Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Office Update

Three things that I love about my job, today:

1. Dixie (our outgoing Program Director) has been training Elizabeth (our new Program Director) in the ways of the BOM office and her new job. That means Dixie has, among other things, been going over who’s who in our partner networks. Often this sounds like “At the Parks, we work with ____. She loves us. Well, everyone loves us, but she loves us most” and “at CISC our newest friend is ____, but if you can’t get her on the phone, you can talk to ____ --it’s not really her job, but she would do anything for us and our program.”

2. We got a letter in the mail from Senator Obama’s senate office congratulating us on our grant from the NEA. It is surely a form letter, but it is delightful to hear that our work is “a source of pride, and a wellspring of hope for the people of Illinois.”

3. In sorting through files on my desk I found the following quote from a student at the Bridge School: ““You were totally awesome, terrific, fabulous, fantastic, exciting and funny!… and that was totally the best school day in my whole big giant life.  Thanks, that really made me really happy.”
and from the author of “Dear Raheel” (currently being performed in “That’s Weird, Grandma"): “My whole class misses you, you gave us the courage to write and imagine what we can do.”

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Friday, July 11, 2008

Contribute to knowledge of the field!

Kellogg School of Management is conducting a study of how and why people participate in the arts. We believe the results of this study will help organizations like BOM understand their audiences better.

If you have 15 minutes to take a survey for the arts, please click here

If you are skeptical, I’ve included more information below. Also, everyone who takes the survey has a chance to win $100 in PlayMoney (that’s 10 performances of TWG!!!)

More information after the jump! 

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Sunday, July 06, 2008

New Program Director!

We have been extremely fortunate for the last three years to have Dixie Uffelman as our Program Director.

(Dixie is second from the left)

The sadness at Dixie’s imminent departure from the office is, however, tempered by the excitement at having hired Elizabeth Levy as our new Program Director.

More after the jump! 

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Friday, May 16, 2008

Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone

Blog: So, Rachel, as the official Chalmers blogger, why have you been neglecting me?
Rachel: Well, because Lacy and Dixie pretty much covered it. They told you all about the Bollywood number, and the power outage, and the uniform debacle.
Blog: They didn’t tell me about one thing.
Rachel: What one thing?
Blog: Don’t pretend you don’t know.
Rachel: Oh, but that’s the dark side of the Chalmers show. Do we have to go there? 
Blog: It would be wrong not to.
Rachel: Fine, we’ll go . . .

The Chalmers show was the last*** school show performance for Jonathan Mastro and Eric Silverberg, and I cannot deal.

These guys have always been a bit ahead of me on the road—seniors when I was a freshman at Northwestern. Eric starred in the first show I saw at college. We all had the same acting teacher. I remember sitting in on their acting class and watching Jonathan rehearse a Pinter scene. Little did I know, within four years time I’d be watching Jonathan perform fourth grader David E.’s story “Ordering Cars” in the same style.

These two witnessed my horribly awkward audition for the company. They were around for the Sorry Tournaments, and rehearsing at the dog kennel, and Thursday night karaoke at Carol’s. They remember when the Monkeys’ first collection of props got stolen because the company kept all its worldly possessions in a van—I wasn’t around for that, but they were. They did nearly every school show my first couple of years. Eric signed me up for my first Monkey teaching gig. Now he’s a full-time public school teacher. Jonathan’s been teaching at Chalmers for so long, and so well, that kids in the 8th grade swarmed him the second we walked on campus.

If Halena Kays is the Monkey Mama, these guys are the Daddies. They’ve stuck around, shaping the company since the very beginning. Now, they’re real daddies, which is at least part of the reason they’ve got to call it a day.

*** Instead of last, let’s say, “last for now,” because you never know where life’s going to take you, and because I’m certain we’ll all be doing Monkey shows together in our senile delusions when we’re 110, and because, as I said before, I can’t deal.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Ten years with Communities in Schools

This morning BOM’s Program Director, Dixie Uffelman, and I attended Communities in Schools of Chicago‘s annual Partner Recognition Breakfast. CISC is a great organization that helps match under-served community schools with community organizations like ours that can fill critical unmet needs--everything from providing health screenings to anger management and so on. This year CISC honored us as a ten-year agency partner by giving us a lovely plaque.

That’s Dixie, showing it off.

The event was at US Cellular Field, which is always exciting. Dixie claims that she’s spent more time at the Cell as a guest of CISC then as a patron of the White Sox.

That aside, it was really great to see other partner organizations and some of the school principals and site coordinators and hear about the other ten year partners. Our friends at CISC were extremely nice (as always) and had a giant poster board depicting one of our school residencies. It’s always exciting to be in an environment where everyone in the room is committed to “meeting unmet needs” and serving the schools and communities. CISC got to thank us this morning, but I’d like to thank them--their help and guidance allows us to serve the schools that can most benefit from our specific programs and over ten years has provided us with many fruitful partnerships. We rely on their network to make sure that we can serve the most appropriate communities and help us make the first crucial contacts with new school partners. Here’s looking forward to another ten years of collaboration.

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