Electro's Hideaway | Wormholes & Jump Gates | Songs to Shock and Delight | The Expoundings Page

Welcome to my Expoundings page! Inspired by Debbie's Blatherings! Except that, being the lazy, procrastinating SOB I am, I don't keep it updated anywhere near as well!!. My apologies for disappearing; as some of y'all know, work was a bit, um, interesting in the year 2000, plus I was handling programming for Conterpoint, plus dance group, plus the usual dozen cons, plus.well, you get the picture. I'll try to be around a bit more this year, OK?

Travel with me now back through the mists of time, to early Sunday morning, March 31st, 1991. The place is a function room on the lower floor of the Hunt Valley Marriott in a northern suburb of Baltimore, MD. Balticon is in full swing, as is the filk, in the very room I've just mentioned. It's about 2 am, and a young man, brown-haired, thin, glasses, a little under six foot tall, jeans and a t-shirt, shuffles into the back row of chairs and sits down for a listen. He listens to the performers across the room, arrayed in a circle, while also admiring the cute 8-year old girl climbing on the chairs at the end of the row. He likes the songs he's hearing; doesn't have anything of his own to offer but does quietly join a chorus or two. After about an hour sleep is starting to claim him, so he quietly slips out and goes off to bed. But as he goes, he promises himself that next con, he'll be back--and maybe stay just a while longer.

Well, a little over ten years have passed since that early-morning hour, and I've been back, many times, many cons, and I'm sure I'm gonna be staying a while. Of course, you've probably noticed that I've worked my way from the back row up into the circle, and from there to the stage, and that I've found a few songs to offer . I've followed the filkers from Baltimore to Boston, to San Francisco, to Atlanta, to Columbus, to Toronto, and across the realms of cyberspace. And my life has been enriched in ways I would never have believed possible. You've shared my celebrations and helped me when I needed shoulders to cry on. You're helping me learn to open my heart to love, and teaching me how to be there for others. And you've released the music that I knew was in me, but I hadn't found a place to express it.

For all of that, I thank you, and I look forward to the wonderful friendships and the beautiful music that we'll share for the next ten years, and beyond.

And like I said, I promise to expound more than once a year.

Don't put those tissues away just yet!

Today is 7 years since my maternal grandmother, Tina Wasley, passed away. As I often do, I was thinking of her during Passover seders; she always enjoyed cooking and making seder at her home in Great Neck, loved hearing me lead the seders, and always enjoyed singing "Dayenu and Had Gadya". And, as I'm typing, it occurs to me how proud she'd have been to see me achieve my engineering licensing; she passed away just as I was about to start an engineering job again after three years sitting out the recession.

But that's not the only significance to today. She passed away while I was attending FilKONtario 4, having driven up with several DC-area filkers to see Kathy Mar and to meet all the really cool folks from the GEnie community. After crying on a few shoulders, I chose to stay up there rather than try and join my family in New York. It would have been difficult to; abandoning my crew would have forced the only passenger in my car who could drive to make the 10-hour run home. And I just couldn't make them all leave. So, I stayed, and let the kind words and uplifting songs of my friends carry me through the weekend.

Now, at that time, I was just really becoming comfortable in the filk community and beginning to form friendships that extended outside cons. I didn't have much of a support network outside fandom. So, to find people who I'd just met so willing to listen and help touched me more deeply than any other experience had touched me. That weekend opened doors in my soul--showed me how to be the kind of person I'd desperately wanted to be. I thank FilKONtario and the GEnie filk community for starting me on that journey.

OK, enough sentiment--on to happier stuff! Took Sheryl out for her birthday tonight; we went to La Panetteria, a lovely little Italian restaurant in downtown Bethesda that's a favorite of my mother's and father's. 'Course I like it too! I gave her a pair of blue-beaded earrings.

Nice filksing at the Hideaway this past Saturday. Bob Esty showed up (with a preview of the new Clam Chowder album--set aside your $$ NOW). Also Jana Asher from Pittsburgh, here doing research for her statistics doctorate. And the usual suspects. Bob sang a really nice new song inspired by Consonance; I did my new song "Racin' High, Racin' Free" which I premiered in the contest at FKO.

Wow, two days in a row. Don't get used to it!