Midlife Meditation

  That's Patrick Short at the keyboard, yours truly on the djembe. Everyone reading this is a musician. So is everyone not reading this. In fact, I can say with absolute conviction that every human being in the world is a musician. But wait, you're thinking, I don't play an instrument, I never sing in public or even in my car or shower, so how can you call me a musician? It's very simple: even if you no longer make any effort at all to make music of any kind, there was a time in your life when you did. You may no longer remember doing it, but when you were a child, you sang, you banged on things, you organized sound with your mind and performed it with your body. It's part of our hard-wiring as human beings. The first vocal experimentation babies do is singing. From the moment they're physically able, they move their bodies when music is played. And their earliest manipulation of objects is to turn them into percussion instruments. You may have had this trained ...

March 24, 1982: my 21st birthday party, and everyone else was having a better time than I appeared to be having. I occupy an extremely particular nook of the spectrum. Fifteen years and approximately 4000 students into my career as a music teacher, I've met and taught students from across the spectrum, from those so high functioning their autism presents as only a mild quirkiness to nonverbal children who express themselves through screams. In that time, I've rarely met any child who more than superficially reminded me of myself. Occasionally, there's an exception. There's a fifth grade boy at my current school whose single-minded enthusiasm for Harry Potter comes across as slightly obsessive, and who becomes deeply upset with his misbehaving classmates. I feel a real kinship with this well-meaning, nerdy kid, and imagine I probably came across the same way to my teachers when I was his age. However disturbed he feels at his peers' disrespectful attitu...

Muggles don't get it. By muggles, I'm referring to people who, while not themselves part of the improv or music worlds, nonetheless are appreciators of those worlds. The more enthusiastic ones can be called "fans," the obsessed ones "nerds" or "geeks," but all of them, from the utterly dedicated down to the mildly intrigued, constitute a group best characterized as "the audience." As the audience, they do utterly get that what they're experiencing is cool. That is to say, they're witnessing performers do something powerful, entertaining, deeply moving, something that resonates deep within the observer; and they're seeing it appear to be effortless. Seeing it happen, feeling awe at how polished it appears to be, how seamless are the transitions from one part to another, they cannot help but think there is something magical about what is happening on stage or, barring the supernatural, at least a sign of great talent. An...

Judge Whapners (or Judges Whapner, depending on how judgy a grammarian you are). One of the many gimmicks that makes ComedySportz a delightful place to work is the way we award points in our competitive improv shows. For $3, any "loyal fan" (audience member) can purchase a pair of colored fly swatters called Judge Whapners. Once both blue and red teams have played a round of games, the judges in the audience (at $3, the cheapest judgeship one can buy) vote for the team that gave them the most enjoyment, and points are awarded accordingly. The gimmick is based in a pun that is almost as old as the show--Joseph Wapner retired from The People's Court  in 1993, before many members of our audience were even born--but the conceit is so funny that we've held onto it. Much funnier than the pun is the idea of judging between two improv performances using fly swatters. Taste in comedy is a decidedly subjective thing. From my position at the keyboard in the sound boot...

This is not  what I'm talking about. The question comes up frequently when people find out I'm a musician: "What do you play?" My vague answer is "piano, trumpet, guitar, a little bit of everything." My much more specific answer is "scratch piano." Then the conversation begins. There are pictures of me sitting at a piano when I was still too young to walk. My mother began teaching me lessons when I was in kindergarten, so I like to tell people I could read music before I could read words, though that's quite an exaggeration. In any case, my formal training on the piano ended after fifth grade, when I was allowed to take up the trumpet instead. This means that, for all practical intents and purposes, everything I do on the piano now is self-taught. I can say this sincerely because what I do is nothing like what my mother taught me. What is "scratch piano"? Most literally, it's a term I made up about a decade ago to d...

Yes, that's supposed to be me there, playing the guitar and (presumably) screaming into the microphone. It was drawn for me by a fifth grader. I love it. I also must, in all honesty, confess that it's not true. I don't rock. I've been known to swing, to jive, to groove, to get down, to jam, and more; but when it comes to rocking, that's not really my bag. All of the above verbs refer to performance--musical performance, to be exact. And don't get me wrong, I love to perform. I just don't need a spotlight when I do it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The occasion for this essay is a conversation I had yesterday with a fourth grade teacher who asked me if I play for fun. He told me he likes to unwind at the end of the day with a ukelele and a microphone, recording himself and using the playback to improve his playing and singing. I told him about Comedy Sportz, which is my only performance outlet at this time, and that I really do it for ...

Blow this image up, zoom in on the far center of it, and you'll see a man with very little hair, wearing a purple shirt. That man is Doug Goodkin. I Googled him in hopes of finding an image of him working with children, but came up dry. Even though teaching elementary music at The San Francisco School is Doug's day job, our modern anxiety over posting pictures of children seems to have limited images of Doug to his weekend and summer job, teaching adults how to teach music to children, something he does all over the world. There's no need to blow this image of a different man who, like Doug, has little hair to conceal his busy head: I'm talking about the tall man in a red jersey (sorry, Andrew). His name is Patrick Short, and he is the founder and co-owner of ComedySportZ Portland, an improv troupe that performs fast-paced shows every Friday and Saturday evening, as well as teaching improv classes to children, teenagers, and adults. Like Doug, Pat travels extens...

I could not have been happier. Saturday I saw two of my favorite philosophies come together. These are approaches that have changed my life in spectacular ways, freeing me up from decades-old hangups to be funnier, more creative, more relaxed, and a far better teacher, father, partner, and human being. Some background: my career as a music teacher officially started in 1984, when I took my first full-time teaching job. That job lasted for eleven weeks. I spent the rest of the school year subbing, and by the time summer had arrived, had made the ridiculous (but far from unprecedented, given my age of 24) decision based on that one year that it was never going to get better, so I should become a minister instead. I spent the next fifteen years living with the consequences of that decision, finally leaving ministry behind in 2000 and returning to classrooms in 2002, first as a sub, then, in 2003, as an elementary music specialist. For two years, I did my best to figure out how to d...

You knew it was coming, that I couldn't stay in high dudgeon forever, that at some point my grinchy heart would grow three sizes and I'd be calling out "God bless us, everyone!" to anyone with ears. You knew it, and yet you said nothing. Jerks. But seriously, this happens every year: I start off like Ebeneezer Grinch, and just like said mashed up Christmas-hater, I wind up sledding down Mt. Crumpet to return all the merch, dancing in the streets of Victorian Whoville, carving the roast beast with the Cratchets, won over by the spirit that so often seems buried beneath packages, boxes, and bags. Things that won me over this year: My 500 Children:  One cannot teach and lead holiday singing in an elementary school without having some of their delight rub off on one. And one absolutely cannot do bus duty with kindergartners wearing a Santa hat and maintain a gruff attitude toward the jolly old elf. When they glommed onto me at the door, wrapping their little bodi...

I work a tough room, two sets a day. Some days I kill; other days I bomb. Most days I reach probably 75 per cent of my audience, and of the remainder, I have very few complaints. Other performers would be thrilled with a success rate like this, but it eats at me, so I'm always tweaking my performance, trying to reach more of the room. And no, I'm not a comic. I'm a music teacher. For the first two years that I taught elementary general music, I drew heavily on whatever curriculum was on the shelves when I arrived at my school. I was creative to the extent I could be with those materials, but it was far from ideal. If, in those days, I had graded my teaching on performance guidelines, I would have been extremely unhappy with it. I was surviving, but I was working with sub-par material, and I had no real idea how to hone it and fit it to the population I was serving. Then I discovered Orff Schulwerk, and my teaching was transformed. What hit me from the first Orff wo...

  Flashback to January, 2009, the day the decision landed. I was two months away from my 48th birthday, and I was as old as I had ever been--or ever would be again. It came as an email from the court-appointed custody study expert. I'm not going to share any of the details, or how I felt about them, except for this: that day was the bottom for me. I was beaten, exhausted, alone. I was a tired old man. There have been times in my life when a defeat like this--or, as sometimes happened, a cascade of defeats--left me reeling for months, sinking into a state of misery from which I could not extricate myself. Both divorces were like that, especially the second, which triggered the end of my career in ministry. The night after I received the decision, I was wracked with insomnia. I think I finally got to sleep sometime between 5 and 6 in the morning, then had to be up at 7 to get to school. Teaching was therapeutic--I was still in my elementary job in Banks, and the kids ...