An exercise in flexibility.
It was a phrase that was uttered at Lisbon Jazz Festival Thursday morning that made me chuckle, but to be honest, this entire month has been just that for this editor.
Started out finally recovering from COVID and working from home for a period of time, to getting back to the office only to have not one 12-inch snow storm but two in one week dump snow on the roadways.
My front wheel drive Ford Focus, Tippy Toe, is not always the easiest car to drive in snow if it is too deep, and so it meant for almost a week I was in my apartment to work.
Which meant I gamified a recent Netflix renewal to watch as many movies and television shows as I could from just after Christmas to this last week in January.
Final count in that session was 92 films and miniseries, and the last two seasons of Better Call Saul watched.
That is including all of Netflix’s films up for Academy Awards this year, as well as a couple who didn’t make that cut off (“American Symphony” was a very riveting documentary.)
If there’s one race to seek out the nominees in the Academy Awards this year, it’s the best documentary shorts, but especially “The Last Repair Shop” on Hulu. It is all about the workers who help at a repair shop in central L.A. to make sure kids have musical instruments in working condition, a true labor of love.
As I spent most of Thursday over at the Lisbon Jazz Festival watching numerous bands from our areas perform, that documentary short kept coming back to mind, and how much an instrument or talent draws the most out of you.
And how much the work of organizing an event like that was truly an exercise in flexibility, from last minute cancellations due to illness to rescheduling on the fly because a bus had troubles along the road to the contest site.
There was great music throughout the day, and a very relaxed atmosphere for the event. But it was as always, the students in our area from all schools who shined in playing on that stage because of the passion of their instructors and for music. And being flexible with the random curveballs life keeps throwing at you.