The end of my summer tour (thought I was done last week, but have a last-minute booking in Greenwood, MS this Thursday) is always a bit bittersweet. That I sometimes drive hours getting home after a show gives me plenty of time to think about the performance and the audience.
My show in Pearl, MS (June 26) was one of the most memorable. That is, not only did it impact me in the moment, but it also sent me on a stroll down memory lane. For context, decades ago I volunteered and eventually had a summer job as a counselor at an intermediate unit in New Bloomfield, PA. This meant that I worked with a couple of other counselors (Angie Ehrhart & Michelle Nickel) to plan activities and care for students/young adults with disabilities for a summer-long day care program.
The connection? Half of my audience for the Pearl library show were a group of adults with disabilities. As they entered the room and took their seats, several audience members saw Nate’s drum kit and the amplifier and were immediately on edge. I heard staffers assuring them that they could leave if they found it too loud (audio sensitivity of some audience members is something that I’ve come to watch for).
Besides this group of disabled adults, families with kids filed in and we wound up with a pretty full room. I’m used to playing for elementary-age kids so I wasn’t at all sure how this was going to go with this mixed group. Turns out, it could not have gone better. Even the audience members who were nervous about the noise quickly forgot those worries once I started to play some music. I had a helper to play the rain stick during “The Weather Riddle Song” who could not have been more pleased. After the show was over, I was swarmed with questions about weather as well as the rocks/minerals/fossils I had brought for display.
I remembered my days working at the summer day camp — fond memories of Geoff Drum, a boy with Down Syndrome who was about my age, dancing to The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.” I thought of the wheelchair-bound boy (his name escapes me, but he was the first person I had ever met with Muscular Dystrophy) who I had to hold in the water at the swimming pool — he loved every minute of it. The reception I got at Pearl Library reminded me how everyone, no matter their disabilities, can have fun and deserves to have fun.
More reflection fodder arrived today in an email from a former student:
“Here are a couple of pictures that I thought that you would appreciate. One of the pictures I think are of the Grand Canyon where it starts at, it was covered by clouds the rest of the way so I would not see, another picture is of Lake Mead, you can see how high the lake used to be, it has lost as much water as the height of the Statue of Liberty and every inch of water it loses is 2 billion gallons of water. The white is calcium carbonate. The other desert picture I thought was cool because you can see where water used to be at and has dried up with the course of time. The cloud pictures are also very cool to see from above.”
Of course, I couldn’t help but think about the last time I saw Lake Mead thirty years ago. It might have been at the “used to be” level my student refers to in his email. I also was so pleased that this student thought to share these photos with me. The course he took (PH1023 — formerly Physical Science Survey II and now named “Science: Our World and Beyond”) is a gen-ed science course. It essentially covers a very conceptual level chemistry, geology, meteorology and a small taste of astronomy.
It thrills me that a survey course appears to have stoked his curiosity in this wonderful world we share. My hope for my library audiences is that I can give them some exposure to science in a fun way that can spur and inspire further study.
