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Author: Anne Cassidy

Ramping Down

Ramping Down

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National Airport is only a mile from my office, less as the crow flies (though Google Maps doesn’t chart crow-fly mileage).  But it took me half an hour to navigate yesterday because of the time I spent  backtracking.

The problem was that I had walked from the office to the airport but never the other way around. I  had the general idea but couldn’t figure out the specifics (like finding the bridge that crosses the parkway and the railroad tracks). Airport signage (in fact, most signage) does not favor walkers!

Eventually I found the road that led to the ramp that led to Crystal City. It all seemed so easy once it fell into place. I was on the downward slope, heading back to office and home.

(The first National Airport terminal in 1941, shortly after it opened. Courtesy Library of Congress.)

We Did It!

We Did It!

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I knew when I heard the trumpet solo in the Triumphal March from Aida that there was a different energy at the performance. Something inspired, something transcendent. Seasoned artists say that performances aren’t usually better than rehearsals, but this one was.

I’m not saying that this particular performer played better at the concert. I was nervous, almost dropped my bow switching from pizzicato to arco. But I held on, made most of the notes in the run, did not rush the entrance in the exposed string bass part half way through the Verdi, and was able to hit the harmonic in the tip-of-the-bow opening of the Firebird finale.

From there on, the hair stood up on the back of my neck as I played our B flats and E flats, putting everything I had into those notes, doing my awkward vibrato, hearing the timpani pounding behind me. I didn’t just play the music, I felt it. The trumpets and trombones blaring out their final chords, the whole marvelous ensemble, and at its helm, Dr. Joe Ceo, 85 years old.

“We’re doing this again in five years for the 75th anniversary,” he said after the concert, as a bunch of us stood around, still in a bit of a rush from it all. “You all will have to be here for it, because I don’t know if  I will be.” No way, we said. If you can do it at 85, you can do it at 90.

It was that kind of music, that kind of concert, that kind of day.

(The Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra with vocal soloists in its final performance of the 2017-2018 season. No pictures of the Reunion Orchestra yet!) 

Concert Day

Concert Day

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Bow has met bass, performers have met conductor, the intrepid Dr. Joe Ceo, and in a few hours we will practice briefly, then take our turn on stage.

There are about 50 or 60 of us in the Reunion Orchestra, of wildly varying ages and abilities. Take the string bass section for starters. Our first chair is a professional bass player, a conservatory graduate and first chair of the Buffalo Philharmonic; he’s about 20 years out of high school. Next is a member of the Lexington Philharmonic and longtime teacher who was in the youth orchestra a couple of years before I was. Next to me is a 2017 high school graduate who was playing his final concert with the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra this time last year.

Not that any of this matters. Playing music together banishes age and occupation. What’s important is being in tune, on time and willing to give our hearts to the task at hand.

And of that there is no question.  We traveled from New York and Texas and California and Virginia to do just that.

Have Bow, Will Travel

Have Bow, Will Travel

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I am usually an optimist, but not enough to pack my string bass bow in checked luggage on the flights from Little Rock to Lexington. The bow, and my concert black clothes, were stuffed into my smallish briefcase. Or, to be more precise, my computer, notebooks, journal, book and clothes were stuffed in the briefcase. The bow was resting on top of it as I roamed around the Charlotte Airport.

To back up a bit here … The Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra is providing a string bass but I’m providing the bow for this weekend’s musical activities. I’m so glad it’s not the other way around, but the bow has presented some logistical challenges. It’s too large to fit into a carry-on bag, which is why I was checking luggage to begin with. And it’s fairly delicate, too, so it has been well padded.

Now the bow and the bassist (seems presumptuous … but that would be me) are on their way to pick up the bass and take it to Bryan Station High School, where the rehearsal (and the fun begins).

Have bow, will travel.

View from the Brow

View from the Brow

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Yesterday, for the “retreat” part of this work week in Arkansas, we drove an hour and a half west to Petit Jean Mountain. It was where the organization I work for began —  and a place that holds special memories for me.

I spent most of the day at a conference room inside, but there were a few minutes at the beginning and end of the day when I could walk to the brow of the hill and savor the view —  the big puffy clouds casting shadows on the fields, the hawks soaring high above the pines, the two mountain ranges that draw the gaze ever westward.

It was a view that captivated me decades ago — and still does. I thought about why. It’s more than just the beauty, I think. It’s also the promise and perspective, metaphor for a nation that once stretched its legs across a continent and took its strength from people and from place.

Down in the Delta

Down in the Delta

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On Tuesday, my colleagues and I drove two-and-a-half hours south to see some of the work we’ve done in a small town called Lake Village.

It’s a pretty little place, situated on the banks of the largest natural oxbow lake in the country. Before visiting I had no idea there were any oxbow lakes in the country, natural or un-.  Lake Chicot was formed when the Mississippi River shifted course 800 years ago. It was discovered by the French explorer Lasalle in 1685.

It was 95 degrees and dusty in the Delta (we were only eight miles from Mississippi), but looking at Lake Chicot cooled me off a bit. Enough that I decided to take a stroll along it and see the cypress trees with their knobby knees.

Into Arkansas

Into Arkansas

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I’ve been working with Winrock for two years and am finally at headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. I flew here Monday morning, looking out the window at the bright sun and clouds, at  the green patchwork below.

When I lived in Arkansas years ago, I wrote an essay called “Out of Arkansas.” It was a play on Out of Africa, the memoir by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen).

My move from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas seemed as radical to me as Karen Blixen’s trip to Kenya must have seemed to her. And when I looked from the plane and saw the vast landscape below, I thought of the breadth of Africa and of the American West.

It’s a liberating landscape for those accustomed to more cloistered, forested Eastern environs.

Good Night, John Boy

Good Night, John Boy

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I’m remembering Mother’s Days of the past, including my first as a mother, which was also my first day in the Virginia house.  I can remember another a few years later, including a meal at a now-defunct restaurant when the cleaning crew started sweeping around our table mid-meal because the girls had made such a mess — and we swore we wouldn’t eat out again as a family for at least 10 years.

I can remember so many other Mother’s Days with my own dear mother, and how I would sometimes have breakfast with her and dinner with my daughters.

Yesterday I hung out all day with the girls, laughing over old times and new times, buying and planting flowers, sipping Mimosas, sharing laughs and eating way too much yummy food. One of the highlights was when Celia unveiled this Mother’s Day card, riffing on my fave show (from eons ago), the Walton’s — complete with Capehart stand-ins (including dogs and cats). We roared over this one!

Feeling so grateful this morning, so thankful that these smart, funny, beautiful young women are my daughters.

My Musical Dad

My Musical Dad

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Today would have been Dad’s 95th birthday, and he would have gotten a kick out of it. Imagine me such an old man, he’d say, with his trademark grin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad and music as I practice for the concert next weekend. How he made sure Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff was blaring from the stereo, about his excitement finding the “Suite from Spartacus” in a bargain bin.

Dad grew up on church and popular music; classical music he found on his own. He never grew tired of telling me how: It was watching “Fantasia” that turned him on (and not in the way that my generation got turned on during “Fantasia”). He heard Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony play Beethoven’s “Pastorale” and Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” — and music was never the same.

In fact, Dad was on a committee tasked to find the money to fly the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra to a music educator’s conference in Russia. Since the invitation was unexpected, he and the other committee members had only a few months to finance the trip. Dad used all his sales personality and charm on business and civic leaders — “our budgets were committed months ago,” they demurred — and even on the U.S. State Department, the closest he came to a bull’s eye. They were going to charter a military plane for us — quite a feat during those Cold War days.

In the end Dad didn’t quite pull it off, but it gave him lots of stories to tell. Now Dad is gone, so I tell the stories for him.

(Photo: Walt Disney Pictures. Don’t get me for copyright infringement; this is for my dad!)

Why She Writes

Why She Writes

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Last night I watched the documentary “The Center Does Not Hold,” about the writer Joan Didion. It chronicled Didion’s chronicles of crazy episodes in our nation’s history: Haight-Ashbury, Charles Manson’s murder of Sharon Tate and others, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. But mostly the film is about Joan Didion’s thinking on these things.

A Wikipedia article about Didion mentions a 1980 essay by Barbara Grizutti Harrison, who wrote that Didion is a “neurasthenic Cher” whose subject is always herself. Apparently, that article rankled Didion for decades. Of course, the essayist’s subject is always herself.
Almost none of us writing essays will achieve Didion’s fame, but we can all do what she did, which she explained in her essay “Why I Write”: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
(In Didion’s honor, a western landscape.)