Just Warming Up

Back in those glorious days when I sang once a week with Fran Hament at the Jewish Home for the Aged, moving effortlessly from one old jazz standard to another, there came the moment when a nurse announced it was dinnertime. Though we had sung non-stop for an hour, we both looked at each other with familiar dismay, “But we were just getting warmed up!”

 

By all conventional standards, my 45-year career teaching at The San Francisco School was the main act of my professional life. When I retired four years ago, it felt like it should be the moment when I left the stage and spent the rest of the days looking through the scrapbooks while enjoying a few games of golf or lawn bowling. 

 

But now I’m wondering— what if all those years were just the warm-up act? Now I’m ready to begin my “career” drawing from all the skills I learned in that “starter job.” Consider: In the past few weeks, I led a Singing Time at the New Traditions School for 2^nd graders, another at the Redwoods Senior Living Home in Marin County and two at my still beloved Jewish Home. I played “cocktail Holiday piano” at the Sip Tea Room seven times in the last three Saturdays, always ending with getting the diners singing a song with me at the end. I led the annual Christmas Caroling last night with new and old neighbors, former SF School students with their kids and more. 

 

All those years leading a daily Singing Time at the SF School has certainly paid off. I know some 200 songs at the tip of my tongue and my fingers on the guitar from the American folk repertoire, some 300 jazz standards I can play on piano without a lead sheet, a wide variety of classical tunes from Bach Fugues to Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, Chopin nocturnes and mazurkas, Debussy suites and with the help of my Classical Music “fake book,” can move seamlessly between a Strauss waltz, a Sousa March, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Verdi and Puccini arias and yet more. Oh, and a fair repertoire of Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb ragtime pieces. 

 

There is not an ounce of boasting here, simply the fact that this large and varied repertoire that doesn’t need me fumbling through pages has well-prepared me to be of use in all these musical situations. Combined by my decades-developed ease in leading a group, sharing entertaining stories and cultural information associated with various songs, I’m well-suited for this new/old work of bringing joy and connection through music to anyone of any age, “offering my simple songs to kids from one to ninety-two.” The World seems to agree as the opportunities to do so continue to appear. 

 

All of the above combined with the opportunities to keep the parallel work of Orff workshops that moves far beyond just songs to body percussion, speech pieces, folk dances, movement explorations, percussion playing, Orff instrument ensemble, musical drama and more. Dozens of such opportunities are lined up for next year in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, China, Ghana, Tennessee, California and beyond. Like I said, just warming up, now ready to begin my life’s work.

 

But it’s late to begin a job. The word in “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has a different ring to them when they say, “through the years, we all will be together, if the Fates allow.” Despite my “encouraging” prognosis to my dizziness mentioned earlier, the exercises seem to have made it worse and I’m painfully aware that all of the above is wholly dependent on the miracle of good health. I feel I have so much to offer the World and I’m ready to do it— if the Fates allow. I agree wholly with Carl Jung:

 

“The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts I could still think, I should think.”

 Paraphrasing the above to “the songs I can still sing, the music I can still play” and I believe that is what I shall do. With whoever is in the room with me.