It fits right now that spring pushes out new birth and renewal. The weight of the present proves more telling than any end-of-year wish or resolution. Backed up by the call of summer, spring let’s you visualize beyond any immediate context of events.
The young ones typify a continual recycling of practice and motion. This week, on Friday at the Count Basie Theatre, Rockit For Kids, showed they aren’t just a casual experiment of high-schoolers trading riffs in between text messages after school. Given a chance to kick around music they love with good mentorship, they make themselves stars for a night each time they play out. It’s a far cry from playing the local high school dance ala 1977 to half-interested peers who wander in from the train station in very uncertain frames of mind….
Group founder and director Bruce Gallipani pieces together a setlist of classic and new rock that satisfies a widely-mixed crowd of listeners. It’s probably the only time you’ll see a seventy-year-old sitting next to an eleven year-old getting their ears blown out at a rock show cranking decibels through a stack of Marshall and Fender amps.
T.J. Bent scowls through a version of Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” while brother Matt plays drums.
Rockit For Kids played to a crowd of 700+ at Red Bank’s historic Count Basie Theatre.
Slightly northward on 67th and York, one day earlier, I had a slice of my own renewal amplified by the doctor named Moskowitz on the fourth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Six years clean, head still above ground and every reason to say, living does rock.
And today, a gift dropped in my lap. Randy Pausch joins Leroy Sievers on my short list of modern day heroes. Sievers, a former Washington journalist is likely dying from metastatic colon cancer. Pausch’s fate is more imminent as he lives through pancreatic cancer. Sievers’ daily blog is the story of a man not willing to give up just yet; his daily missives help thousands of readers. Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon is busy leaving a legacy for his young kids with lectures and several television appearances, most notably a one-hour program with Diane Sawyer on ABC. Some of it is the expected syrup that drips into a network TV piece, but the powerful stuff comes through.
They, like many close people around me, are inspirations for realignment, reminders to watch the occasional slip into the cracks, beacons of spring.
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