Midlife Meditation

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 ...

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...

"You're so calm. I wish I could be that way." I had just presented a quick, concentrated lesson to other music teachers at Orff 101, the annual introductory workshop put on by the Portland Orff Schulwerk Association, of which I am now vice president. Every member of the board presents at this event, and from what I saw of the others, we were all confident, prepared, and at ease. Except apparently we weren't. Though I should qualify that statement: I was, in fact, at ease, but one of my colleagues was not. I'm sure she's fine in a classroom, and her lesson was masterfully presented; but from what she told me, she was inwardly extremely nervous, probably from delivering her lesson to adults, rather than children. I'm an introvert. Introverts are supposed to shy from microphones, stages, podia, lecterns. We don't like to raise our voices, because we don't like to hear our voices. Public speaking, teaching, performing should tie us in knots of...