I interviewed my Aunt Connie back in 1993, using a little cassette recorder sitting on her kitchen table.

I asked my Mom a bunch of questions about her life and she had a lot to say. After we were done, she added, “I really liked to darn socks. The little cross stitches.” That didn’t make it into the recording.

“Why are you doing this?”

Regal Blend is my barbershop quartet. We go out singing Valentines on February 14. While we’re traveling around town, we like to visit schools and sing for the chorus classes, to give them a little demonstration of what adults do for fun. The classes enjoy the change of pace, and we can do a little tutorial on barbershop singing.

Of course, the first thing we do when we get to a school is report to the office to check in. As long as we’re there, we sing for the secretaries and administration. It always draws a crowd, and not so subtly shows that people keep on singing long after they leave school.

One of the students this year asked that question above. I mumbled and stammered about how much fun it was. But she made me think about it. There are more reasons than “fun” to sing in a quartet, a chorus, a band, even alone in the shower. Continue reading “Why are you doing this?” →

Every summer in Washington DC the Smithsonian Institution puts on a big Folklife Festival cultural show in the National Mall. They feature cultures and countries from all around the USA and the world. As it happened, Wisconsin’s 150^th anniversary as a state was 1998, and Wisconsin was one of the featured cultures that year. Continue reading Robert Siegel and the Polish polka band from Wisconsin →

We were at a beer festival in Fond du Lac Wisconsin serving out some of our local brewery’s samples, along with our own home made beers and meads, when a slightly intense gray haired gentleman in a beer-themed baseball cap tottered up to us and intoned “Clean. Temp. Starter.”

Then he nodded and looked as if he had delivered the secrets of the universe, waiting for us to acknowledge the blessings of his bountiful wisdom. Continue reading Clean Temp Starter →