I saw a play/musical called The Drowsy Chaperone this past Friday with some friends at a local Austin theater called Zach (if you click that link you can even see a short video) and it was very good. The narrator was hilarious. He is an obviously gay guy who was married once but now is alone in his apartment listening to old vinyl records, one of which is of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. He intervenes during the performance with his opinions of each scene with great commentary from his life experience. He is so excited about the musical, where most of the cast end up marrying each other (i.e., 4 weddings take place at the end), but also sad and lonely about his situation about not finding the right person to be with. Actors to me seem to be entrepreneurs, selling themselves for each show in the hopes of getting cast. I’m guessing that unless you are on Broadway in New York, acting is a tough life financially.
I also discovered a new restaurant called Paggi House. The food was great (except the mussels were too small) and they had half price drinks and appetizers until 7pm so we shared a bunch of interesting things including one of my favorite things: soft shell crab! Well, my friend isn’t a big fan of soft shell crab so she let me eat 95% of it (yummy) with a really interesting sweet/sour/vinegar house made sauce. She had a really interesting salad that I took a few bites of that had vanilla in the dressing!
Saturday and Sunday consisted of meals at homeand Chuy’s as well as seeing the movie Despicable Me with the kids. They had already seen it, but since I hadn’t. I used my strong persuasion skills (not hard) to get them to see it again. It had some pretty funny, but predictable scenes. The main character strives to be the best villain in the world and gets caught by surprise when he adopts 3 little girls as part of one of his schemes to be the best villain. His mother is never pleased with his attempts at villainy as a child and later in life which motivates him but also makes him sad. In the end his mother pays him probably the best and only compliment he’s received from her when she tells him that he is a great parent to the 3 little orphan girls he adopted…”probably even better than me.” You can tell he was pleased that she finally gave him credit for something and it wasn’t for any of his attempts to be a bad guy. Us mothers can cause so much joy and sadness in our kids lives…well according to movies anyway…oh and a few psychologists. I wonder where the dads are in these animated movies?!
I had planned to post this earlier, but my Internet has been down for the last couple of days because some squirrels chewed through some of the cabling…those darn squirrels!
I saw the movie Salt yesterday with a friend and it was intense. A good action/thriller with Angelina Jolie as the main character. She plays a CIA agent who is set up by Russian agents to infiltrate American intelligence, but she doesn’t know this about herself until she’s much older. Of course the bad guys always underestimate the power of true love to destroy even the most evil plots and plans. The stunts and effects were really good. However, as skinny as Angelina is, some of those stunts and fights with men twice her size are even harder to believe…but hey, it’s just a movie. My friend and I left the theater pumped with adrenaline, and we both concluded that the way the movie ended there was probably going to be a Salt II.
We decided to grab some dinner and headed over to Baby Acapulco’s which is just across the street from the theater. We were pleasantly surprised with the band who was playing that night – The Brew. They play Latin Jazz music and they were really good. She had heard of them before and I wasn’t sure if I had. We both enjoyed a margarita and the show! They even had a free group salsa lesson that I participated in despite the fact I was wearing flip flops. I’d love to take salsa or almost any kind of dance lessons some day so it was a fun experience. A bunch of us lined up in front of the stage and my practice partner ended up being another woman who was there supporting the band so she already knew how to dance salsa. She was older than me and really sweet. She just got back from Hawaii and was wearing a pretty flower in her hair. We took turns being the man in the practice sessions as did others because it was mostly women who came up to participate in the free lesson.
The Brew has a sound similar to the Gipsy Kings so beautiful and romantic. Musicians are entrepreneurs and I’m always impressed when I see a band who is able to seemingly make a living sharing their talent. To me, hearing them after watching Salt was a nice way to calm the nerves after watching an intense movie! I look forward to hearing them again sometime soon.
One of my favorite female singers is Sarah McLachlan. My lifestyle doesn’t really allow me to keep up with all the latest things going on in the world of music, but I picked up a copy of a recent M-Music & Musicians magazine at my voice teacher’s studio, Octave Higher, this Saturday because she was on the cover. The title of the article is called Resurfacing. She just released a new album after 7 years called Laws Of Illusion (Amazon link). At the bottom of this post is a video of one of her new songs called “Loving You Is Easy,” which is probably the most upbeat song that I’ve heard from her. She says “It was based on a new relationship, and on hope and excitement and the fact that it is possible to feel this way again. I didn’t think I could. It was about the thrill of possibility and, quite frankly, lust.“ She said she is 42 and that she’s going to have “fun” tattooed on her arm because she’s determined to have more of it! She also said (and I agree) that “Writing about happiness and giddy love is tricky. It’s not as easy to write about as sadness and heavier things….happiness is quite fleeting. It’s very light and it’s not something that you can pinpoint.”
She got divorced a couple of years ago and says her music reflects much of her emotional life. I think most singers/writers works reflect their emotional lives. I know my writing does. She has two daughters named India and Taja, whose father is Indian. It’s nice to see that she has been able to use her emotional experiences to write songs. She admits it’s harder now with two small kids because “being able to have long periods of time to focus on nothing but myself and writing is long over. I live in a pretty ADD world right now.”
She is also reviving the female musician focused Lilith Fair tour that she helped start many years ago. Successful musicians to me are the ultimate entrepreneurs. They are betting against the odds of making it big that are probably 100 times greater than a technology company making it big. There are so many more people trying to be successful singers (e.g., just look at American Idol) than there are business entrepreneurs. I was reading the article and wondering how it would be to go to a studio every day of the week to work with someone as talented as her musical partner, Pierre Marchand, who helps her complete her songs. I have to say I was day dreaming a bit while I was reading the article. She has the benefit of great successes behind her before she had kids and she can play the piano as well as the guitar. I can’t play either…but there’s hope! They also featured Ozzy Osbourne in the magazine and he says he can’t play any instruments either.
I sing one of her older songs called Ice Cream (you tube link) to my kids sometimes. I drop them on the couch during the part where she sings “It’s a long way down” and they laugh hysterically. It makes me laugh while I’m singing it to them. “Your love is better than ice cream…your love is better than chocolate.”
I wonder if it’s possible to find someone out there who could be my music partner who is looking for a lyricist/singer like me and if we could both take a month or so off and create music. A nice little dream…
I interviewed Sandi Aitken (pdf) for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, for an article that was published in the Sep/Oct 2006 issue. My writing partner, Pam Losefksy, and I pulled these articles together a while back and you can see them on the Success Profiles page of this blog. You can see the full article on Sandi by clicking HERE (pdf). I haven’t connected with Sandi since the interview so I’m not even sure if she’s still at Freescale, but here’s an overview:
Sandi was/is a benefits manager for Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. in Austin. Previously she was Director of Wellness and work/life programs for Motorola and health and fitness coordinator for Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. She was also health and fitness program coordinator, director of nursing, critical care instructor, and director of the cardiac rehab and pulmonary education center for St. David’s Community Hospital. She was awarded Texas Nurse of the Year and held a Chair position for the Seton Cove board of directors. She received her MS from UT Austin in Nursing.
She shares:
Success has a lot to do with being true to your life’s purpose, vision, and goals. Often, that means running counter to what our culture’s definition of success is, because so often in our society, success is defined by your material worth or the initials behind your name. Making money is important on a certain level, but what’s really important is to know your heart, to find your passion. Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true.” Like so many things in life, it seems so simple, but there’s probably nothing harder to do.
She goes on to say:
Finding that alignment between your head and your heart, while at the same time not getting caught up in external pressures, is critical.
Oh, if everyone could be true to themselves, what a world this would be. But as Sandi noted it is so hard to do because being true to ourselves doesn’t always go over well with other people in our lives. Aligning head and heart is something I struggle with as do many others because what your heart/passion wants you to do in your career and life doesn’t always mesh up with what is practical given life’s responsibilities and other people’s expectations.
I’m working on trying to mesh some of my passion/heart’s desires with life’s practicalities. Today I scheduled a make-up voice lesson with my voice instructor, Gene Raymond, who I really enjoy working with, and brought the kids with me. I’ve brought them to a lesson once before. I bring them coloring books and they color without fussing at all. I think they think it is funny to hear mommy sing scales and do vocal exercises. Some of the vocal exercises are quite funny.
A few of the songs I’m working on right now are Killing Me Softly With His Song (Roberta Flack), Play Me (Neil Diamond – changing the ‘she’s’ to ‘he’s'), and The Rose (Bette Midler). I have the opportunity to take a lesson with a teacher at a level higher than Gene in this particular style of coaching called Speech Level Singing in a couple of weeks. This teacher has sung with Bette Midler and trained several American Idol singers. I’m looking forward to it and hoping I don’t choke!
I’m on a winning streak! Not only did I just win a bunch of I-Spy stuff, but I also got a call this morning from our local radio station Mix 94.7 and they told me I won a special viewing with Diane Birch, a great up and coming singer. I first saw her at SXSW earlier this year at Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop party. She really has such an amazing voice which is so mature for someone in her mid-20′s. She’s been on David Letterman and played with Prince. Fortunately, I could shift my schedule to make it there for about an hour in the late afternoon before I had to pick up the kids.
Last week I got an email about her visit to Austin, so I went to the site and signed up for a chance to win. I didn’t really think I’d win so when I got the call I was pretty surprised.
I even got a picture with her and an autographed little poster, that I’m not really sure what I’ll do with. I’m wondering if I should take these unusual wins as a sign that I’m on the right path in my life journey right now or just chalk it up to mere coincidence?
I have been really interested in learning more about music, getting into the music scene and my kids could certainly use some more brain exercising games so they are both nice coincidences.
Many great things in life and business can only be attributable to luck. But you have to be open to the opportunity. There’s a difference between the person who walks by a $5 bill and sees it because she’s looking around and open to opportunities and the one who walks right on by because she’s looking straight ahead absorbed in the incessant thoughts in her head. I often wonder how many opportunities I’ve missed because I’m too caught up in thinking and worrying too much about things I probably shouldn’t.
The entrepreneurial journey is full of interesting twists and turns. Even the most successful entrepreneurs I know struggle with what success means. I was recently meeting with a two time successful (multi-million dollar exits) entrepreneur, and he said after a few months we’re all back to our miserable selves and looking for the next thing to do. It’s funny how many people I interviewed for the Success Profiles sort of said the same thing. They would achieve or fail in one thing and then it was on to the next with something to prove.
Are we ever content? I’m not sure if it’s an entrepreneurial trait, a mid-life characteristic, an MBA grad fate, or something else. But as I continue to tweet about and reach out to my contacts about finding a good home for Babble Soft, I find myself turning to music as I have often done in the past during times of transition. There’s something about music that pulls out the emotions in me and lets me process them in a way that can’t be processed in silence or even with close friends.
Since I started taking yoga last year, I’ve seen the benefits of certain meditation and quiet times but music – the combination of words and instruments – pushes buttons in me that make it OK to to feel things that intellectually my mind tells me not to feel. The mind just says focus on this task, get it done, and move on. The mind doesn’t want to be bothered with stuff that affects the heart and soul. Music reminds me that to be human is to feel because other humans are singing about their life transitions and it reminds me how kind of normal some of these feelings are. And sometimes we need to give ourselves the space to feel and really listen to what our body is telling us instead of just our minds to make the best decisions. Instead of feeling isolated in silence or the sometimes deafening noise of two kids incessant chatter, music brings me softly into the river of humanity.
So some of the music I’ve been listening to lately is by Billy Joel (hence the title of this post), Indigo Girls, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson (mostly because of his recent death), Sarah McLachlan, and oddly enough Book of Love.
A friend recently introduced me to the sounds of Lisa Lynne Mathis. What a voice! Her music and lyrics are obviously inspired from deep within her. My favorite song on her new CD Hancock Place is called The Anchor. I didn’t realize until I read her reason for writing the song that it was inspired by a friend of hers who survived the tsunami in Sri Lanka. Since I was born in Sri Lanka, I now understand why that song resonates so much with me. Another song on that CD is Comfort Zone, her muscial interpretation of what having children (two daughters) has meant to her…the raw, pure feelings that are a part of being a parent…and how our kids often pull us out of our comfort zone.
So on this Memorial Weekend in between parties, BBQs, and get togethers with friends & family, let’s remember our soldiers in Iraq and all over the world. We wish them a safe return to their families, children, and friends. Whether you agree with the war or not our soldiers are there fighting for what they have been told to fight for…fighting for what they believe is right to fight for. Let’s make sure we do not ignore them “when the cameras are off” and that we are available to serve as their Anchor when and if they return.
I saw a play/musical called The Drowsy Chaperone this past Friday with some friends at a local Austin theater called Zach (if you click that link you can even see a short video) and it was very good. The narrator was hilarious. He is an obviously gay guy who was married once but now is alone in his apartment listening to old vinyl records, one of which is of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. He intervenes during the performance with his opinions of each scene with great commentary from his life experience. He is so excited about the musical, where most of the cast end up marrying each other (i.e., 4 weddings take place at the end), but also sad and lonely about his situation about not finding the right person to be with. Actors to me seem to be entrepreneurs, selling themselves for each show in the hopes of getting cast. I’m guessing that unless you are on Broadway in New York, acting is a tough life financially.
I wonder where the dads are in these animated movies?!
(Amazon link). At the bottom of this post is a video of one of her new songs called “Loving You Is Easy,” which is probably the most upbeat song that I’ve heard from her. She says “It was based on a new relationship, and on hope and excitement and the fact that it is possible to feel this way again. I didn’t think I could. It was about the thrill of possibility and, quite frankly, lust.“ She said she is 42 and that she’s going to have “fun” tattooed on her arm because she’s determined to have more of it! She also said (and I agree) that “Writing about happiness and giddy love is tricky. It’s not as easy to write about as sadness and heavier things….happiness is quite fleeting. It’s very light and it’s not something that you can pinpoint.”
I’m on a winning streak! Not only did I just 
