Stacy Horn

God, I hate having to promote myself. I’ve been emailing up a storm about my TEDx talk, and now I need to curl up in a ball for a week. Most of the people I’ve contacted have been so nice, and helpful and understanding though. It’s very heartening. And the very, very small number who haven’t, well, I honestly can’t blame them and no one was horrible about it.

Did I tell the story of what went on behind the scenes of my TED talk? I have to go look, I don’t want to repeat myself. For now though, I really do need to go pet a cat for a while or something.

Some goldfish I felt sorry for. You can’t see in the picture how dismal their situation was. The tank was so small, and not very deep, and the fish in there had no room to move.

The video of my TEDx talk is up! I chose my outfit thinking this was all that would show. I would have re-thought the jeans I chose (jeans are okay, just different jeans).

I worked so hard whittling down my talk to the most crucial points I wanted to make. Can I just say: public speaking is hard!

I was watching the Grammys and I didn’t know it was coming when they announced that Kent Knappenberger won the first ever Grammy for “Music Educator.” I loved how they listed all the choirs he ever started (there were a lot of them). When asked how the award money was going to help initially he said, “Right now I have a student that wants to play violin, and our school doesn’t own a violin, so we got one on loan (from me).” Not a single violin!

This is such a great and important award. From Neil Portnow, President/CEO of the GRAMMY Foundation and The Recording Academy: “Many musicians would not be expressing their gift for creativity had it not been for the dedication and encouragement of a music teacher who inspired them to pursue a professional career.”

Very true. But I would not limit the rewards to professionals only. Anyone who has music in their life at any level benefits. So congratulations, Kent Knappenberger! You can nominate someone for next year, but you need to hurry. The deadline is March 31st.

Yesterday it was almost like spring, today this. 

My way down 11th Street was blocked by this fallen … bush thing.

Yesterday I was tweeting about all the helicopters in the sky and everyone said it must be for the Superbowl. This afternoon, I came up out of the subway and once again the sky in my neighborhood was buzzing. It wasn’t the Superbowl this time I learned, sadly. Philip Seymour Hoffman (who lived nearby) has died.

Right now his block is filled with police, news people, friends and neighbors.

A lot of people like football, I take it. These people were in front of a stage set up on Broadway, many waiting for autographs from I don’t know who. I want to say … football players?

Also set up on Broadway was this giant slide. There was a slide like this at a place called Adventurer’s Inn out on Long Island, except we’d go down it on burlap bags. I loved that slide. I’d go down it over and over. Adventurer’s Inn is long gone and it would have been so much fun to go down this slide, but as you can guess, there was a monster line.

I turned around and took a picture of the crowd watching, and sure enough, that one kid is looking at me like I’m some creepy stalker person.