It’s about starting over . com

This is the long awaited blog post. I’ve officially announced that I’ve been accepted to The Berklee College of Music in Boston (Hallelujah!) but the oft’ asked question is, “did they give you a scholarship?”

This year, around 7,000 budding musicians auditioned around the world to attend Berklee . Each one was considered for a scholarship that’s based solely on talent at first. Once a few are selected as being worthy, they then must prove financial need. The need is the final determining factor.

Out of the 7,000 (I hope I remember these numbers correctly), 30% were considered talented enough to be considered in the first round. That’s around 2,100 people. Out of these, 70% are weeded out in the second round. That leaves 630. This is the final selection group. I don’t remember the percentage that actually gets selected for some type of offer of talent-based scholarship, but it’s small. The top, most coveted scholarship, the Presidential Scholarship (covers all cost of attendence) is usually offered to only around 7 to 10 of the original 7,000. What’s that, 1/10th of 1%?

Oh, and BTW, the entire student body of Berklee at any given time numbers around 4,000. Yup, a LOT of people are turned away each year.

Scholarship selection process: What is talent?

So, I recently asked someone who is involved in the selection process exactly how this works. I was told that people are grouped into categories based on their main instrument. So all singers are in the vocal group, guitar players in the… well, you get it. Then, within each group, the most talented are identified. Then, the most talented from each group are compared to those from the other groups.

What is talent anyway? Continue Reading »

Hints of stories lie in the places where the broom doesn’t reach. Shards of dishes that slipped from hands, chunks of glasses dropped in shock, thrown in anger. They lie there as secrets, stories of the deeply shamed. Can anything ever clear them away? Do I want to clear them away?

If we walk there they pierce our feet, our bareness, and bury themselves in our flesh. Safe and uncaring in their proper place, they pain immense when we press on them. So we avoid them at all costs, treading lightly or not at all…and they fester.

They fester like the secrets that hide in those corners, away from eyes, questions, brooms.

My shards will out, one way or another, in song, poem, love, loss, illness…

And when they do, they will hurt again and again and again until finally, they fade like a vampire in the light of day and no longer are the primary colors of my being.

So I move the furniture and cupboards while listening to a Cheryl Wheeler tune (she has a way!) and gather the shards of memory, sweep them into the dustpan and throw them into the bin. Out is out.

My sweet kitten jumps onto my lap.

And now for something completely different…sort of.

Being a woman over the age of 50 who is faced with a certain predicament, and seeing as how I’m cooking up something….er…interesting…to get me out of it (which I’ll tell you about later), I thought I would Google “Women over 50″ to see if anyone is already doing what I’m cooking up. Reading what’s out there in the Internet is a great way of getting advice and it helps to spark ideas when making decisions regarding the “how” of it all. You might not be surprised at the search results, but I was.

The Internet is today’s great indicator, more so I think than any other media. Search results can give us a very good idea of what people are focusing on publicly, and certainly a very good idea of what people are talking about and what sells. Well, I guess search results can also give you an idea of how effective your search keywords are: If you get results that have nothing to do with what you’re searching for, it might be a good idea to choose different words.

Searching for women over 50

Searching for “Women over 50″ is both general and specific enough to give me a nice list of articles, blogs and sites, or so one would think. Here is a list of the suggested searches (a list of auto-completed searches that pops up when I enter the words into the Google search field–selecting one starts the search for that string of words). Continue Reading »