Terrified Arts

I did not anticipate how facilitating this creative space would be.

When the logistics of driving to music schools to teach became cumbersome, I chose to start and run a small pottery instead. Greatness is born of insanity?

Out of necessity, I moved my clarinets into a loft office so I could practice after hours. (I never had any intention of not performing, and that takes practice). Then out of too much wine, I agreed to join our town’s arts commission, because I had so much free time? And one day we moved in a piano because I got a text in the middle of the afternoon that there was a piano out on the road a couple miles away.

Because Mme Plinky doesn’t go up stairs, she sits in a carved out rehearsal space on the main floor of this beautiful 1885 building in historic Stafford Springs. I’ve occasionally hosted open chamber rehearsal events in coordination with our Main Street and Arts Commission events, and I discovered that the acoustics here are delightfully and serendipitously good. It’s now become the home base of Terrified Tango.

So each day I arrive at ESP, clean up some of the mess from the day before, set some things in motion (the espresso maker), and spend my first hour arranging the song du jour. After the work day, I practice and tweak the morning’s arranging, do one last swing around the studio, or head out to a rehearsal, and then find a couch and a cat and some streaming video.

As long as there’s coffee, I’ve never found the need to confine my work to one discipline, and the interesting result is to see how it all winds and twists together. I may get a little cranky during especially busy seasons, but I am never bored or out of ideas.