She may have handed off her crown to Miss New York back in January, but there’s no question that Laura Kaeppler will always be MIss America to the people of Kenosha. That was really evident last night at an event where the Kenosha West Rotary Club gave Laura their Outstanding Kenoshan Award. One of the
There’s nothing more delicious in life than when something exceeds our every expectation. I knew full well that last night’s senior recital by Prairie School’s Ryan Anderson was going to be musically splendid. He’s one of the best young cellists I have ever heard - and a really fine tenor, to boot - so there
So what happened this past Sunday afternoon at my 25th anniversary concert, “Streams of Mercy, Never Ceasing”? The short answer is: a lot. But unfortunately for you, I’m more a fan of the long answer. And speaking of “long,” it was a long concert -almost two hours long with no intermission. I swear that when
No, this is not a picture of Nick Barootian and I slow-dancing- although at a glance, it might look like that. No, it’s a shot of the two of us in the midst of a rib-bruising bear hug- one of my favorite moments during a once-in-a-lifetime concert this past Sunday afternoon called “Streams of Mercy,
It was just over a quarter of a century ago that I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of Popeye’s Chicken in downtown Racine, eating a sinfully unhealthy dinner and debating whether or not I should appear at a job interview scheduled to begin in the next half hour - an
It sounded like such a good idea.... combine opera workshop and music theater workshop for a semester in order to mount a program where a number of important stories would be told with excerpts from both operatic and music theater settings: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” with Rossini’s opera “La Cenerentola” ... Verdi’s “Aida” with Elton
He’s Dr. Woodrow Hodges - and even after all the years that I have known him and worked with him, I still call him Dr. Hodges, not just to his face, but even when I’m talking about him - to his great chagrin, I might add. But the rest of the world knows him and
Today is the first day of Teacher Appreciation Week, which I suppose makes anything I might write about teachers seem a tad self-serving, After all, I’m a teacher myself. . . and an essay on appreciating good teachers could be interpreted by some as a thinly-veiled effort on my part to score a couple of
