Raising Helen’s Big Gig

At the end of last year, Mr. Sather hosted an end-of-year party for the HKMS staff. In his email announcing the party, he said, half-jokingly, that a group of teachers would be providing live music under the name “Raising Helen.” That group included Mr. Macaluso, Mr. Dolecki, Mr. Sather, Mrs. Newman and myself. We had never played together before. And we never ended up playing that night. But before the school year began, Mrs. Kaplan, having heard about “Raising Helen,” reached out to us about the idea of opening the first faculty meeting with the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” because she had seen a YouTube clip in which a random performance of that song in a public space transformed the environment into a positive one. So, we banded together, the five of us, for an hour before the meeting, and hashed out the song and performed it. Later that day, the superintendent was looking for some musicians to play at the convocation, which is when the entire district gets together the day before the First Day of School. Well, you can see where this is going, and this is what happened:

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About rcjockers

I am a middle-school language arts teacher in Connecticut. I like eating hot peppers from my garden, writing, and watching German soccer matches in the dark.

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