This is a Blog about the way that Einstein has changed how we experience the world. It is being composed in collaboration with talented students from Ewha Woman's University. I am calling my blog The Big Bang because we have started this workshop with a big bang and our universe is expanding exponentially every day.This is also a blog about my interactions and reactions to the work of these participant artists from Korea. I have asked them to keep a Blog in English about their work during these three weeks. You can find links to their blogs at a listing created by the students using my MacBook Pro posted at the workshop website.
In their first blogs, I asked them to tell me about themselves. There are 40 participants from Ewha, and this will help me to get to know them better. I also asked them to post pictures of themselves on their blogs. I promised to also Blog about myself in some way as to reveal something of my involvement in the arts.
I told them in class that in my very early days in Amarillo, Texas, my first love was baseball. Summer was spent playing baseball. My sister, who was 9 years older than me, was the artist, a really talented pianist. However, I would sneak times at the piano to improvise and soon was getting around the piano as though I had taken lessons.
Some of my teammates decided they could build their strength and skills by taking dance lessons that the local dance studio called The Dixie Dice Dance Studio. We went in the afternoons and on Saturdays where Dixie would teach us tap dance and ballet. I advanced rather rapidly. Dixie Dice's one claim to fame was that she had taught Cyd Charisse, who had become one of he greatest dance stars in film playing in movies with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and many others. Dancing did increase my strength and I began to do tap routines that were very much like Donald O'Conner. He often played the buddy of Gene Kelly and could tap toward a wall, leap against the wall and flip over in the middle of a dance. I got to where I could do that also. Dixie was really impressed. All of this occurred when I was about 9/10 years old. Dixie Dice wanted to take me to Hollywood where (she told my Dad) I could become a big child star. My Dad would have none of it. I guess that career is happening in some parallel universe!About that time I was also publishing neighborhood newspapers, and then became editor of the Junior High School newspaper. I was sent on my own to the BIG CITY (Topeka,Kansas) to a journalism conference. While there, I saw a film that changed my life: An American in Paris. The film title was based on George Gershwin's symphonic poem, and the film used Gershwin songs and his Concerto in F as well. After the film I went back to the hotel in a daze. I took the elevator up to the penthouse and the doors opened o
n a deserted ballroom with a grand piano by a huge window revealing the city skyline. I went to the piano and began to improvise, playing for hours. From that point on I became a composer, composing musicals that were produced by the high school and by the city theatre. I would write, compose and dance in them (See An American in Paris for one of the greatest ballets created as part of a musical show.) So I began with baseball, to dance, to journalism, to composition, to dance! At this point that seems to be in some parallel universe of long ago.
