On That Note

Almost Home - Part 2

I've learned now that it's important to check for understanding with your spouse/partner/SO, etc., for their actual definition of "downsizing." That question occured to me too late - like at 10:00 p.m. the night before we were to close and be moved entirely out. We were exhaustedly and frantically trying to clear out Keith's main office, AND closet, AND...well, you get the picture... It seems we had originally been operating, albeit unconsciously, on a downsizing concept that was, "take everything you already own and fit it into a smaller space." We've radically, and quickly, evolved to a definition that sounds like, "whatever you can fit into your new space, that's what you own...."

I continue to be struck by how attached we are to things in general - but OUR things in particular. After all the throwing out and selling we did, looking at the piles of stuff and boxes of stuff still remaining now sitting in our small, elegant, and formerly pristine new space, I am slightly heartsick at the immense amount of all of it and really jolted into awareness of how it gradually creeps up. I look at boxes carefully labeled, and as I spy the written contents on the side of one, "Large Salad Spinner and Asparagus Cooker, 12 Chinese Blue Fish Plates" I pick it up, unopened, and put in the new pile to be taken to Goodwill. Who on earth needs an asparagus cooker? (But then, why do I think someone at Goodwill will find it and be delighted??) Am I perpetuating the system by offloading it out of our space and potentially into someone else's? As a student of ethics, who could imagine I'd be grappling with the issue of "stuff" as an ethical issue?  Keith and I have instituted a new rule: if we haven't used something in 6 months or needed to go to any one of the remaining  boxes in our storage area, then out it goes - unopened, no questions asked, no regrets. The lightening of the loads does indeed feel lighter, freer. Our operating goal during this past year and a half has been to become nimbler and we DO feel more nimble, less encumbered, lighter. We are eager to do more. And as we go through this process, the conversations with friends and family have been illuminating and fascinating. More on those conversations in another post. 

So, on that note, what's the "stuff" that keeps you from being light of spirit?

 

"Saw my life this morning, lying at the bottom of a drawer.
All this stuff I'm saving....God know's what this junk is for.
And whatever I believed in, this is all I have to show
What the hell were all the reasons for holding on with such dear life
Here's where I let go...."

Those lines are from Mary Chapin Carpenter's song, Almost Home. After 13 years together in a house that we made into our dream house, Keith and I are moving. A couple of years ago we started having the predictable Boomer conversation about downsizing and simplifying. It sounded and felt felt right. We were ready. Even though we live in a house of almost 5600 square feet, we didn't think of ourselves as people who owned a lot of "stuff," even as owned the ubiquitous paninni maker and Cuisinart coffee maker. Oh, there was the asparagus cooker...things like that, but we still haven't traded in our old fashioned "fat television" for a new "flat screen television." We don't have DVR, we drive two cars (a 10 year old Hundyai and a 7 year old VW wagon), both paid for. So when it came to the idea of moving, we knew we had a challenge, we knew it would be work, but we were not intimidated or daunted. Helping our situation, we told ourselves, was the fact that our house took almost 18 months to sell, and we had been streamlining and purging all along. We'd taken truckloads to the dump, carloads to Goodwill, and so it went.

So imagine our surprise when the day actually came that we sold the house and had a closing date. We had 10 days to complete our move out of the old house and into our new location, vacate, and clean the property. We made a plan. We made organized to-do lists, rolled up our sleeves, and went to work.

Let's set aside for the moment that our actual move date turned out to be the snowiest, icy week in the snowiest, coldest winter in Connecticut history. Let's also set aside the fact that our long, curving, downhill driveway could have alternated as an olympic toboggan run (sans Olympians, I'm sorry to say.) Let's just focus on: STUFF. The stuff that we did not see ourselves actually owning. The stuff that after all of our purges, selling, trashing, dumpstering, and donating, now had to move and made fit into our 1600 square feet antique barn we'd rented. Oh, yes......the ...... STUFF.... (To be continued....)

Life Lessons from Jazz: Part 1

Duke Ellington is purported to have said, "When you hit a wrong note, it's what you do with the next note that determines whether it's wrong." I've been doing some thinking lately about this concept of "mistakes," how we handle them and what I can learn from them. I'm also thinking about how leaders handle mistakes and how we instinctively can tell if it's a teachable moment, a moment of personal truth and humility, or a moment of blame or shame. My wonderful friend and colleague, Frank Barrett, Ph.D., who is a faculty member in Fielding Graduate University's Human and Orgaizational Development doctoral program, is also a gifted jazz musican and was a pianist with the Tommy Dorsey Band under the direction of trombonist Buddy Morrow. As Frank describes it, jazz is "a metaphor for leaping into the unknown, hanging out on a limb, [suggesting] the exhilarating and periolous nature of engaging in an activity in which the future is largely unknown.....often in the presence of an audience." Whether I am in my role as leader, consultant, or performer, navigating the unknown is always fraught with what might be labled "mistakes."  I'm learning to focus on that "next note" to see what wonderful event or learning emerges.

Keith Jarrett, jazz pianist, said: "I think the fear of failure is why I try things....if I see that there's some value in something and I'm not sure whether I deserve to attempt it, I want to find out."

On that note....what "mistakes" of yours have turned into something wonderful?

Love's Enough for Anyone

Music entered my life at a very young age. Family legend has it that at the age of two I was singing ,"Abba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba said the monkey to the chimp," to the near total distraction of my parents. Apparently, on one memorable car trip I was singing that while swinging my bottle back and forth in my teeth until it accidentally went right out the car window. Maybe a star was not exactly born at that minute, but clearly a music lover was. At the age of six I joined my first church choir and loved the white billowy short robes and big outrageous blue bows almost as much as singing itself. Perhaps that was the moment a cabaret singer was born...clothes and fabulous outfits are no small part of the enjoyment. I sang solos in school choruses and church choirs, studied music in high school and college, and sang in the ubiquitous and somewhat obligatory Peter, Paul, and Mary trio clone group. (Mine just happened to be called "Chickie and the Roosters." A story there, of course, but not one to go into now, thankfully.)

It shouldn't be a surprise to me or anyone that I eventually married a singer songwriter (among other things) and that we would sing together in many local venues. He introduced me to a lot of music that I would never have become familiar with if he hadn't. Folk groups, rock groups, individuals, and the foundational and musical bedrock of The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and so many others. We were a good team. Until we weren't. Life moved on, we grew apart, and eventually separated. I didn't sing for many years after that. I continued to listen to everything I could with my broadened horizons, but I didn't perform. Not even in choirs. Clearly, a lot of stuff was going on there, but I didn't want to look at it. Only six years ago did I arrive at the moment when I declared, "I'm tired of defining myself as 'someone who used to sing'" and got back into music in a deep way.

It's been over fifteen years since the ex and I separated, and through it all we've maintained reasonably friendly contact - birthdays, family get togethers with the kids, that kind of thing.

Last week I received an email from him - not that unusual. He wrote about how the ex-husband of his new wife (don't get me started on the mathematics and algorithms of the modern family....) had passed away. He reflected on the indisputable fact that we are all aging and we will be losing other friends and important relationships to the inevitability of death. And he apologized for his, in his words, "immature behavior of the past" and just wanted to let me know that. And then he quoted a line from a song that used to be one of our favorites in the mid-seventies - David Ackles' "Love's Enough for Anyone Today."

I hadn't thought of that song in years and went to iTunes to listen to and download it. (YouTube didn't have one being sung by David Ackles, but the link above will give you the flavor of the song.) Such a simple lyric. "Tomorrow is forever, and love's enough for anyone today."

Love is enough for anyone today. I just want to remember that.

On that note......what do you think?

Why do YOU sing?

I feel very blessed (and downright lucky, too) to be part of a thriving and generous cabaret community here in the greater New York area.I am surrounded by astoundingly accomplished professionals who are teachers, musical directors, arrangers, instrumentalists, club owners, fellow students and performers, and all sorts of support people. I am happy to get up at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings to take the train from Westport, CT into Manhattan to be an on-going part of Lina Koutrakos' and Rick Jensen's  Advanced Performance Workhop. I often meet with them individually to think through shows, try on songs, and all in all make sense of my life.... I am able to attend the shows of many friends as well as people I don't know in many clubs. I love the variety of the shows, the stories, the songs, the approaches, and I always, always learn from being there. I am thrilled and honored and when people show up for my shows....not to mention genuinely surprised when I fill a house! It is a generous, hard working community of the deepest sort.

Most of us don't make a lot (any?) money of any sort doing this great work. One of the on-going jokes goes like this, "What's one thing you'll never hear said in NY? There goes the cabaret singer's Mercedez...." Over the years, I've come to learn why it is so important for me to sing - just to sing - whenever, wherever - and to keep learnng how to do it well, engaging all three components of singing - as Marilyn and Alan Bergman once famously said, It's about using your head, your heart, and your voice. All three. If something's not working for you, check and see which one is not in play or in use. Another cabaret teacher I've worked with once said, "Don't open your mouth to sing unless you would die if you couldn't." Pretty strong and powerful words, yet they get at the heart as to why I sing....to touch my own emotions in an honest enough way that it touches you in some honest way about your own experience. (Well, OK....did I mention the fabulous dresses and the shoes?) 

So why do YOU sing? Can you send me a short statement as a comment to this blog, or a 30 second audio link or video link as a comment or as a separate email to morgan@thephdiva.com? I'm compiling the answers and will reflect them back to our community. I'd love to know.

On that note.....send me your answer!

And it comes full circle....

I had one of those wonderful evenings recently that reminds me that all of my life is interconnected, even when I want to believe that certain aspects are separate. I have those experiences more often ever since I gave up the belief that I can compartmentalize various aspects of my life, especially embracing the PhDiva aspect of my life in all I do. When I started including my musical life into my professional consulting and leadership development life - and openly talking about the joy and the work and the process, I found that my conversations with senior leaders started in a new, fresher and often deeper place than not. I always  include a one liner on the bottom of my corporate bio "When Morgan is not occupied with her organizational "day job," she performs in NYC as a professional cabaret singer known as "MorganPhDiva!" And that's the magic ticket. That's what people want to talk about. I tell them the consistent work of being a professional on stage, just like the work required for any type of profession, and I tell them about my Director, Lina Koutrakos and my amazing and talented Musical Director, Rick Jensen and what it's like to build a trusting, collaborative relationship.

One of my good buddies in the cabaret community was a very senior global executive at Bear Stearns. When the crash came a few years ago, he went down with it, along with a group of friends and colleagues who all worked together. It's been a tough couple of years for most of us. Consulting gigs have dried up, jobs are scarce to come by and finding one is a full time job in itself. I often wondered where these folks from the big finance companies ended up - did they "land " as they say in the placement parlance. I'd lost contact for a couple of years with my good friend and then last week, at the show of a very good friend of mine who was performing at Don't Tell Mama, there he was. It was a great reunion and he was with three others joining him to enjoy the show. It was a reunion evening for the four of them - the first time they'd gotten together since the diaspora. It was also a celebration as each of the four had landed new jobs. I was interested to hear that all of them were now working in smaller, more flexible, high tech financial firms and loving it. There was definitely relief in the air, of course, that they'd all landed in new postions, but also a sense that it was an exciting new beginning for them. It was fun to share their energy as a group. It was fun to hear my friend, the oldest of the four, describe his musical life, the shows he's done, and his introductions to others like me who were there that night that are part of our cabaret community. It was great to hear the admiration in the voices of his colleagues for being let into this "part" of his lfe. It was music, work, and the integration of our whole selves being played writ large.

I was happy to be there. Happy to experience a small group of colleagues who had weathered the financial storm so far, and had come full circle to celebrate in a great little club in NYC. I left hopeful that our larger economy may be on the upswing, and happy to enjoy it all,

And on that note....what do you think??  

It's about time!

Hi And welcome to my new blog, "On That Note!" I'll be talking about music, and cabaret, and life and dreams and the things that organizations do that drive us all a little mad, or make us a little sad. I've been talking about doing this for so long that I can't believe I'm actually doing it. I'll always try to make it worth your while that you checked in - with provocative ideas I've come across, great sites to link to, interesting interviews, some videos that add something to the quality of our days together. So join in!

So check out my new video introduction at www.thephdiva.com.  It's courtesy of a terrific professional and a real business partner, Robert Chesney. Look for him at www.youonyourwebsite.com. It's good stuff! 

And On That Note.....what do you think??

Welcome to Morgan, Ph. Diva

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