Music

A Pause on this Site

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Image by raphaelsilva from Pixabay

Hi Everyone!

If you’ve been a subscriber here from the beginning, you know how many iterations this site has gone through: from a series of posts about my son Gideon’s cancer and successful treatment, to a blog focused on a concept I called “Intentional Happiness,” to a more general “Intentional Living” area, and then finally to a food and healthy eating emphasis with the catchy title “Respect Food Roles.” I’ve written a cookbook, which I encourage you to purchase on this site or through Amazon. It’s focused on feeding crowds, tellingly titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind. My earlier book, Intentional Happiness, is available through the same outlets.

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Some Year-End Thoughts

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Image by Erad from Pixabay

Have you just recently started getting posts from this blog? The pause was caused mainly by an accidental change in our mailing-list service. It was also at least somewhat caused by the fact that I hadn’t been writing many posts recently, as I’ve been concentrating on my music blog. For 2021, though, I’m going to set the goal of writing a post a week here. Remember, this isn’t a food blog as such, or a cooking blog. It’s a site that concentrates on the part that food should play in our lives. (“Roles,” remember.) Ideally, all the food that you eat should fulfill at least one of these two roles:

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A Bittersweet Farewell–and a Look to the Future

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Overlooking Lawerence and the Kansas River. (Boston Public Library) (cropped).jpg
Old North College, the first building on the University of Kansas campus, at the northeast promontory of Mount Oread, looking north over Lawrence and the Kansas River, ca. 1867. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

I decided to re-post the following here at the Intentional Living blog from my Behind the Music blog. This is my last post for the season. Next fall I’ll do something to amalgamate the two blogs for my subscribers. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote about the lovely piece that we’ll be performing to end our concert. Be sure to come if you’re in the area! It’s going to be great. (And if you come on Friday night you’ll get to attend the reception afterwards, which will include my version of Sally’s Baking Addiction Guinness brownies. If that’s not enough of a reason for you to come, I don’t know what is!) So here’s the post, in its entirety:

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Keep Your Ears On Stage.

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One of the joys of my participation in The Magic Flute over the past weeks, culminating with the performances on April 21 & 22, was the great privilege of just being around a whole group of talented people and getting to overhear things they said and did. I told one of the other MF chorus performers that I’d be willing to crawl over broken glass to be able to sing Mozart and work with Devin Patrick Hughes, the conductor of the Arapahoe Symphony.

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Magic Flute Musings, Part Two

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poster for MF premier in 1791; image accessed via Wikipedia.

Well, folks, it’s all over. My tiny part in this fairly big production is now a thing of the past. It was so much fun! We didn’t have a huge crowd for either performance, but the people who did come were quite enthusiastic. And our small chorus added to the overall effect. Everyone was pretty pleased, I hope. We added to our stock of good will with the Arapahoe Philharmonic. We bonded. We invested time. And we got to hear Mozart’s glorious, glorious music performed by some very talented singers. I’m so glad I stepped up and volunteered to do this. (Be sure to read Laura Vanderkam’s post about her own singing experiences. So fitting that she wrote about that today!)

And now it’s Monday morning, and life has moved on. I came home yesterday at about 6:00 and just vegged out in front of the TV, but that was perfectly okay. This morning I’m up and at ‘em. There’s so much stuff to do! Writing projects. Gardening projects. Getting ready for the big trip to France in three and a half weeks. Getting ready for the final concert of the year for the Chorale. (Do come! It’s going to be such a nice evening!) And just the ongoing business of life. The lovely performance is receding into the past even as these words go onto the page. I reminded myself several times yesterday afternoon to be present, to pay attention, to be in the moment, and I succeeded in doing that at least some of the time. It’s very hard to keep your mind from racing ahead.

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It’s the Prep Work that Counts.

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The title comes from a recent BSF lecture, an idea that is so obvious that it gets overlooked, especially by me. Our teaching leader was talking about the Billy Graham crusades that took place in past years, when whole stadiums would be filled to hear the dynamic preacher. But, as she said, the results came about not just because of Mr. Graham’s own spiritual standing, Scriptural knowledge and personal magnetism but because of the advance teams’ work. They would go to a city where a crusade was to take place and meet with churches, scope out the venue, recruit volunteers to help with everything from counseling to cleanup—on and on. Without all of that unseen work the crusades just wouldn’t have happened, or if they had they’d have been much less successful. Whether or not you agree with how the message of the Gospel was presented in those crusades, and many don’t, the fact is that they were masterpieces of organization, and of organization that was done ahead of time.

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Magic Flute Musings

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A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Loving the Mozart Requiem Isn’t the Same as Singing It.” My beloved Cherry Creek Chorale was performing the entire work, with orchestra, in the original Latin, and I was so excited about it. But when we actually started working on the piece I was pretty lost. I ended up investing in a professional recording with the tenor part being sung over the top of an actual performance, a move that helped tremendously. That performance was such a joy, on many levels. But boy, did I work! In the end, though, to stand up there and be so sure of my part was an experience I’ll never forget. I said in that post, “If I really love it, I’ll be willing to do the work. But the love isn’t a substitute for the work but the inspiration for it.”

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In Which I Save My Readers the Price of a Movie Ticket

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Did you watch the Oscars this past Sunday night? I don’t always do so, but KRMA was having yet another set of fundraising programs, and the guys were playing a game that I didn’t want to participate in, and I always like to see at least a little bit of the show, if for nothing else than to observe the crazy outfits that the women wear. Honestly! If we women don’t want to be treated as sexual objects, why do we put ourselves on such display?

Well, enough of that. As the world now knows, “The Shape of Water” won Best Picture. I was rooting for “Dunkirk” or “Darkest Hour,” both of which I’d seen and loved, but it was not to be. “Shape” hadn’t held any particular fascination for me, but the more I heard about it the more familiar it seemed. Then I realized, wait a minute—that’s the plot of a book I read years ago, Mrs. Caliban. And didn’t the sea creature somewhat resemble a character in a movie that all three of us

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Is Your Procrastination Costing You?

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half-closed window, closing window, window of time, prorastinationTwo ways my procrastination is costing me right now:

1. I missed getting my material on the choral masterpiece Carmina Burana ready in time for the fall concert season. This short e-book has been on the back burner for at least a year and probably longer–I can’t remember when I first came up with the idea of packaging the posts I wrote for the Cherry Creek Chorale’s 2013 performance into some sort of sellable item for other choral groups.

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“So we beat on, boats against the current. . .

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boat against the current going into future. . . borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

This closing line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald came into my head Saturday night as I walked out of the building after the final performance of the Cherry Creek Chorale’s wonderful fall concert. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I very much dislike the novel itself. I can’t stand Daisy and don’t have the slightest idea why Jay Gatsby would carry a torch for her and even take the fall for her.

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