because life with a disability — she’s had a prosthetic leg since childhood — complicates going out into the world, but working for Olam Haba, Hebrew for “the world to come,” is central to her life.
“I really want to speak to the uprising for black liberation that’s happening all around the country and is also happening in Olympia,” she said. “I think that Olympia believes itself to be a bubble where people aren’t racist, and that’s just not true. I’m committed to making Olympia less racist, and I feel so in awe of the beauty of the uprising that’s happening.”