Tag Archives: gathering

Strange Birds & Iconoclasts

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Nothing particularly wrong with being a strange bird.

Strangeness may be my only truly notable characteristic. I may not be particularly memorable to most people, what with being a mere mortal and all. Superpowers, I’ve none. Standout knowledge or skill or charisma? Nope. But being just a teensy bit weird, yeah, I’m all over that.

So I like to make art sometimes that is as pointlessly silly and eccentrically absurd as I am. I just feel I’m in a larger company of fringe characters than ever. And that, after all, is very probably exactly where I belong. I kind of like it on my perch. From here, the view is quite quirky and therefore strangely appealing. Come on over if and when you like, all you other odd birds out there.

digital illustrationRoom for Everyone

My friends, you are welcome to sit in my house,

admiring my other friends, family, spouse,

each one of us charming, delightful and sweet

as any convention of people you’ll meet,

as brainy and clever and heartwarming, too,

as anyone can be, and that includes you;

come in and enjoy the great company,

come in and be welcome, as welcome can be,

but please keep in mind, while you lounge in this spot:

compatible, yes, but the same we are not!digital illustration

Be It Ever So Humble

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I had such a grand week at the conference. The 11th through 15th of March was my spouse’s purported Spring Break from the university, but as so often happens, most of the week was filled up with work. In this instance, the work was exceedingly pleasurable, but as it was the conference of the American Choral Directors Association, it was, as are most tremendously enjoyable activities, exhausting. Two, three or four concerts a day, master classes, seminars and sessions of all sorts, wandering the exhibitors’ booths, networking and lots of socializing and late, late nights are all piled into the ACDA conferences. By the end of the week, going home sounded beautifully and truly welcome.photoIt might surprise some people to hear it, but by nature I’m an introvert, shy, and I used to have a fairly nasty perpetual case of social anxiety. Yeah, all that fun stuff. I spent a lot of years feeling scared and sick over every new meeting, every unfamiliar place or event. Luckily for me, there are such things as therapists, medications, and lots of family support and training. As a result, going to the various conventions, festivals and conferences that bring together the choral world from time to time has gone from what was, the first time I attended one with my then new husband, quite overwhelming and nerve-wracking to this last, which like its latest predecessors was a much-anticipated ‘family reunion’ with a great number of beloved friends and colleagues from all over the world.photoSo I certainly had a grand week. Meeting with longtime friends from various places we’ve lived, choirs my husband’s conducted, and from our school days, and with ever so many outstanding colleagues, we got to celebrate with them all over music, lunches and dinners, receptions, walks-about-town, drinks and quiet conversations. We laughed and hugged and chattered with current and former students, with composers and conductors and publishers and singers and players, so many friends, and it was all tremendous fun. It made for long days and for short sleeps, for incredibly dry eyes from staying up way too late and for teary eyes from amazingly sweet meetings, no matter how fleeting, with our long-absent dear ones. Stellar music performed by both friends and strangers moved me to both sniffling and silly grins (sometimes simultaneously). It made me as happy and full of love for music and friends and life as I can get, and it made me so tired I could hardly move ten of my cells at a time. And it made me look forward with great intensity to the splendors of home. There, I can relish in retrospect all the sweetness of the multitude of marvels granted by a superb week. And I can revel in Just. Plain. Being. Home.

If You can’t Say Anything Nice, Why Not . . .

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We love to gossip and tell tales behind each other’s backs, don’t we. Of course, the public attitude is generally to decry such inhumane and ungracious behavior and to vilify those who allow themselves to be caught acting on it. Even those of us who shamelessly mock others for being unlike us don’t really like to admit we engage in such naughtiness. In fact, many of us are quite adept at picking on people for being precisely like we are and doing exactly the same sort of, well, picking.

It may just be that we need to reevaluate the whole way we approach such things. Being in conversation and community doesn’t mean we have to spend our energies on acting like those stereotypical meddlers we like to decry, which is of course precisely what we’re doing in decrying them. How much better to spend our energies and attentions together on positive and good things, like finding common ground, sharing what we admire and respect about each other and learning fine and meaningful and joyful things from and with each other. That leaves little room for interfering with other people’s ways of doing, being and living. We can sit around chattering and nattering with impunity when the intent is to be kind and thoughtful, and without worry when we’re not creating any sort of reasons for anyone else to be critiquing us either.

Improbable as it all may seem, we all know from experience that there are good and happy and positive things to be discussed and done and that there can be just as much pleasure in them as in exercising our Schadenfreude instead.graphite drawing