One of Many!!!

If you don’t know or never met Rachel Lin, you have missed out on a real opportunity.  She was my Drum Major for a couple of years (sharing the job with Lara Pitts her Sr. year). Rachel was both our first chair clarinet player and the best violinist Houston ever turned out (sorry Michael, she wins the tiebreaker on cuteness).  Rachel was often my most efficient problem solver and, from the day I first met her in middle school, she spent quite a lot of time and energy mothering the likes of Max Docauer, Jack Mo, and other known criminals.  Talented and dedicated describes a bunch, if not the majority, of the kids I got to teach at Houston.  Rachel stood apart as special and (now) memorable because of a host of other, sometimes lesser-appreciated qualities.  

            Rachel could be picked on.  Most pretty, popular girls don’t handle this so well.  For example: It used to be that, when we went to All West, televisions got switched off in the rooms to keep kids from watching pay channels (porn).  This was obviously before the day of broadband internet service.  For years, kids would pile in my room and watch a suitable movie from among those on the pay movie channels (it was a different time!). One night, they all came up to watch the movie “Ring”.  For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, a summary is: after watching a disturbing video, a person would get a phone call where someone whispered “seven days”.  Seven days later, they died a gruesome death.  After the movie was over, Rachel went back to her room before the other kids.  We waited about 2 or 3 minutes and then called her room to say, “seven days”.  The phone rang forever and finally someone knocked on my door.  It was Rachel saying, “You guys are not funny at all!!!” Still she smiled.

            Rachel sure seemed to solve a lot of problems for me before I had to deal with them.  Once, also at All West, all the kids were just getting up for breakfast.  One of the most endearing and likable band folks you would ever hope to meet, went out into the hallway in a state of some undress to fetch a USA Today.  His roommates, obviously less endearing than he, locked him out of the room.  I missed all of this as I was in my own room getting dressed.  When the young man realized he was locked out and to some extent naked, he didn’t panic…. He just went to Rachel’s room for help!  My first clue that something was wrong was when I heard Rachel POUNDING on the door to the guy’s room.  By the time I got there, Rachel had all the other boys seated on a bed and was giving them a good chewing out about growing up.  All I had to do was throw in a “….Yeah, what she said” and close the door on my way out.  Kids not only seemed to know to go to Rachel for help, they listened to her much more intently than to me.  

            Rachel was sneaky.  For a while, she had a boyfriend that her mom and dad didn’t know about. She let me in on the ruse because she was using band as a cover.  She would tell me that, if her mom called, please tell her we got through unloading equipment at midnight instead of 10:00.  Sometimes you have to trust a kid’s judgement.  I was also told at the debriefing that seniors get from me (just before graduating) that she and other band kids would make rude hand gestures to each other during Wind Ensemble practice when I wasn’t watching.  Probably hard to understand why I find this amusing, but I do!

            I offer the preceding to establish that Rachel wasn’t a perfect child and didn’t distance herself from other band kids by being preachy. What she was, was always prepared, always caring, always thoughtful, always supportive, and always a friend to everyone in my program.  It is difficult to describe the feeling you get when someone like Rachel Lin is graduating and moving on.  Had it not been for my oldest daughter, Faith, coming into the program the next year, I might have retired much earlier.  

            This all came to mind recently as I was speaking to a group of band directors at a band clinic about getting kids to buy into their band programs.  I told them that you have to have at least one student who (1) “gets it” when it comes to what you expect, (2)is well liked by the other kids, and (3)will have your back when another kid goes off about how much you resemble the anti-Christ. I told them that having one such kid would make it possible for directors to band direct without looking over their shoulders.  I told them that just one such kid who was happy with band would be contagious such that others would get a good case of happiness.  While she was here, Rachel was one of those kids.  Though I had the good fortune to teach many like I just described, I really hope every band director gets the chance to teach at least one Rachel Lin.

A person doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.  – Joe DiMaggio

Program Hijinks!

You Can’t Tell the Oboist from the Clarinetist Without a Program!

            Every time you have a concert, you have to do a program. Seems simple enough – you just list all of the tunes with composers and all of the players by instrument.  What could go wrong!?!  I know most parents thought I gave this chore to my office assistant who passed it off to the secretary who in turn gave it to an intern to take care of.  In reality, I would usually be lying in bed the night before the concert and go “#@%^#**&” (insert your favorite expletive here), “I forgot all about the program”.  After that realization, I sometimes forgot again until band class the next day. This resulted in typing a program and getting it printed between school ending and concert time that night.  No pressure!

            I never really understood the need of a parent to come up immediately after a concert to tell me I had misspelled their kid’s name. How about  tomorrow?  Or better yet, that I had left the name off entirely.  I believe I did this to Robbie Moore for 3 concerts in a row and he still loves me.  The exact time in my life when I decided to let program worries go and have a little fun was during my third year at Houston.  My parents had come to hear my concert band for the first time ever. After the concert was over, they made their way down front to see their son (me) just as a band parent was expressing their unhappiness with my having spelled their child’s name wrongly.  At our next concert, I spelled every kid in the bands name wrong except for their kid.  Some messages aren’t meant to be subtle.

            Once, there was some emotional distress in band caused by a breakup between Jackie Young and Shane Halpern.  I don’t know whose fault it was but I did want to have some fun with it.  At the concert that week, I added Halpern as the last name for every girl in band EXCEPT Jackie (ex:  Jane Doe Halpern).  Some would think that cruel but my memory is that we all laughed.  I also think that Shane’s percentage chance of ever getting a date with a band girl plummeted – which was not a bad thing!

            There was a period of time in Jazz Band where we had discovered that the secret to life was…………. Chicken.  This resulted in me buying a jazz tune called “The Chicken”. When it came time for our concert, I changed the titles of ALL the Jazz Band tunes to something with chicken (ex: Blue Rondo ala Chicken, I’m in the Mood for Chicken, and that Commodores’ hit Brick Chicken).  The world is better off with more chicken.

            Mike Irby was our soccer coach at Houston for a while and every time we played a match, they would put the box score in the sport’s page of the Commercial Appeal.  If the other team scored, he would instead substitute the name of a Houston teacher into the box score (ex:  Ben Cook – assist).  For one of our concerts, I substituted coaches for all of the composer’s names. Oh, I dressed it up a little (ex: Wolfgang Irby, Ludwig von Haney, etc…).  The total number of folks that noticed was about 12.  Sometimes this is all only for my enjoyment.

            For the last concert I ever conducted at Houston, I left sort of a hidden message inside the names of the Wind Ensemble members. I gave everybody a middle initial. If you read the initials in order, it said, “If you can read this, you must be incredibly bored!  Happy Trails!”  The next day, I got email from a mom to tell me I had misspelled her daughter’s name and that her middle name was Ann.  The fact that she emailed and did not accost me after the concert shows we made progress in 25 years.

            I loved every minute I spent in front of the band at Houston (and even the few minutes I have gotten since I retired).  While I respect the gravity and importance of teaching someone else’s kids, I none-the-less approached my job like a game provided for my amusement.   If I haven’t thanked you for that in a while, I thank you now from the very bottom of my heart.

            

The Smith Girls!!!

Moose and Goose

            I tried to google “having kids quotes” so that I could start this with some pithy statement that would make me seem wiser than I am – which is not a high bar.  I noticed that about 95% of the quotes were about the problemscaused by having kids.  That was not my experience at all.  Both of my girls are wonderful, personable, helpful, powerful, smarticle,…….  Well, there are not enough positive adjectives so I will move on.  My wife, Amy, gets all of the credit for this.  I do understand the biology of child production and offer Faith and Mary Ann as proof.  Still, I am reasonably certain that should they be genetically tested, somehow 99% of their makeup comes from Amy.  

            Because my becoming a father lined up roughly with my taking the job at Houston, my kids were raised with and grew up with many of you. A great number of you babysat for them when they were little.  This was always a positive experience for them.  I noticed that, when Mary Ann moved to Florida for medical school and we redid her room, there was still a sign on the door made by her and Alaina Thetford during a babysitting stint.  In the ‘maybe it wasn’t always a positive experience for the babysitter” world, I recall Kathryn Anderson allowing Faith to do her hair.  Kathryn had really long, thick and curly hair and Faith (3 years old) took a comb and teased it out into an enormous afro. Probably took days to tame it back into shape!

            They spent many hours in the band room as kids. Mostly they just ran around but sometimes they would help clean or sort music.  The music part stopped when Mary Ann brought me a piece of music with Mr. Smith is a Great Big ______ (not a compliment) written on it and asked what the word after “Big” meant.  Yeah, I know we had days where I was a great big ______, but I didn’t want my kids to know! 

As we raised them, we became aware that they had negative athletic potential. What I mean by that is that if you had athletic ability and stood next to them, your talents would be diminished.  So with me as a father, being in band was almost a given.  My wife had hoped that one of them would pick the clarinet as an instrument but I used them to plug instrumental deficiencies (horn and baritone) in my own band.  They went on to become All State players so, while it may not have worked out perfectly for Amy or the girls, it worked out great for me!

            Both of my girls attended Collierville schools until coming to high school.  They were both very successful in middle school, which meant going from a hero to an unknown when moving to Houston.  They got to spend one year together at Houston, which was a dream year for their parents!  Having your parents teach at the high school you attend is not an easy thing.  When a teacher would mistreat them or they had some other issue, they would just have to suck it up.   Both even experienced some disappointment at the hands of their father who would have to hedge when giving them chair positions or leadership positions in an effort not to complicate their lives by making them look favored.  I do, however, remember Mary Ann telling me that a kid had stolen her lunch out of the instrument room so I picked him up and hurled him across the band room (as any father would do for his little girl).  There is not a parent handbook for this sort of thing and without their understanding and unconditional love, none of this would have worked.  To the extent that this hurt them, consider this a long delayed public apology.

            They are alike in many ways.  Both are extremely talented musicians and both were over the top successful as students.  They are, however, very different in demeanor!  One is more likely to listen thoughtfully when being confronted with a problem person and the other is more likely to stuff that person in a trashcan! I’m not telling which is which! Faith had the added difficulty of dating (and eventually marrying) a young man who played trumpet in the band. I often marvel at the bravery it took to ask MY daughter out while playing in MY band.  When Faith and Luke (said trumpet player) went off to college, Amy and I got something we had not had since Faith was born:  one child to focus all of our love and attention on! I am certain Mary Ann was thrilled. Her senior year, I threw showing favoritism to the wind and wrote a marching show just for her (Porgy and Bess). Maybe the best time I ever had putting a show together.  When it came time for her to graduate it also came time for me to be done.  I did not know that yet and wouldn’t for over a year but teaching a band without my kids in it suddenly, and through no fault of the kids in band, became a job and not a passion.

            Both of the girls are doing great.  After spending a year in Austin, Texas working for Intel, Faith and Luke are moving to Orlando where Faith will begin her dream job as an engineer for Disney!  They have a dog named Waddles that is perhaps the most photogenic dog ever.  Mary is working on her MD/Phd in Gainesville at the University of Florida.  Her cat, Sushi, is just like her – both cuddly and bloodthirsty at the same time! I am so extremely proud of all they have and will accomplish.  If only they could do all of that accomplishing 5 miles from home, I would have a perfect life.