Category Archives: Elseblog

Dog Days of Podcasting: Sunday Brunch – Mail Call

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letterboxes-615

Is it technically Sunday Brunch if I record it at 6:30 PM? Do I really care? The answer to both questions is NO!

The piece itself is the Sunday Brunch piece from 26 August 2012. You can read it, listen to it on SoundCloud, or play it in the applet below.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/107216257″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Dog Days of Podcasting

Dog Days of Podcasting: Taps and The Trumpet of the Swan

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Dog Days of Podcasting

I hate “Taps.” I hate the way the song makes me feel, and I hate that this lovely piece of music is forever linked with death. I even wrote a Sunday Brunch piece about it, as part of a tribute to a recently departed friend.

Today, though, I rambled about “Taps” in a new way – I associated it with the E. B. White children’s novel The Trumpet of the Swan.

You can listen my ramblings at SoundCloud or play it via the applet below.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/105466011″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Dog Days of Podcasting: Medium Monday – In the Starbucks Doorway

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Dog Days of Podcasting

Happy Monday.

Today’s entry for DDoP is a reading of my first piece from Medium, “In The Starbucks Doorway”, which I originally posted there back in May.

You can listen to it at SoundCloud, or play it in the applet below.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/105174438″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Dog Days of Podcasting: Sunday Brunch – Isn’t It Pretty?

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Dog Days of Podcasting

Every other Sunday, I write a column called “Sunday Brunch” for the ezine All Things Girl. Regular readers of this site have seen me link to it before.

Today, for my DDoP entry, I picked the Sunday Brunch entry from 17 February 2013, and recorded it, with a bit of extemporaneous book-ending.

You can listen to the recording at SoundCloud or play it in the applet below.

If you want to read the original column, you can find it here.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/104966247″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Sunday Brunch: Cello Hands

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My latest Sunday Brunch piece, “Cello Hands” is up at All Things Girl. music6_by_KarpatiGabor_via_MorgueFileAn excerpt is below, but you can read the whole thing here: Sunday Brunch: Cello Hands.

I knew what a cello was, of course, because when I was much younger (five or six) I’d been gifted with a copy of Captain Kangaroo’s album of “Peter and the Wolf,” where he introduces all the orchestral instruments and tells you what characters they represent. (To this day the bassoon reminds me of a happy, sloppy, drunk man, but that’s another story.) “Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

Now, while nine may seem incredibly young and innocent to the average adult, it’s actually a pretty advanced age at which to start learning music, especially for stringed instruments. I’d always been a singer, and I could pick things up pretty quickly, and knew that a quarter note was short and a whole note was long, but this was different. This wasn’t me picking out melodies on my grandmother’s ancient, out-of-tune-except-in-summer-when-the-humidity-made-the-cracked-soundboard-sound-intact piano. This was learning how to think in a whole new language, and literally see the music and then be able to make it.

Sunday Brunch: Heroes, Villains, and Loss – Excerpt

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reflectionthroughabugle_by_markcoffey_via_istockphoto

Reflection Through a Bugle by Mark Coffee via iStockPhoto.com – Click to embiggen

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Earlier this week, I found out that a good writing buddy lost his battle to cancer a few months ago. He was a veteran, and an amazing writer, and so I talked a lot about him.

Excerpt:

Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh — Falls the night.

Like many people, however, especially those of us with family, friends, or loved ones serving in the military, “Taps” has a more emotional context. It’s the bugle call you hear at funerals, and once you’ve heard it in that setting you never lost that connection. For me, the tears come, mostly for my grandfather, but for a string of others as well, from the very first note.

This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, “Taps” is playing on an infinite loop in my head.

Why? Because I found out recently that a dear friend, a military veteran who survived a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, then a year in Kabul with the National Guard, lost his last battle, one with that insidious enemy we call “cancer,” in February.

His name was Mike Greene, but I knew him best by the handle he used on OpenDiary (an early blogging platform that existed before LiveJournal or Blogger): WarriorPoet.

You can read the entire post here: http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/05/sunday-brunch-heroes-villains-and-loss/.

In the Starbucks Doorway

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Rainy Morning

My friend Debra invited me to Medium last month, but it took me til late last night to write anything there, and then, I waited til this morning to take it live.

Here’s an excerpt:


The pattern of this visit was similar to most others: I bantered with my barista, who commented on the color of my hair that week, asked how my writing was going, mentioned she’d bought tickets to my improv troupe’s show the next week. I spent a few minutes people-watching (a father and his teen daughter were both absorbed with their cell phones, two teens were on a very awkward first date, a table of young women was engaged in animated conversation), and then, drink in hand, I made my way to the door.

~ Melissa A. Bartell, “In the Starbucks Doorway”

Read the rest here: “In the Starbucks Doorway” at Medium.com