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Sunday, December 8, 2013

Do Artists and Musicians and Writers Have More Fun?

Concert poster
Our weekend got off to the best possible start on Friday, with the annual Madrigal Christmas concert by the Leelanau Children's Choir and Youth Ensemble. I didn't take my camera to the concert this year, so all you get to see (if you weren't there) is the poster at left. The costumes and staging are beautiful, too. But of course the focus is on the singing. All hearts in the audience were lifted by the young voices. The Christmas concert is director Margaret Bell's "skill-building set" for her singers, with largely the same traditional English and French carols every year, solos and ensembles with different personnel, of course, from one season to the next. With what they learn from preparing this concert, they go on in the spring to put together a new program each year. (I'll let you know in plenty of time, so if you're close enough to Northport you won't miss it.) If musicians do have more fun, they certainly work hard for it.

Saturday evening I spent baking cookies with a friend. One kind of dough, chocolate added to some portions, colored sugar and sprinkles to a few -- and here is the result, all ready on Sunday for our bookstore event:

I told you there would be cookies!
Here's what I was thinking off and on during Glenn Wolff's book signing. Glenn is an artist. He's also a musician. We had many other artists and writers in the room today. So do these people have more fun? Artists' and writers' work is often solitary, but they seem to enjoy getting together and comparing notes, and their appreciation of each other's work is heart-warming. I wonder if you can tell from the pictures below which people are artists, which are writers, which are musicians, and which are fortunate benefactors of the work of the artists, writers, and musicians.





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We all had fun at Dog Ears on Sunday! Thank you, Glenn!





5 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

'Do artists, writers and musicians have more fun?'
..I would guess yes...although I
haven't been to an accountant's
convention. :)

dcase1418@yahoo.com said...

I love seeing the pictures - almost as good as being there. Well, not almost but as close as I can get this year. Thanks!

P. J. Grath said...

Here's a link to a recent article about A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN NEW ENGLAND and an interview with the author, Robert Sullivan.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/12/09/with-robert-sullivan-author-child-christmas-new-england/TVko4dc7LHXm1MSMIOU21L/story.html

BB & Deborah, I wish you BOTH could have been here. There were plenty of cookies!

Kathy said...

What a fun time this must have been! I can feel the holiday spirit!

P. J. Grath said...

And then, Kathy, just five days after the book signing at Dog Ears, Glenn Wolff returned to Northport, playing bass with Don Julin's Neptune Quartet. The music was across the street from my bookstore at Lelu Cafe. It was a great crowd, and the music was so wonderful I told Glenn at the break, "It makes me feel like I'm in Paris." In Paris with a lot of our friends -- can you tell THAT would be a good feeling?!