Madison, Chance, Charles, Le'Charles, Claudia, Armani, William, Brian, AnLeia, Woody, Joon and more: Welcome to MYO!

This is one of the most exciting periods of my entire life: watching a dream, a hope, a prayer for our children and our community turn into reality.

We are welcoming so many new people into the ensembles. Chance came to play the trumpet for Nick. He will be in MCYO. Cave9 regulars Claudia, the Siglers, Armani, William, Brian, AnLeia and others will also participate.

We've been noticing a shift away from drums and guitar toward the orchestral strings and that was reinforced this weekend. We ARE growing an orchestra! (Not to mention that it looks like we'll easily fill the 90 slots available for string students at the Barrage workshop on October 4--with literally bus-loads of young string players from several studios eager to participate.) We are so grateful for Hamilton and Elliot Cleverdon, who have been teaching just about everything. Multi-instrumentalists are so handy at Cave9.

Brandon was back to play the trombone. It was so good to see him again. A BSC graduate came by to volunteer as a voice teacher--which is good because we have students waiting for us to replace our summer teachers who have gone back to college. The Siglers worked with AnLeia on sax and gave Brian a trumpet lesson.

Cave9 was having a big show Saturday night. Musicians began arriving around 2:30. They waited outside, but came in to use the restroom and to scope out the venue. One asked what we were doing and I explained. He asked if we had a violin he could use. He then played for quite some time, even asking Nick for music. While Hamilton was busy teaching a viola lesson, some neighborhood boys ran upstairs to the drum set. This young man from California ran upstairs and gave them drum lessons. He obviously got it. Late in the afternoon we cleared out instruments and stands so that the bands could start loading in. As they went out, several left donations in our bucket. A young man strummed one of our guitars as we packed up. I told him we should have gotten him to teach. He said that if he had known what we were doing, he would have loved to teach.

As I was driving home marveling at the day, wondering how to convey the power of all of this, wondering if the photos or the video would give even a taste of the specialness of what is happening, Nick called me. His single word says it all: 'WOW!' Here's the video.