Good article on continuing corruption in our corporations and government:

Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy – NYTimes.com

Retired Justice Stevens reveals his reasoning behind changing his mind about capital punishment

On the Death Sentence by John Paul Stevens | The New York Review of Books

A more calm assessment of the recent trial and conviction of a terrorist.

The Verdict on Ghailani—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

Finished reading this book yesterday.  It is a book written by a co-worker of my daughter, Elizabeth. It is a bit of an uneven read. The author decides to go undercover in jobs that are stereotypically worked by immigrants and migrants. He begins in the lettuce fields of Arizona which is one of the two well written sections of the book.

He speaks Spanish fluently which is a great help in getting past his obvious non-immigrant status as a white guy.  His portraits of his coworkers and his description of his interaction are engaging. His descriptions of his own difficulties in learning the skill of lettuce “cutting” as it is called is vivid.

The other section that engaged me was his time in Alabama working in a chicken packing plant. He manages to write not only about the work but about people in the area both repelling (racist politicians) and charming (co-workers and his landlady).

The book slows down a bit when he returns to New York and attempts to get some kind of similar work. It lacks cohesion as he obviously settles back into a more familiar life and tries to get work that will finish off his book and research.

However, his descriptions of the work sites and activities he experiences are the strongest section of the book, including his last jobs in New York. Here he spends some time working for some insane bosses who sell branches and flowers to New Yorkers.

I found his description of their inexplicable behavior not only believable but sadly recognizable.  They scream at him and give him inexplicable criticisms and directions. I guess my experience as a bar musician and a church musician confirms the portrait of people in charge who are a mess.

I felt the weakest section was about the last job which was working as a delivery person for a Mexican style restaurant.  Thompson’s expertise as a union activist and research into lettuce cutting and chicken packing is obvious and helpful. Equally obvious to me is that he skims the surface a bit around the fascinating life of the delivery person in New York.  Just how it hits me.

Thompson’s book is a  solid argument for the good that unions can do. Unions get very bad press these days and have for decades. But there is no denying how they could help with the abuses that Thompson witnesses and experiences first hand.

I enjoyed the book.  I didn’t really learn about injustice. Here in Holland I personally knew a farm worker whose hand was chopped off by a machine. He was a musician I knew who spoke only Spanish and obviously wasn’t trained properly to run the machine he was assigned to work. There was not a wisp of reporting around this in the local press. They did report when a couple of workers were killed in an accident at local business. But locals seemed to be more sympathetic to the business owners than the families of the dead. Could it have been because they had Hispanic backgrounds?

I also witnessed coyotes who herded blueberry workers to Mass at the church I worked. It was obvious who the boss was.

I did learn about the on the ground aspects of lettuce “cutting” and chicken packing.

Elizabeth accidentally left another Thompson title behind when she returned to New York.

Not convinced I will read it after reading “Working in the Shadows.” I admire the work this man and my daughter do in union organizing. Not sure I need to read about about it. We’ll see.

This book was sitting on my wife’s desk at the library one day. It is a graphic novel and looked kind of interesting so I interlibrary loaned a copy. My first reaction seems to hold true: this book is strongly influenced by my hero R. Crumb. Almost to the point that I’m not that engaged since I’m not experiencing stuff for the first time.

The only interesting part so far is the appearance of robots and space suits. I will probably keep trying it, though.

I

I have been reading in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. This is subtitled a “Play for voices.” I am enjoying it immensely. I am finding Thomas an antidote to the banality of church. He strikes just the right note with his lovely images that sometimes refer obtusely to biblical passages.

Here’s a quote from a poem I have been thinking about. It’s the last bit.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed  in my dove cooed room
I lies down thin and hear the good bells jaw—
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

from “Lament” by Dylan Thomas

and see religion from a unique honest perspective:

I could see the lights in the windows in all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness. Then I fell asleep.
from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”  by Dylan Thomas

I love this from “Under Milk Wood”:

Beynon, in butcher’s bloodied apron, spring heels down Coronation Street, a finger not his own, in his mouth.

Yesterday, I played my little heart out for Advent I.  The Bach prelude went pretty well.

This piece (Trio super Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV 660) is rather tricky as it is a trio with imitative entrances on the opening melody of Savior of the Nations in two unusually low accompanying voices and a beautiful ornamented solo voice. I managed to pull off this my first public performance of this great work.  There were several formal organ type hymns in this service. I was satisfied with my execution on these.

The anthem was an adaptation of the famous “Zion hears the watchmen calling” from Cantata 140 by Bach.

It was dropped a third into the key of the hymn. The organ kept the bass and obbligato going while the choir came in with the chorale melody intermittently. This was a very exposed organ part. Usually if one is doing two independent parts like this it makes sense to do them both with your hands instead of doing one with the pedal and one with the manual. Unfortunately, my organ is so limited that there was no set of pipes that would encompass the bass played on the manual. So the only way to do it was with pedal.

The choir dependably brought itself in, as I found playing the accompaniment took all my concentration and wasn’t able to do much conducting even though I had a hand free. This came off pretty well. I put the obbligato in the flute 8′ which is one of the beautiful stops on the organ. It is gentle. I hope the whole thing came off kind of gentle but beautiful.

The postlude was another Bach setting of “Nun Komm” (BWV 661).This is a setting for full organ in which the melody enters in a bombastic bass pedal part. I made some very silly (and new) mistakes in the exposed beginning. Ah well. Most of it went fine. Again it was the first time I had played this piece of repertoire in public.

Saturday night found me working carefully over these organ parts.

One does wonder about putting so much effort into stuff like this. I guess it is good for me to challenge myself. I am still feeling fatigued from the weeks from hell when I was juggling three part time gigs.  When I am tired, my tolerance for silly religious stuff seems to be lower. And of course the impending Christmas commercial deluge doesn’t help.

Next week I am seriously considering playing the congas on the choral anthem for the day, “Keep your lamps.”

I tried it yesterday with the choir. It would be my first time playing and conducting from the congas. That appeals to me. Heh.

I recently purchased the complete Cadmeon recordings of Dylan Thomas reading. It is mostly his own work but also there are live readings he did of other poets and the charming remarks he prepared for these readings.

The Cadmeon label was formed by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Rooney in 1953 specifically to record Thomas. I purchased a vinyl recording of him reading on their label when I was a teenager. I still have this vinyl.

Since my own mp3 player died and my netbook is rather touchy in the power cord department, I have temporarily borrowed my wife’s mp3 player (and ordered one of my own). I have put some podcasts and recorded books on it as well as two of the discs from the Cadmeon collection.

I listen to recordings at night when I wake up to help lull me back to sleep. Sometimes they do the opposite.

This morning after listening to all of one of the discs of the Cadmeon recordings of Thomas and some of the second, I began to muse upon how I seem to bundle Dylan Thomas with two other literary passions of my life: James Joyce

and Anthony Burgess.

All three men were writers I read as a young man and still read. As a teen I began reading Thomas and Joyce at about the same time. I think Burgess came a bit later.

Interesting to note that all three are not American: Thomas was Welsh; Joyce, Irish and Burgess a colonial Brit.

Joyce was a life long challenge to crack. I continued reading him and trying to understand his work. I have read Portrait of an Artist several times and Ulysses at least twice through. Finnegans Wake I have never finished but have read in extensively over and over. It’s that kind of work.

I can draw a line from Joyce to Thomas in Thomas’s title of his “fictional autobiography,” Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” So Thomas apes Joyce who apes innumerable visual self portraits titles.

I was drawn to Joyce’s prose and Thomas’s poetry at first.

Later I would be charmed when Burgess started writing the Enderby novels. Enderby was a Falstaffian creation which had intentional elements of Dylan Thomas in him.

I can’t remember when I began reading Burgess or why. I do know that in the seventies I had read his Malayan trilogy as well as several other of his novels. After that I followed him and tried to read his new books as they came out.

Presently, at this time in my life, I have a tendency to swallow the works of creators whole. I have read through the piano sonatas of Haydn and Beethoven at the piano. I have also played once or twice through Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. I am on the fourth of the multiple volumes of Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 Essercizi (Literally “exercise” but more commonly referred to as Sonatas).

I can also satisfy myself that I have systematically read and re-read most if not all of Burgess, Trollope, Proust and others.

Recently I realized I had not read all of Dylan Thomas’s work and began chipping away at it.

This encyclopedic approach to exposing myself directly to excellent writing and composing feels like doing so quickly before my time is up.

I attempt to trace the origins of my literary passion and fail. I do know I had an English teacher named Mrs. Stormzand in High School who both inspired and repelled me. She introduced me to the New Yorker magazine which I still read. I also knew that in the summer break she read a book a day or so.  She managed not to ruin Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood which we read in class and she boasted of having read in its original serialization in the “New Yorker.”

But I don’t think she was the source of my passion.

It was around this time that I remember meeting a pre-goth like girl at a State Solo and Ensemble Festival. Either I boasted that I wrote poetry or asked her if she did because I recall her blase answer: “Doesn’t everybody?”

Well hardly anybody I knew at the time was interested in words and music.

I do know that Dave Barber my friend in my teens was extremely literary and artistic and had pronounced opinions which he expressed charmingly and in no uncertain terms. His ideas fascinated me. But his passions differed from mine.

So whence comes my love of words and music? Something to think about as I age.

I trace my love of beauty to a childhood in which certain adults pointed out to me the beauty of my surroundings in East Tennessee.

My parents were occasionally attuned to this sort of thing and would help me see the beauty in nature. But neither was particularly literary. In fact as a young man I remember disagreeing with my father’s approach to the great ideas and works. He was comfortable and sought out interpretive secondary commentaries on them. I preferred (and still prefer) to throw myself at the actual works themselves.

In the case of Sarte’s On Being and Nothingness I simply carted the book around with me and read and re-read incomprehensibly the first few pages.

With other writers (like Joyce and Thomas) I had a bit more luck.

At any rate it is a joy to me at this time in my life to read and study the music and literature that I love whatever the origin of this anachronistic and eccentric behavior.

I skipped posting yesterday… Got up late and started poking around preparing for the day.

Since I worked all day Wednesday cooking, I had a bit more leisurely time on Thursday. Eileen and I accidentally unplugged our telephone land line and wondered for most of the day why it wasn’t working.

I managed to have all the food on the table around noon: baked turkey breast for the carnivores, ananadama bread rolls, wild rice with butternut squash and blackened pecans, caramelized corn with fresh mint, whipped mashed potatoes, savory cornbread stuffing, two kinds of gravy (one with meat, one without), mama stamberg’s cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

My Mom didn’t stay too long. I think she was fatigued. But a good time was had by all.

I spent most of the rest of the day chatting with fam, primarily daughter Elizabeth. She brought me a book written by a coworker:

She also told me how she taught this guy to put up directed facebook ads for his book. Apparently it’s quite easy and one can cleverly advertise to specific audiences that might be more interested in your topic.

In this case, she recommended tapping into the facebook admirers of Nickeled and Dimed, which is a book similar in concept.

She described Thompson’s glee when he had over 26 clicks (people who saw the ad on their facebook page and clicked on it) in the first day.

I’m on page 19.

I did manage to politely sneak off for an  hour of organ practice.

My son in California called me on my cell phone (remember the land line wasn’t working) while I was on the bench.  We had a turkey day greeting.

I  put in some serious work on the Bach for Sunday.

While I was gone Elizabeth trounced Eileen in Scrabble. Then we sat around and chatted drank wine and vaguely watched “The Big Lebowski” on cable. Eileen figured out why the land line wasn’t working.

Yesterday the ballet class instructor mentioned that she would be giving an open rehearsal of a dance piece,  choreographed by a fellow instructor.  The choreographer is Steve Iannacone.  He was a member of a famous dance troupe founded by Alwin Nicolai.

There is a celebration of the centennial of Nicolai’s birth in New York this month. Steve has been invited to present an award and also present a dance piece. He asked Alicia Diaz (one of the ballet teachers I am working for) and her husband, Matthew Thornton to come along and dance an adaptation of a piece Steve had previously done for 17 or so dancers.

The piece is called “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

I rushed through my tasks yesterday and managed to get to this.

At first I thought they were going to dance to live music. The rehearsal preempted the beginning  of a modern dance class. The congas were apparently for that. Dang.

Disappointingly the Iannacone piece was danced to recorded music. I suppose this is inevitable. I have seen more dance to recordings than live music in performances.

The piece was quite engaging. The music began with what sounded like an Islamic call to prayer. First one voice, then another.

Alicia and Matthew were hunched over and began twitching as the music changed to a sort of new age jazzy bassy guitar thing.

The dancers continue to awake and transform in pretty cool abstract plant looking ways. They move toward and away from each other. Entwining, then disengaging.  At the end of the piece they are completely engaged in each other’s body in what looks like a new creature.  I quite enjoyed this.

Today I’m planning to do as much cooking as I can bring myself to do, so that I can enjoy being with Eileen, Elizabeth and Mom on Thursday and not be stuck in the kitchen.

I’m looking at preparing the Mama Stamberg Cranberry sauce,  the stuffing, and the pies. Also thinking of adding a dish that combines apples, sweet potatoes and squash, since I have some of these in my fridge.

I did decide yesterday to bite the bullet and perform the two difficult Bach organ pieces this Sunday.

The main reason this is a choice is that I don’t want to spend too much time away from fam practicing on Thursday and Friday.

I received email from my colleague and friend Jordan VanHemert asking when we could get together and do some chatting and practicing. I am afraid I have neglected figuring out when he will play at my church while he is on break from school. I will look at my schedule and email him today.

He wants to do this lovely piece for sax and piano by a composer named Decruck. He and I worked on it a bit last summer. I will have to work my tail off to do the piano part. But would love to do this, probably in January if he is still around.

My netbook seems to be dieing. Right now I have the fraying power cord taped to the computer so that it doesn’t shut off accidentally.

I am considering that when the choral/theater department sends me the money they owe me I might purchase another Acer netbook like the one I have with the money. I noticed that Miejers ( forchrisake) has them for $279.

When I purchased the one I am using, Eileen and I had to drive to Grand Rapids to get it. Heh.

Working on a Thanksgiving Menu

Possible Thanksgiving 2010 at the Jenkins house
(with a few links to recipes)

small Turkey breast (for carnivores)
Wild Rice with Butternut Squash & Blackened Pecans
Vegetarian Stuffing
Green Beans
Mashed Potatoes
Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Sauce
Anadama Bread (link to a recipe like mine, but I leave out the nutmeg)
Pear Custard Pie &
Pumpkin Pie

Eileen and I will discuss this after she gets up (and probably after my ballet class).

I am feeling a bit more rested today.  Of course, my blood pressure is up this morning. Sheesh. It stayed low all the way through my stressful schedule. I don’t know what this means.  I need to get back to treadmilling. That seems to help.

I have to decide today if  I am going to play two meaty Advent organ pieces by Bach this Sunday.  (Links to James Kibbie playing them: BWV 660 BWV 661 … I will play both of them slower than he does.) I want to learn them this Advent for sure. The  choir will be singing a little easy (for them) arrangement of “Wachet Auf” or “Wake Awake” by Bach. This Sunday would be the good Sunday to perform these two. I will probably have to go to the organ bench and convince myself today.

I relaxed last night and listened to the wind and rain and read English Music by Peter Ackroyd.

I am enjoying this quite a bit. He fictionalizes dream versions of many English creators including William Byrd the musician and Hogarth the artist.

In the Hogarth dream, the main character and Hogarth literally walk into this engraving of “Gin Alley”:

Earlier in the book, he has the great William Byrd utter these wonderful words:

“[H]uman musique is the concordance of diverse elements in one compound by which the spiritual nature is joined with the body. What other power can solder and glue that spiritual strength, which is endued with an intellect, to a mortal and earthly frame? Only that musicke which every man that descends into himself finds in himself.”

from English Music by Peter Ackroyd

Today is St. Cecilia’s Day.

Yesterday was the historical date of Henry Purcell’s death. The juxtaposition of these two dates was pointed out in the novel I am reading called English Music by Peter Ackroyd.

Today is also the date that JFK was shot and is my mother’s 84th birthday.

Last night in the middle of the night  my netbook failed.  Couldn’t get it to manually restart. This morning I got up and removed the battery and then replaced it and it came back. This is not a good a sign.

I don’t keep much on it that I will need when I have to replace it.  There are a few passwords in my Chrome installation that I might miss. Usually a password can be restored. It will be a pain in the butt to start over with a different laptop because I will have to install the software I need and the security stuff. Also this netbook is set up to automatically log on a number of wireless access points that have rather elaborate sign ins. That will be a pain.

I am considering purchasing a larger laptop.

Mostly because I think I can probably get one used a bit cheaper than a new netbook.  This netbook was my first laptop and I do adore having the portability. The size is not that significant to me. Weight would be a factor. Ease of access to wireless would presumably be a working feature of any laptop I could purchase.

Well I survived the marathon of the last two weeks. Today all I have is an 8:30 ballet class and then later in the day to take food to my lovely wife. I have invited my Mom to do this with me since today is her birthday and this is the only way the three of us can have dinner together.

I did church and rehearsals and a funeral in a bit of a daze yesterday. Everything came off fine. It was helpful that I had scheduled a lovely little Telemann violin sonata as prelude and postlude.

After the funeral, I asked Eileen to take me to the pub where I proceeded to have three martinis.

Today I want to plan Turkey day meal and probably go grocery shopping. I’m hoping life will settle down a bit now that the musical is over.

“Beauty and the Beast” is finally done. Now to see if I get paid. The band director, Greg Maynard, was very clear that if I have not received a check by next Saturday I should let him know. The choral/theater department also owes me money for the extra accompanying I did for them. Sigh. I hate wondering whether I will get paid or not after all that work.

I’m not too exhausted this morning after two shows yesterday. It was very encouraging to see my Mom come out and see the matinée with Eileen. Apparently when Eileen inquired they gave them easy access seats on the front row due to Mom’s age and walker. Very cool.

I spent the interim time between shows at Panera. During this time I had contact with Sarah in England and Eileen in Holland via facebook and David in California via a brief online chat. I do love the internet.

Now all I have to do is survive today. I have a pre-game rehearsal, a service, a post-game rehearsal, a funeral and then I’m done.

My Mom received her first land contract payment from the buyers in mail yesterday. Excellent. It looks like the property in Fenton has at the very least turned from a drain on my Mom’s assets to a source of income.

Now I am going to get serious about figuring out how spread sheet formulas work and set up some docs to keep track of this and some other running totals like my own extra income. I looked briefly at formulas this morning and they don’t look too hard. Eileen can help me with this.

Tomorrow I plan to do some grocery shopping for Turkey Day. It is also my Mom’s birthday and I have invited her to come with me to take Eileen her supper at work and celebrate that way. She will be 84.

Only two performances left and then I’m done with “Beauty and the Beast,” the high school musical.

There have been some comical moments in this endeavor. The best one so far was on opening night when a cellist accidentally unplugged my piano.

For some reason, the band director stopped the show when I discovered the piano was not working. I frantically tried to figure it out.

This so rattled the actors on stage, that the final number was pretty ruined with the singer jumping around, the director attempting to follow him and me not being able to hear him and following him apparently incorrectly.

There is a lot of music in this musical. It’s more like a film score than your typical musical. And for once there are honest to god piano parts. I work from a  piano/conductor score (as does the director…. there is no full score which makes it tricky sometimes because players have parts that the conductor does not see.) There are many passages where the piano part seems to be very important to the music. This is kind of fun, because usually I envision my role as one of reminding high school players where the fuck we are in the score.

I have been listening to a dramatization of one my favorite series of novels by Anthony Burgess on BBC. It’s called ‘Inside Mister Enderby.”  [here’s a link that will soon expire as BBC only keeps up its shows for about a week online]

It’s a dramatization of the first of the Enderby novels. I keep wondering why I find it so unsatisfactory. I think it’s because they don’t capture the personality of Enderby very well. He just sounds like another dramatic radio personality.

I have a picture of a little unattractive man with huge glasses, a steely determination about his calling (poetry) which easily devolves into irony intended on not.  In fact the whole essence of this character for me is irony.  Enderby is a total loser, but extremely logical in his own little world.

The actor who plays him often raises his voice and sounds emotional. I never pictured the character that way.

Enderby in the novels is ridiculous but extremely funny in an understated way. It is interesting to remember that Burgess’s first wife was actually Dylan Thomas’s mistress for a while (they had an open marriage).

Enderby is nothing like Thomas but does seem to smack of a little poke at him and his ilk.  Poets who take themselves seriously are much funnier than the BBC characterization of a desperate loud shallow loser.

Speaking of comedy, I spent two hours yesterday trying to figure out why I lost the internet.

I mistakenly did one of those registry clean ups that are offered on a trial basis and my mainframe desktop couldn’t find the internet while my wireless could. Then both of them couldn’t. I did a restore and several reboots of the computer and the modems. I picked up the land line to call Comcast and had no dial tone. The cable tv was still working (we bundle all these services with Comcast). I called Comcast on my cell. While I was talking to robots and technicians (press one if your internet is not working), the phone returned.

The human I finally spoke to walked me through more reboots and lo and behold everything worked. For a while. As I proceeded with my weekly online bill session, it once again stopped. Before I could reboot anything, it started again and continued for the rest of the day.

I love technology.

I slept in this morning. Having a morning ballet class five times a week makes for long days when I have other stuff like the musical and  church stuff. I usually can’t sleep in. But today it was no problem.

By the way, I figured out a back door entrance into the stupid online book mark service which changed its configuration. Good grief. No response to the email I sent them. Sooprise.

I had a very full day yesterday.  I meant to do more resting in preparation for the evening opening night performance, but couldn’t stop myself from cleaning the kitchen and doing some piano practice. I also had the usual ballet class, meeting with my boss and trio rehearsal that happens on Thursdays.

My trio rehearsal was largely chatting yesterday. I was exhausted. My cellist also has a strenuous schedule since she has a full time job at Hope College Library and also plays in the Grand Rapids Symphony which means several rehearsals and performances a week during the season.

We rehearsed the Telemann pieces we are playing Sunday then the cellist asked if we could play through an arrangement of a Gershwin piano prelude that I purchased at the college library sale for fifty cents.

We liked it so much that the trio quickly agreed to play it for the church on the Fourth Sunday of Advent for the morning Eucharist Lessons and Carols. It is a lovely thing.  It motivates me to get a copy of his preludes and look at them. I doubt if I will find one for fifty cents.

I also couldn’t resist a bit of organ practice yesterday when I should have been resting up for the evening. I have been reviving a Franck organ piece from my undergraduate study. I’ve never been wild about Franck’s music.  I learned his Grand Piece Symphonique and his Pastorale under the tutelage of the late Ray Ferguson.

It is the Pastorale I have been rehearsing.

Franck was supposedly a very gentle man. I don’t dislike his music. I’m just not attracted to it that strongly.  I recently put Marcel Dupre’s recording on my turntable and figured out that it’s not a recording or even an interpretation I like. There might, however, be an interpretation I  can come up with on my little organ that I can stand.

Unfortunately the Pastorale is kind of long. I just checked and Dupre’s recording is 8 minutes and eleven seconds. I probably will take  that long to perform it.  I am beginning to develop a bit of affinity for it. This seems to be more and more important to me: to perform music I can sort of “endorse” artistically and personally.

I just tried to access my online Bookmarks via Diigo.

I just had the not uncommon experience of having an online web  site totally change its initial frame and lock me out. I have been using an online bookmarking system since NYT introduced one years ago. NYT dropped it and passed me on to another online system which did the same thing and passed me on to Diigo. Now Diigo has changed. I can only hope I can access these online bookmarks. Years of recipes, articles and other things.

When I went to access my bookmarks, Diigo had an video they wanted me to watch about their new wonderful (no doubt aspiring social network) services. It didn’t seem to occur to them that users want immediate access to what they have and don’t have time to discover their wonderful new improvements.

Typical.

Yesterday in dance class, the teacher (who was the chair of the department substituting for the regular instructor) decided she wanted to do an exercise using phrases of three measures length instead of the usual four.

At first I didn’t understand. Dancers use language different from musicians. I think three or four in terms of meter or pulse. In other words three means the oom pah pah of the waltz and two is the left ride stride of a march or walk.  It organizes the fundamental unit of the measure.

Dancers think in larger terms. In terms of reference to the moves. It reminds me of marching band. Probably because I remember marching eight steps between yard lines.

Ballet dancers think in eights like that, or sixteens or even fours.

Many if not most western musical phrases are in the same groups of 4, 8 or 16. 4, 8, or 16 what? Measures of oom pah pahs (3/4) or left rights (2/4 or even 4/4).

Of course much interesting music does not fall into these regular patterns.  This is one of the reasons I adore Bartok. His use of irregular rhythmic patterns often derived from folk music from Hungary or surrounding areas.

Anyway improvising in groups of three measures presented a fun little challenge.

I also ran across a good explanation of the history of the cross rhythm of playing fours against fives. Haven’t read the whole thing but this is the kind of thing I think about quite a bit as I learn music that uses these more complex interaction of  meters. Link to Kyle Gann’s music blog post: “Metametrics: a brief history of 5 against 4.”

I had a flattering moment also in class when the instructor turned to me (as they some times do) as she was formulating a series of moves and asked me to play. They usually say “What do you have?” or something vague like that meaning what are you planning for what I am formulating.

I immediately start playing when instructors do this, to help the pace of the class and keep things moving. As I played the instructor moved and murmured the description  of the moves she was planning to give to the students.

After I stopped she asked me what it was that I was playing and that she quite liked it. I said in my goofy voice, “Made it up.”

It’s funny what works in the ballet class. The music doesn’t need to be profound. In fact I think it might help that it’s not complicated. It does benefit however from being delivered musically. I think that might be key. And one of the reasons dancers like live pianists for class.

A melody played with expression and as much beauty of execution as the poor pianist can muster helps remind the dancers of the expression content of the rigorous physical moves they are attempting.

It seems to be another of those rare odd niches in musical life where I just about fit in with my interest in spontaneity, improvisation, composition and gratuitous nature of art.

My daily schedule continues to be nuts. I collapsed in the living room last night after the dress rehearsal for the Grand Haven High School performance of “The Beauty and the Beast” and told Eileen that I didn’t think I could work three part-time jobs permanently.

Ballet, church and pit orchestra is at least one thing too many. Thankfully there are only four performances in the next three days and then I’m done with the musical.

Last night’s rehearsal only went three and half hours.  In the number where the Beast transforms to. human, the smoke machine went crazy and filled the auditorium with an odd gritty smoke. The singers choked. We stopped and they opened windows and doors for a bit, then finished the play.

Later walking to my car I stepped through several kids sitting on chairs trying to get their breath back.

The last thing I heard was the choral director telling someone that if they didn’t respond she was going to call 911. Nice.

I tried to pace myself yesterday because I was so fatigued as to be light-headed in the morning. Today is bit better.

Yesterday was Hindemith’s birthday.

I learned this because I follow Naxos records on Twitter. Couldn’t resist playing a bunch of his music on piano and then listening to CDs of his music back and forth to Grand Haven last night. I do like this composer. I have a recording of Glenn Gould playing the piano sonata that I played through yesterday and enjoyed listening to his interpretation.

I also found a couple of interesting articles via Twitter, one from the left side of politics (the side I more often identify with) and one from the right.

The left side was represented by economist, William Grieder.

He has written an article that constructively criticizes and advices President Obama: link to “Obama Without Tears.”

Tough love from the left.

On the right, I found an interesting article on one of my favorite conservatives (still don’t agree with him but the man is dam literate and can write sentences and isn’t wrong about everything and seems to be pretty civil to me).  link to “Pleasures of reading Christopher Hitchens” by Christopher Caldwell

I have to cut this short because I need to get moving and get to ballet class.

I slept in until 7:20 this morning. My ballet class begins at 8:30 so I only had to time to grab a cup of coffee before heading off for class.

Last night’s rehearsal went for four and half hours. Which is actually shorter than most  of my evening rehearsals last week. I was feeling pretty good all day and didn’t pace myself like I”m going to have to today.

I have two more weeknight rehearsals and then performances begin. It’s going to be a tough schedule, but I was expecting this.

This Sunday at church is Christ the King. It also will be Telemann Sunday.

Amy the violinist and Dawn the cellist in my trio have kindly consented to performing the prelude and postlude with me which are pieces by Telemann. This greatly takes the pressure off having to do these things solo. The choir is singing a little movement by Telemann. Good solid stuff.

I checked yesterday and verified in Spitta’s bio of Bach that Telemann was CPE’s godfather. Cool.

I have been using the Tangos I prepared for ballet class in both my advanced and beginning class.  They’re not called for every time and never more than a couple per class. I purchased mp3s of the group I used as a resource for getting some Tango chops. I like their sound: [link to http://mandragoratango.com/]

I also have been branching out doing new Schubert waltzes in class.  When I first seriously studied piano with Richard Strasburg as teacher, he assigned me some of these waltzes. They are simple and Schubert wrote them to be danced to.  He wrote literally hundreds of them. Some of them are quite charming. I am glad to reel them off for ballet class. Lovely music, really.

After class today, Eileen went to the local college coffee shop (Lemonjellos) to have breakfast but there were not tables. So we opted for Southside Inn. Another local business which appeals to older people. They also have free wifi. I do like being able to connect up in different places.

My $30 phone died. This time I remembered that we had an old nicer Samsung that Eileen used before we upgraded to the silly T Mobile hotspot (this is an option where  you pay the company more money and they give you a phone which will connect to the network via your ISP. We did this because T Mobile has such poor coverage right here in our house.)

Anyway, I felt very high tech when I switched the SIM card from my dead phone to Eileen’s old phone.

I’m sitting in my living room exhausted right now trying to build up some energy to go practice organ.

I got up  yesterday and cut up a fresh pineapple and made biscuits before I walked to church.

I was hoping I could walk out the kink in my leg but this did not happen.

Church went pretty well. I played the Calvin Hampton piece well despite the inattention it received. This doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s a nice gentle rocking piece that when the congregation eventually settled down provided a nice piece of musical wallpaper as people got ready for prayer (“you’re soaking in it” was what the manicurist surprised her customer with in an old commercial when she informed her  that she was soaking in actual bonafide dish detergent guaranteed to soften her nails).

The congregation sang well. The anthem went well. It was one of those easy ones in which the pianist (me) has much more work to do than the singers. It was a bit on the new age Jesus side of the Episcopal practice but whothehell.

I had a moment in the introduction to the closing hymn when I committed the unpardonable error of making a mistake in the actual melody. Very unnerving. Although I played well I never really got my groove back and did not play the Distler as well as I hoped I would even though I repeated the entire short piece just for the fuck of it.

Ah well. Sometimes you eat the ba’r and sometimes the ba’r eats you.

Came home and made pear custard pie.

Eileen seems quite enamored of this recipe. This time I managed to get the “custard” in the pie to set up nicely. This was my second try on this recipe. The first time it was delicious but runny. This time it was delicious and  not runny.

I think I may have accomplished this by carefully measuring the pears (instead of just throwing in what seemed like the correct amount), carefully mixing the wet ingredients including beating the “egg beaters” quite a while before gradually adding sugar and flour. Then instead of pouring the wet mixture over the pears, I made sure the pears had no extra moisture coming from them and folded them gently into the final “custard”  mixture before slipping everything into a freshly made uncooked pie crust.

Something worked. Eileen and I ate half the pie last night.

In between all this I researched tango scores online. I came across a very helpful site from a Minneapolis  group, http://mandragoratango.com/

Like many hard working specialist music groups I have found online, this group is very generous with sharing its playbook and ideas about its speciality, in this case, the tango.

Last week my advanced ballet instructor announced to the class and me that they needed more tango in their lives and I promised to try to “dig up a few more.” I already have one little tango improv I have developed over the years for ballet use.

So I had fun yesterday looking through hundreds of tango scores and listening to several mp3s of Mandragora Tango.  I do like the tango even though I am really just beginning to learn something about the genre. I came up with ten tangos I could probably pull off for today.  There’s no guarantee my instructor will call for them today, but if she does, I’m ready.

For the next three evenings I have  final rehearsals for the Grand Haven High school production of “Beauty and the Beast.” This will probably be a bit arduous, but then come the performances which are actually much less work.

There were still many varieties of local fall veggies and fruit at the farmer’s market yesterday. I succumbed and purchased pears, apples, sweet potatoes, leeks and Brussels Sprouts on the stalk.  Came home, then ran off to practice organ before the afternoon memorial service at church which I thankfully was not scheduled to play.

Today at the Sunday Eucharist I am playing organ music by Calvin Hampton and Hugo Distler for the prelude and postlude. Though both men are dead I think of their music as “fresh” because each writer is so unique.

I am still figuring Hampton out.

The piece by Hampton I am playing is a gentle one with four ideas: a strictly repetitive jumping about of octaves in the pedal, a quiet echoing of the last few notes of the reed theme in soft beautiful stops which interestingly is heard initially even before the theme itself, long notes that provide the cantus-firmus-like long note theme with a reed stop, then a meandering filigree—a descant, I believe Hampton calls it—-which follows a strict rhythm as it wanders all over the flute stop. This rhythm is specifically six quick notes in a sextuplets, then four sixteenths, then two slower triplets over the constant duple bass notes.

All of this goes on four about seven minutes.  It’s called “An Exalted Ritual.” It reminds me of the “minimalist” school and might even be what he had in mind when he wrote it in the eighties.

The piece I am playing by  Distler is based on the tune of the closing hymn, MIT FRUEDEN ZART. Distler’s lovely music is delicately dissonant and always very clearly constructed. He also has a way with rhythms that throws the listener a short distance into unfamiliar and quietly unexpected rhythmic places. I find him a joy to learn and perform.

After practice yesterday, I came home and took the Brussels Sprouts off the stalk.

Sliced them up and cooked them with sliced sauteed leeks. Made rice to serve them over and also made veggie chili dogs. My wife who doesn’t like either vegetable but she says that veggie hot dogs are not easily distinguished from meat ones.

Despite my ongoing exhaustion from a temporarily brutal schedule, I forced myself to treadmill yesterday.

Unfortunately, I had some cramping in my right leg and had to stop a couple times. I finished off at a slower pace than usual. The cramp still hasn’t quite gone away this morning.  Ah, the joys of aging.

A couple of quotes grabbed my attention during Timothy Wu’s segment from this weekend’s On the Media broadcast.

They were quotes from Walter Lippmann. I ran down a reference to their original context in his book, Public Opinion.

Regarding the Lippmann’s opinion that humans are not equipped to be the “informed citizenry” needed by democracy theory, he says that we become reductive when complex “facts exceed our curiosity.”

Also he comments on the role of symbols.

“The making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes is an art well known to leaders, politicians and steering committees. It consists essentially in the use of symbols which detach emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.”

I found this entire quote via a google search which linked me into a power point slide presentation for a course from Berkeley last year. Here’s a link to the pdf: [pdf of a slide presentation on propaganda]

I was laying in bed dozing when someone began quoting Lippmann beginning with the “facts exceed our curiosity” quote. Suddenly my mind struggled to wakefulness realizing these were interesting ideas.

Although Lippmann was writing in early part of the 20th c. his ideas seem salient to an understanding of dumbing down of discourse.  I also was intrigued by the idea that symbol relates to emotions detached from ideas. Not sure how accurate any of these things are, but certainly food for thought.

Speaking of food, I need to go grocery shopping this morning. I kind of ran out of mental and physical energy yesterday afternoon. I was in the middle of doing my bills when I received a late notice that Turtle Island String Quartet would be presenting a lecture recital in about an hour at Hope College.

I decided to attend.

Later I would figure out that my exposure to this group was at the beginning of its career in the late 80s.  I like that they are a group of composers who play their own music for string quartet. I did wonder a bit about the “freshness” of their music. Their latest CD is “Have you ever been…?”

David Balakrishnan is one of the founding members and did one fourth of the speaking yesterday.  I have been thinking about music in terms of “freshness” lately.  “Fresh music” is sort of how I am thinking of music that takes into account how we listen and think at this point in time.  The Turtle Island Quartet ended their little noon recital yesterday with their rendition of “All Along the Watchtower.” It was a nice arrangement but as an ending piece it seemed to not necessarily engage the restless young crowd already thinking of their next class. I wondered what the music meant to the young musicians who made up most of their audience. I caught a furiously nodding head out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to see who was “digging the groove” it turned out to be someone who looked like a professor not a student.

So Hendrix and Dylan. Hmmm.  I like Hendrix and Dylan. But when Mark Sumers the fantastic cellist answered a question about what music occupies him in his private life it was accompanying his 22 year old son at the piano on jazz tunes and listening to the Beatles on his Ipod.

Again, hmmmmm. Elvis Costello released a fascinating album this week. Next week Bruce Springsteen comes out with a new CD. These are not exactly revolutionary or obscure composers. I wonder why Sumers and The Turtle Island String Quartet aren’t doing what many thoughtful jazzers are doing and using the wonderful improv approach to more contemporary tunes.

In my initial response to Costello’s CD in particular I hear some pretty solid interesting self consciously tuneful melodies that would hold up under some jazz approaches. Not to mention the many recordings you can find of tunes by Radiohead and others.

I have kind of a funny relationship to jazz. David Balakrishnan pointed out that the two younger newer additions to the quartet, Mads Tolling (30 years old) and Jeremy Kittel (26 years old), had both had more academic opportunity to hone their abilities in the area of jazz and improv than the older members, himself and Somers.

I keep wondering just what a systemized (not to say frozen) approach to the wonderful world of jazz as a performer is all about. I know it helps me to learn to play in the style of great jazz pianists. But that is about the technique and the already existing corpus of music. I think that there is a bit of drawback when a style becomes so systematized as to enter the hallowed halls of academically sanctioned recognition.

I heard Balakrishnan using the word jazz to describe his and the quartet’s music.  All four referred to rock and roll, claves rhythms, scottish and irish fiddle music, back beat, comping and so on. I feel more at home in music that struggles for a clear vocab to define itself.  The word Jazz in many contexts seems to have become the term of choice for something that’s not really about 20th century music styles of Morton, Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and others.

For example in Ann Arbor there is an Episcopal community that has “jazz” services. They do the 20th century jazz thing mentioned above. But they also do almost any other style that occurs to them to put into their worship.

Anyway, I do go on. I need to stop and go do stuff.

So this brutal week is drawing to a close. Last night was only a five hour rehearsal for the musical, “Beauty and the Beast.”

I sometimes talk to musicians about being on the front or the back of the beat.

This is a very subtle or telling choice that professionals can make.

If you think of the sound of most bebop music, it can give you an idea of how musicians playing on the front of the beat.

This means with an insistent relentless energy that invigorates every pulse. If you listen to a good funk beat and pay attention to the bass player, they are usually on the back of the beat.

That means an almost resistant funky approach to going on to the next pulse.

These are two obvious examples.

I realized recently that my ballet instructors often like music that is in the center of the beat or the back of the beat.

If I energize the improvisation they often ask me to “slow down.” Sometimes I do vary in my tempos but rarely. Usually this dance talk for playing carefully, insistently, with an emphasis on the upbeat that is almost like a a hesitation (playing on the back of the beat).

String players do this to, especially in small ensembles but also in orchestras.

It is instructive to me to sit down with my violinist and cellist friends each week and have a musical conversation with them as we play piano trio music in which I experience this beautiful understand of rhythm in classical music.

On the other hand, the band director that conducts the Grand Haven High School student pit orchestra often likes to do rhythm on the front of the beat.

This man is a fine conductor and easily the best high school band director I have seen. His conducting is always clear and seems totally intentional. His sense of tempos and style is one I admire and enjoy playing under.

So I find it interesting that I move in one day (yesterday, since I had a trio rehearsal in the afternoon) from the ballet instructors and string players who are often on the back of the beat to playing under a conductor who is often on the front of the beat. I like the variety and challenge of all three situations.

I wasn’t too happy with my behavior yesterday at church. I went to prepare for my string trio rehearsal and discovered that an audio technician had the sound system in pieces and spread all over the music area. I asked him if he or whoever had scheduled him had mentioned the fact that there was a rehearsal on the church calender from noon to two. He said no. I’m afraid I wasn’t very friendly to him even as I as curtly assured him that we would cooperate and he didn’t have to pack up.

After a couple of conversations with my boss and him I figured out that it was more a miscommunication about making Thursday morning or the whole day available for this man’s  work.

In any event he was very cooperative and cleared off an area for us to rehearse in. While we practiced he  took his lunch and then came back and worked quietly while we practiced.  After the strings left I told him he could make noise while I practiced organ.

I felt pretty creepy even though my frustration was a bit justified. I mentioned to the workman that I was the one who introduced the concept of a master calendar to my community and staff. And that the church had grown from the size where you pretty much count on not conflicting when you scheduled something to one where scheduling was more critical.

Before I finished rehearsing I had chatted him up and thanked him. I even gave him a Butterfinger candy bar from the stash in the church office. Oh well, some days I act more mature than others, I guess.

It has been a marathon of a week for me. Next week we begin final rehearsals then end with performances. Next Saturday I have a matinee and an evening performance. Performances are easier than rehearsals. And shorter. As we finished up last night the choral director congratulated the cast and crew that they had taken a six hour show and reduced it to a workable three hours.

Today all I have is a morning ballet class and some tasks around the house to do like bills and maybe grocery shopping and cleaning. Light day.

I continue to be pretty busy. Yesterday morning before class, my teacher mentioned to me that she had requested me as pianist for two of her classes next semester. For me, this is the highest form of praise: being asked back and to do even more. Very flattering.

It was in this teacher’s class that I felt I had not done well on a couple of exercises last Friday.

My Mom and I went out for lunch yesterday at 8th Street Grille (no martini for Steve in the middle of a busy day).  It is so encouraging to see her old self emerging from this time of distress around my Dad’s illness and death. After lunch she walked two blocks to Kilwins, the fudge store, and bought a bunch of fudge. After that, she wanted to go the the Dollar Store before her eye appointment. She is rockin!

I managed to get some organ rehearsal in before leaving for my rehearsal in Grand Haven. Last night there was no student pit orchestra, just myself at the piano starting and stopping music as the choral director choreographed a pretty complex scene. Thankfully it only took three and half hours, not the five hours these have been running this week.

I feel tired this morning but not as exhausted as I have been.

Amanda my ballet teacher who I will be working with again next semester mentioned to me and the class that next week she wanted to do a bunch of tango moves.

Actually they’re not tango moves, they are classical ballet moves such as grand battement (large beating or kicks).

So I have been printing up a bunch of the tangos on my favorite copyright free music site: http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

I also have been preparing some Telemann scores to go along with the little Telemann anthem I have scheduled for my choir to sing a week from Sunday on Christ the King. I am going to invite my string players to help me with the prelude and postlude. If they decline, I was thinking of doing the same pieces on the organ: RH playing the violin part, LH playing the keyboard chords and Pedal doing the cello part. This is feasible but requires some preparation. Next week is the performance week for the musical. It will be another brutal schedule week and probably not the best time to pick something for the prelude and postlude that requires a lot of rehearsal.

So this morning I was looking at Telemann scores on http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page when I remembered I own a little book of Telemann fantasias for keyboards. Telemann didn’t write much organ music. That’s why I’m flopping around trying to figure out what to do to match the choral anthem.  (Telemann was the godparent for one of Bach’s children and was much more popular in his lifetime than Bach was. I like to think of them as friends.)

Anyway, these are pretty easy and if my string players aren’t up for another Sunday right away after playing last Sunday, I will choose a prelude and postlude from this book.

Off to go check my tangos. Life is good.

Four hours stretched into five at last night’s rehearsal of Grand Haven High School’s musical, “The Beauty and the Beast.” One nice thing was that for the first hour I was stage right on a baby grand piano working with the choral director and the chorus. Always nice to have a real piano. It’s even not a bad piano. Earlier in the day, I accompanied the leads as they sang for their lunch and funding from the Grand Haven Rotary Club.

I do enjoy working  with young people and good teachers who work at getting inside their heads and helping them learn and have new experiences.

The theater teacher and choral director have recontracted with me for more rehearsal hours this week. Subsequently I am going to begin rehearsing with them and the musical at 5 PM for the next three nights.

I must have looked fairly approachable yesterday because I had two different fathers in two different contexts come up and chat me up about their kids that I had come in contact with as a musician in my roles at local churches and schools. The first was at the Rotary Club after lunch, the second was at Panera as I was grabbing some food to eat on my second drive from Holland to Grand Haven that day.

I like it when I get reports of how what I have done in music has had a bit of an impact on young people that still shows as they mature. The second father reported that his son was going on in music. He seemed mildly curious about how musicians lived. He assumed that music was not my day gig and said it must be hard to devote time and effort in addition to a real job. Heh. I told him I’m pretty much just did music and that musicians often have to work mutliple jobs. I added that I was on my way to work with Grand Haven High School in addition to my church gig.

Last night it was impressive how many young people thanked me personally for my work with the musical. The actors and singers especially expressed appreciation that I was doing some extra hours with them. No doubt they are prompted to these good manners. But still it’s nice to see people being civil.

In between all my music things yesterday, I managed to find a bit of time for organ rehearsal and also to begin a transcription of Corelli Violin trio sonatas for organ trio.

When I began my organ study with Kent McDonald, he had me learn some transcription of the slow movements of these sonatas. I always wondered how the rest of the movements would work on organ. Yesterday I took a look at some online scores of them and began transcribing them for organ. I managed to get two of the four movements of the first one finished.

Corelli seemed to be writing for at least four instruments with these sonatas: two violins, cello and double bass. In places he has composed different parts for the cello and double bass so that the texture changes from three voices to four. The three voice texture is what makes these pieces easy to transcribe and realize on the organ.  Corelli’s change of texture makes it an interesting puzzle for transcription.  I really wont know how successful these are until I print them up and take them to the organ console. This is usually how this stuff works. Then I can make necessary changes to my little edition of these Corelli pieces. If they are any good, no doubt, I will post them here for anyone interested in using them since there are no copyrights involved.

Today I have a bit lighter day: 8:30-9:30 AM ballet class is all I have scheduled besides the evening rehearsal. This is good because I have some other tasks I have to attend to like cleaning the kitchen and submitting the prelude, postlude and libretto for Sunday’s anthem to the church office secretary for Sunday’s bulletin.

I spoke directly to my MWF Ballet II instructor yesterday about the structure of her two opening exercises that never vary. She was quite open to talking me quickly through them. Unfortunately, we still had a bit of a dancer/musician gap in meaning. I was puzzled by her description of the first exercise as one of 4 phrases, two on each side. I think that I misunderstood the use of “side” to mean the second repetition of the exercise when in fact she was telling me of the design that would then be repeated. The second exercise is unusually 9 phrases and I think that’s probably what screwed me up last Friday. Anyway, I paid closer attention, made notes and feel better prepared.

For some reason I was pretty frazzled all morning  yesterday at church. Working with such a variety of personalities and skill levels is challenging. Especially when so many of them are unpredictable to me. It is the nature of the work that leaders have to make room for people’s response. This means reacting as little as possible to people’s behavior while trying to guide them through the music.

So when people show up late, don’t show, walk away in the middle or leave early it is disconcerting to me.

But I kept up a cheerful countenance and led the musicians and the congregation through the music. All in all it went pretty well. I felt it was a bit of a victory to have two high school student instrumentalists play along with  five adult instrumentalists. Three of the adults are professionally trained on their instrument.

After service several choir members skipped the post service rehearsal. But it was a good one anyway. I took the choir through the Advent/Xmas music. I sight read my way through the accompaniments since I had had no time to rehearse them. The Corelli Xmas Cantata (which is actually an adaptation of his Christmas concerto) was a good choice I think for the group for Christmas. I am using the organ accompaniment edition (we own both an edition for organ and choir and for instruments and choir).

I told the choir I was in the mood for a Baroque Italian Christmas.

I have been rehearsing Bach’s organ transcriptions of Vivaldi’s concertos. This is such happy clear music and it seems to be just what the doctor ordered for jupe right now.

Along with big doses of other composers like Calvin Hampton on organ and Beethoven piano sonatas.

Another interesting piece I introduced to the choir yesterday combines two melodies: “Of the father’s love begotten” and “Lo, how a rose.”

I felt like those who chose to attend this rehearsal felt good about this direction. It is difficult to choose music for a small group that is inconsistent in attendance to short after service rehearsals.  My evolving strategy is to choose several easy but interesting pieces and then one or two more challenging (but not too challenging) pieces for them.

After service, Eileen and I went out for lunch. It ended up being a two martini lunch Sunday.

Which was good. We came home and found our cat dead. This was not unexpected. Eileen thought she might have expired while she was preparing to come to church.  Since the cat has been largely immobile and unresponsive for the last 24 hours, it wasn’t easy to tell just exactly when she died. At any rate, she didn’t suffer.

Today I have a day from hell. After my 8:30 Ballet class, I have to drive to Grand Haven to accompany lead actors from the musical as they perform for the local Junior Chamber of Commerce. After that I drive back to Holland to meet with a disgruntled choir member. Then back to Grand Haven for a rehearsal with the chorus from the musical, then a full evening in the pit rehearsing the show.  Not much breathing time in there today. Maybe that’s why I’m up so early. I like to have a bit of time alone. It helps me gather what composure and balance I can muster.