Just Warming Up

One of the ongoing jokes between my friend Fran at the Jewish Home many years back was singing old jazz standards together for over an hour and then having to stop so she could go to dinner. At which point she exclaimed, “But we were just getting warmed up!” And it was true.

 

I watched The Secret Song movie for perhaps the 15^th time yesterday, this time in company with some 40 friends, colleagues and acquaintances here at the Carl Orff Canada National Conference in Vancouver. Many Canadians who I had worked with or alongside since my first Canadian Conference in Calgary in 1988. All of whom had experienced or witnessed the ideas and materials and processes generated by my many long years teaching at The San Francisco School, but only a few of whom had actually visited the school. So it was a special pleasure to share the snapshots spanning 45 years as we watched the film together and they could see where it all came from. 

 

In that audience was my friend Pam who I first introduced Orff Schulwerk to back in the early 80’s. We took our Level Training together with Avon Gillespie in 1983-86, went to Bali together to study tingklik bamboo xylophone in 1987 and in 1992, she formally apprenticed with me back in Santa Cruz where it all began so she could become a certified Levels teacher. There was Kofi Gbolonyo who took the Levels training with James, Sofia and myself, took my jazz course, went on to direct the Orff Afrique Course in his home village of Dzodze, Ghana with James, Sofia and myself as his guest teachers, came often to The SF School to work with the kids and more. There was Barbara Haselbach, the “grande dame” of the Orff world who travelled with Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman to Toronto in 1962 to plant the seed of Orff Schulwerk and at 85 years old, still is teaching workshops and participating in some she visited. There was my friend Debby Meyer who I met hitchhiking in California in 1972 and kept in touch with all these years that followed. And when it comes to naming all these special people sitting together at the film showing, I’m just getting warmed up!

At the end of the film, the applause had a different ring to it knowing whose hands were clapping. And my closing words surprised me, but ring true:

 

“I had always thought that all those years at The San Francisco School were my whole life. My wife teaching alongside for 42 of them, my two children in my classes for 11 of them each, my second daughter teaching 5^th grade for 13 of them and so many of the staff my genuine friends as we built together the world as we wanted it to be— “retiring” from that felt like it would be the end of my story. 

But now I think it was merely the beginning. That The SF School was merely the warm-up act and that finally, I am ready to teach and wholly inhabit the life I was meant to live. So I awake each morning and following Billy Strayhorn’s advice, think:

 

Ever onward and upward!"