Mom’s dinner service

On Saturday evening, I used a few pieces of my mother’s dinner service. Now this is no big deal, except that I’m mindful that this dinner service has not been used at all in more than 35 years. When my parents became missionaries to Argentina, they boxed all of this up. The plates and cups

Oops

I may have gone overboard this month with book-buying. But here’s the catch: four of these books were free! I recently completed a book review for Rowman & Littlefield, who own the Applause Books imprint for books about Broadway. They don’t remunerate with hard dollars, but they do compensate with an allowance for books from

Two stories

NPR has broadcast a couple of gems already this weekend! Aged men figure prominently in my picks today. First is the story of the oldest male drag performer on record (who sometimes leans on his walker while performing). And then we have the obituary of a Bard College professor. Both stories are worth a listen!

Miss Maple

My little friend Miss Maple was on national television this week. So was my other friend Jessica.

#TBT: Pop Carter

My grandfather, Vincent O. Carter (who we called “Pop”), died on this day in 1985. He was a kindly man, if a bit flawed, but aren’t we all?

Tahlequah scenes

I’ve been in Tahlequah, Oklahoma since Sunday afternoon, undertaking an official visit on behalf of the National Association of Schools of Music to Northeastern State University here. At breakfast this morning, two hotel guests were trying to figure out the automated pancake-making contraption, which was truly quite a contraption indeed: And by mid-afternoon Tuesday, I

Carver

Knowing that I would be near the George Washington Carver National Monument on Sunday, I built in some extra transit time to visit the site outside of Diamond, Mo. Carver, regular readers of this blog will recall, has been a bit of a hero to me for nearly half a century.

Chances

All-District Choir

Congratulations to all four of my students who auditioned for All-District Honor Choir this year, as all four made the cut! Sebastian Ashman, MICDS Tyler Gregg, Parkway South Declan Ryan, Parkway West Lucy Schene, Kirkwood Special congratulations to Sebastian Ashman for making the next cut as one of the handful of students selected from the Saint Louis

Redistricting

The City of Saint Louis is slimming down the city board, to 14 from 28 districts. https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/aldermen/redistricting/index.cfm#CP_JUMP_929254 I took a look on Wednesday at the proposed new districts and submitted a comment to the working committee. These three single blocks of Lawn Place, Berthold, and Wise have so much more in common with the Kingshighway