The best job I ever had

It’s been a pretty stimulating month so far:

From front to back that’s Anita, Floey, Moi, my sister Cheryl, and Ray at the Cougars game. My niece Janet took the picture.

• August 1: A lot of talented writers attended my Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, and now I can look forward to reading their memoirs once they’re published!
• August 2: Sat in on Kevin Davis’ two-hour workshop at the writer’s conference. My neighbor Margaret was at the conference, too, and on our walk home together we talked about all the new ideas we have now to make the characters we write about come alive.
• August 3: Took a commuter train to the suburbs with Whitney to join family members for a Kane County Cougars baseball game. Renowned baseball organist Nancy Faust has been playing for Sunday afternoon home games for the Cougars ever since retiring from her White Sox gig in 2008, and my friend Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Operations for the Cougars. So of course Amy set us up with a row of tickets right in front of Nancy — we could actually turn around, name a song, and have Nancy play it instantly on her Hammond B3. I requested Stevie Wonder’s “I wish” and marveled at how she nailed the bass part on the organ’s foot pedals. She played a UB40 tune for my niece Janet, a song from Beauty and the Beast for Floey, and even managed to honor five-year-old Raymond’s request:“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
• August 4: Put together a post for my part-time job moderating the Easter Seals blog in the morning, hopped on a CTA bus with Whitney to lead my Monday memoir-writing class in Lincoln Park in the afternoon, then put on a fancy dress and headed to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The opening reception for the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) conference was in the lobby there, Mike came along with me, and few things make me happier than being on the arm of a handsome man and having wait staff come around with teeny-tiny unidentifiable concoctions for me to try. Heaven.
  

  That’s me and the legendary baseball organist Nancy Faust. (Cub fans, that’s what a World Series ring looks like.)

• August 5: Our panel at the LEAD conference about the challenges and successes in accessing arts programs if you can’t see was a hit, but that was no surprise — I had Sally Cooper (Volunteer Coordinator at Blind Service Association here in Chicago) and George Abbott (Director of the eLearning Center at the American Foundation of the Blind in New York) at my side! At lunch afterwards I had the good fortune to be seated next to some very fun people from the Pittsburgh Arts Council, and now, who knows, maybe Whitney and I will be heading out there sometime to give presentations and check out the Pittsburgh art scene.
• August 6 & 7 Led my Wednesday and Thursday memoir-writing classes and made some progress on the book I’m writing about all I learn from the writers in those classes . Their topic for next week is “The Best Job I Ever Had,” and after reviewing everything that went on this week, I’d have to say that, hands down, the best job I’ve ever had is the one I have right now. Who could ask for anything more?