Hi, Richard! Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

Still remember working in the studio, guy brought in
his own drum kit. AS I'm wrapping some hardware to
silence its rattles he hits a rack tom right next to
my right ear. <ouch!!!>

To the ears & the brain focused on subtle nuances the effect is like that of dropping a load of bricks on a scale intended for measuring the weight of a SnailMail letter or a fistful of granola. Not everyone understands. :-(



[re the jazz lounge piano gig]

Mr. Manager and I had a couple of discussions, and he
found out that my study in college was hotel restaurant
management. HE asked me why I didn't work in the
industry, and I told him that when I did I found out I
didn't like 7 day weeks, sometimes 12 hour days. tHen
I pointed it out to him as I'm selling his cashier $100
worth of small bills one night during Mardi Gras, which
came from my tip jug <grin>.

Nice work, if you can get it! Your comments have brought up so many memories of various catering managers etc. I hardly know where to start. :-))



[re different styles of music]

I found there was something from all of it I liked.

Same here. I might even have realized I liked it sooner if I hadn't been surrounded by people who complained about how they'd had a miserable time at the symphony concert because Bobby Corno played a wrong note in the twelfth bar of the third movement & by people who apparently used AM radio to fill the empty space inside their heads. I couldn't relate to either or to the general music teacher I had in junior high school, the one who introduced her class to the MOONLIGHT SONATA with the expectation that we'd imagine a bunch of fairies dancing around & draw a picture. It wasn't until much later that I understood the technical distinctions between absolute music & program music. But I know now that I'm not alone in enjoying a sonata differently from a ballet.... :-)

being born blind my parents wanted me to get literacy
and other skills that I'd truly need my entire life,
and did it, in spite of the system I hate to say.

Seems to me you & your parents had very clear goals in mind. That's important when you're dealing with others who have different priorities and/or who think they know better regardless of what's going on in your life.... ;-)

at the period of time I began my education there was
a lot of experimentation going on, not all of it for
the better for the children. That's another story,
and another thread if anybody's interested <grin>>

Yeah. The idea of the least restrictive environment has its merits, but what often happens is that the school for the blind (e.g.) is closed & the support system we were assured of never materializes... or if it does it's one of the first things to be axed as soon as there's another budget cut. I could go on at length about that too. But IMHO there's more to be gained by putting the emphasis on where we've succeeded, despite forces beyond our control. :-)

A lot of opportunities to learn about various styles
of music, and good ear training.

I imagine as a blind person you would have had to develop your other senses more than sighted people generally do. When I was growing up it seemed to be taken for granted that Mother Nature endows blind people with supersonic hearing... but you worked at it, just as I did. By the time our daughter came along I was ready, willing, and able to learn that a 20% elevation in the rate of a child's breathing may... in the absence of any obvious reason... indicate s/he has a fever. To a musician a 20% increase in tempo is quite significant. To a lot of non-musicians, however, it seems like a black art even if they can see the wall clock nearby measuring the elapsed time in seconds... [wry grin].




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)