Today

Ok.

I wrote the couple I was talking about...yesterday? Was it yesterday? Great couple, but I was like, look this is how much I am.


I have instituted another policy about new music. If they commission music for the wedding, it's significantly cheaper. Imagine doing something cool is cheaper!!!



I also created a website today. My penchant for blatant self promotion is flying haywire right now because I can't tell you. If you get on Facebook and look up my profile, you'll be able to find it, but it is only a first in a larger order construct. The Super Group, LLC at work again.


Let's just say, everybody in KC is complaining about it. Some people are complaining in a way that is constructive to the community and others are sadly, well you know. We are all crazy so what's the diff.


I'm proud to say that the majority of my people are doing a great job in utilizing their competence and their restraint in our situation.


I also started dabbling in adwords. I think it's more fun than slot machines, though it bobcattingly is a heckofalot slooower.


I'm alo listening to Tin Machine right now... the first album I bought at full price. No columbia record club or whatever on that one.


Wow. I had no idea. "Shopping for Girls"... this truly Was a Super Group.


Later.
NG

OK, here goes.
For all of you professional performers out there who get asked to play in your hometown...
Yikes. It's such a problem and a dilemma.

I have people come up to me all the time, asking if I'll perform in their wedding. It's hard to gauge whether your professional fee will be gouging for you or for them.

Many times - 9 out of 10, the couples are very nice and you really want to help them...

by the way, this is strictly for anyone who may be up to a good acquaintance,
but not friend. for example, you know them, and there's real potential, but you
don't even know what color their bathroom is.

but their hierarchical idea of the music at their weddings is below say, decorations at the table. Understandable, really, due to the scads of people who are relatives asked to perform. Relatives whom everyone in the family insists play some type of instrument, or who majored in music. Before going on to major in (bah-boom!) NOT music.

Yet there they are, at the however many hundreds of thousands of weddings cutting away at the Bach or Pachabell, Vibratoing through Ave Maria and The Lord's Prayer, just making it worse for us who can perform to a certain aesthetic.

I am all for people singing and playing. Really I am. And these self same people do not have this idea held as one of malice they just aren't informed. Truthfully though, when it comes to demeaning my living, I really have a shrinking tolerance for the low ball attitude, intended or not.
I have no problem giving my full price to those people and others whom I get by referral or through being a fan.

Let me just add, I've started putting in a caveat when I quote my price. If your ceremony by any chance goes wrong, it wont be by me. People talk about the weddings I sing for decades. I really do enjoy giving that WOW factor. I don't say that smugly, its through the experience of having countless people coming up to me about how I sang in so and so's wedding and how great it was, as well as some bride or groom coming up and still after (too many...sheesh has it been THAT Long??) years, they still have people coming up to THEM, saying theirs was the best wedding they'd ever seen.

And that was when I was cheap.

So now that I am not cheap, although if you compare some other high profile performers, I'd be on the less expensive side, I now have these problems of the one couple in ten ( you can lump wedding couples and party throwers together ) who just do not have the cash, sometimes to my surprise. AND I like them, and there's no way they would have the dough and no way I would charge them my full fee.
And to make matters worse, there are those who can't even make my lowest fee.

Sigh.

There's always trade, but I think it was Vonnegut who hated the idea of trade because you trade something you don't want to do for something you really don't want.

I like weddings, for the hope it brings to a couple and a community. I like attending weddings my friends are in, as a participant or as a guest. But really, I am just a typical guy who would rather not go. And yes, sometimes I'd rather sit on my duffer than sing in a wedding.

Personally, I don't want to be held responsible for witnessing and having to be responsible in some way for keeping the couple together years down the line. You know that thing where the reverend asks all the people at the wedding if you and me will help these two fulfil their vows in the many years to come?
Yeah, I take that seriously.

I mean, I'm not going to go home with them and make sure they conceive and I'm not going to do anything out of the norm, or anything, but I take that vow because I care. I want things to work and if I can help I will.

It's stupid I know, but for a while, I didn't really realize what the preacher was asking. I was just biding my time until I sang again.

So that's part of it. and then again, sometimes I'd rather sit on my duffer...especially for how much dough I'd be making. Remember the 9 in 10 people. Sometimes they actually pay the fee.
And I'm right there for them...both professionally and personally

.
But again, there's the couple just starting out, or out of sorts, or whatever.
...pause 10 seconds...

One loophole I have found is Military Weddings!! That's free!
*unless it's out of town and they need other instruments etc. *
Yep, it's just one of those things. I DO give a banana this country and those who are putting their lives in harm's way. If you read this and are a cop or a fire fighter, I'd consider that too.
It's a new policy and limited to my schedule, but I think it's important.

But here we are again at the couple. ugh. Such nice people. Maybe I could do a trade.

Laters

Eyes blazing

Burning the proverbial candle from four sides now.

I am now helping Jeffery Ruckman raise money for his Spoonbender Orchestra Series.

The group consists of a full Gamelan as well as a few other choice instuments. Personnel, top notch of course.

I guess I could list it all for you , you know.

Would that help?

I found a motherlode of books at Half-Price Books which I can fully endorse because one of the owneres of the company is a fan and buys my records...so I buy his books and talk about what a cool selection of super cheap new and repurposed books they have... for nothing more than making these things available... they also sell LP's.

The Complete Idiots Guide to Grant Writing, or some such falderall. Yes!

I am the owner of a small business, an arts corporation, not an organization, whose three year purpose has been to develop arts brands that had the capability to translate to both the arts community, as well as targeted demographics, in order for these brands to be matched to and sponsored by corporations and or investors.

A total profit oriented company completely removed from the charity scene.

Nice idea.

So what's an Opera singer doing in this world anyway? Yeah. good question.

I have two ultimate heros in my professional life.

Kim Witman of Wolf Trap Opera. She took a chance on me so many years ago, to let this green kid come sing in her company. Amazing. I know, I have mentioned her before...and I will do so again. She puts it out there every day. From seeing WTOC and what it is now compared to what it was ten years ago and that's just from my perspective I am beside myself with a need to at least work that hard to put something together that has such an impact in the world. The art form and the community are far, far richer for what she has been steely and supple enough to accomplish.

Obviously she has a cadre of people that create a lot of the magic there. Without self starting individuals, brilliant in their own capacity, Wolf Trap would be less than the sum of its parts.

Placido Domingo:

I don't know how many times I will envoke this name, but I have to say that I strive to work half as much as Domingo. And if that happened I would only be Artistic Director of one company, sing only what...>75 roles professionally and conduct twice a year.

These are the people whose work holds my feet to the fire every day.

I strive to be the best singer I can be.

I strive to be a leader who leads by example and follows as well as he leads.

I try to have an amazing attitude always...at least outwardly.

I strive to face my fears.

I strive to keep a loving relationship at home.

I strive to have as much fun as I can.

I strive to retain my objectively.

I work toward keeping abrast of my finances.

I fight to propel artistry as an equal to, at minimum, business.

I pain to remian vibrantly authentic.

I try to live like a human being.

and I try to keep my word at all times and not equivocate.

There are others and I'll fill you in on those heroes in due time but.. I'm nodding off

I don't get enough sleep. rehearsal tonight for the band.

must go and prep.

Thanks you two.

Off like bug spray.

NG

Bus Kid

My folks dropped me off at the bus station at a quarter to four. It was almost Christmas.
The thing I remember was the smell.

When I was a kid, my family went all over the place, not even three years before, we went to Mexico.
Mexico, where the smell of humanity coalesced into something that I didn’t at first dig, being I was a kid from Iowa small town. Where even the smells from the packing plants were far away. The grass was indeed sweet and summers had a timeless over bright green blue, as if those pictures you see now, from the era, were true depictions of life. It’s hard to differentiate these pictures from my true memories…especially if they were good…

So Mexico, pollution, people, food, sewage, trash, shit, flowers, sweat and dirt was the palate of this din of scent. Somehow though, as I look back…and even now, witness these smells from time to time, I think back and realize that it wasn’t all bad. Even though you knew part of it was the decay of our humanity.
I forgot to mention…the smell of death was there too.

So getting to the bus station in the then foreign downtown was no closer to adventure than a dog getting a free ride to the vet.

A most of it was due to the smell. B, I was going to my grandparents, who would have again, nothing for me to do and c. I turned around, looking for my parents… and felt like an adult for the first time. I can’t remember exactly if my folks were together or not then.

You know, it’s odd. I can define my childhood and youth through other people’s eyes, but to look back and make sense of the actions I took in direct response to the actions of others…I guess, I’m a little fuzzy.

But there I was. The Kansas City Greyhound station. A dark place. Dark tile floors, less than antiseptic. Fiberglass chairs, you know, the kind that are formed to look like they’re comfortable and then when you sit down, you realize that the joke is that the floor, the cold, especially dirty floor of the bus station, was more comfortable. And yet, to sit on the floor was to admit some National defeat, as if we were too civilized to park it on the floor like people in so many other populations…including México.

Cruel humor. TV’s at the bus station. Connected to the same pastel plastic ejector seats; like the joke of my Grandpa and Grandma bringing sugar free candy for Easter, like the joke of moving to the suburbs. Into a house with a pool, moving into a house with a pool in the suburbs in August. Until you find that your chores are to mix the nuclear compounds together to make that pool clean and fresh, and to vacuum that very same pool. The slow death of a ten year old. To make sure the giant crystal diamond, the toy of all toys, the culmination of all of your childhood dreams was to make sure you moved the aluminum pole slow enough so that the sand and dirt in the bottom was able to be sucked by the not powerful enough vacuum.

My dad always thought I was doing a half-assed job. But he didn’t realize the anguish of cleaning that thing…took hours. The joke of finding you old blind dog dead floating in the pool and the stench of the foul thing entering into my coke after we cleaned up from the burial. The smell of death pervades everything it touches.

Incidentally, about the dog. I’d found her time and again in that pool swimming for dear life. And I generally did not want her to fall in and took some precautions, like putting towels out around the pool, to act as a tactile reminder to the poor thing that she was getting close. For my part, I was too confident in my invention and stayed away too long. It didn’t take long. Really only fifteen minutes and she was gone. But can you imagine, this yellow death funk, glomming onto everything in that short of time. ..Especially my coca-cola.

The TV’s, these black pods bolted to the ends of the fiberglass ejector seat rows, were all the rage at the time. Some were bashed, magic markered and basically vandalized. But I tell you, they deserved it. Let me tell you, and I know bus stations haven’t really changed over the decades. Mostly, poor people go there. Maybe some bussers have money, but I’ll wager you, they are either seriously penny pinchers, or are out for an adventure… hah. But those four people are the minority and the underdog.

These black boxes they called TV’s were black and white mini TV’s that at one time, like simple function calculators with LCD screens, cost hundreds of dollars. So I, at the time, stuck there at the bus station, and being somewhat addicted to TV, was thinking, ah, sweet freedom.

We put our quarters in the slot, and turn the knob. Slowly the screen comes to life. A dot appears. After an eon, the dot turns into this hazy snow and static swells like a slow motion wave. Before you know it a double vision image of some rerun comes on. There’s no antennae, so reception is as-is.

Here’s how the bus station is. Of course sooner than later, the timer shuts off the tv and you think that purgatory is no worse because… well you never have enough coin to turn the thing back on…even though you’d rather just draw on the thing, or break it, out of contempt for those who thought it would be a good idea to bolt the little black licorice boxes onto the pastel death chairs. The Bus Station – Good and Plenty… Witnesseth your addiction and be tormented by it.

It was just at the time, I felt vulnerable.

I swore up and down to my folks that I was ready for it. And I was, if everything had worked out perfectly.