Thursday Interlude:The Day Before... Friday

It's been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown... Wait a minute. I'm not Garrison Keillor. Actually, it's been a busy week in Reston, Virginia, for staffers at MENC. For many of us the week has been filled with deleting computer files and emails and clearing obsolete stuff out of our mail room.

Also we have had some music educators in the building who are judging CDs submitted by music groups who want to perform at the MENC Biennial Conference in Milwaukee in 2008. When you walk past various closed doors you hear orchestras, or jazz bands or choral groups singing and playing, kind of a nice punctuation to the day. I am glad I don't have to pick, though. With my untrained ear every snippet of music I heard sounded great.

In addition to that inadvertent eavesdropping, for me it's a been a week of finishing up September Music Educators Journal news pages, making final edits on the August Teaching Music online news. That and saying goodbye to ARN, our stellar government affairs guru and fellow blogger, who is leaving tomorrow. She is one of those people who is really good at what she does but is fun to work with too. Oh, well. she knows we wish her well in her new life north of here, despite the fact that we will miss her. CW has been named to replace her and I know he will do a great job in her stead.

We did have some really good news recently that I wanted to share with you. MENC won a Bronze Telly Award for the 2006 edition of The World's Largest Concert, featuring The Oak Ridge Boys, which also helped to raise money for Feed the Children.
Nicole M. Springer, a project manager on the MENC staff, was Executive Producer of The 2006 World's Largest Concert. We are so proud of the award and that Nicole's hard work was recognized

According to the Telly web site, the Telly Awards "recognize distinction in creative work," honoring outstanding local and regional television commercials and productions, as well as non-broadcast video productions."

I will be on vacation next week. My son is playing in an out- of-town baseball tournament near a beach area next week, so my husband and I are tagging along.

Hope summer is going well for you. You should be seeing the August issue of Teaching Music soon if you haven't all ready. Look for my special two page section on the National Anthem Project Grand Finale in the news. And the August online news with additional content will be up shortly,at www.menc.org/news where you can link to the the special National Anthem Grand Finale section. DP has worked really hard on the Web stuff and the sections look great.

Ta Ta For Now
RF