Remembering the "Boss"

We all call her “Boss,” for that is her name. No, like literally, Sister Bossard is her name. But the meaning behind the endearing moniker is far deeper than just her legal surname; she seriously is just soooo boss. She’s so cool. So hip. Absolutely everyone who knew her here on earth loved the bejeebers outta her, and I am honored to say that I am one of those bejeeber lovers. She was my college professor — a vocal coach of mine. And indeed I do declare that she was my most favorite vocal coach that I ever had up there in the Gem State, as a music minor.

College was kind of a long time ago; it’s kind of a blur now. As I’m sitting here, I’m trying to piece together the timeline of my musical journey as far as my four-year university experience is concerned. Besides the vital academic requirements I had to accomplish in order to obtain my Bachelor’s degree, and besides my library job, my church callings, my social life, my sports-official duties, and my extracurricular leadership responsibilities, I filled much of my time with on-campus musical performance.

Before I go back to the beautiful topic of Boss, allow me to describe a portion of my aforementioned timeline that features highlight after highlight of what, to me, were outstanding and incredibly fun musical opportunities. I don’t know how I got to be one of the lucky students who snatched all these ops, but I’m not displeased about it at all. First thing first, I auditioned for a show called Grand Pianos Live and made it onto the program. I played and sang a song from Toy Story 2 called “When Somebody Loved Me.” For the performance I was dressed up like the cowgirl Jessie, with braided hair, plaid shirt, cowgirl hat and everything. It was all so much fun.

Not too long after that, I somehow ended up being in the Broadway Revue. (Contrary to what was popular belief, it wasn’t supposed to be spelled “Broadway Review,” and I was the one who put my foot down and told the advertisers to start spelling it correctly on the posters…or else, hahaha.) I was Christine Daae from Phantom of the Opera, my friend Bubba was the Phantom, and he in his white mask and I in my great dress sang a spectacular duet together. I hit the flippin’ high note at the end of the song (I still can’t believe it) and the crowd roared in delight.

And then I auditioned for Guitars Unplugged with my two gal friends, and we made it into the preliminary show, got a swarm of affirmative votes, and we moved on to the “Best Of” show. I didn’t know how to play guitar, so I played the “drums” on a huge plastic trash can, while I left the guitar work to my friends. We graced the student body with some smooth Collective Soul. The ginormous crowd roared again.

The same two friends and I tried out for Guitars Unplugged again the next semester. Made it into the preliminary show. We were on a high. I was on a high. We were prepped to make it into Best Of again. Didn’t happen, though. Wah.

Then I tried out for Grand Pianos Live again. Didn’t make it in.

Then I tried out for a community fireside choir. Didn’t make it in.

Then I tried out for a top-notch collegiate choir. Didn’t make it in. Now that one broke my heart.

And then I met Boss.

Upon my meeting her for the first time, I felt like I was in a phunky phase where I was fallen from off a horse. I felt like I had been rejected so many times from things that I thought I really wanted to do. I felt like I was continually being denied chances to chase dreams. But soon I realized that those were flimsily frivolous dreams that would hardly affect my destiny.

The longer I ponder my knowing Boss, the more I get to thinkin’ that Boss did affect my destiny. I honestly think she did — very subtly, but I’m pretty sure that’s the case.

What she did was help me hop back onto my horse. She helped me gain a solid understanding that singing is for fun. It’s not solely a talent to be possessed that can land you glamorous minutes in the limelight. Infinitely more importantly, singing is for the soul. That’s what Boss explained to me through her kind n’ krazy words and example.

Of course, I knew that I loved to sing because I loved to sing. I mean, I knew that I loved to sing because it made me feel good inside. But I think, during that most recent chapter in my life — the chapter that was chock full of seeming “rejection” and “dejection” — I was failing to remember the true reason why I loved to cultivate my instrument. Boss was placed on my life’s pathway to remind me of my reason. Every meeting with her was full of fun. It was full of her raving about the gloriousness of Linda Eder. It was full of her benevolently and enthusiastically encouraging me to just simply be my best and do my best as I aimed high to constantly achieve my best.

She didn’t emphasize on having me stress over mastering meticulous vocal techniques. (In fact, lots of times that method of teaching is counterproductive with me. Back in the day, after I had already been practicing piano for 11 years, I quit lessons because the meticulous “mastering” was really starting to hinder my progress. While at the last piano lesson I ever was a pupil in, the piece-in-study was a challenging Chopin valse. I kept on not being able to get the hang of the song, because I was so stressed about impressing my teacher. A couple of weeks after I quit, however, I sat back down at the piano, pulled out the same song, and played it stupendously. Anywaysss…)

Anyway, so yeah, the laid-back and gentle (yet ultra-riotously hilarious) way that Boss taught her students was just what the doctor ordered for me. It helped me to earnestly admire my instrument for what it was and to take good care of it. Boss’s coaching methods aided all her students in gaining (or, in my case, regaining) confidence. I know I said earlier that she indirectly helped me, in the personal secret corners of my heart and mind, to not sweat over not snagging all the spotlight slots I desired. But she did seem to see something special in me that was apparently worthy of a shot of singing in a fancy NATS Recital (National Association of Teachers of Singing). After a somewhat long while, Boss helped me hop back onto the horse of standing up and singing in front of an audience again. For the Recital, she had wanted to know if I’d like to perchance take one of her favorite Linda Eder songs and perform that? In my mind, I was like No, because I still have no clue who Linda Eder even is, hehehe… I’m sure she’s great, but… “I think I’d like to do my favorite Josh Groban song.” She smiled and liked the idea, and I ended up singing “Remember When It Rained.” Best solo I had ever given in my lifetime. As what happened back in my “glory days” on campus, the crowd tastefully roared (tastefully, due to the environment). And I smiled. And felt great. And silently thanked Boss for helping me feel happy in my element again.

I once said in this post that Boss affected my “destiny.” I feel like my destiny, as far as music goes, is more visible now than it ever used to be. I’m not 100% positive that what I’m doing right now musically is what my full-blown destiny is, but it sure is a dreamy dream come true. It’s a dream in which I get to sing because I love to sing, and I love to sing with the people I sing with, and I get to help bless people all over the globe with the work we do. I couldn’t ask for a neater nor sweeter opportunity than this one that I’ve got.

I have a boatload of amazing people in my circles of friends who specifically have helped me recognize my talents and dedicate myself to developing them. I am forever thankful for these terrific men and women, and Boss is definitely numbered among them. As of yesterday, she's gone on to heaven to be with her God and her dear husband again, and to reclaim her star-performer place in the angelic choir. She will be deeply missed, but she also will be fondly remembered as one of the best friends that any of us Boss-fans have ever had.

25 Ways You Can Know for Sure that You're Tall and/or Gangly

How can you know for sure that you’re tall and gangly? Well, since I'm an expert, I can teach you. Here are 25 signs that all point in that direction:

1. You’ve stood in the back row of every elementary school class photo since you were old enough to internalize the fact that the comma comes after every third digit in a written-out number (100,000,000,000,000,000 = aka “one hundred quadrillion”).

2. You somehow always seem to be the person geographically on the far-left or far-right of a group photo with your friends, and all the rest of your friends are shorter than you, and your natural tendency is to pose in a leaning-inward stance, and then you look at the photo after it is developed or “posted,” and you’re like, It is definitely possible that I could’ve looked slightly less awkward in this picture. Next time, remind me to insist on standing in the center, and all the shorties can just gather around me.

3. You can mount a horse just as masterfully as Legolas does in the Lord of the Rings movies – every time.

4. You cannot find pants long enough for your incredible inseam in any physical store anywhere; online is your only hope.

5. All pants in the stores are capris on your body.

6. You are frequently asked if you can please reach something from a high shelf or cupboard, OR you are asked if you perchance have the ability to reach waaaaaay far down behind the couch or waaaaaay far back underneath the couch to retrieve a stray-yet-not-unimportant small object, and you’re like, Have you seen these arms of mine? With these arms, I am the superhero you seek. Hashtag: Ganglyness FTW.

7. Virtually every long-sleeve shirt within any given 15-mile radius of you would be three-quarter-length shirts if you were to try them on.

8. You sometimes can sport a killer block when you play front row during volleyball games, if you aren’t a killer vball player already, which you can be – follow your dreams (if vball is your dream)!

9. Your wingspan is longer than you are tall. You are a wide rectangle in this way.

10. Speaking of your wingspan, it legitimately is practically as long as Team USA swimmer Michael Phelps’s wingspan is, and his wingspan is crazay babay.

11. You can’t touch your toes. Hashtag: Fail.

12. You can’t successfully sit down on the ground in the form of the letter “L,” where your core, shoulders, neck, and head are the Y axis, and your legs are the X axis. You can’t keep your legs straight, close together, and flat upon the floor whilst simultaneously keeping your upper body perfectly vertical. Maintaining—let alone acquiring—a perfect geometric right angle at the point where your Y and X axes meet is utterly impossible. This is the problem of people who are all leg and no torso.

13. Your younger, less-mature self has been irked multiple times when you saw your super tall crushes pursue and date girls who were vertically challenged in major ways. You felt gypped, and you felt the pain of all your fellow tall gal friends who also had crushes on tall guys who chased the short chicks. You’re grown up and past that angst now. Hopefully. Maybe.

14. Every now and then you feel self-conscious about your height, but then your friends who are not as tall as you rave about how much they wish they could be as beautifully tall as you. Your height is stunningly radiant! Fact!

15. You tend to duck a little bit when you find yourself in restroom stalls or wardrobe-changing stalls whose walls appear to be – um – insufficient.

16. You hit your head on the car ceiling when you get in and out. Hashtag: Owiiiiieeeee!!! Mommyyy!!!

17. A plethora of pointless human tricks are cinchily accomplishable by you, due to those squid tentacles that you endearingly call “limbs.”

18. When you do a handstand, you are 10 feet tall.

19. When you try to dance hip hop, you actually just look like a … well … a squid.

20. You have something in your hand that a kid – or even a grown adult – wants to swipe from your hand, and all you have to do is raise your arm straight up, and immediately the struggle is over. Unless they begin to wrestle you. Then you’d better pray you have buff muscles.

21. Two words: slam dunks. Unless u ain’t skilld like dat.

22. Remember in junior high and high school when the dress code was such that if you wanted to wear shorts, they had to be “fingertip length”? Yeah, well, then my shorts always went to my knees.

23. Your nicknames, when you were a kid, included “Jolly Green Giant” and “Big Bird.” In my life, my favorite was “The Alisaurus Rex.”

24. Your legs dangle off the edges of motel beds.

25. If you are a gal, you are intensely careful when it comes to deciding when to wear platforms or heels. Especially if you are on a date with a guy who is precisely your height or ever-so-slightly shorter. What if you are in heels and you want to kiss him or he wants to kiss you? Suggestion: smooch while sitting down.

When You Feel Like You Want *Their* Great Skills, While Forgetting Your Own Great Skills (nunchuck skillz...computer hacking skillz...)

It’s easy for us to compare ourselves with other people, isn’t it? Yeah, I think it is. And I wonder if what I’m going to say here will be edifying to anyone who reads this. I’m going to say it anyway, in case it does come across as helpful.

I’ve been a “yuppy” for a long time (I think “yuppie” is how you’re supposed to spell it, but “yuppy” looks better to me because “puppy” is a word and “puppie” isn’t). For those of you who don’t already know, the word “yup” is an acronym for “young urban professional(s).” Well, it means “yes” too, but in this case, please think of it as the acronym. And also please think of it as somewhat a term of endearment, or at least as something with a positive connotation, because even if it may sound like I’m calling my friends mean names, I’m really not. To be a yup is a good thing.

All my yuppy friends range from being anything from pilots to party planners to professors. They each have their own distinct occupation. I have mine. I love mine. I love the things I know and know how to do in order to succeed at my job. But sometimes I catch myself looking at all my yuppy friends and wishing I knew what they know, and longing to know how to do the things they know how to do.

For example, I have boatloads of lawyer friends and schoolteacher friends. Sometimes when we’re socializing together, and I hear them introduce themselves to people who don’t know them and don’t yet know what they do for a living, I’ll hear them explain their livelihoods, and for some funny reason it almost makes me want to say “I’d give my arm and leg to be a lawyer or schoolteacher!” because their jobs sound so rewarding, and those are the types of jobs that, to me, seem so elite in their own elements. Personally, I feel like it takes really special types of people to be downright decent lawyers and teachers of integrity, like my friends are, and whenever I gander at people like that, I’m kind of in awe, and I think, Wouldn’t it be nice if I could be just like them?

I also think it would be awesome to know how to be a great graphic designer, museum curator, whale trainer (yes, that was my dream as a child), actor, or astronaut. I don’t know how to be excellent at any of these careers that I’ve mentioned. But even though I think it would be “nice” if I did know how to be any or all of those things… If I did know how to be all that, honest-to-goodness that would mean I would have to actually practice and keep practicing all those things so that I could stay sharp-as-a-tack in all those professional fields.

Ain’t nobody got time for dat. Not in this mortal life, anyway. Maybe in the eternities.

Why, if we knew how to be all those things (all the things that we daydream about someday becoming amazing at), and if we somehow had the time to practice all those things, we wouldn’t have time during our days to sleep, drink, shower, eat food, or have hobbies. The only phrase we would ever want to utter is “please lead me to the nearest guillotine.”

My current opinion is that it’s important to remember that we each have something that we’re quite good at. More like somethings. Chances are that every one of us has probably more than one valuable skill that somebody else we know wishes they had, every time they look at us. The valuable skills I’m talking about can be both vocational and interpersonal.

The reason why I think this is because I’ve told people before that I’ve noticed fabulously kind and exceptional traits about them, and then I’ve turned around and attempted to develop those traits, because I think they’re all-round stupendous traits for any human being to have. This is largely why I try to be better today than I was yesterday: because there’s some role model whom I look up to, whose footsteps in which I’d like to follow. After all, that’s the reason why we have each other as loved ones: so that we can help each other to positively grow and become better.

So those were the interpersonal skills that I wrote about in that paragraph you just read. Now, back to the vocational ones for a moment.

Whenever I start down that road again, about how I wish I could know and do what a lawyer or schoolteacher knows and does…and thus mentally walking towards a place where I don’t think I have all too many skills and services to offer, simply because I’m not a lawyer or teacher like them…I snap out of it!! And I begin remembering all the times when someone asked me to help them learn something particular, because they knew I was the best person they could think of who could help them.

I’ll never forget the day when I heard musical notes floating out of an open door, and I casually walked into that room because I was curious, and lo and behold I found a friend of mine perched on a piano bench, plunking out a hymn from the hymnal. I had just come in to say hi, but he humbly asked me if I would be so kind as to help him learn to not only play the song, but to read music in general. To paraphrase, he said it was serendipitous that it was I who walked in, because he knew that I was someone who could assist him. I sat down next to him, and it turned out to be a terrific music lesson.

I remember that that is not the only experience I’ve had in my life where someone sought my expertise. And I bet that all of us have had experiences like that. It’s those moments that tickle me pink in a humble sort of way, because I’m like, Really? You’re asking me to mentor you? I dunno, it’s just kinda touching when you are the person that someone else is looking up to, and turning to for guidance.

Anyway, so all I’m really trying to say here is that every one of you—every one of us—has commendable skills and gifts that are positively helpful to other people. Everyone has a magnificent intelligence and spirit that is capable of learning, growing, and developing traits that can benefit the world. The key is keep on keepin’ on, to remember that we all are full of infinite worth, to be patient in learning, to be excited about learning, to be cheerfully productive, to be continually striving to nurture the brightly wonderful human characteristics that we find in others, and if we do all of this, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to recognize the goodness and greatness that we contribute to the earth and to mankind.

Kind of reminds me of that Andy Grammer song… “you gotta keep your head up, oooohhhh, and you can let your hair down, eeeehhhh.” That’s a good one.

Once When Alison Was in Paris (Homemade "Mad Gab")

Here's a mind game for you. Are you able to read this story?

Wants sup pawn gnat thyme, Iowa’s wok king grrrrr owned in France – Paris, to be exact. Jardin du Luxembourg, to be even exacter. Iowa’s ought tempting two disc hover wear ache reaps tan ‘twas, bee cause sigh was so vary, vary hung gray.

Sum won whose poke English shooed me where the nearest stand was, hand die forever was crate full too that purse sun. Awn my weight toothy cart o’ crepes, a handsome Frenchman stopped me, hand die was like, “Ooo la la,” boot tie was also like, “Oh know! Eye dew knot no how too talk French whiff few!” Buoy oh buoy how eye whish shy cooed talk French whiff him, though.

Boot heed deed knot whish two wisp hers wheat nothings tomb me, though. Tall, muscular, handsome Frenchman hone lead D’s hired two pairs wade me two munch on feud in the beast row where he was a wait tore. He pole lightly add rest me in his bee you tea full language. Want sire eel hazed that he bee leaved eye was joust ton other calm un-French speaker, afros up and my jaw locked up, hand died id knot no watt twos hay, obviously, bee cause eyed id knot no how to talk French, hand needle lest whose hay, eye was off righted, sew eyed id dints hey anything. Eye justice mile Dan walked away. Whale, eye pole lightly shook my head Dan den walked away.

Boo hoo! Why dew eye knot no how two talk French? He was joust a wader, boutique cooed half bean the loaf of my life! Blast yew, native tongue!

French wood of cumin handy a bout twin team in it’s later, win eye was standing in line for the public water closet near the Jardin. Their wassail lady of seasoned age who was standing in front of me in the line. She was short, whiff white hair, where ring lasses. Sheet urn duh round and shift header ryes sup word tomb meat mine. And then she’s Polk. In French. Hers was an interrogative statement, but naturally eyed id knot no watt she was trynna ask. Sew eye justice mile Dan oozed body language in a manor that translated into, “I’m sorry, I have know idear watt your saying tomb me.”

And that was that.

And that’s all eye half twos hay about that.