Hairy Naked People

“What you love is the cure” and I agree wholeheartedly. Not only the cure for all your personal suffering and disappointment and anxiety and sadness, but for the greater world as well. And there’s few things I love more than teaching music to a group of people, than making music and sharing music and dancing to music with a group of people. And if it’s a group of people I already love, so much the better. And if not, I can grow to love them if we spend enough time together.

 

And so it has been for me and so many Orff teachers in Brazil. Perhaps five times I’ve had the good fortune to teach there and some 50 plus teachers have come to our California summer Orff Course to study, another group to my Jazz Course, some to the Intern Program at the school and some to the Salzburg Summer Course. Such a vibrant, warm, funny, smart, good-looking and musical-down-to-their-bones group of people! They seem to get what I’m driving at one notch above some other cultures and I certainly am drawn to so much of their music, their dance, their beautiful language and their culture. The love from both sides keeps growing and glowing.

 

And so it was that in the first minute of my 3-hour online workshop with Brazil this morning, it already felt complete just from the act of seeing each other. But on we went, me teaching in Spanish, which they seemed to understand and which I miraculously had inside of me ready to go, having not spoken it in quite a while and certainly not taught in Spanish is quite a while. I began with a Spanish nonsense rhyme and because I was focusing on how to develop any given piece of material far beyond the usual, we stayed with variations of that for almost two hours. By the end, we had probably recited it some 50 times! 

 

At the end of the sequence, I asked if there were any questions and one of my dear friends said, “Do you know what these two words mean in Portuguese?” “No,” I confessed and she told me. One was “naked,” the other “hairy.” So apparently all my Brazilian friends were just fine with letting me go on for two hours singing about hairy naked people without anyone alerting me!!!!! Ha ha! 

 

And that’s why I love Brazil so much.