The week after my Confining Illness was almost harder than the week itself.  There was a point what with the obscenely sore throat and conjunctivitis in both eyes that I realized couldn’t even pretend to work.  After that I almost enjoyed not having to do anything except occasionally forage for food.  Feeling well enough to  Read the Rest…

The All Present/OK Chorale Holiday Concert and Cookie Exchange took place over the weekend.  The actual Cookie Exchange was demoted to Cookie Potluck as in the end no one had the stomach for the politics of a formal cookie exchange. “Whose idea was this cookie exchange anyway?” asked Susan, my lovely assistant with All Present  Read the Rest…

It’s been two weeks since I’ve written.  If you follow my blog, I bet you thought I was reading David Copperfield all this time. Not even close. I haven’t begun to look for my copy of it yet. No, I’ve been Doing Christmas.  I tried making divinity and ended up with vanilla soup.  Only then  Read the Rest…

When I tried to picture the logistics of the recent Summer Musicale featuring both The OK Chorale and All Present my mind tended to shut down. Working with either group can feel like trying to juggle Jell-O cubes. For this event we sang at the Community Hall at the Phinney Neighborhood Center.  It has great  Read the Rest…

All Present, a song circle for people living with ESML (Early Stage Memory Loss) is in its second quarter. Almost everyone from the spring returned. It’s a peculiar feature of this group that if I hadn’t been told every one of these singers had some form of dementia, I wouldn’t have known. Some of them  Read the Rest…

About 15 years ago there was a massive controversy in The OK Chorale involving a camp song called “The Titanic.” Something similar has come up and again it involves camp songs. Who would have thought that camp songs– camp songs!—would exercise so many people? I have finally realized that what most people call camp songs are  Read the Rest…

It’s Christmas Eve (morning).  There are streaks of rose madder in the sky.  All is calm and bright before The Onslaught of Holiday.  This morning I read Robert Browning’s (very) long poem “Christmas Eve.”  A dream is set off by the poet going into a dreary church service on Christmas Eve, falling asleep during the  Read the Rest…

The OK Chorale has sung itself into performance mode: two down and two to go. You still have a chance to hear us if you live in Seattle.  We sang for Pinehurst Court, a senior housing complex, and home of the grandmother of one of our sopranos.  It was a hot, crowded, noisy venue but  Read the Rest…

I knew I’d be writing this post at some point but I thought I had another few weeks.  Last night a friend named Karen died.  For the ten years I was music director at the church, Karen had been popping her gum in the pew and feeding dog biscuits to Marvin, her Miniature Pinscher. As  Read the Rest…

Who couldn’t like Robbie Burns? Well, the British, I suppose.  And he didn’t wear well with the Edinburgh Scots.  When I turned the page from William Blake in my trek through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there was Robert Burns with all his apostrophes.  After I got used to the a’s, the whas and  Read the Rest…