I met her at a crime scene…

As I recall, she was stringing for the Deseret News at the time. I was the editor of this paper. Nadalee Noble, who had lived in Samak (yes, Kamas spelled backwards) and worked in Park City at a sporting goods store by the movie theaters — was murdered by her estranged husband in front of the grocery store here — then known as Albertsons. He had been served hours earlier with divorce proceedings. She had spent the two weeks prior living in Salt Lake City in the YWCA’s program/shelter known then as the Women in Jeopardy Program. She left her work to get groceries and head to her new home in Heber that the shelter folks had arranged. Her children were there waiting for her.

Months later once the murder trial started we had both contacted (unbeknownst to each other) Nadalee’s adult daughter about seeing the home where her husband had abused her for 20 years. We were both surprised by each other’s presence that day. And then we immediately started asking questions of each other about the direction of our stories (as I recall — hers became a multiple-part series that resulted in an award). Mine — a four-part series — resulted in a book contract.

That reporter, Ellen Fagg, didn’t produce any competitive streak in me but rather a desire we both tell the best story possible about the tragedy. We congratulated each other on the success of our work months later and then we watched each other’s paths go in different directions. She left to work on and receive an MFA in nonfiction writing from the famed program at the University of Iowa. She edited a book of short stories and somewhere in my home I have a copy signed by her.

I left the paper and walked away from the book project and helped start the Peace House here. And then I started to help raise money to build a joint-use performing arts facility. Every couple of years we’d find each other again. She went to Portland and worked there and I think that’s where she met her future husband. She did some other things and in 2005 she landed back in journalism at the Salt Lake Tribune in the arts where she won Society of Professional Journalists awards for her thoughtful work. Not in some sappy, always cheerleading way but in a thoughtful careful reasoned approach to the stories behind the stories and why the arts mattered. We met for lunch a few years ago and I saw pictures of her beautiful toddler twin daughters who came to her later in life. She wrote a few pieces about what we did at Eccles when we had offerings that deserved coverage — not every season and not even every year.

Most recently she covered Monica Lewinsky’s talk on the Eccles stage. She was surprised by the evening and even more surprised by emotions Monica elicited. Her story had hundreds of comments online. It was, as we like to say … a spirited debate.

Chris Smart and I worked for a bit together when he was a reporter at The Newspaper — a competitor of The Park Record in the late ’70s. And also the paper that absorbed The Park Record when it sold. There were a few months when The Newspaper folks debated what to call the new merged paper. The New Record was the only dumb name I remember but there were dozens of suggestions. In the end — owners Jan Wilking and Steve Derring were convinced to use the historic name from the 1880’s — The Park Record.

Chris and I had a lot of laughs and disagreed over style points and he always encouraged me to keep writing my column.

I lost track of Chris for years. He ended up at the Salt Lake Tribune — covering Park City stuff for awhile and then he morphed someplace along the way to write thoughtful difficult stories that focused on social justice issues and the immigrant crisis. He has been a serious, hard-working journalist for more than 30 years.

This past week Ellen and Christopher were part of the 34 award-winning journalists, editors and photographers let go by the Salt Lake Tribune in an effort to right the ship. The second such drastic cut in two years. It sends hot lead into the natural red ink veins of every one of us who lives to share stories. To shed light in dark places — expose bad guys, paint portraits in words, introduce tough subjects, try our damnedest to keep readers informed about their communities and their colleagues and their constitution.

A free press — to steal an old song lyric and bastardize it — isn’t free. That taken-for-granted Superhero cloak of taking on politicians and crooks and shady characters lifts us all up when we include football heroes and senior centers opening and real estate deals including affordable housing. When we see our kid, parent, neighbor in a photo for doing good and/or well. When there is dirty water to be cleaned or attention to be given to DACA kids who need their cards renewed or an author who has a new book that we really should take note of.

I am so sad for my colleagues who lost their jobs due to budget cuts because the very nature of a print newspaper is so fragile as to not be able to support them anymore. Freedom — for all the centuries of our republic’s existence has depended upon a lively free press to keep government accountable and the rest of us informed. What has happened here should scare us all. And make us grateful for (what I believe is) the oldest weekly paper still in continuous publication in the Intermountain West — The Park Record.

Renew your subscription. Save a journalist — any day — like this Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: All the news that fits appeared first on Park Record.

It is very noisy — the quiet this time of year. I have taken to sleeping with the upstairs bedroom door to the outside world open — a bit — again. There is a screen door behind it which leads out to the postage stamp porch. The door itself is fully glass — I replaced the heavy wooden one that had a tiny window about 10 years ago, so any time of year I can wake up to the quiet oasis that is still pretty untouched in our neighborhood. There are cottonwood trees and maples and aspens, of course. Giant pines and apple and crabapple. There are birds aplenty again.

I was a neglectful birder this winter. I just couldn’t find the energy to pay attention to so many things on the home front. I finally filled all the feeders last Sunday and it took hours — to replace hooks and clean out winter debris — and do that yard walkabout on the less than north 40 of my little corner lot of the world.

In a matter of hours I was rewarded. Red-winged blackbirds visited and sparrows and cowbirds and honestly I need to drag my bird books out to identify and attach names. With the door open and the feeders filled, I now wake with that first flat light of the day — gray — and somewhere around 5 a.m. the birds start. Although during the night recently we have been hearing the owl who who who is visiting the big pine trees and is a giant creature as evidenced by the phone photo my neighbor captured.

There are small songs and longer ones and I don’t understand the musicality of it all but it works it blends it compliments and for me — it soothes. Somewhere there is a poem or a song about “faith is the bird that sings before dawn” and I have long loved the thought. Before we know the outcome we have faith in its existence.

The gray mornings are otherworldly — mysterious — uncertain — if only for minutes before the sky breaks or stays cloudy for the day and flat light just becomes brighter.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area about 20 minutes from the coast. Gray mornings could last all day. And they bred a kind of moodiness and uncertainty and an undefined longing that never fully goes away — even though I have lived now more than half my long life, right here in Utah — the land of vibrant colors and surreal light. Those days when the fog would suddenly creep in on cat’s paws and move over the hills and cover buildings until all the landscape was simply gray. And ocean itself turned gray. Those days stamped inside me and patterned a certain melancholy that can sometimes find me and catch me unawares.

In the evenings here — after a day of intense light and sunsets that never can be captured fully by paint or camera lens, the gray returns. The trees become silhouettes against a soft warm lavender gray and the landscape again is reduced to monochromatic not kodachromatic colors. And then slowly the sky turns black to wait for dawn.

The seduction of spring in the mountains are these few weeks — when we might still see snow and the green grass looks like a carpet that can’t possibly fade. Underneath is knowledge that our light winter means there won’t be enough runoff and by late June we could be tinder dry again. But for just these few precious weeks, we measure our days in tulips not eaten by deer, the daffodils and hyacinth and just this week tight lilac buds appearing. The crabapple blossoms seem late but of course they are right on their own schedule. We anticipate the beauty and bounty that lies ahead.

Except when the gray lasts for days. And then, for me anyway, the moodiness creeps in like the fog of my youth and it is not quite Churchill’s big black dog that comes to sit on the porch but perhaps a cousin to it.

This morning as I write this column it is overcast — with either clouds or fog — hard to say exactly. And there is a song from decades ago coming to mind that Randy Newman wrote and Bette Midler sang in the movie “Beaches” and honestly I never fully deciphered the meaning in words but I always attached to the mood…

Broken windows and empty hallways,

A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with gray.

Human kindness is overflowing,

And I think it’s gonna rain today.

Some weeks, in some months, in parts of some years, are parades of days in shades of gray. And I sit down with those shadows and shapes and let the fog have its way with me. Not often but some Sundays in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: Some shades of gray… appeared first on Park Record.

It was a big week for me — I finally saw the Tony award-winning musical “Hamilton” and I watched a modern day firestorm happen over that very first amendment.

And I was reminded why I rarely book comedy into our theater.

First — spoiler alert — “Hamilton” takes the story of the founding of our country, sets it to a combination of rap and hip hop music (throws in a ballad) never lets the audience have a second not be fully engaged in the thrilling story — most of which we have become completely inured to — and breathlessly lays open and raw, how very human those men and women were.

I confess — it took me a minute to adjust to the colorblind cast and brilliance of that. Seeing George Washington played by a short Asian man and Hamilton as a large black man did what I suspect Lin-Manuel Miranda had in mind. It made realize me the brilliance of our very human, flawed, founding fathers (and mothers) and the rights they dreamed were possible for all men who were created equal. It compressed the hopes and fears of those historical figures in a single groundbreaking musical.

I remembered seeing some PBS special in 2009 about a Spoken Word/Poetry arts evening at the Obama White House. (Remember when we had those?) It featured this young guy performing a spoken word/rap song about Hamilton. That television special made me reconsider RAP as a powerful storytelling form — in a positive edgy way. After that, I really listened to RAP music — to hear the story.

Miranda created several songs about the founding fathers and performed them in a variety of places before he pieced together “The Hamilton Mixtape.” And then Miranda went on to win all the prizes — all of them — the Emmy, Grammy, MacArthur Fellowship, Pulitzer and Tonys — so many Tonys. He mined the raw beginnings of this remarkable experiment in democracy and helped us see those brave, flawed, ambitious, vain, passionate men and women with new eyes.

My day and night job involves bringing all kinds of performers to various stages to perform. For 20 years it has been a privilege to do that. I can count on one hand the number of times I have booked comedy. I’m a big fan of laughing and finding humor in everyday things — politics and fur balls and wacky drivers and living with technology. But I also find it is far more individual and personal than dance or song or a play. Comedy can turn — in the moment — and is meant to be a bit freestyle. Personally, I find it turns vulgar or mean too often and while I may want to push an audience’s comfort levels with a controversial speaker, I just don’t feel the same about a stand-up routine that is based in insults. Sure — there have been exceptions — Paula Poundstone is my favorite — she just makes fun of life — mostly her own — and she doesn’t have to degrade anyone else to tell a good story. She makes fun of the peanuts (or lack of them) on a plane, or life with her cat or her kids or the packaging that resists opening and politics. She just sees the messy world with amusement.

This spring marked my 40th anniversary of writing this column. I know a bit about flopping when trying to make light of something. I know about sticking sacred pigs and watching them bleed. I have been — more than once — the center of a firestorm for something I said — in print. I have written stories in this small space more than 2,000 times and I have bombed in a spectacular, controversial passion that offended more than once. Mostly when it hit too close to some politician or political process. I have a right to do that because those old white boys created a document they immediately amended to create my right — and yours — to criticize our government. It has kept us checking and balancing for centuries.

Which brings me to Michelle Wolf — the comedian who was given the tough — near failure-insured task — of skewering the pompous body politic known as The White House. At the annual Correspondents’ Dinner there is a predictable banquet meal and an unpredictable comedian to roast the Current Occupant and the dust cloud of people who come and go around him.

I didn’t watch the event in real time and saw it (taped) after I returned home from a dinner. And before the internet blew up with both criticism and defense of the monologue. I didn’t love her routine. I didn’t find her delivery effective. I didn’t laugh out loud which I often do at the roast. I cringed a few times when she made fun of Sarah Huckabee. But she wasn’t vulgar or hateful or other comedy killers for me. It just wasn’t my cup of spiked tea.

When I woke up the next day to the explosion on the internet about her gig and the threats to her and demands for apologies — I was shocked. She was invited to do a job — admittedly a dumb job — and she did it as expected, really. And if her criticism of the President or his staff seemed out of line — here is what it wasn’t — treasonous. She has all the rights to make fun of politicians and those who work in that arena for their foibles and heavy-handed eye make-up. She has those rights because those white guys — who weren’t all that old — had such vision about how we could govern and create a democracy the rest of the world would call “the light on the hill.”

Maybe next year — to change up the vibe — the Correspondents’ Dinner could feature Miranda. And then everyone would want to be in “the room where it happens…” Just a free range thought in a democracy, this Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: Freedom to — say it all… appeared first on Park Record.

They are all shapes and sizes and colors. Some as plain as a brown paper cover and others — foil covered and shiny. Most fit in a back pocket of a pair of jeans. But not all. Some are over sized and have quotes on the front cover. They end up in large purses or backpacks. For all I remember of my whole life, I have had a notebook somewhere around me.

Like a hungry person at a lush cocktail party I am always sneaking little bits. If you linger just slightly where the best sandwiches are laid out or where the lemonade is being poured and you are lucky — little tidbits can fall right into the air before you. As a writer, your job is to catch them before they fall victim to the next set of great quotes/ideas/stories. And if the conversation lulls or the guests bore — you can take a photograph with words of the details — the temperature of the room or the veranda, the lace on the cloth or the table, the curtains. The sound of the wind or birds or the ocean. Or the children in the yard. Or the young couple cooing on the porch.

The mind plays tricks and tells you sometimes — no need to write this down — you always remember exactly everything about this moment. The softness of the lips, the tenderness of the touch, the casual toss of the hair, the slant of the light. But age teaches you differently — details fade. If you want to be reminded later of what happened in the moment you need to record the moment.

When I have time and some measure of determination I take my camera with me. Not just the quick snap from the phone — those will work like a quick note. But rather the full structure of a photo where I override the automatic and choose the settings, the focus, I make such selections with intention. The fade, the shade, the objects I will edit out later from the wide angle shot.

I am a mostly self-trained observer — though I have taken a workshop here — a class there. And I learned there are techniques to improve the capture of the moments. While you may think that means a certain attitude or listening skill or questions cued to start or continue conversations — mostly-like much of life — it helps to be even slightly prepared. Hence the obsession of the notebooks.

I tried a system once I had seen a most organized and successful young woman had created. She was fully color-coded for what should be in what notebook … Money stuff in a green one. Urgent stuff in the red one. Random thoughts in the brown paper bag looking one — pencil in there. Boards she sat on — in the blue one. I added my own touch with serious poems in the making and thoughts I briefly thought were brilliant — in the black one.

I was an abject failure at her tidy system.

I tried too just having one beautiful large notebook where I wrote with different colored inks to accomplish the same division of smart categories…

But then I’d be in a meeting and find a notebook in my bag and just start writing stuff. And I couldn’t find the write thing to right with — so sentences would look just like this later in the moment that when I looked for reason. The correct message needed to be corrected to make sense.

My life and therefore my notebooks are nothing that organized. If desperate I will write on anything with anything and have — inside gum wrappers and paper napkins — often. Match covers used to be a thing when matches were given out like mints. I write on programs at plays and while attending celebration dinners where the speakers have gone on too long. I have used lipstick in my house for a quick note on a sticky when no other implement could be found. Folks have given me notebooks with beautiful covers — hardbacks — and filled with thoughtful quotes or inspirational sayings. Those are wasted on me. I write over every surface. Often when I am in a darkened room — like a movie or a play or setting where the lights are too low to see my words. Those require a skill akin to an Egyptologist when I later try excavate the words or their meaning.

There is science now — or at least the science is again getting traction — declaring the way to retain information is not to type words on a screen but to have the brain understand the connection the hand has, to the movement of the words on a page … the weight of the words.

The man I loved more than any other once gave me a piece of calligraphy he found on a trip — he had it beautifully framed. It read — “Our aim should be, I think, to make letters live — that men themselves may have more life.” Edward Johnson. The letters are different sizes — black on white with the author’s name in red. In the years after our break-up I purged myself of reminders of that sad painful ending but I have never been able to let go of the simple elegant words — framed in shades of gray and black and white.

I shouldn’t be surprised it was the words that stayed with me.

There are blank journals — and they whisper … if I really tried maybe I could create stick-figure drawings kinda like The Little Prince. I could capture my travels in caricature. And I have a box of sharpened colored pencils for the day when I take that up.

On a spring day soon — when I decide I have the luxury of time and patience — I will gather notebooks from their hiding places and see if they need to be tossed or treated with reverence. The words wait — for a Sunday in the Park …

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: Scribbles and dribbles… appeared first on Park Record.

At a recent weeklong global conference in Vancouver, about 20 of us were selected to discuss, “Equipping future generations to thrive.” Those around the dinner table were from New Zealand and New England, the UK and Utah (OK that was me). A pediatrician/author who has appeared repeatedly on Good Morning America. An educator from deep in the Canadian wilderness. A Hollywood producer of one of this season’s hottest new television shows and a 20-year-old Stanford student, who for many, many years already has been a successful Ford model and human rights activist/speaker at the United Nations. It was heady company in the private dining room overlooking the twinkling harbor lights. Especially for someone who never finished college.

The format was a Jeffersonian-style dinner — a discussion where reasonable decorum was expected and moderated around a single topic. Regardless of age or geographic location or personal educational opportunities, everyone agreed quickly education is severely broken. We have embraced and emphasized mastery of technology but we have lost the ability to connect to the reasons why. The humanity of learning has disappeared and the result is a generation that has (largely) lost both curiosity and compassion.

Almost all those at the table had their children in a variety of private schools. One couple had started their own private school. The young Ford model admitted her high school experience — because she was working all those years — was online — from Stanford — and it had worked well. She now calls her current style of education “gap-year-ing” her life.

We agreed with educator Sir Ken Robinson’s mantra — we are still educating children in an industrial age model to create better factory workers — when what need are better humans.

We talked about the high rate of student depression, mental illness, gender fluidity, increased drug use and really smart students just dropping out. The way these students learn is completely out of sync with how they are being taught.

And we spoke of those remarkable kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High who, in the face of what was clearly unspeakable horror and tragedy, became national spokespeople who created a movement #NeverAgain and intuitively included the faces of BlackLivesMatter and understood how to speak bravely. They understood — in part — because they were drama students and reporters for the school paper. That public school in Florida has been doing a lot of things right and we should all be looking carefully at how the young humans there have been educated to be whole people. They were suddenly enrolled in a national dialogue and they had the tools to stand in the hottest of spotlights and shake up — and lead — the adults around them.

I am in awe of those kids. And I’m hardly alone. Just this week Time Magazine named them in the rarefied class of 100 Most Influential People. No less than former President Barrack Obama wrote their tribute. It concluded…

“Our history is defined by the youthful push to make America more just, more compassionate, more equal under the law. This generation — of Parkland, of Dreamers, of Black Lives Matter — embraces that duty. If they make their elders uncomfortable, that’s how it should be. Our kids now show us what we’ve told them America is all about, even if we haven’t always believed it ourselves: that our future isn’t written for us, but by us.”

My final statement as we circled the table was something like — while we are in the thrust of the greatest accelerant of new learning and discovery perhaps the world has ever experienced and all kinds of devices are available to teach young humans how to explore with existing machines and create new machines and Artificial Intelligence and space travel and the like — the intensity with which we were pushing and rushing young people into adulthood is alarming and without context. As the Old Broad in the room, I reminded them of the famous words of wisdom from the refrain of The Grateful Dead’s “Uncle’s John’s Band” … but are you kind? We can teach them so many wondrous things about how the world works and the mechanics of all of that will mean nothing if we haven’t taught young people compassion and empathy. How the arts — all of them — are the foundation for that unique kind of learning. So while teaching STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) sounds either very forward thinking or something that could have come from the Eisenhower Era, I suggested putting Arts into teaching and learning really does create STEAM that can move abstract ideas into action with compassion.

We didn’t leave there having solved anything, in nearly three hours of stimulating, spirited conversation but we did agree — across continents, countries and counties — to keep talking. We all want “future generations to thrive” but there is no road map to take us there. How we learn determines what we learn. When we are taught by big-hearted humans who are supported in creative problem solving, young minds ignite. Along with how to diagram sentences and how to understand nuances of story, crawling inside award-winning Broadway shows — from Spring Awakening, and Fun House to Hamilton — maybe the learning could be relevant enough to engage students and challenge them to challenge us.

Given the state of Our State — Dead Last in the nation in per pupil spending for education — we can only go up. Maybe sideways or into the rafters, around the world, into the wild … and into a kind of global classroom that really prepares the future generation to thrive. Here’s what stayed with me about the night — besides all the stimulating conversation — the first person to introduce herself to me — in a room of strangers — was the youngest — the over-six-foot tall, United Nations speaker/Ford model and 20-year-old Stanford student. That kind of hope in (red) heels — looks really beautiful. Any day you want to consider it — like Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: Educating ourselves to hope appeared first on Park Record.

We all need them. Times away from routine. Embracing the serendipity. A break. This week it arrived first in the drumbeat of a text. The neighbors would gather in the grassy circle of the cul-de-sac at the end of day. There would be a fire and beverages. And sure enough, soon enough there were kids and bikes and dogs and neighbors beyond our circle — who wandered in — and laughter — much laughter.

I sent a note to a friend explaining I need to reschedule our get together that night but he was free to join ours. We have this “spontaneous tradition,” I wrote. He responded we should just reschedule our time and he questioned the concept of “spontaneous tradition.” I admit — to the literalists among us — it sounded oxymoronic. But for years now we have gathered like this — last minute — and we are all receptive to the unpredictableness of the call.

You grab what is available — pizza gets delivered for the kids — and weather dependent, you toss a jacket over a shoulder for when the sun sets. The spontaneity is the connector — you most always abandon previous plans because you know how random and precious this tacit agreement is to creating and maintaining community.

Later in the week there was planned dinner across town with women who mostly didn’t know one another except for an event we had worked on together. The gracious hostess had planned everything “just so” and there was no need to bring anything but ourselves to the table. What unfolded over the next few hours involved storytelling and so much laughter and then heartfelt stories with some tears and then more laughter. The beauty was how diverse (for our little community) the gathering was and how connected and bonded we all felt by the end of the night. Life is turbulent and tempestuous. It is always good to know where there are extra life rafts.

And this week marks my annual sojourn to a conference filled with international thinkers who all have ideas worth spreading. Unlike some conferences, where you arrive skidding in on fumes of your last week of life with no prep for a gathering — this time away requires homework. So for months there have been messages about — what to read — what to watch — who to contact — to be ready to gather. We map out carefully our choices during the week, where from sunrise to long, long, long past sunset, our days are filled with big onstage stimulating talks and quiet corner conversations and fabulous food and great adventures and mostly, more than anything else, re-connecting with folks who are all trying to make changes in their far-flung corners of the planet.

It is a week that pulls me through all the others. And it is a network I rely on more and more. It helps me plan performances I want to bring to our community. It allows me connections to people who have connections to people who can help me connect to other people. It is a community who lives to problem solve. There are no small problems or questions or ideas. It is inclusive in a way you wish the entire planet could be. It is always surprising and always exhausting and always makes me feel small — in the very best sense of the word. The gathering is meticulously curated so the guests and speakers eventually become a seamless quilt of hope stitched together with the strength that comes from difficult choices in a complex world. It is not a week for the faint-hearted or those who think they can show up and sit in the back and return emails during a session. Your computer is not welcome in the conference space — nor your phone. Display either and you will be asked to leave. And during the breaks you rarely see folks in a corner with their heads down staring at a screen. You have been exposed in each session to so many big ideas you can’t wait to talk about them as you grab a snack and gaze over the harbor in breathtaking and breath giving, Vancouver.

When the week ends and you realize how little you have slept and how many miles you have walked around the city and how many stories you have heard and told and how many new people you have been introduced to from so many countries, you are exhausted in a way that feels so good. By the time you need to go through customs you know those things most precious you are returning with aren’t packed in your bag but rather your heart.

This week the resorts close and spring break comes to those with children in the school district and there is a kind of forced pause to reset. Time to have a few days where there are no plans. Where you sleep in and stay up late and take a drive or fly away or just crack that book you received at Christmas and have been eying for weeks. In a resort town — we have rhythms unlike other communities and are willing to have all kinds of delayed gratification because the sweetness of the down time is later matched by the excitement of playing host to guests who get to discover our town and all its magic — anew each season. Recharging in the spring should have its own local holiday — a kind of Maypole of good tidings. Ribbons of success after a winter of challenges. But then again, spring is nearly event-free. And there is something delicious in that, too.

However you define “recharge” we are entering the week to start the process. Frantic patterns need time to unravel into seasonal simpler patterns. Stopping on the side of the road to watch the nesting of the sandhill cranes is free and readily available to those who take time to be observant — any day — including a full measure of Sundays in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: Reset-rejoice-renew appeared first on Park Record.

I was talking to a deeply connected soul friend visiting here the other night about a place we both hold dear — the red cliffs in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The burnt oranges and coral and cream and slight chocolaty brown rocks that look like sundaes melting. Those unimaginable shapes and colors that surround the land where Georgia O’Keeffe had a place called Ghost Ranch.

My friend spends a lot of time there and he said the folks who run the Presbyterian camp in the valley call the space — “a thin place.” I had an idea what he meant but I asked anyway. He said it was a place where the veil between heaven and earth was so close — it was thin.

And I knew exactly what he meant and where some of those places exist for me — the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state but just three water miles from Canada. Where old growth forests tumble into the sea and whales spout and eagles nest and the water lapping on the side of the boat creates a rhythm meant to alter time and space.

The river bed of the Escalante in the shadow of the Grand Staircase rock formation. Where one night with my son and his wife and their two teenagers we saw every single star in the constellations in the ink black sky on a clear cold Thanksgiving night.

Oliver’s Camp in Tanzania last summer where new friends were really old soul lost friends reunited and the warm days allowed us time to stare in utter and complete wonder at seeing the most magnificent creatures on the planet run and walk and swim — free of fear of poachers. And each time our vehicle stopped to observe — our previously chatty car silenced — in awe of being in the space between the space in the circle of life.

It happens here often — especially in the summer when day quietly becomes what the Scottish call — the gloaming — where twilight is creeping in and you start to make out the first stars as the veil between light and dark reveals the shapes randomly and then the patterns.

Sometimes I think I can feel the thin place when I am with dear friends. Where the laughter and heartstrings are so close the words are just extra. The wordless shoulder hug, the shared grade school giggle at an inappropriate time, the tissue for the tear.

My visiting friend shared a story I needed to hear last night at dinner. I was frustrated in the lack of progression with a work problem I was trying to solve. And he told me a story…

He had sent a new young staff member to interview an elderly donor and try to get an oral history about a deceased artist. She returned after a few hours dismayed. There had been martinis and the much, much older woman was hard to understand. After hours of conversation she had returned with only a couple of paragraphs of actual history about the subject. My friend laughed and told she done great — considering the woman she was interviewing was “105 years old and drunk.”

It is a matter sometimes of perspective.

So this week when the rains came with the wind and it blew tree branches across the yard and gravel-like drops pelted the windows and it reminded us of Seattle or a tiny coastal town near San Francisco or Boston. I sat with a dear friend together in the late afternoon and we watched rain puddles. It looked like invisible hands were skipping invisible rocks over them. And the rain made noise. It dripped on the deck railing. It bounced and pattered off the wet wooden porch. It made the tree trunks dark and strange faces emerge in the bark.

On a gray cloudy rainy day when we have to work and can’t just curl up with a book by the fire — it is a different kind of frustration and longing. Remembering that rainy time on the docked boat when there was no place to go and nothing to do but read and be rocked and be grateful for the brownie mix with nuts (!) you found in a cupboard to bake.

Yesterday too I saw green skinny shoots, in the tiny rock garden, on the edge of the yard, quite by accident. I was in the car backing out of my driveway and another car drove past — very slowly on the street — so I couldn’t do my customary peel and roll maneuver. I looked down next to my car and there they were in my tiny rock garden … if memory serves me right — the shape of crocus and tulips and hyacinth leaves starting their journey back.

And when I think about mysteries of the universe, flowers often rank right up there with the stuff Stephen Hawking tried to explain. I mean how do tulips know to pop up again with straight shoots and still produce a pink flower? Or the purple hyacinth? Or the bachelor buttons? What is the coding that tells them how to make a flower and not say — a potato or grass or a tree? And maybe there is a thin place there too — between the science and the logic and the amazing illusion of normalcy of nature that should remind mere mortals to treat each spring with the complete and utter wonder it deserves.

Renewal. Spring promises after the snow melts away the months of monochromatic whiteness all will be replaced with shouts of color. That vibrant spring green that takes naked trees and dresses them all producing leafy figures. The yellow of the columbine — the sage blue and the purple thyme ground cover. You cannot not be hopeful and joyful and amazed at spring and the hope it brings unbidden. Sometimes remembering we live in a thin place is enough to make me grateful — especially this Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

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The Vietnam war was my era, and Civil Rights and civil disobedience. I was such a good girl for such a long time. Raised by wolves — actually just Republicans — I was polite and eager to please. Until I wasn’t. In my senior year in high school, my all-white school was integrated. It happened by busing black students from 10 miles away into our school. I was a member of a service club that “built spirit.”

I remember the day I was asked to help a new student learn our campus. He was a black football player, and my boyfriend (later my husband) was the captain of the football team. It was the first day of integration for our school.

I met Franklin at the bus. Led him to his first period class and was waiting outside the door when the bell rang to show him the lunchroom. At some point — news people appeared to record all this in my San Francisco suburban town.

At the end of football practice no one had considered Franklin would have no bus to take home — it had left hours before. I offered him a ride. I had my black Ford Falcon with no restrictions on where I could drive. He kept saying “Are you sure you wanna do that?” And it just seemed like my hospitality should extend to getting him home. I had never driven to his high school — Ravenswood — before. We made small talk about his first day and when he guided me to his neighborhood he suggested corners where I could drop him. I just kept driving until we reached his home. He got out of the car, thanked me and told me to lock all my doors and drive straight out of there.

The next night the local weekly paper came out and my mother was furious — I was on the front page — with Franklin — showing him the campus. She used all of those words I taught my own children years later were words we NEVER used. And she told me how embarrassed she was — what a disappointment I was to her. I didn’t tell her the fact she was involved in her fourth divorce and was sleeping with the married mayor embarrassed me.

I left for college months later to Colorado — where I was involved with other polite white girls in a civil rights march on campus. I transferred from that school after only one semester. I was engaged now so I headed to the University of Nevada to be with my fiancé. Protests about the war in Vietnam were growing. I was planning my wedding. And I was taking a graduate level poetry class. It was a mistake — everyone else was older and smarter. A hiccup in the schedule had put me there. I asked if I could stay. The professor was a cerebral, long-haired guy, at the end of his tenure — he didn’t care as long as I did the work.

And I did because everything happening in that class was relevant. Those folks — and now me — were writing mostly very bad poems but about issues of the day. Kent State happened at the end of the semester — students in Ohio were shot and killed on a campus in the middle of the day for protesting the war in Vietnam. They had in no way threatened the National Guardsmen who showed up and fired into the crowd.

Days later I was getting ready to join my poetry teacher lead a march on the football field to protest the shootings. We had been told any teacher participating would be fired and students ran the risk of having their grades for the semester erased. I decided not to tell my fiancé I was marching. As I got ready to leave my dorm room the phone rang. There was no caller ID then. Or recording machine. I picked up the call. It was my estranged mother, wanting to talk about the wedding I was paying for. I told her we could talk later — I was leaving for an event. She said she thought classes had been canceled. I said I was attending a rally in support of the students who had been killed at Kent State. What she said next changed everything. “Those kids deserved to die. And If you weren’t in class where you belonged, I would hope the same thing would have happened to you.” I hung up.

I walked down to the football field and joined my long-haired professor. The school took pictures of us so they could accurately erase our grades. My fiancé was on the field for spring practice. He looked away when he saw me.

They released our grades eventually and I got an A in that class. Honestly, I think all of us who marched got A’s. The professor was fired — he didn’t care. My fiancé told me to never do anything that dumb again. And for years I didn’t. But I also didn’t forget. When I got divorced with two small children — six and half years later — after six years of being abused, I started writing again.

So I have been watching the news this week with much heartbreak and much pride. I don’t know if this actually is the Age of Aquarius (in astrological terms) if these are Indigo children (in psycho babble terms) or if these are a tribe of superhumans emerged. Their origin doesn’t matter. They are fearless — frank speaking — no crap taking — fluid of gender — missing predictable bias and wanting a world of fierce equality — young humans.

As former President Obama said, “We have been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.” Hearing those words I hope inspires them even more. Because the haters are always there — sometimes in your own family. Sometimes all it takes is a long-haired professor who believes in you or a former president of a once-great country to praise you — to have those words inspire you for a lifetime. Let’s make certain all the young people hear from us how proud we are of their bravery to speak truth to power. Tell them any day — even Sunday in the Park.

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

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I am of the age where we were taught to hide under our desks — for when The Bomb dropped. It was the early 60s. We had a plan. It also involved emergency routes to walk away from the school and to walk to preplanned safe places. So we did the drills and we giggled hiding under our desks. Many of our dads had been in The War — and they cautioned us not to laugh at the possibility of such danger because they had seen the ugliest face of a nuclear war.

But nothing happened. So the drills were an exercise and we sometimes got out of school early and nothing happened. We didn’t feel unsafe. We didn’t fear much. We were preteen kids in the Eisenhower era. We were safe.

We raised children who were also pretty safe. The guns started with Columbine really — in the late 90s — at the same time as the movie “The Matrix” and a lot of violent video games came on the scene. That is simply the truth. We invited horrible violence into film and our lives — in the name of art — and entertainment.

If you have read any of my other columns about shootings since Sandy Hook — there is nothing new here. Except the anger. The raging — Times Up! — anger pointed in a bullseye-scoping — high-powered — targeted — can’t-miss device at the problem. And it is aimed too at nonsense excuses of everyone who defends the rights of civilians having access to assault weapons.

The past 24 hours I tried to stay offline and away from electronic media. I did. I tried. But then I felt like it was somehow disrespectful not to pay attention — not to see the faces of those killed. Not to try and learn something about those victims. Not to understand the pain. Wanting to look away. And then trying to imagine the pain of the friends, parents and grandparents — the teachers, the First Responders, the reporters assigned to the story. These shootings have so many more victims than those who are immediately buried.

So I’m crying writing this — crying because as the parent of two and the grandparent of three, I am in pain for each of the families who lost their children. To the adults who lost their lives protecting those children — there is a special place in a heaven for you.

CNN on Thursday night took us through each person killed with a short bio. I watched every one. I wanted to see them. Know them. And yes … pray for their families.

Years ago, we had the award-winning playwright, actress and professor at the New York University School of Law, Anna Deavere Smith, who is a black woman, speak at the Eccles Center. After the show we sat in a booth at a restaurant and agreed on the most dangerous person in America — a white boy in a hoody.

From Columbine to Sandy Hook from a church basement in Charleston to Sunday service in Texas — the race and the outfit are the same. A young white male in a hoody.

People of color aren’t killing children in schools. White young men with assault weapons are.

This isn’t about having your hunting rifle that fires maybe three bullets in a minute. This is about a weapon that shoots 45 bullets in less than a minute. Created to fight in wars and kill — people.

We need to better address mental health resources — yes and also social services for kids falling through the cracks — this kid was orphaned four months ago. He went through all that in the holidays and ended up here — in the month all depressives know — February. The friends who took him in allowed his weapon be in a special locker in his room. An assault weapon. The kid can’t buy a beer legally but he can own a gun and murder 17 people.

I am part of an international conference of attendees who are among the most original thinkers in the world. They come from Africa and the Middle East and the Far East and South Korea and China and all of Europe. And in the past few years I have invited them to come visit me in my most magical town in the greatest country in the world. And to a person, they have said no. And the reason is in a kind of mash-up answer that sounds like this… “You just shoot people there — randomly — anywhere. Movie theaters, malls, churches, schools and concerts. There is no place safe in your country.”

And I protest — of course — and try and say that is just the sensational reporting but the truth — in my heart — is I know they are right. Random acts of violence take place in mostly spaces that should be safe — even sacred.

The women’s movement has become a force to send bullies in the workplace packing. All the Me Too stories about sexual assault and abuses that have been an abuse of power have been successful in bringing overdue attention to a problem that has been too long ignored.

Times Up! is part of that same movement but I would suggest we can claim it — both female AND male and use it for the need to change the influence of the gun lobby in politics and remove assault weapons from civilians. Let’s just start there. Let’s finally be mad as hell and agree not to take it any more. MAD AS HELL. EVERY ONE OF US. Every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, sister and brother. We need to tell every politician they can take those thoughts and prayers and light a candle in the wind with them.

Here’s my thought — the national gun obsession needs to be reset right now. Here’s my prayer — that not another child at school, concert-goer, or grandmother in a church is slaughtered.

We want change and we want it NOW. Times Up! — this Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

The post Teri Orr: We must demand an end to gun violence appeared first on Park Record.

We are here — at the midway point — of our collective winter of discontent. I had been thinking the full disorientation of too many events crammed into too short a space of time combined with mild weather was making me, alone, completely out of sync. But it turns out there are many of us suffering, increasingly in less silence, about how we feel a bit unmoored this faux winter season.

I had lunch this week with an old friend/former fellow teammate from a work environment almost 30 years ago. We have stayed friends probably because the bonds we made in the pressure cooker of the newsroom are like no other. We have been involved deeply in our community in different ways ever since — because we genuinely love it here.

But this lunch we talked a lot about “getting off the bus.” Not stopping our work lives but trying to stop some of the insanity swirling around us. The never-ending cycle of needing to respond to the next crisis and or email. And there is always a next crisis. January had been brutal. The traffic — the news cycle — and the mild weather — had made for extra work in abnormal conditions. We both commented how hard it was to feel winter when it was sunny and 51 degrees outside.

We laughed a lot too — as we always did — part of the glue that has kept us friends. And as we left the diner and walked outside with the sun shining in the bright blue sky, he stopped in the parking lot and said, “What a beautiful day!” I responded by saying, “Unfortunately!” And then I stopped myself and backed up and said, “You’re right. It is a beautiful day and I should just enjoy it for what it is.” And he replied — “See, that’s what I mean about wanting to get off the bus. We are so ingrained in what we think we should want, we kinda miss what we have.”

That night after a day of work-related moderate full-body slams, I pulled the drapes at home and looked around for something for dinner. I was feeling sorry for myself, which is a room I try not to enter very often. I decided the solution was chocolate pudding for dinner. I had some pre-made from the store along with some whipped cream. I covered the pudding with so much whipped cream it looked like it had fully snowed all over the dark pudding. I ate every bite while I rented a movie on television and got lost in the book brought to screen I had loved years ago.

The book was being assigned to middle school kids the galaxy over about four years ago. So all my Grands were reading it and I did too. It was called “Wonder” about a boy who was entering public school for the first time at fifth grade. He had been born with a number of defects that required a number of surgeries and left him with a scarred misshapen face. His mother had homeschooled him. Entering school for the first time at that pivotal moment in life was a challenge — for his parents and older sister. I loved the book as did the Grands when we all read it.

The movie features Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson — who has never won an Oscar. I don’t think this is his year either. But the story wasn’t really about their characters — it was about their son, Auggie, and how cruel kids can be and how the human spirit is resilient and how kindness always wins. I had about a two-hour nonstop deeply cathartic cry.

I did get back on the bus — er computer — after the film to … just check a few things. Xfinity had already sent me a message about my buying the movie. “You chose a good one,” it said. And I laughed since that is ALWAYS what it says when you purchase any film.

A friend who makes her living from the land in a different way had posted that the arrival of her seed packets was occasion to celebrate because — “they give me hope.” And I looked carefully at the photo. There were packets of fennel and brandywine tomatoes and pumpkins waiting for the ground to thaw in her high-desert location so she could plant those seeds that will become the vegetables that will be the ingredients that will become the meals she will serve again in her award-winning kitchen. She loved the arrival of the packets because seeds help her see the future.

Which is what has been missing for a while in our nose-down daily grinds of a season that is neither fully winter or anything else. The mild temperatures have confused plants in the yard and things are popping up that should never be seeing a February in the mountains. I have lived here long enough to not be surprised by snow in any month of the calendar. I’m guessing this year will not be different. When the resorts close we often have great storms for days, sometimes weeks, on end. Mother Nature is a fickle brazen hussy some years. I suspect this is one of those. Fat Tuesday is next week and the season of Lent begins the day before Valentine’s Day — which seems unusually cruel. I mean giving things up the day before you might really want them. So this year I’m gonna follow my friend, Sister MaryAnne’s lead and instead of giving up anything for the season I will add something. I will try very hard to add gratitude for things just the way they are … every day including this Sunday in the Park…

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