Hi everyone,

I’m sitting in the Dulles airport waiting and waiting for my connecting flight home after taking the redeye last night from LA. I’ve been at USC for 2 weeks now participating in the course on orchestral management and wanted to update you all. I had the chance to use the pen microphone nearly every class, which worked GREAT! There were some little hiccups due to not thinking through how things might work for someone hearing impaired, but I was able to navigate nearly all of them. In general the biggest barrier was that our class was large - about 35 - and we sat in a room on semi-circular risers - large ones, with tables and chairs. I think the room’s main design is for chorus rehearsals. So we had plenty of room to spread out. And that made it really channeling to hear the students when we had active discussion. I asked the teachers to repeat what a comment was, even in brief, but this clearly threw many of the presenters off and they’d forget after a few mintues so I’d be back to hearing nothing back the presenters answer or just “yes, right, anyone else?” I did get pretty good at reverse engineering comments to figure out what a question had been though. 

This one thing happened about 8 days into the class. The students started piping up for me. They’d tell a presenter who put on the microphone backwards (when they do that, I hear a lot of muffled shirt sounds), or they’d start asking the presenter to repeat comments. I felt so clearly see and held by my community at that moment. Some of the students asked me later if they had overstepped their bounds - they didn’t want to speak for me. But they never went that far. They were always respecting my ability to speak for myself and to simply highlight that a technical adjustment was needed to include everyone was amazing on their part. 

I will say being in active discussion and deep thinking for almost 12 hours a day was exhausting! I got cold-called about an executive director job at a very small summer festival and took a phone interview while I was there. The artistic directors were not at all put off by my hearing loss story and were even pretty energizing by my desire to stay in the arts and continue working to expand the field. I should hear in the next couple of days if I’m moving on in the process. 

There were many “aha” moments while I was in class. I need to synthesize more and then I’ll share them with you. So many self-awareness times, that were packaged as something else just because of what we were talking about. But so many ways that our meditation practice showed up again and again. Be well everyone!