The Perfect Song Blog

Mansfield University shuts down for 10 days over the holidays.  For many years I looked forward to this mini vacation as a time to get a lot of my projects done.

After many frustrating years, I now know that there is no free time leading up to Christmas.  Leigh is stressed out with cleaning the house, Christmas shopping, decorating, packing and wrapping, in addition to her business.

So I’m called in to help cook, play with the dogs, and wrap presents, a job I absolutely hate.  In my hands, scissors turn crooked and cut the paper in jagged lines.  I never cut it the right size.  The presents I wrap always look like they’ve been slept on by an overweight insomniac.

Christmas day is a physical and emotional rush. The post-Christmas recuperation time has lengthened into about three days.  I kid you not, I was up and around after surgery faster that I felt half alive after Christmas 2007.

One of the presents for Leigh was curtains for our living room which she’s needed for two years.   This year I gave her a note saying I’d buy them but she had to pick them out  Kim, our daughter was here.  Kim had to leave a few days after Christmas.

It worked.

What I hadn’t thought about was the unholy hassle of assembling rods and putting up the hangers.  I did one set the first night and found that the holes already in the wall  were not right for the new hangers.  I took everything apart, moved it over an inch and drilled a new hole.

There was, of course, no stud there.  I measured and re-measured,  screwed in the new hanger and found my level was no longer working correctly.

“I’ll just have eyeball it,” Leigh said.  I hate it when she eyeballs.  “Okay, just tap the bottom a litttttle to the left.  Nope!  No!  Too much.  Back just a tich.  No!  That was  more than a tich!

“What in the Hell’s name is a ‘tich’?”

“You know what a tich is.”

Obviously I don’t know if I just moved it more than a tich!”

“Don’t make such a big deal of things.  Just tap it –a tich.”  She did that just to anger me.  It worked.

I was now sweating and wanted a drink, something with significant  dose of alcohol in it.

“Ah! Ah! Close.   Now put it back to the right a tich.”

I found myself angry that the term tich was getting on my nerves.  I tapped it.  She stood and stared, studying it.  Time dragged on.

“Did your body freeze up?” I asked.  “Are you breathing?  Communicate, please!

“Over just a freckle of a hair,” she finally said.

I curse the carpenter who first came up with this non-existent universal measurement.  I curse all carpenters who keep it alive.  And, I realized, I was in a general, all-encompassing cursing mode.

I touched the hanger.

“It didn’t move,” she said.

I touched it harder, the old freckle-of-a-hair-touch.”

She nodded.  “Perfect.”

When shared projects like this are over, there’s a feeling of cautious relief.  Slowly, we speak to each other to make sure neither one was offended  too much.  She happily began hanging the first curtain.  I fixed a drink and went downstairs to watch The Family Guy.

I just discovered a new social site, Kickstart, that Yahoo is developing for recent college graduates and alumni of all ages. It’s been described as a cross between Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s designed to connect alumni of all ages to help young graduates contacts kick start their careers.

I love the concept and I think it has great potential. It goes a long way to helping recent graduates with that frustrating Catch 22: “They want someone with experience but how can I get experience if no one gives me a chance?” This is a good, practical way to network and help our own alumni with job availability information, advice, etc.

It also has the potential to link up college classmates from all classes. It will also be interesting to folks like me to see where other graduates are working. I’m interested in this for a couple of reasons.

1. I graduated from Mansfield in 1971.

2. I’ve served as PR director at Mansfield since 1980 so I know a lot of graduates.

I also like the clean, practical approach. I’ll be interested in watching the site’s growth.

Joining is easy. I registered and completed my profile in about 10 minutes.

Yahoo is offering the incentive: a $25,000 donation to the college with the most alumni registered on Kickstart by the end of the year. I would love to win that contribution for MU.

So, if you’re a Mansfield grad of any age, check out the site, register, and let other MU grads know about it.

You can see my profile here.

I’m sitting in Barnes & Noble Cafe with my son, Nathan, sipping Chinese Flower tea which has a delicate aroma and flavor. He’s drinking a latte which is too sweet and strong for me. We talk about the pros and cons of Facebook and Myspace. He likes Myspace. I like Facebook, though I don’t use it much.

“I went to your blog site and you haven’t posted anything in a long time,” he says.

I nod.

When September hits at Mansfield University where I’m the PR director, my life isn’t my own. Watching school open is like staring at an oncoming train rushing forward at 80 mph. I reach out, grab it and hang on for dear life and get dropped off the following May. One of the most time consuming things for me is the Fabulous 1890s Weekend, which I cochair. The first night football game in the world was played at Mansfield by Mansfield University in downtown on September 28, 1892.

The event was lit by General Electric which was then six months old. When I found this out in 1990, I contacted GE officials and told them they lit the first night football game. They didn’t believe me. Later they called me back and said I was right. We worked together for the next two years. GE produced a very lavish and expensive commercial about their role in night football. Mansfield University nearly disappeared in all the edits, but we did get a mention at the beginning of the spot.

We’re also celebrating the 150th anniversary of the university and the borough. I’m one of the cochairs. Coordinating all the events, the website, and publishing two books has also taken a lot of time.

And I’m creating a five-year strategic marketing plan.

So,for the first time in a long time other things got in the way of my blog.

Nathan brought me back to blog reality.

Thanks, son.

I was just checking my traffic facts (well, I do every night) and was amazed to find I have readers in 25 countries around the world.  There’s a big readership in Panama (thanks, folks) as well as groups of readers in Europe, Russia, Canada and the middle east.

I get involved in the regular postings that I forget that all this started with the Perfect Song Website, whose original purpose was to promote my novel, The Perfect Song.  The book, which still gets glowing reviews from readers, is available at Amazon.com or iUniverse.

All proceeds from the book go to the Perfect Song Scholarship Fund at Mansfield University for future writers.  So if you buy the book, you’re helping future students.  If you want to read the book for free, it’s on my website.  I also recorded an audio version.  Then, if you want to make a donation, you can do it on the site through paypal or send a check to the Mansfield University Foundation, Mansfield, PA  16933.  Mark it: The Perfect Song Scholarship Fund.

Thanks to all my “perfect songsters”  for letting me share my life and thoughts as I make my way through this adventure called life.

Went to see the Mansfield University production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast today. I had seen it Thursday night and loved it so much I took my mother-in-law today. It was a Sunday afternoon and the 1300 seat theatre was nearly full.

The word had gotten around about it.

The set was gorgeous. Everything about the play was right – the actors had great singing voices. The orchestra was superb without overwhelming the actors. The lighting moved between being subtle and lovely to dark and mysterious.

I had tears in my eyes at several points because of the power of the above and the story line.

Several optimistic mothers brought their three and four year olds thinking they were going to sit quietly enchanted for three hours. So, at different periods many adults leaned forward to hear the lines over screaming kids.

It was okay though. I kept thinking, we’re in an age when kids lock themselves away with computers and cell phones. It’s a period when live human interaction is nearly a lost art.

Yet here we were in an auditorium, 1200 people of all ages sharing the action and emotion on the stage. We all laughed at the humor, clapped loudly at the close of a rousing song.

At the end we all rose for a standing ovation.

No matter how isolated we become with iTunes and text messaging, there is nothing more powerful than losing ourselves and sharing — in real time — a good story