Lance Bass!

We interrupt our fascinating adventures of cruiser hijinks to bring you a special insert bulletin!

Last Friday and Saturday were pretty darn cool. I spent a day prepping my Burbank show choirs, a day prepping my Carlsbad show choirs, then onto the Southern California State Championships.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear but,......LANCE BASS? Yep, the former member of In Sync, auditioning astronaut, Hairspray actor and out-of-the-closet spokesperson was a show judge at the competition. Turns out he was a very nice guy, as I got to shake his hand, listen to him give a speech and pass out some trophies, and be one of the 500 people that clicked a photo with him. Friendly, unassuming and seemingly humble. As celebrities go, that equals a good guy. The photo I had taken with him was courtesy of my friend, Christy Owen. Unfortunately, she was so excited by the utter "Lance-ness" of the moment that the picture is a bit parkinson's disease-y.

Oh yeah, and my group won!

Old Photographs

At auditions today, one of FC's directors commented that my wallet was too fat. "Not with money", I replied quite seriously. No, it was full instead of every frequent travel club, discount club, gift card and library card I've ever filled out a form for. While I was fishing around for my Cub Scout Membership, AARP application, room key from my anniversary trip, and free pass to a tanning bed that expired in 1986, a bunch of old photographs fell out.

Some nerd-looking dude stared back at me with a stupid grin, as he held the hands of a silly-looking girl that was beautiful, yet a bit geeky herself. I winced,...it was my engagement photo from 1988! Another photo fell out, this one with the same couple. He'd grown a beard and she'd gotten a promising new hairstyle, yet there were these 2 tiny aliens they were holding, recently hatched from some mysterious pod in a wheat field or cocoon hunkered down in a damp cave somewhere. Our first family photo with our 2 daughters,.......WOWZA!!

Old photographs capture just one second in the billions of seconds we all live, yet they say so much about "who we were when". Our tastes of that "when". Our styles of that "when". Our relationships of that "when". So much is captured in that millisecond, and so much is remembered. The studio we went to by the Delaware Cinema for our engagement photos, cause they were having a sale. We ate at Duff's Smorgasbord afterwards, then decided shortly thereafter,.......we don't like Duff's Smorgasbord.

Our first family photos taken at the Sears Portrait Studio in Lafayette Square. A mall that barely even exists today, except for a food stamp supermarket, a 99-cent store, and possibly a store that sells cobwebs or something. We'd had Madeline a few months earlier, and Tina decided that 17 hours after giving birth that Chinese food sounded good, so we went to China Coast with a 17-hour old baby in tow. Think that's bad parenting? With our first, I decided on our anniversary that 3-month old Morgan should celebrate too, so I dipped my teaspoon in champagne and let her lick it. The 30 minutes of shuddering, wincing, puckering, shrieking and bawling that immediately ensued (compounded by Tina's dirty look) let me know that wasn't my finest moment of parenthood!

We all have thousands of photos stuffed in scrapbooks and mounted on walls. Lost in kitchen drawers, shut up in desks, left at people's homes, or even undeveloped from years gone by. I challenge us all to stop sometimes and just open a few packets of these old photographs:

Let them talk to you like they did to me. They're great conversationalists.

A Day In The Big Apple

Follow me through a pretty fun and exciting day that just finished. It was a really great day that I just want to relive for my own selfish reasons, and isn't that mostly what blogs are for, anyway?

*3:45 a.m. wake-up call and out the door at 3:58.

*6 a.m. flight to Chicago, smooth as silk

*6:45 a.m. stop for a quick trip to Admiral's Club, then board my 747 for NYC

*8:30 a.m. boring, headache-inducing cab ride into midtown Manhattan.

*10 a.m. checked into Roosevelt Hotel (NOT too nice, but air conditioner worked!)

***11 a.m. spent 45-minutes watching part of the NYC St Patrick's Day Parade (which lasted FIVE HOURS!!!!!) The single greatest collection of drunks the world has ever seen, replete with passed-out teenage girls, guys yelling "F@#* YOU!" over and over as they walked through the crowd, and people that constantly bumped into me because they truly had no control over their own balance!! Cool bagpipe troupes, some great marching bands, and lots of genuine patriotic pageantry, but finally got sick of the alcoholic nonsense.

*11:45 a.m. The next 2 hours were spent walking through Times Square, Flatiron District and Hell's Kitchen. Discovered "BisCo and Latte", a lemon-yellow hippy joint with it's own biscotti sampling bar of 25 biscotti flavors and large latte's served in fiestaware cereal bowls. COOL!!

Also on the walk, spotted a club called "Birdland", that was featuring a concert last night by my favorite Broadway songwriter, Jason Robert Brown! (more on this later)

*2 p.m. MEMPHIS, THE MUSICAL Wow! Just plain WOW! I mean, in the most sincere context of the word, WOW! Great commentary on society in the 1950's south, with amazing acting, a terrific soundtrack, creative sets, and a really well-paced script. Two and a half hours of pure, unbridled musical-junkie overload,...I LOVED it!

*5 p.m. 4-mile run through a very crowded Central Park. 71 degrees and sunny, and the parade was STILL wrapping up! Beautiful run through the elms and horse-drawn carriages. If it wasn't for hearing yet another drunk slut of a girl yelling racial slurs at a jogging African-American, the work-out would've been just about perfect.

*6:30 p.m. Met Chad Alexander (a friend from my business) at Birdland Supper Club, and were seated IN THE FRONT ROW for supper and the Jason Robert Brown concert. Very solid supper, though not great, but the concert was totally thrilling. He did about 10 of his Broadway "greatest hits" plus a couple new ones I love about Vegas and Millionaire's. Halfway through the concert, he brought Aniki Nonni Rose (Dreamgirls movie, Princess Frog) to the stage to join him for 6-7 additional pieces that were total highlights. If he'd have just not cussed out (literally) a lady who tried to take a picture of him and stopped to pout in the middle of a song, then the concert would've been even better. (Learn from this Jason, you looked like an impudent little tantrum-throwing baby!)

9 p.m. An unexpected surprise. Got a call from friend and client Christy Owen. I was informed that my Carlbad, CA group's medley from Next to Normal had been uploaded to Broadway.com, and that the entire cast and crew of the musical had been watching it, AND LOVED IT. Though some purists had been trashing it online, one of the show's stars went online to defend the group, my interpretation, and their artistry, calling it "awesome".

9:30 p.m. Standing on Times Square had a 10-minute talk with my oldest daughter about my day. She informed me that she'd gotten the soprano solo to the song I wrote for next week's Evening With The Ambassadors! Go Wooda!

10 p.m. After a quick trip to M & M world for some much-needed peanut butter M & M's, I trekked through the land of Drunkard Irish Pubs and back to my hotel.

11:30 p.m. A bit of tv, checking the Broadway Dance Center schedule for tomorrow, going over my judging itinerary for Friday, and off to slumberland.

Thanks God, for a great day of life!

Time To Be A Daddy!

I've waited eighteen years for tomorrow. Well, actually 17 years, 9 months, and 6 days, but who's counting? I was already 11-12 years into my career when my oldest daughter was born, and tomorrow the wait is over,.........SHOW CHOIR CONTEST WITH MY DAUGHTER IN IT!!!

Unless you're a certified junkie like me, you'd never understand. Show choir, high school students, music and choreography fill most waking moments of my entire life. My wife and I talk about it. I write music while I'm jogging and driving. I constantly am on some sort of double-secret lookout for the perfect song that nobody else has heard yet. And to top it off, I do it for a living over 300 days per year. Show choir has fed my family, purchased my home, taken my family on vacations to amazing destinations, gotten my car, built my reputation, kept me in shape, driven me nuts and made most of my hair turn grey and start falling out!

But tomorrow will be grand! My princess in her gorgeous costumes, performing with the Carmel Ambassadors, one of America's finest high school groups. Grandma Dixie, Pepaw Jim, my wife and I will all be up front with a mix of tears, laughter, pride, amazement and nostalgia hitting us full force all at once. We'll yell like fools, cheer like idiots and throw rotted tomatoes at the other groups,..........perhaps not that last thing. Most of all, I step away from the weekly routine of judging and critiquing, of firing everybody up for the big push into finals, and I just get to be,....a,.....dad!! SWEET!!

The next morning it'll be an all-too-early trek across Indianapolis on virtually no sleep to watch my youngest daughter swim her heart out at the yearly divisionals meet. Trying her hardest to make state cuts, drop best times and raise her "street-cred" within the Carmel Swim Club to new heights. I'll be sleepy, semi-delusional, and in a quasi-trance state from lack of rest, but it's just so freaking worth it!! My duchess has swam better than ever this year, and has even been conquering the world of algebra, which HAD been conquering her until recently.

2 daughters, 2 days, 2 big events, and 2 chances to take some time to just flat out be a daddy. Very, very cool indeed.

Olympic Reflections

They're over, and I simply hate it. I need more events, like long-distance curling, ski jumping over cars, cross-country skiing with random wildlife attacks,......SOMETHING!!

I love the fact that the Olympics are every 2 years now, instead of happening with the regularity of leap year. People whom we've never known become our new heroes, with stories of obstacles overcome and odds triumphed over. They're our heroes, they appear on Jay Leno, then they politely disappear into the ether of athletic lore, with only grainy highlights to remind us of them. True, they might do an Old Spice commercial or get a DUI down the road, but they pretty much vanish until the next Olympics.

Although I don't care about most of the events, I watch them anyway and feel a tug of patriotism when we show the communists who's still the boss. I sit on the edge of my chair while the ladie's figure skaters try to pull off a quadruple, super-duper, spread eagle whatever and my heart goes out to them when they accidently do the splits and quickly get back on their feet, hoping through fake smiles and real tears that nobody noticed. (By the way, what's the difference between a triple axel, a triple sow cow, a triple lutz, a triple toe loop and a triple scoop of fudge monkey ripple on a sugar cone?!?!) All this being said, though, I HATE MEN'S FIGURE SKATING!!!! Johnny Weir in a chinchilla tutu and mink bra is frightening!

Once in awhile, I even cheer for another country and hope they do well, as their story is so compelling I can't help but pull for them. Joannie Rochette, the Canadian figure skater who bravely persevered through her mom's death a couple day's earlier to win Bronze. The 57-year old Mexican downhill skier who just had fun and finished almost a minute behind the leaders. The European cross-country skier, who's legally blind and has only peripheral vision as he treks rapidly through 50 kilometers of mountainous terrain. If you don't pull for these people, you're just not human. Thank you Morgan Freeman for pointing out their stories, even though VISA paid you to tell us!

So, as I fall asleep to curling for the last night and quietly wonder in my dreams how the hell short track figure skating relays keep track of who's going next, I bid adieu to these two weeks of athletic spectacle and look forward to the next one. The celebration of brotherhood, peace, kindness, triumph of the spirit, soaring of our souls,...........AND WINNING THE MEDAL COUNT!!

The Colts

Funny, how none of them know me, not even that I exist at all on the face of the Earth. If I were to be incinerated by a stray meteor and flattened by a steamroller, ala Austin Powers, I doubt they'd send a card or show up at my funeral. Yet, they just broke my heart into tiny, horseshoe-shaped pieces.

I'd made brash predictions (which I actually believed, by the way) of a 37-17 Colts victory. The Saints 23rd ranked defense wouldn't even be able to put up a fight in the second half, yet there they stubbornly were, hanging on. A wide open dropped pass by Pierre Garcon didn't help, and neither did a riverboat gamble of an onsides kick that paid off with a touchdown jackpot for the Saints. Drew Brees threw, and dodged, and scrambled, and connected time after time after time on a Colts defense that looked like EVERYBODY IN THE SECONDARY had a bad ankle! You know something's going horribly wrong when a 2-point conversion is made by a guy literally standing on his head backward on the half-yard line with his outstretched arms cradling the ball over the goal line!

But it was my hero of athletics, my champion of the gridiron, and the Goliath of NFL quarterbacks, Peyton Manning that brought a tidal wave of nausea to my belly, and sent me reeling back in my chair with weak knees and surrender. A "pick six" to a Saints cornerback, who ironically went to college at Indiana University, was the dagger in the heart of the Colts. He's still gonna be my favorite player, as he DID let the city of Indianapolis taste the sweetness of Super Bowl glory in 2006, but he basically tossed the game into the hands of an awaiting opponent who had read his eyes, and attacked.

So I come full circle to my first point,.....WHY DO I CARE SO MUCH?!?! I have no vested interest, other than living in a bordering town to Indianapolis. If I knocked on the doors of their homes, any of the Colts would call the police about a trespasser. Why, then? If I knew, I'd type the answer. Right now, however, I just want to go somewhere quiet,......and puke.

Ending A Phase

Yesterday was my oldest daughter's last swim meet. There was no coverage of the event, no banner headlines in the paper, no records set and no formal announcement of any kind. But to her it was a big deal, as it was a torch being passed from one phase of her life into the beginning of another.

I wasn't there, as has been the case far too many times in her life. Mind you, I think I'm a pretty great dad, as I'm monumentally supportive, loving and involved in a great many things she's done, but I wasn't there yesterday. My job involves travel, which makes it also involve prioritizing WHEN I'll be there. Because I'm on the road about 35 weekends a year, I have to figure out which concert, recital, meet or event weighs more heavily than another. This year, showchoir and orchestra take precedent over swimming for my girls.

In a few weeks I'll be a parent chaperone on a four-day trip to Chicago. Later, I'll be a "proud as can be papa" at orchestra concerts and scholarship banquets, take my daughters on a getaway day to ride rollercoasters at Cedar Point, and eventually drive my oldest on a 5-day cross-country sojourn to California Baptist University where she'll begin a tremendous adventure in her next phase.

But yesterday was her last meet,....perhaps ever. Swimming had early on been a passion, then a job, then a source of tremendous stress for my princess. One of her favorite parts was always singing the national anthem at home meets (beautifully, I might add) then being one of the team's loudest cheerleaders for her compadres. The greatest compliment her teammates ever gave her happened earlier this season. Although never one of the fastest members of her team, her sportsmanship, supportiveness and leadership abilities got her voted as one of three team captains!

But yesterday was her last meet. I remember her being the crying 6-year old whose illegal starts, strokes and turns got her disqualified from every event she entered in her first meet. I remember the excitement in her face the first-time she broke 5 minutes in the 400 IM. I remember how funny she looked and how proud I was when she was the high-scorer at a divisionals meet a few years back, clad in a turquoise and black polka-dot full-body suit.

My wife had her coaches and teammates talk about Morgan on a videotape yesterday. They love her and will always remember her as part of what made the team fun to be a part of, beyond the 24 state titles and Olympic trial qualifiers. Her little sister (a vastly improved freshman on the team) will always remember the early morning rides to practice with her, primarily spent in silence with both trying to wake up for another grueling work out.

Even though she's not moving to college until August, my heart aches and I miss her almost unbearably already.

As one phase ends, another begins.