News news news,
where oh where do I begin.
I’ll start with The Happ.
I’ve been teaching vocal workshops in a private residence in Lennox Head. And it’s has been a heart-warming delight, to have a random bunch of singers come to this home and explore their voices with me.
It’s not a choir. We aren’t trying to sing together, in perfect harmony. We aren’t trying to meld, and vocally bond and gloriously swoosh together so our voices compliment and melt like in a real choir. No no. Nope.
It’s a vocal workshop that’s more like a singing lesson. Where you make some weird sounds, learn the names, seclude your voice, make a private safety barrier and excuse your inner nutter, feel the energy and effort to pull these random sounds I ask. And in doing it together in a group, we build a little self-confidence. A little dinner table sized sing out with technique involved. You can’t sing in front of other people in a single studies singing lesson. There’s no practising the ideas and theory of harmony when you’re pretty much alone. Not with other living breathing voices. I mean you can. You can study music theory and harmony till you’re one hundred and eighteen. But some shit is just more fn with other peeps. Believe you me.
So we tried it together.
There’s an underlying flow to this term of The Happ.
I held it in my mum’s house. Who passed away late last year. It’s taken us kids some time to gather the emotional strength to get to the point of appropriately morbid jokes and gut felt swearing as we decide what to do with the artefacts of our entire lives. The things that just belong there. No where else, but there.
So, unbeknownst to most who came, you were raising you’re voice exploration, song defying giggles, your meeting stranger smiles, in this home of a woman who loved a good party. Who loved to cook up a storm. Who loved art, and cooking, and pottery, and gardening, and her kids, and me. You did good.
Easily most of the delights who came, who enquired about where we were, or already knew, gave me sincere, knowing, appreciative nods. Warm small smiles. Stories of their grief for their people. They got it. And that made it ok.
Cause I would understand, and did understand, to the people who I think I know of weirded out. I didn’t mean to weird you out. I’m just doing this shit called life the way she taught me best. Book stuff in and sing.
So that’s my Happ news.
We’re packing it up now. We’re moving it out. Sorting through generations of keepsakes. My mum was a precious keeper. In all the ways. And we’re letting family friends move in to have laughs and music and smiles with their kids. This is the way it goes. I hope you see fairy lights there at Christmas.
I’m going to find a new home for the Happ. Cause it’s fun. And a new way to run it.
But I needed and wanted to send a special thank you to the people who came to Term 3, The Happ, 2019. You were part of a precious 10 Week journey of singing for me. And I heard you. And we sang.
I hold my breath as I go to advertise and promote The Happ… Because I also teach Singing Workshops with a complete fear, that those who taught me will see me and judge me, harshly, for not doing it how they did it. Because it’s not the kind of thing or “Vocal Workshop” format that I have attended in the past. And so to them, from the bottom of my soul to theirs, I think I need to say, with a fear in my voice only I can hear…. “How cool is breaking the mould?”.
Pretty frickin’ cool.
If YOU would like to host The Happ at your house,
We can really make that happen!
Contact me now to chat.
You don’t have to commit to a whole term or anything crazy… But i’m just saying…