Stacy Horn

Oh God. They said my camera repair was going to take 2 – 3 weeks, which means I won’t have it back until April 13 at the soonest. That’s my new haircut day, by the way. I think I’m going to do something short-ish. But how am I going to last??

This is a picture I took on 11th Street during the spring two years ago! It’s part of a series I took to prove that 11th Street is as lush as I describe in my singing book. I’m sure someone is going to accuse me of exaggerating. I’ve got to get another shot when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.

Going out and seeing things I want to shoot and having no camera to work with is killing me! I’m not going to last weeks without my camera. Not. Going. To. Make. It. Sigh.

This is a scan of a polaroid from a photo shoot for Fortune Magazine. I think it was 1994. I’m in a courtyard behind my building next to the phone company’s punch down block and that’s either a phone company worker or just some guy who was doing some other form of work, I forget!

That was a fun shoot though. While I was always very grateful for them, they were good for business, getting my picture taken was a tedious process. Hours of hair and make-up and stylists, which isn’t as fun as it looks on America’s Next Top Model, it’s difficult to read or do anything, so you have to just sit there. Then hours of shooting. The whole process often took an entire day. Again, I am VERY grateful for all the work people put into these pictures and the articles about Echo, don’t get me wrong, but honestly, I don’t know how models do it. This was fun because I did my own hair and make-up (I think, unless I’m remembering wrong) and that was one of my dresses, and it went a lot faster.

A few weeks ago I posted the list of living composers I hoped to interview. Among them was Eric Whitacre. The guy is a freaking rock star. I mean, look at him. Someone tweeted about his TED talk yesterday. I watched it and teared up. I loved his story, what he thought of choirs and then hearing the basses around him sing the kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem for the first time. (It’s such a great piece of music, I can just imagine what he experienced sitting among the basses.)  You can see his talk here.

My choir did Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque, the first piece that was performed via the virtual choir. It’s an absolutely stunning work of art, as you’ll see. I can’t wait to see the complete video of Sleep.

By the way, the camera repair shopped called me and the repair is going to take WEEKS. I don’t know how I’m going to cope.

I went to the Florida Institute of Technology for one semester only, and while there I was the coxswain for the crew team. We’d get up before dawn to go for a run and then row on the Indian River.

I hated running, wasn’t good at it, and so once everyone else was far ahead of me I’d use that time to explore the area which was still largely rural. It was spectacular. So lush. There was an abandoned mansion nearby that had all the beauty of decaying splendor. I saw and dodged my first alligator there! (I forget if I froze or climbed a tree.)

I also discovered and learned about bioluminescence. The water in the river would light up around you as you waded out with the shell. I’ve never seen it anywhere else since, but that effect was magical. The whole place was magical: orange groves, the sparkling river, that magnificent mansion being taken over with spanish moss. But most of all I also discovered that the hour just dawn is the most enchanting time of the day. It has that particular stillness, but also the sense that everything is about to happen.

A local newspaper did a piece about the crew team. This is us coming up out of the water out of after practice.

I’m out of the picture, sitting to the left of this guy. I felt bad because I was a terrible coxswain, and I didn’t yet accept that some things you’re good at, others, not so much. I barely accept that now! But it stung because the thing I wasn’t good at was leading and motivating the team. The other coxswain was amazing at it. She not only got them to work harder, they had more fun doing it!

The other day on Echo the topic was: haircuts we’ve never forgiven our mothers for. This is mine. I was 12, and right before leaving for what was my first vacation ever, my mother took me to get what was called a Sassoon haircut (it was made popular by Vidal Sassoon).

I was traumatized by it. We went to the Bahamas, and I was mistaken for a boy everywhere I went. People called me “young man.” It killed me. Plus, I developed a HUGE crush on a guy we met there, but he liked the other girl in the picture, who was the daughter of my parent’s friends who went with us (and my future step-sister years later when my mother married her father!) The boy was 16, I was 12, and I didn’t understand how much of a kid I was to him, but still! Plus, how do I put this delicately? An important life change took place for me during that vacation, which made me able to get pregnant, wink, wink. I felt like the female version of Samson whose powers had been shorn with his locks.

Looking at this picture, I think the cut is actually kinda adorable, but that doesn’t let my mother off the hook!! (May she rest in peace.)