BY YOUR PUPILS YOU’LL BE TAUGHT

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It is amazing what can happen if you say, YES!  And I did…

Tracy Wilson, head of The Berkshire Music School called last Friday to ask if I would critique a class of students that were studying to be Cabaret Artists.

Having spent many years in and out of Cabarets…with or without smoke (oh, yes, if they weren’t blowing smoke in your face you were not in a cabaret), or waiters taking and delivering orders and of course, as you are building up to the final crescendo of a very dramatic song,  a drunk yells out, “Sing Melancholy Baby”!

And yet, with all of that, some of my best experiences have been in the Cabaret.  The experimenting  with new material, learning how to think fast on your feet as a lyric goes missing from your brain, there is NO SAFE HOUSE to hide behind.   And most of all because there is an incredible intimacy with the audience…even if you make the connection with just one person, it is a connection you can feel because it is the most intimate venue.

For all those reasons and most of all because Tracy asked me.  What she has done in Berkshire County with all ages of peoples with musical talent at all levels is nothing short of breathtaking.  So yes, I said “yes”.

I showed up at the Berkshire School of Music last Saturday to a Cabaret class taught by Sherri James Buxton with Bob Sheperd as Musical Director.  I was introduced to all.  No one had any real cabaret performing experience.  The age of the youngest was 65, maybe 70 and the oldest was 92.  92!!!!

I had complained about getting out of bed that morning.  Get a grip, SJ.  And if you haven’t heard “My Way” sung by a 92 year old man, you’ve not heard it.  And let me tell you, from that moment to right now, I put my over-the-top sense of judgment (ask my children they’ll tell how well developed my judgmental self is) in the garbage.  I replaced judgment with gratitude:

• to Tracy for asking me
• to Sherri and Bob for just being who they are
• to the four students who performed for a total stranger as if that’s what they did all the time.

I am an ordinary human who feels I have an inordinate right to complain particularly when life doesn’t go my way.  I watched and listened to four people push the envelope of life until it blossomed like the rose you wish you had planted and nurtured.  And yes, they all won the prize.

Each one in their own way went for the dream.  Oh, yes, this was something they wanted to do for a long time.  Life is what happens while you’re making plans, right?  Of course, right!

Many of us go along with coulda, woulda, shoulda.  None of that was apparent in the room as they sang with heart with soul with LIFE.

In my show I ask the audience to check their pulse.  I remind them if they feel it, (and believe me if they don’t they probably didn’t buy a ticket)  GET UP, GET OUT, LAUGH UNTIL YOUR SIDES HURT, BUT MOST OF ALL LOVE!

Oh, my friends there was so much love in that room that morning.

I floated out and am still airborne.  More and more I do not recognize the world around me. But on that morning in Berkshire Music school , students of a certain age were following their dreams and, for me, for just that moment in time I remembered, like the t-shirt says, LIFE IS GOOD.

To you, Tracy, Sherri, Bob… THANK YOU.

Love, SJ

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder…Yeah, Yeah!!!

I am depressed.  This morning I spoke to an intelligent and warm hearted woman.  We were discussing the Democratic National Convention.  For me, the only convention that promises “something” for women and children and men who like women and children.

 

Out of her mouth came, “Isn’t it a shame.  If Hillary were attractive people would vote for her.”

Hillary not attractive???  That must make me Godzilla’s twin.  I knew for sure the age of plastic celebrity had truly arrived.

If you are a woman and you want to be elected President, you have to have a TV show where you belittle and fire people or you have to be surgically enhanced to look “attractive”.

I don’t see the multitudes carrying on about a man with a little extra weight, a balding pate, wrinkles, tired eyes, socks that don’t match, jackets that don’t button anymore.

And as long as I am on the subject of trying to be someone other than who you are, what is it with the media who insist that a woman be all things to all people.

The commentators took Hillary over the coals because her speech didn’t knock it out of the park, was the phrase they used.

It reminded me of some stories about Abraham Lincoln.   According to reports, his voice was high and nasal and boring to listen to.  With the media on his case, aren’t we grateful print was the sole media of the day, he never would have been elected President.

We only has his printed words to know what kind of man he was as President.

We live in an age of presentation.  It’s as if we were all chefs arranging platters of food to please and make it appetizing.

Never mind what it tastes like or if it is healthy.  If it looks good it must be good.  This was how Lucretia Borgia took care of all those husbands.

I think people cannot handle real reality.  Look at the women leaders around the world.No!  Don’t look.!  LISTEN!

And women…stop it!  Stop asking a woman to wear the mask of acceptability not from what she says and what she stands for but for what she LOOKS like.

And furthermore…

Beauty and being beautiful and wanting to be beautiful this is not new. I am reading Claire Harmon’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte characterizes herself as an homely, plain girl.  All the Bronte girls wrote about being plain women.

Agnes Grey, the title character of Anne Bronte’s book, “triumphs over the tyranny of being judged on appearances but the problem lingers in the reader’s mind long after the happy ending has been arranged.  Although Agnes knows that it is foolish to wish for beauty, “nevertheless she can’t help wishing she had some, if only to avoid the isolation or, worse, “instinctive dislike” that unbeautiful women constantly encounter”.

Enter Hillary Clinton?  You have to be kidding…