If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On

Their idea of a smashing lyric is one with lots of whithers, betwixts, quoths and doths. Wherein coy lasses fall a-kissing with knights who have more than jousting on their minds.

They are the Hollywood Early Music Players, an octet of devotees of low Renaissance and folk baroque music and of the largely forgotten instruments on which it was played.

“It was literally sort of, ‘Hey, let’s put on a show!’ ” says founder Marisa Rubino of how the group started last summer. She knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who shared this enthusiasm.

After a few shakeouts, here’s the group:

Rubino: A computer programmer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, she plays the viola de gamba, a small cello look-alike dating from the 15th Century. Early music has been “an absolute passion” since college. “It’s very sensual,” she says, “just so human.”

Howard Posner: “A lawyer in real life,” he plays the archlute, a long-necked 17th-Century lute, and its cousin, the theorbo. He’ll tell you he bought the latter at “Theorbos R Us on Sunset,” but in truth he paid a few thousand for this handmade German instrument. He came to the lute from the guitar, noting, “Kids don’t get theorbo lessons from their parents.”

Charles Podmore, bass vocalist: A clerk for a Formica countertop maker, he loves doing serious music “with pratfalls” and “a mad tilt.”

Rick Wilson: By day, he teaches math at Caltech, but his hobby is early flutes, including one carved from boxwood--”not Bach’s wood,” but of the type that Bach and Mozart would have known.

Terry Lieberstein, alto: She does “Nature Watch” programs for kids. A folk singer, she was quick to embrace early music. “You can play with it, do a lot of double entendre.”

Toni-Talia Marcus: In real life, she’s a session player for the studios. For the group, she plays the viola pomposa, a 10-string violin dating from the 1600s. She loves “the incredible spirit of each person and how they’ve cultivated their personal art and the lineage of the art.”

Kris Kennedy, soprano: She’s principal soprano for Opera a la Carte, which performs Gilbert and Sullivan. A part-time medical transcriber, she hopes soon “to be able to stop typing” and teach and perform full time.

Rob Lowry, tenor: A Jaguar mechanic in Santa Monica, he loves Renaissance music. “The lyrics sing of things that matter to regular people.”

The Mother’s Day concert at a Westside church was billed as “a tribute to the good, the bad, the ugly and the morally questionable women of the past.”

In this often bawdy lineup: a shepherdess, a seductress and a choosy young maiden who winds up, alas, an old maid.

Although the group’s repertoire is largely from England, “We savage pretty much everybody,” says Rubino--French, Italian, German music from the late 1500s through the 1700s. And if it’s obscure, well, “That’s the joy of it.”

As artistic director and scriptwriter, she haunts libraries for published works and even seeks help on the Internet.

The jokes have to be contemporized. Audiences, Rubino notes, wouldn’t get one-liners about “whatever pompous aristocrat was making pronouncements in Parliament.”

Now, how did this group come by its name? Well, Rubino says, “It’s a spiffy acronym”--HEMP--and, “It was the only thing we all had in common. None of us lived in Hollywood.”

“Job Fair” will be the theme for the next concert in August. Job Fair?

Yes, Rubino says, straight-faced, “mercenary work, shepherding, minor deities, town crier. And privateer or pirate is always a fine career choice.”

Mother and Son Weary After Hard Journey

So how did they feel--Maria-Theresa Roland-Fernandez and Mark Robertson, mother and son--with their just-conferred master’s degrees from the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University?

“Tired!” they replied in unison.

Each had traveled a long road to this memorable Mother’s Day. Her roadblocks were poverty and discrimination. His were of his own making: alcohol and drug abuse.

Born in Houston to Mexican immigrants, Roland-Fernandez never dared dream of college. At 17, she married--”to get out.” Defying her husband, she finished high school.

The marriage ended, she taught for Arthur Murray and, by 1959, had come to California “to see if I could be a Vegas showgirl, but I was too short.” A secretarial job at a law firm led to 15 years in the L.A. office of Stanley Mosk, the state attorney general.

Two more marriages failed and she found herself a single mother with a young son and daughter. After eight years as a full-time homemaker, she faced reality: She had to work. She was rusty.

Driving past LMU one day in 1983, she thought how pretty the campus is. On a lark, she called and was referred to a dean who suggested the Encore program for returning adults.

“I’ll be forever grateful” to LMU, Roland-Fernandez says, for giving her a chance and a job, as senior secretary in the Chicano-Latino Student Services office. That meant free tuition for her and, now, for daughter Jeri-Lynn Roland, 20.

It took eight years, squeezing in classes at lunchtime and evenings, but she earned her bachelor’s degree with a major in Spanish and a minor in alcohol and drug studies. With a partner, she runs a pay-as-able counseling center in Inglewood, where the family lives.

Robertson was 11 and living with his father when he began experimenting with wine and marijuana. By 15, he was snorting cocaine. By 25, he was an addict and a dealer.

Never busted, he was making big bucks. And killing himself with drugs and alcohol, “wrinkled and turning yellow.”

Roland-Fernandez resorted to tough love--he could “sleep in a ditch.” But if he went into rehab and went back to school, he could come home.

Clean and sober, he knew what he wanted. As a kid, riding the bus past LMU, he vowed to go there someday.

His mother went to bat for him. “It took a lot of cajoling on her part,” he says.

At 27, trying to make up for lost time, he plunged into campus life while earning a bachelor’s in 1994 in political science with a minor in alcohol and drug studies.

“I’m very proud of him,” says his mother. “He should be dead by now.”

He, in turn, says admiringly, “She was out there.”

For now, both will keep their jobs, hers on campus, his with Federal Express. But he hopes to go to law school. Of his past, he says, “I’m not proud of it. I realize I may have hurt people and I’ve done what I can to address that social debt.”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.