SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

16 December 202312 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

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Eight days ago (Friday, 8 December 2023), my students had their annual Christmas Concert. The Christmas Concert is one of the two marquee concert events of the school year, the other being the more amorphous Spring Concert, which can fall pretty much anywhere between March and April (and even early May). Of the two, the Christmas Concert is my favorite, and while it’s also one of the most stressful days of the year, it’s also one of my favorites.

Our Christmas Concert follows a predictable format, consisting of performances from our choir, our World Language classes, and finally from my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles. Historically, dance classes have performed pieces prior to the musical portion of the concert, but this year marked the first that dances were not included, as the dance class performed before the Christmas Musical, which was on Friday, 1 December 2023.

Honestly, excluding dances was a major improvement. I have nothing (well, not much) against dance as an art form, but it was never a comfortable fit in an already-overstuffed Christmas concert format. It also adds some minor additional headaches for yours portly, who in the past has had to move pianos in the middle of the concert to accommodate the dancers. At the risk of editorializing (but isn’t that the whole point of a blog?), I find most of these “dance” routines to be rather distasteful and a tad lurid, although I am to report that this year’s dance performance was really exceptional, tasteful, and beautiful.

But I digress. What of the music itself? Let’s dig in, like a Wisconsin dad shoveling snow.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Boring Politics

9 December 20233 December 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Has anyone else noticed how boring politics has become? I don’t mean to imply that nothing is happening—I mean, we had a Speaker of the House fired for the first time in American history a couple of months ago—but it all seems so… dull.

If everything was hunky-dory, it would be fine for politics to be boring. Indeed, it would be great—we want to live in a world where the issues that face us are so miniscule, we can elect boring people to administer boring, predictable law and order.

But the opposite is the case. Everything sucks. Our government is wildly oppressive. Our institutions can’t pave the roads adequately, much less govern the country. People aren’t allowed to say anything reasonable in public without losing their jobs. Inflation is through the roof. Wages are stagnant. China owns everything. Our leaders want to drag us into wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that involve ancient clans battling over ancient grievances. Peaceful protestors—actual ones, not progressives robbing their local Wendy’s—are in federal prison without trial because they were invited to walk through the Capitol Building.

In spite of all of that, politics is boring. I think I know why.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Showtime!

2 December 20232 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s the busy Christmas season for yours portly, and last night I made it over the first of two major humps before Christmas break: the Middle School Christmas Play. The next hump is the Christmas Concert for my own students, which is this Friday, 8 December 2023, in the morning.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the play, as our school particularly loves to stage light-hearted musical comedies. You wouldn’t think that a musical would involve substantially more tech setup than a typical play, but it makes the work exponentially more challenging.

The Drama teacher this year did a fabulous job, and created one of the most tech-heavy productions I’ve been involved with so far. It was a multimedia extravaganza: songs, choreography, videos, backing tracks, lights, around twenty-five microphones (stationary/hanging mics, floor mics, individual headset mics, wireless handhelds, etc.), and more.

Here is a panoramic view of my sound booth about ninety minutes before the play:

The astute observer will note two sound boards/mixing consoles, plus a lighting controller, as well as my $80 refurbished laptop, which does fine if I’m just cuing backing tracks, but otherwise runs like a potato powering a lightbulb. There’s also the spotlight, two lighting trees with around ten lights each, and a projector screen. During the production my student assistant and I had to move a projector into place, along with a auxiliary cord running to a DI box, which fed via XLR (microphone) cable to a “snake” onstage, which ran all the way back to us at our booth. We also had to move a baby grand piano (don’t worry—it was on wheels)!

Setting all of this stuff up is stressful, because it’s usually done in fifty-minute snippets of planning periods. But the finished product is worth it.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Thanksgiving Break 2023

25 November 202325 November 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s been an action-packed Thanksgiving Break for yours portly. I’ve been busy with family—the best kind of busy—while also trying to snatch some time for myself. The ankle is doing well, although I have to be careful not to overdo it.

My younger brother’s kids—my niece and nephews—absorbed a good bit of my time once they arrived at my parents’ house, and we had a lot of fun. We built a couple of LEGO sets together, and I also got all three of them messing around with my composing software. It’s so fun seeing them placing the notes and trying out different things. My niece—a very gifted pianist—insisted I transcribe the theme from the Harry Potter films into the software, which was a fun challenge (originally, she wanted me to do it around 9 PM Thanksgiving evening, which I flatly refused on grounds of mental and physical exhaustion).

All in all, it was a good chance to recharge my batteries before the craziness of the end of the school semester. Once I get back home tomorrow, it’s full steam ahead until Christmas.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Acceptance

18 November 202315 November 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Readers are likely familiar with the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief. It’s one of those psychological models that has percolated into the popular culture. As is often the case, The Simpsons illustrates it better than I can:

When it comes to the future of our nation, I’ve reached the “Acceptance” phase after many, many years in the other phases.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Ankle Break

4 November 20233 November 2023 The Portly Politico3 Comments

On Monday, 30 October 2023, I suffered a very bad fall in my laundry/mudroom. I had an infestation of these little tiny beetles that are, fortunately, harmless; however, I wanted to get rid of them. To that end, I sprayed a lemongrass indoor insecticide liberally throughout the laundry room.

Well, it worked: it killed the bugs—and it nearly killed me! I missed a spot when stepping into the room to take out Murphy, and fell hard onto the concrete floor.

At the time, I just thought it was a bad sprain, as I was able to hobble around well enough. I iced my ankle and elevated it on some pillows on my bed, and struggled throughout a night of pain.

Well, after spending Halloween walking around on my hobbled foot—and borrowing first some crutches and then a cane from colleagues—my foot seemed to get worse. By Wednesday morning, it was clear I needed to see an orthopedist.

Right after the Fall

Another Angle

Stubbed (Broken?) Toe

Halloween Night

Purple!

Well, it turns out I had a broken ankle.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Spooktacular 2023 Preparations

28 October 202327 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Yours portly is knee-deep in preparations for the annual Spooktacular, which kicks off tonight at 6 PM. The Spooktacular has become a hotly anticipated event, and while I’ve failed at a number of enterprises lately, the Spooktacular is a marquee event that my students and their families enjoy.

As a longtime dilettante and fulltime slob, I’m not the best housekeeper. My energies are expended on other endeavors, like this blog, my teaching, and my private lessons. The last thing I want to do after a long day of mind-molding is clean the toilet or vacuum the carpet.

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were neat freaks. They’d scrub the baseboards with toothbrushes and risk their lives to second-story windows. I scrub so poorly, my dentist regularly warns me about gingivitis.

But even I succumb to the overwhelming sense of shame that comes from having company over in an unkempt house, and as I want these people to keep giving me money to touch their kids—and as I hope to avoid my father’s dismayed disapproval at my dirty baseboards—the Spooktacular forces me to deep clean.

I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SC Bigfoot Festival 2023

21 October 202320 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Last Saturday I attended the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival in Westminster, South Carolina. The festival is in its fourth year, and it was a bustling, fun event—a good model for how small town festivals should be.

There were some hiccups over the summer, with vendor packets (my own included) getting lost in the mail and the festival’s website disappearing for a couple of weeks. The event organizers weren’t responding to e-mails, and I thought for awhile that maybe the whole thing had been shuttered.

Fortunately, that was not the case, and the festival organizers got everything working again. I paid my vendor fee using some Discover Card cashback, and went up to Westminster after school on Friday, 13 October 2023 (spooky!).

My neighbors went up ahead of me, on Thursday, 12 October 2023, and picked up my vendor packet for me during the day Friday. We stayed in adjacent campsites at Chau-Ram County Park, a beautiful park near waterfalls—and just $25 a night!

I made a critical error, however: I should have taken off last Friday. Because I was unable to attend the festival Friday, the vendor organizer put me down a little side street. I was super close to the main strip, but just far enough away that most folks didn’t even realize my tent was there.

Needless to say, it was not a strong sale’s day. Indeed, I only sold one painting, to a sweet little girl who loves the Loch Ness monster. She purchased a painting I’d done of a strange aquatic animal, which she liked because it resembled Nessie.

I shared my vendor spot with the wife my neighbor’s family, and she was selling really cool crochet hats. I figured she’d do a killing, as the hats were really well done, but she did not make a single sale.

In that regard, the festival was a disappointment. As for the festival itself, though, it was an absolute blast.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Hamster Wheel of Productivity

14 October 202313 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Americans are obsessed with productivity. Our entire ethos—a witch’s brew of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic and a form of capitalism that sends the message that a person’s value is linked to their ability to produce something(s) that other people will buy—screams that if we aren’t doing something, we’re nothing.

My older brother has covered this topic much better on his Substack, The Highlight Zone, but I wanted to tackle it here. His piece largely examines the curse of productivity from the academic’s perspective, but I suspect its specter haunts us in every facet of our lives.

Before getting to the bulk of my thoughts on this topic, I’ll share another source, from the YouTuber Horses:

Horses and my older brother are socialists of some degree or another. I am not—strenuously not. But if conservatives want to win hearts and minds, we should probably listen to the legitimate concerns our ideological opponents are making, because they are diagnosing and addressing a real problem. Their solutions might not work—they may even be abhorrent—and I suspect no change in the form of government, no tweaking of government policy, will solve the problem, because it’s not a problem of government policy, or even economic policy.

Rather, it’s a problem of the heart, of the soul, of the mind, of the culture. I doubt there is any one solution to this cult of productivity—this worship of the pagan goddess Efficiency.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Pee Dee State Farmers Market Plant & Flower Festival

7 October 20235 October 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Festival season continues apace; ergo, my reviews/travelogues/retrospectives/self-indulgent recaps of said festivals roll on as well. If my use of the word “ergo” hasn’t turned your stomach, read on.

Last Saturday, 30 September 2023 I attended the Pee Dee State Farmers Market, which was hosting its annual Plant & Flower Festival. I learned about the festival from, of all places, YouTube ads, featuring our long-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, Hugh Weathers. Commissioner Weathers has held his office since 2004, and I’ve seen his name most of my adult life on gas station pumps (there’s a little inspector’s sticker that bears his name), but I’d never seen him until these commercials.

That uninteresting fact aside, I needed to pick up some pumpkins for carving, and I figured buying some Certified SC Grown pumpkins was the way to go. There was also the added bonus of taking in another festival on a crisp, autumnal morning.

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The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

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