Scott's Last Concert

DCDD is a group I've been in for about 25 years now. I can't remember the exact date I started with the group, but it was my first attempt to learn how to be a gay man after college.

In college I had a group of friends who were mostly pretty accepting, but I had no gay friends that I knew about. so when I graduated and moved to DC, naturally one of the things I wanted most in my new life was to meet gay people and figure out what it meant to be gay. I had even had sex yet, except for the beginning of a drunken encounter with a professor that turned to a temporary disaster with me running out of his place....another time, another story.

My wonderful sister Genilee lived here in DC and I'd spent a summer between Sophmore and Junior years of college getting to know her (she's 7 years older than me.) She also wanted to help me meet more gay people and become comfortable with it....to the point where she and I went to Dupont Circle, found someone who looked obviously gay and followed them till they went into a bar, so we could find a gay bar. She went right in with me.....to Mr P's. In any case, she also encouraged me to join the band, so I did....I believe still in 1983.

I was fresh out of college as a euphonium major....so my playing was currently at it's highest level, probably ever. I joined a group of what I can only loosely describe at the time as musicians....the band sucked, frankly. And it sucked for years afterward as a musical organization...playing third grade music, badly and out of tune. We had conductors who didn't seem to really care to improve the group musically, treating the whole thing like a social organization. Because I was uncomfortable being around gay people, I would arrive at rehearsal just before it started, and RUN out the door as soon as it ended. I didn't stick around because I felt like I was intruding on a close-knit group. People who were in it in 1983 through probably 1990 wouldn't even remember me. I was like a ghost or a fly on the wall, and honestly felt like I never belonged. Gradually, I came out of my shell....but I didn't mean to go on about me.

So musically, the group stank and I was playing at such a high level that I was musically almost totally bored. And I was completely embarrassed to be heard so I never even thought about inviting anyone to a concert. I got no musical satisfaction out of playing stuff way below me....so after several years I decided to switch to an instrument that would at least challenge me a little. Gradually the level of the band both organizationally and musically crept up somewhat, once Glenn Cadoret became president. that was probably in the early 1990s. We had a series of good presidents, then good boards, and a few conductors that started to challenge us a little bit. We had no audience and a tiny band, but at least we produced some reasonable semblance to music. I was still pretty embarrassed by the group, and switched again at some point to French Horn....essentially just offering to play my instruments based on what the band was short on.

In 1998, we got a new Artistic Director....Scott Barker.

Right from the start could tell this guy was different in several ways from anyone else ever in that position. He saw possibilities that no one ever seemed to see before. He saw that although small, we had a core of good musicians. He saw that we were not stretching ourselves musically. He saw that we had no steady audience, and that our concerts were sort of like attending a wake. Go sit in a pew and don't interact and come out depressed. Honestly, there was absolutely no connection between the band and it's audience. We didnt' speak, didn't DO anything with the songs, didn't attempt to educate, or anything similar. We simply played like we did every week in rehearsal, only it happened to be in front of a disinterested, slightly embarrassed audience.

At times I thought Scott was crazy for trying some of the things he tried over the years, but I was wrong virtually every single time. Scott immediately had a profound impact on DCDD, and thankfully for us, he gave us 10 extremely high quality years of his energy and his vision. He connected like no one ever had before him. He dragged the group forward, sometimes kicking an screaming at him, to places none of us even dreamed of when he started.

I had honestly given up on ever getting much musical satisfaction out of DCDD. It had finally become a social group for me once I relaxed, one that happened to get together and throw instruments up in front of their faces for a couple of hours a week. I was still not asking anyone to concerts, was not proud of the group's performances. I guess I got some satisfaction out of my own musical growth as I became a decent trumpet player and French hornist.....and because we had so few others, I got lots and lots of solos and exposed parts. But the group was still rather embarrassing. I remember one year taking a take of our Christmas Concert with me to my parents in Texas. My sister Allyn also had joined a community band recently and brought a tape of her Christmas conert as well. When we played my tape, my sister started to laugh because it was SOOOOO bad. The tuning was just horrid.

I fully credit Scott Barker for completely changing DCDD. Sure he didn't do it alone, but he was the reason it happened. DCDD is, right now, not only not embarrassing, but a group that I am extremely proud to be in. Because Scott started to challenge us, and started to make our concerts into shows rather than wakes, starte to educate us and our audiences, started us playing music that truly challenged us, new musicians started to join and the level of quality started to rise. 10 years later, this is a group that can hold it's head high. We've played at the Kennedy Center, taken trips, and played before big audiences, gotten good reviews in the paper, etc. We've developed good relationships with other gay and lesbian groups like the men's chorus, that simply were not possible until we raised our game. We are a group that the gay and lesbian community is now proud of.....truly we used to be an embarrassment.

I have enormous respect for Scott. I'm very sad to see him go and I'm a little bit scared for the group. I want this to keep moving forward, but I know that it could fall apart again and more easily than people realize. I have faith that the organization is now pretty well run, and our new conductor has great possibilities. But we no longer have that linchpin that got us started.

I heard some rumblings that people had problems with Scott. He could be stubborn with his vision. People have their own opinions and people who were not here before truly don't understand what Scott brought to the table.

I didn't always agree with Scott or his vision....but not having my own clearcut vision and not really being much of a doer myself, I never grumbled about or to him (much) and tried to simply go along for the ride. I often got pretty disgusted with people, especially those idiots who thought we'd be better off without Scott. You people simply don't know what it was like before, and you don't realize that all it will take is a bad conductor who rubs people the wrong way and this group will lose all those good musicans quickly.

In any case I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you Scott. I wish the best for you and Dave and Eli. I'll miss you, both as conductor of the group and as a person. I respect you enormously and always will. I said in the program that I truly understood what you brought to DCDD, and I do.

Sports

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Ok...I'm a rare bird. I admit it. I'm a gay may who loves sports. While that's not probably that unusual considering all the gay jocks in the world, I'm rare because I never really played sports as a kid.

Oh I tried....played kid's minor league baseball when I was a peewee and I distinctly remember not being very co-ordinated or good. But I also remember that I didn't really care and it didn't matter. I was left field.....put him where no ball will ever go. And I couldn't hit. Another year I somehow became a catcher and had to wear an official cup. I was catcher for two kids who ended up being the star pitchers of the high school team. And me, scared of the ball and all...go figure.

After a couple of years you became too old for minors and went to major league....still kids. Suddenly everything changed...it mattered that I sucked. I was mocked and teased and basically tortured. My mother had this thing...."you start something, you stick with it till it's finished". So she refused to let me quit even though I knew on the 2nd day I wanted to.

In 7th grade, my skinny (and it turns out gay) best friend begged me to join basketball with him. Then he promptly quit after one rehearsal (oops, guess it's a practice...can you tell I'm a musician?)....leaving me stuck with my mother's rule. I lasted about a week, then quit without telling my mother for another month. She thought I went to practice every night after school....hehe.

Joined track in 8th grade. I actually just went to the coach and said "I do not want to be on the team, but i need to lose weight and would like to practice with them....is that ok?" He was totally cool with that, and I ended up going to every single meet and doing the shotput, discus and 400-yard plod. I sucked, but again, no one cared as they didn't expect me to score any points. I was the only person who practically got lapped in a 400-yard dash. Oh, when I finished with track....I was as fat as ever.

Did no other sports other than neighborhood stuff.

Oh wait, joined the golf team in high school...having never held a club. If you joined the team you got to play at the local par3 golf course (9 holes) for free. So I joined....I was 8th out of 10 on the team, not bad considering.

There's my life-long career with sports. Somehow I love them anyway....once I got out on my own I started reading the sports page...love the numbers, love the competition. My first real job at Schwartz Brothers was in Landham, with a whole lotta straight people. I won the football pool 8 times one season and the whole office was pissed...lol.

I bring this up because tonight is the 7th game of the hockey playoffs between the caps and the flyers. I'm a huge Caps fan and Ovechkin, Semin and Backstrom fan (hope I spelled those right.) It's on right now and Tivo is getting it for me....can't wait.

Oh yeah......there's one other reason I love sports....



yep, a gay man who loves to watch sports, and read about them....so sue me.

Man's Best Friend

A dog is truly a man's best friend. If you don't believe it, just try this experiment. Put your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car for an hour. When you open the trunk, who is REALLY happy to see you?

Spike's Boys....my first blog

Ok, I've been doing Spike's Boys for more than a year now, and often wondered if I should also write more.....I've injected a comment or two, but largely have not offered any opinions and have attempted not to clutter it up with text. That blog was started for two reasons.



First, my wonderful dog, Spike, had just recently been diagnosed with bladder cancer.....I was sitting around one day feeling wistful about Spike and looking for something to do on the computer.

Here's Spike

Second, I'd heard about this 'blog' phenonmenon, but really hadn't paid it that much attention, so I decided to poke around to see what was out there. Largely, what I found sort of bored me....musings from a lot of people that I didn't know or care about. I found several that were basically diaries, and a few that were people going through a trauma of their own, and writing about it for their own purposes....and to help anyone else who might happen upon it. I also found others that were about specific subjects, such as a particular TV show, sports, Brad Pitt, etc.


So on the spot, I decided a few things. I would start up a blog to learn how to do it and see if it's something that amused me enough to keep it up, would pick a subject that is easy to keep going, and I would dedicate it to Spike.



So....what interests me....what do I do mostly when I'm poking around on the net. Look for cute guys. I had a fairly sizable folder of pictures and porn I'd found on the net one way or another. Mostly I used it as a screensaver for my computer screens. So for my blog subject, I picked essentially, pictures of men. I hesitate to call it porn because if you spend any time on Spike's Boys, you'll see that there is not a ton of nudity or gratuitous sex. Oh, it's definitely there, but it is not my focus. My focus for that blog is simply men that I find extremely attractive in one way or another. It can be an Arm muscle, a face, something they are wearing, or just a gorgeous man. Each posting is themed to whatever amuses me that day, and I picked the overall theme of 'boys' to tie it together.


The theme of 'boys' has limited me a bit because I put that into the title of each posting, and coming up with new clever ones isn't easy. But I do my best to keep it interesting for myself, and now for others since some people seem to enjoy visiting (have had about 150k hits at this point.)

More limiting than the theme though was organization over time. I've now done about 125 postings in the last year and two months, and each posting is 15 pictures (blogspot lets you upload 5 at a time, and that seemed like a good number.) That's approaching 2000 pictures and I've done my best not to repeat. That became harder and harder over time, so now I'm in the process of moving my pics on my computer into 'used' subdirectories. I do a ton of surfing for new pics all the time, and I keep them somewhat organized by categorizing them as I find them into a subdirectory structure similar to the blog. That organization started when I started the blog (I already had several hundred pictures before starting it, all unorganized.)

Geez, I'm already boring MYSELF....

Ok, so who is Spike? To know Spike and his brothers, you have to hear a bit of history of me. I'm a 47 year-old gay man who has never truly been comfortable with himself. I'm sure I'll tell more of this another time, but essentially, when I was 29, I met two guys that had been a couple for 10 years, Jim and George. Eventually we started a threesome which lasted another 7 years before George and I split off on our own.

Jim and I started as friends and he did a lot for me as a person, but we had a terrible time because he brought out the arguer in me for some reason. By nature, I'm not argumentative at all, but for some reason, he and I fought like cats and dogs (and I almost never won an argument because he's GOOD at it.) For our first three years, I essentially moved into their place, and in 1994, we decided to buy a place together, all three of us. I grew up with dogs and was absolutely insistant that I WOULD have one when I owned a place. Jim was dead set against having a dog in the house. We knew it was an issue....but we proceeded anyway.

Fast forward to about a month before closing on the house we found on Capital Hill. We had an ornery owner to deal with....all of us were in the house together and the owner was being an Ass about something....and the next thing I know, Jim is gone from the house, out the front door. About 30 minutes later, he comes running into the house saying 'oh you have to come see the puppies!!!' He had noticed the new next door neighbor in the yard and went out to talk to him. The neighbor's Jack Russell had recently had puppies, so he invited Jim in to see them, and Jim fell in love. Next thing I know, Jim is insisting that we EACH had to have a puppy....lol. 'Oh, three is no harder than one!', he tells us. (He can rationalize absolutely anything in his head.) Well, I had just averted a very difficult argument, so I went along because I was going to have my dog.

Spike Bruiser and Skippy



Well, as these things happen, I got three dogs as I have always been their primary caretaker and disciplinarian.

So of course, we had to decide on names for our three new puppies (we were only assured of two of the 5 as they were keeping one (Scamp), one was definitely spoken for (Nardo....the long lost brother as we never saw him again) and a third was possibly taken....but we ended up with three of them living next door to their mother (Lady) and brother. We wanted a theme for the names....Hewey, Dewey and Louis or something silly, without being silly...lol. Finally we decided that since Jack Russell Terriers are little dogs who don't have a clue that they are little, we'd use big names, and decided on Butch, Spike and Killer.

Well, the first one born was the biggest and the first one to push his brothers aside (yes, she had 5 boys) to get to the milk.....he was a baby bully and the owners named him first, and called him Bruiser. Well, that fit the theme just great, so it became Bruiser, Spike and Killer.

Jim being Jim, decided that each of us owned only one of them, and somehow it became Jim owns Bruiser, I own Spike, and Killer belonged to George. George is the world's sweetest person (I'm sure I'll have more on him later), and just couldn't call that dog, who was the runt of the litter, Killer. After 2-3 weeks of waffling, I finally said, 'ok the dog needs a name, if you can't call him Killer than NAME HIM SOMETHING.'....and George says, ok, lets name him Skippy.

Well, thank you very much for ruining our THEME! But he was right, Skippy turned out to be more of a Skippy and he grew into the name. Killer would've been all wrong, and it makes for a good story :).

These dogs are truly special to us and I'm sure I'll write more about them at another time. As a gay man with no children, my animals become my children. I also have two cats, Rachi (pronounced Rocky and short for Rachmaninov) and Copeland.

No Clue what to write or who will care

With so many blogs in the world already....who needs another one? Who will visit, who will read it, and will anyone care? I'm realistic enough to know that I'm not the world's best writer, and certainly am not the world's most interesting person (although I like to think I'm in the top 5 billion.) I'm not terribly clever or funny (but I try), am not good-looking or overly talented

I've come to realize over time that blogs do not have to be for anyone other than the author, and that's essentially what I intend here. This blog will be my chance to say things out loud that I'm thinking. I intend to keep it wide open and honest. I don't intend to attempt to make it widely known precisely because I want a place to say anything I want to say without worrying what anyone thinks. It will serve partially as my diary....and I hope over time that I will improve on all counts (interesting, clever, funny, good writer, etc.)

If I'm lucky, one day it will be interesting enough that you may want to return.