Delicious Miss Daisy

I was so excited when I got the email blast announcing that premier violinist Daisy Jopling would be performing with her band in my hometown at the Katonah Village Library. Daisy was my son Cooper's first violin teacher  at the Bloomingdale School of Music in New York City. (Yes, he was only in kindergarten, but Daisy's philosophy was to have children improvise and make up actual songs rather than technique, which would come later.) She had such passion and energy, I would find myself asking to sit in on her classes just to watch her.  (Eventually she was touring so much that she stopped teaching.)

So of course Cooper (now in sixth grade) and I weren't going to miss it. Last Thursday night we sat in the front row. Daisy, petite, beautiful and British came out in a hand-knit angora sweater vest and black pleather pants and began to play Vivaldi - but unlike any Vivaldi you've ever heard. This was rock n' roll, baby!  She was revelatory to watch: her face shone as every part of her body vibrated. The sharing of herself was so complete and intimate the entire audience was blown away.

I came away inspired to share myself more in a deeper way with people, to continue to find my own voice and not write what I think others will want to hear or read. (Marketing.)

We all couldn't get enough.

And we can get more of Daisy! She will be playing with her band in Peekskill at The Paramount Theater on Saturday May 19th. Let's get a posse together and sell that theater out!

Forgive me Father, For I Have Multi-Tasked

Multi-tasking is not something I am proud of, but is what I find myself constantly doing to keep my life organized and on track. For instance, at present I am sitting in on my son's violin lesson while I answer emails and attempt to blog, whilst thoughts of making school lunches and my daughter's readiness for bed invade my concentration.

I go back and forth between taking notes for my son's violin lesson and this blog, making a concerted effort to stay in one tense: the present. (A couple of days ago I wrote about my propensity for writing in a myriad of time zones. There. I just used the past tense. Oh well!)

Time! I can't seem to get enough of it: I'm fascinated by it, enslaved by it, just like everybody else in this perpetual-motion-forward, results-oriented world. No wonder I love reading books where my sense of time can be "lost", or that I confuse my tenses in my writing, and that I am drawn to writing as a means of making sense of the past, exploring the future, and finding out what I believe in the present.

Here's a cliché for you: If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, then you are pissing on the present. But writing teaches me that everything informs and builds on everything else! Why must I beat up on myself for multi-tasking and mixing up tenses? If I truly want to appreciate the moments I am really present, I need to give myself a break for being only human.

Let's make a pact: Let's celebrate all of it together, all of the moments of messy multi-tasking as well as the purely present moments. Let's go hog wild and forgive ourselves and each other for past mistakes.

Now, if that could only translate to finishing my novel . . .