Hot Times at Old Town

Appearing below are selections from the hard copy Hot Times. The objective is to highlight activities at the School and in the larger community, especially those featuring or of special interest to teachers and staff. Your suggestions are welcome. Enter a comment (under any item); it will come to me rather than automatically appearing.

A Bit of Old Town School History

In 1987 after receiving his Grammy nomination (he later won the award), John Prine talked with a Chicago Tribune reporter. “When I was 12 or 13, [my big brother] took me [to the School] just to sit and watch what they were doing. They put me in class and I learned some different styles. I took classes for two semesters and then went into the Army. When I got out, I got interested in guitar again and went back down when I heard Ray Tate was teaching bluegrass classes. You didn’t have to read music [because] they could teach you…. It gave everyone a different corner to hide in until they learned how to play chords. It stopped being so complicated and without that, I don’t think a lot of people would’ve continued on. That’s what I thought was great about the School.” www.oldtownschool.org/history/celebs

(This is just one of the fascinating items on the School’s website worth exploring. Did you know that the site includes streaming video from years of concerts? Including Irish and bluegrass. http://www.oldtownschool.org/video)

For celebrity stories, see http://www.oldtownschool.org/history/celebs.html)

Filed under: Teacher stories by Skip | March 22, 2008 | Comments (0)

Diandra Jones in Ghana

As a trained competitive Irish step dancer, turned pro, turned Old Town School teacher, I never expected at any point in my career that I would end up dancing on a latrine door – although remarkably true to tradition – in Africa. But there I was, in the middle of a remote dusty village, under an African sun, surrounded by an audience almost as unsuspecting as I was, hammering away on a nail-studded dismantled slab of wood, all in the name of AIDS. As unlikely as it seemed to be, my Irish dance skills helped to educate marginalized villagers of Ghana, West Africa, on the very likely threat of an oncoming HIV/AIDS epidemic. And though I couldn’t have predicted at the age of four, at my first Irish Dance class, that my dance shoes would have ever meant more to me than the sacrifice of a Saturday afternoon for practice, or a few fleeting blisters, I’m happy to see where they eventually took me…

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Filed under: Teacher stories by Skip | September 21, 2007 | Comments (3)