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 ...

Worst. Improviser. Ever. The first improv performance I ever attended was a sermon. The year was 1988. I was student pastor of a tiny rural church five miles south of Oblong, Illinois. My advisor, Professor Virgil Howard, had come up from Dallas to see how I was doing. While he was there, he guest-preached for a Sunday evening service. He sat on a stool in the middle of the sanctuary, and like any good improviser, asked for a suggestion: "What's your favorite Bible story? And what are some things going on in your lives?" He took everything the congregation threw at him, and wove it into an amazing conversational narrative that was moving, personal, and inspirational.  By the time he'd finished, I knew exactly what kind of preacher I wanted to be: not a lecturer, not a poet, not a stem-winder, but an improvisational storyteller. For the remaining twelve years of my pastoral career, and the ten years after that that I continued to occasionally preach, I ho...

O would some power the giftie gie us  to see ourselves as others see us. --Robert Burns Well look at that, Andrew. You're keeping company with Robert Burns. Andrew is a Comedy Sportz veteran, a brilliant improviser who has performed in more shows than I can imagine. He's also a world traveler, both for business and pleasure. Right now, he's in Barcelona, attending an international improv festival. That's what led him to make this observation on Facebook earlier today: You know how our shorthand for French people is smoking, and our shorthand for Italian people is hand gestures and kissing on the cheek? Well here in Europe, improv shorthand for American people is grabbing guns and shooting. That landed him squarely in the company of Robert Burns, and the quote at the top of this blog. Improv shorthand is an occasionally uncomfortable thing for me as I do my work behind the keyboard. I hear that we're doing something French, and I fi...

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...

First the disclaimer: this is not about the scratches on my piano, prominent as they are. I’ll add a picture to this post when I’m home, so you’ll know what I’m talking about. I don’t know where they came from, I wish they weren’t there, and let’s move on. Now comes the definition: “scratch piano” is a term I invented to describe what I do at the keyboard. I make big music out of small pieces. Sometimes what I have is a lead sheet, a musical skeleton with a melody and chord symbols (and, if there are any, lyrics). From that, I create my own arrangement of a piece, whether it’s a jazz standard, a Christmas carol, a gospel hymn, a folk song, a symphonic fragment, or something really esoteric. If this was the extent of what I do, I’d use the common term for it: faking. In fact, large collections of lead sheets are called “fake books,” and I have a huge library of them, enabling me to play gigs that call for music from many genres. But I do more than that. I can also take fu...

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...

These guys really need to meet: Pat Short of Comedy Sportz Portland and Doug Goodkin, master Orff Schulwerk educator. I move in different spheres: Music education. Orff Schulwerk. Improv. Jazz. United Methodism. Clergy. Outdoor recreation. Running. Cycling. Body Pump. Science Fiction. The Anderson family. Survivors of divorce. Beer. Preacher's kids. Summer camp alumni. Willamette alumni. Trekkies. By "sphere," I mean an activity, occupation, or status shared with a group of people that is a frame of reference for understanding the greater world, and which has a knowledge base unique to itself. Two people meeting each other for the first time who both went to camp as children can reminisce, nod knowingly, find common ground with each other. Many of my spheres overlap. I know a lot of United Methodist clergy, and we share experiences both of our education and work and of simply being United Methodist. Star Trek fans usually have a taste for science fiction in general...

Last night, MaryAnn Rambo blew me away. MaryAnn has been on a weight loss journey for over a year now, and as of the last time I checked, had last 203 pounds. She blogs about it at " Repairing Me ," and reading it is well worth your time. She has also begun telling her story on stage as part of a show called "Campfire" and, for the first time last night, as monologist for a long form improvisation called "Disco Lounge." Working from the suggestion "teddy bear," MaryAnn told short stories from her childhood that were the inspiration for scenes by a group of improvisers. The players were silly, blasphemous, hilarious at times, often inspired, but none of what they did would've been possible without the offers MaryAnn made with her stories. To be fair, MaryAnn has actually been doing this for a long time. She's been running the screens at ComedySportZ, putting up images and text that comment on moments in the matches (in keeping with ...

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...