Category Archives: arts education

Name It.

May 15, 2016arts education, Christian fundamentalism, classical music, humor, musicians, performance, psychology, sectarian Fundamentalism, social behavior, social commentary, sociology, UncategorizedAwakening Your Fearless Heart, branding, Harvard health letter, junk mail, mindfulness, naming the daemon, naming the fear, pack rats, Tara Brach, The Music Man Fredonia State University 2016, yin and yangruth ann scanzillo

Last evening. Yet another Friday night.

The debut of a university chamber orchestra. A big band. And, “The Music Man”, in concert.

Having failed to mark not one, but all three really worthy performance events on her calendar, she’d found herself in the kitchen – occupied with the contents of a voluminous, stale smelling cardboard box overflowing with charity collectors, mail order catalogs, medical documents, and receipts, material to which she would affectionately refer in disclaimer to visitors as her “household flammables”. And, emanating from the laptop, mounted on a chair to her left: Tara Brach’s podcast, Awakening Your Fearless Heart.

The latter being the primary intention, this belated sorting was a manifestation of necessary yang to Tara Brach’s yin; and, on this night, she’d forsaken a majority of her colleagues’ live musical offerings to position herself at home, as mediator.

Her house was a load, a prohibitively inhospitable space cyclically overtaken by stuff which could ignite in a heartbeat. These people who had long since graduated to online banking, online mailing, and online purchasing had left her in the awe of their wake. She was a pack rat, the residue of a generation doomed to save.

As she sat, self-righteously separating out the home improvement brochures from their neighboring Harvard health letters she attuned to Tara, who was underscoring these efforts with measured, modulated monikers for successful triumph over human failing.

Be Mindful. Be Present. Name the feeling; know the Fear. Call it out.

She knew what to call it.

You don’t begin life in the shadow of a much older sibling who happens to be male, the only daughter of two parents with diametrically opposed needs (inheriting the lion’s share of their strengths and weaknesses ) without learning to expect equal parts indoctrination, condemnation, and exploitation.

She knew fear. Knew it viscerally, in the cinematic mind inherited from her father, colored by the surefire flames of Hell and the rapturous hope of the heavenlies. She knew it in the sectarian dogma to which her mother had dutifully ascribed, pinning and then initiating her headlong into the warm fellowship of jealousy, envy, gossip, and slander. After all, if “come out from among them, and be ye separate, touching not the unclean thing” was the dicta, then surely all those found either haplessly or willfully just outside of the gate were of all things most contaminated and worthy of immediate rejection.

Decades hence, she would be the master of branding. She would know, in a millisecond, which sin-laden emotion drove any action – in both herself and, formidably, others. She’d learned at the feet of the Sunday School teacher, and the Gospel preacher, and the demons that left prints on all their glass houses. Tara Brach’s multi-headed gargoyle deities would have nothing on her scary story.

But, the guru of inherent good would not be moved – not by anyone’s notions of self-defeat. Brach, too, sat, presiding at a podium, smiling out across the unseen throng of attending participants and, in tones barely penetrating, gently gathered them all into direct self-confrontation.

She wasn’t at all sure she’d wanted a fight, that night. Trauma wasn’t something to be addressed in adherence to some syllabus. You didn’t relive its destabilizing pain in a conference room, or even a warmly lit kitchen. Only God as Infinite Wisdom would have known the protective power in a box of junk mail on any other evening.

Her recognition came in a flood. She allowed it. Inspecting, she both identified and then freely detached.

Anger at being displaced in musical collaborations was supplanted by her own creative efforts. Fear of being left out was diffused by the comforting company of her imagination. In short, by being present in the moment, recognizing her primary motivations, allowing their validity, inspecting them for corrupting influences, and finally submitting to the greater consciousness, she was liberated. Liberated, to clean the kitchen on a night when half the population was sitting in somebody else’s audience.

But, missing “The Music Man” ?

Regret. Transcending even guilt.

Ye Gods.

littlebarefeetblog.com

Birthed.

April 15, 2016arts education, classical music, classical musicians, creative writing, drama, film reviews, musicians, performance, scenes, social commentary, sociology20th century musical theater, embittered mothers, mothers raising sons, musical theater, psychotherapy, reviews of musicals, Sondheim on Sondheim, Stephen Sondheim, theaterruth ann scanzillo

The American musical is ubiquitous. Sooner or later, all that is popular finds its way into the genre that delivers singing, dancing, singular sensation. Ever since opera buffa drew the local crowds to the town square, promising momentary diversion from war, pestilence, plague, and stench, humans have craved the escape of pure entertainment.

Enter Steven Sondheim.

A boy, born to a woman who loved a man who left her for another. Said child to learn at the feet of the greats – Oscar Hammerstein, Jimmy Hammerstein (Jimmy Hammerstein). Leonard Bernstein.

One would have thought that, bathed in such saturating influence, the young composer would have churned out second rate imitations of the icons who surrounded him. But, there was another factor at play, one that would be profoundly key to what would ultimately distinguish him as the social commentator of the age.

But, to reveal it would give away the heart of the story.

Steven Sondheim, for any musician from any genre, for any poet, for anyone who loves or has loved, for any student of the human condition…….people, you know when you come home from a session with your therapist, and all you can think about is how much money these people make for telling you to breathe deeply when you’re angry? Last weekend, I saw this man’s definitive autobiography, “Sondheim on Sondheim” at the Erie Playhouse. If you are privileged to see any production of this blended retrospective of his work, two full acts which he narrates on accompanying video, be sure to stay until the end. If you do, you will see into a mirror that will show you what you never before realized, feel things that you didn’t even know you needed to or could, and be floored by what is revealed.

As in his very life, the experience will tear you up and put you back together, like nothing else. It’ll be all the therapy you’ll ever need.

littlebarefeetblog.com

Hiding.

February 21, 2016arts education, classical music, human behavior, public education, relationships, social commentary, sociology, Uncategorizedillumination, light, public school music teachers, related arts teachers, retired teachers, self-actualizationruth ann scanzillo

You could say that I spent twenty five years hiding. In public education.

It’s possible.

You get a room. (Or, when times are tight, you don’t – in which case, you get a “cart”, and a 10×10 storage closet for the djembes and tubanos and Orff xylophones). You get a schedule. And, you get students. All the students. Every single student enrolled in the school. And, you get all five days of the week, just like everybody else with a full time job.

Beyond that, most everybody else gets from you a solid forty minutes of downtime every week. (Not all; some).The bosses like you best when they never have to remember that you are even in the building. Actually make your presence known, and you could already be in trouble.

Count on hearing about every other teacher’s birthday over the morning announcements. Expect that, when you reach your big 50th, there will be a faculty meeting scheduled keeping you on the premises for an extra forty minutes after the students leave, with nary a mention of your special day. And, of course, no announcement.

Put the entire enrollment on stage every winter and spring, in full concert mode. Get one chance to do all this in the evening, properly, but when the administrative staff is stuck running parking duty for five hundred parents, expect to be relegated thereafter to nine o’clock a.m. Greet the parents who show up in the morning because they don’t have day jobs. Recognize the docile humans, easily led to their folding chairs in the gym so that the auditorium can remain dark and the parking lot unattended, and thank them for coming.

Slip on a dusty stage floor during the musical (at 9 a.m.) lose your additional footing on a choral riser with an unstable frame, fly into the air and land in the pit in full view of an auditorium filled to capacity with K, 1 and 2, and know even before it happens that the principal isn’t even in the room to witness. Break your hip, your sacra, and a bone in your hand. Count on Workman’s Comp to provide your medical attention thereafter, preventing your ability to sue for damages.

Fall in love with thousands of children. Between the hours of 8 am and 2pm daily, help raise them. Be there as they grow into adolescence. Feel them turn. Face them, every day, the handful of sullen, dismissive ones who alpha their way into dominance over hundreds. Feel the ache in your chest. Experience the mild trauma of diminishing returns. Vow to walk away and disappear.

Finally, stop hiding. Step assuredly into your own light. Represent. Collect your thoughts and the sum of your experience. And, sign your name to your own life’s work.

littlebarefeetblog.com