Tag: music

Facebook- Are You Wasting My Life?

Next time you’re in a bad mood, resist the urge to try and cheer yourself up by checking Facebook. It likely won’t work, according to a recent study, reports Rebecca Hiscott, Editorial Fellow, HuffPost Business. 

The reason? Even more than other areas of the Internet, Facebook makes you feel like you’re wasting your life.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook due to the fact that I am host to three different Facebook pages; my professional page, my personal page, and one of my son’s Facebook professional fan pages.

I’ve been sitting here today waiting for a new furnace to be installed in the back of the house so I have a lot of time on my hands with nothing much productive going on except for the simmering vegetable soup on the stove. Which brings me to Facebook and all the time that I spend with my FB friends.

I started thinking about exactly what posts are in my newsfeed. What is the profile of my friends and their interests. Just exactly what shows up as I scroll my newsfeed every day? Are the posts in my newsfeed a mirror of me?

Well, a lot, a whole lot of my friends love animals. Dogs, cats, kittens and unusual friendships between domestic and wild life. Videos that have circulated forever of cute, crazy and rescued animals. Then there was that crazy dentist who killed Cecil, Zimbabwe’s beloved lion. A favorite. My friends, including me, couldn’t get enough of that dentist of death! A pox on him!
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My Facebook friends and I share envious pictures of food – where we ate it and what we were doing and who we were with while we were having a good time eating food and taking pictures of it, including not-always-so-flattering selfie’s with our friends while eating at that marvelous place. I kind of feel left out of the good times when I see these friends of mine celebrating while I am sitting at home wracking my brain for a blog idea, or alone with a pile of laundry looking at me. They may be right on that point if you never ever have anything going on in your own life.
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There are the political posts and gun issue posts. This is where my friends divide. I find a spectrum of diversity on both of those issues, each friend so sure their conclusions are right. I have always believed that friends and politics don’t mix, so it is only on a rare occasion that I stick my nose into any divisive issue, rather than to have it bitten off. I don’t think FB is a forum of persuasion. Just my opinion.

And music. I love music and many of my friends also find music to be an integral part of their lives and we share all kinds of music information on Facebook. I love these posts. 

Finally, there are the myriad of shared posts with affirmations about how much we love being mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. 
Someone said to me the other day that when she logs onto Facebook and sees all of these people socializing and having a good time it makes her feel lonely. So maybe the studies are right, but I doubt in the very near future that people are going to walk away from Facebook. 
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In the meantime, in my own personal non-scientific study I do find that my friends mirror who I am and what I’m interested in reading about; with the exception of politics and keeping my nose out of it.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2015©. All rights reserved.
 

 
 

THE ART IN POLITICS

  

   

The Art in Politics

I know it sounds silly, but that doesn’t make it not true. Art engenders empathy in a way that politics doesn’t and in a way that nothing else really does.  

Whether it’s a photograph, play, television show, movie, or lyrics in a song – it doesn’t matter. Art has a way of changing things that most factions don’t or can’t. 

Art can bring the conversation to the forefront when politics on sensitive issues builds walls and divides. We can dissect, digest, debate and appreciate Art in whichever form it is delivered and ruminate the message we take away. 

Without malice we can disagree, but Art spawns conversation and changes the temperature of how we talk about divisive issues. 

  

   

The books and plays; To Kill A Mocking Bird, Look Who’s Coming To Dinner, Bird Cage, West Side Story, Schindler’s List, Hamilton (now on Broadway) and, of course, Shakespeare. The list is long. I’m sure you can add to this with some that might have influenced or changed your thoughts about a social issue.

  

Photographs by Robert Capa, Eddie Adams and others that have evoked conversations and changed the world forever. Visuals of events frozen in time that provoke and will stimulate discussions for generations to come. 
  
Lyrics of Dylan, Springsteen, RAP, and, if I might add, the 90’s generation Dylan songwriter, Emerson Hart. These and many more creative or controversial writers bring sensitive issues – war, racism, poverty, dysfunction, mental illness into conversation. 

Art creates change in people’s hearts. It happens slowly, but it does happen. As the wheel of creativity turns, so does the world.

Copyright Sandra Hart© All Rights Reserved

EMPTY NEST SYNDROME

( Author Note: As former Romper Room Teacher and Pittsburgh CBS affiliate anchor, my children began their lives with Romper Room and Mr. Rogers as their ‘normal’ family. We relocated with my late husband to New Jersey 43 years ago, but no escaping for them – their friends here in New Jersey always remembered me as the lady on Romper Room.)

Growing Wings Of Their Own

It has almost been 20 years since one of my children took his sisters out from under the ‘Romper Room Mom’ shadow they had been living under for most of their lifetime. A new dimension was added to our lives and nothing would ever be the same again.

In 1996 my Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey singer/songwriter son, Emerson Hart, and his band Tonic released their first album, Lemon Parade, which rocketed to multi-platinum status and garnered him awards, including the Billboard Award for the #1 most played song on rock radio.

What followed in the ensuing 19 years would be world tours, six Tonic albums, two Grammy Nominations, ASCAP Award, movie soundtracks, two successful solo albums and concerts in war zones entertaining our American troops – even being knocked off of his feet by a bomb blast while the band was staying at one of Sodom Hussein’s Palaces in Iraq.

Springsteen. Bon Jovi. Both New Jersey icons, were already firmly established within the 80’s Rock frenzy by the time Emerson and Tonic came along. But the ‘new kid’ on the block from New Jersey, the late ’90’s talent entry, came into the game like gangbusters when music tastes were were changing. Emerson was on the tail end of Rock’s biggest roll, but he and Tonic have survived.

So have his sisters. Each of them with their own quiet, or not so quiet victories growing up and out from under the ‘Romper Room Mom’ memories.

So a toast from parents to our children and their victories growing up and out from under our wings. A toast for 20 more quiet and maybe not so quiet years!

FAST FORWARD

“One is the loneliest number that you will ever do.” John Farnham

Several years ago I wrote a piece on “one is the loneliest number,” adding various reasons why that didn’t necessarily have to be true:

“So many songs including the one with the famous line in the above title ‘one’ means heart ache, single, lonely, by myself and all of the other negative images they want us to conjure up about poor little ‘one’.

Isn’t ‘one’ the primary, the very first number in our numeric system? Without ‘one’ there would be no starting and with all of the other infinite numbers trailing behind it certainly is not lonely.

For me being by myself gives me the opportunity to do as I please. So when you are alone and feeling sorry for yourself embrace your ‘oneness’.

Always remember tomorrow is another day and a chance to be number ‘one’ again, head of the pack and at the top of the heap. If you learn to love yourself, you will be your own best company.”*

Fast forward to the present. Right now, I am waiting in the orthopedics office, alone, filled with a room full of injured people to varying degrees of injury and loneliness. Old, young, broken arms and legs, wheelchairs. Surveying the large waiting room, I am feeling quite vulnerable, witnessing how a trip, slip or other catastrophe can change one’s life. The human body is an amazing machine. But a human machine that is quite fragile and vulnerable to all sorts of damage.

My husband is in the city, my children are spread throughout the south and Midwest and here I am, ‘one’ and not so cocky about my ‘oneness.’

Right now, I am realizing that all of the prior feelings I had about the number 1, changes as I get older and more aware of how important 2 or more can be.

On my way home today, a quick stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for número uno, and then calls to my husband and children to tell them that they are ‘one’ in my life, head of the pack and top of the heap!

* Excerpts from Read Between My Lines: What Was I Thinking. Sandra Hart Copyright.

Copyright 2014 Sandra Hart

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BRAIN BEHAVIOR

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Lately, it has been hard to turn on the news. It seems as though there is so much violence among us that every day or so it easily makes its way into the headline news. And the most tragic element of it all, a great portion of the deadly violence is by persons who are mentally ill. Time and time again, it is not the guns or knives, but the instrument of death among us is a mind afflicted with mental illness.

Until we as a society wake up and make a conscience effort to erase the stigma of mental illness, arm ourselves with tools to recognize those who need help and take action by opening the attic door to the myths of brain disorders, the tragic news will only increase.

Why am I so compassionate about this? Because I care? Yes. Because I want to support research for cures? Yes. Because I am one who has recovered from the trauma of living with someone who was mentally ill? Yes. My husband was an acute paranoid schizophrenic.
http://bbrfoundation.org/stories-of-recovery/in-schizophrenia%E2%80%99s-wake-a-son-laments-the-father-who-might-have-been

As the article explains, recovery is sometimes a difficult journey for not only the patient, but those caught in the chaotic mental web that is spun around them.

I found my healing through my writing and my son, Emerson Hart through his music.

There is recovery also by giving back to society through knowledge and understanding that if diagnosed early before the illness becomes acute there is help and hope for those who are not able to rationally help themselves.

Within our communities and families let us all start a dialogue about how we can erase the stigma of mental illness and in the process save lives of both the afflicted and their potential victims. Brain Behavior is the issue, not guns.

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Sandra Hart copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

Twelve Notes

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Just think about it. We only have 12 notes in music. Only 12. We rearrange them constantly, add octaves, sharps, flats, various rhythms and then put them in a box with a label.

The personal combinations and cultural adaptations are endless. Don’t you sometimes wish we could take all of those notes with their variations we have labeled as classical, jazz, rock, folk, rap, country and other boxes and make them as one? Let’s just embrace it all as what it is — MUSIC. Just one box holding all the variations of those 12 notes. Twelve notes that for centuries has united us through the love of them.

As a lifetime lover of those12 notes in all forms, it is an overwhelming thought to me that in this universe, generation after generation has produced talented composers that can create new tapestries with them, over and over again.

Those 12 notes continue to remain a common language through which nations and cultures can speak and understand one another. I firmly believe if the music ever stops, so will we.

Sandra Hart copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

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Listen to Beauty In Disrepair on iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/beauty-in-disrepair/id807270885

The Final Cut

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My son, Emerson Hart, released his second solo album today and on the inside cover is a picture of him in his studio in Nashville. On the wall behind my son is his grandfather’s fiddle and a grouping of family pictures, including a silhouette of me when I was about 13 years old. Seeing that silhouette reminded me of an event relating to my short hair in that period of my life.

Summer of 1946………

“Now don’t waste your time trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, young lady. Your curly locks you got from me, and they’ve suited me just fine!” Grandma used to say as she pulled and tugged at my golden mass of kink, taming the wildness on top of my head into thick braids tied with rubber bands at the ends. Much better her fussing with my hair than my mother, who would make the plats so tight my scalp would hurt for days.*

September, 1952………..

I was twelve and I had never had my hair cut. Ever. Except I did have bangs, but that was the only part of my wild flaxen locks that were ever touched. And to me that really didn’t count. I couldn’t wear my hair loose because it was like a big tumble weed on my head it was so thick. So my mother insisted and saw to it that I had braids for what seemed to me to be—-forever.

I was a cheer leader at Roosevelt School on LaBelle View in an industrial town on the Ohio River and in the sixth grade. To be a cheer leader for all of us girls chosen was really a big deal. But for me it was just the opposite. Almost an embarrassment. I had to suffer the humiliation of those braids when all my girlfriends had short hair. On Saturday nights I would hang out with my girlfriends who would wrap strands of hair into pin curls fastened with bobby pins like the grown up girls did. And I envied them for having mothers that understood.

But no matter how much I begged, my mother stood her ground and refused to budge regarding my golden braids – until her patience with my pleading wore thin when I was twelve. She went upstairs and got her big sewing scissors and with one final cut to each braid severed them from my head. Wack. Wack. Just like that. Then she sent me next door to my Aunt Dorothy who did hair from her house, to try to make something of what was left of my hair. Needless to say, that wasn’t easy.

I really should have been traumatized by the harsh and finality of my mother’s chopping off my braids, But at the time I was so relieved from not having those braids anymore, that I didn’t have any thoughts about what my mother did and how she went about it. It just was what it was and I grew into a teenager inside of myself instantly once those those appendages were removed from my head. Kind of a free-at-last .

But it wasn’t until forty five years later when my mother died and I was going through her things did I remember about those braids.

It is true that we never know what is in someone’s heart, a lesson I learned too late in my relationship with my mother.

I loved her very much, but sadly, I never understood how painful it must have been for her to cut from her daughter what she never had. There, in a long faded blue box that probably once held a necklace were my two golden braids-remarkably intact with the rubber bands still securing the silky curled ends.

* Behind The Magic Mirror, Sandra Hart. copyright 2002

Moonlight In Her Eyes, Sandra Hart
Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

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Who Knew?

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Break dancing? Who knew? In 1984 my then almost 15 year old son and I traveled through Egypt and Israel. We were fortunate to have been invited onto to a secret underground air base in the Israeli desert. The pilots and their families gave my son a birthday party while there and he was the hit of the party break dancing for all of them. They had never seen anything like that in person before and were taken with my young sons moves. (Ahhh…the days before everyone was on the internet and social media).

Little did we all know that my son, Emerson Hart, would grow up to be a twice Grammy nominee, Billboard awarded for the most played radio rock song, ASCAP award for the best television theme song, movie theme song writer (including hit film “American Pie” multi platinum artist, lead singer/ songwriter for the band Tonic.

It is against this remarkable backdrop of self-achievements that my son will release his second solo album, “Beauty in Disrepair” on April 15, 2014, “Beauty In Disrepair”, a follow up to his last “Cigarettes and Gasoline” solo effort that garnered two top 20 singles.

emersonhart.com. .

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STORYTELLING

(Atlantic Highlands Elementary School is on our main street here in town and each time I pass I think of the wonderful foundation this little school with less that 300 students gave my children  when beginning their lives and still continues to do so with the children here in our Atlantic Highlands Borough. After attending a concert this weekend in New York where my son, Emerson, and the boys of Grammy nominated Tonic performed, I am remembered of the days when I waited in line to pick up my children and hearing of their adventures big and small within the rooms of The Atlantic Highlands Elementary School. I am moved to repost this blog written almost a ;year ago)

This Sunday morning on the CBS morning show, they had an interesting segment on storytelling and the resurgence of live storytelling with not only the baby boomers, but also the younger generation. More are are putting aside Facebook and other social networks to listen and create in real time.

Interesting how the universe kind of puts things in order in front of you when perhaps those things have been recently on your mind. Last week, at my son’s wedding I had been thinking about his life, the lives of my two daughters and the paths that they have walked. Whether it has been a curse or a blessing, my three children and I are creative beings, destined to create or dry up and blow away.

Sometimes, unless you get lucky, one’s creative life moves to the back shelf as an avocation instead of a vocation. Of the three of my gifted children, only my son has been lucky enough to use his creativity as his vocation.

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All of this takes me back to when he was in kindergarten. During my first conference with his teacher, I was stunned by her blunt revelation. My son was telling tall tales in school. Creating stories that were,to her, obviously untrue. I could feel the crimson creeping up my neck toward my face as I sat with my knees almost touching my chin in the kindergarten chair. It wasn’t until she continued that I became both intrigued and relieved.

“I decided that since Lee has such a creative imagination, I have given him the task of being the class storyteller. Each week I have set aside time for storytelling. He has never failed to entertain us,” she said with a smile.

Thirty-eight years have passed since that conference night. I now, so wish I could remember her name, because that was a great teacher. Instead of making my little son feel ashamed, she turned his childhood creativity and imagination into something special. And I can honestly say she was possibly responsible for the beginning of his confidence in his creativity and love of words to express his thoughts and feelings.

That young kindergartener has since grown up to be a twice Grammy nominated, Billboard Awarded, ASCAP honored singer/songwriter. A multi-platinum recording artist, movie and television theme songwriter and has been featured on over 40 recorded albums other than his own.

His genetic childhood love of storytelling grew into truths from his heart that have been embraced by millions of music fans.

This was the story I was thinking about sharing during the toast at his wedding last week, but I thought better of it. This was his bride’s day and her family’s. So I sat quietly with my heart filled with joy for all of them with my silent thoughts within my mother’s heart about that little kindergartener of mine with his entertaining imagination.

(Editors note: My oldest got into New York University through her creative writing. Brett has the special ability to write with a humorist edge and has also designed all of my book covers. Alison has written for equine magazines and is a wonderful writer and photographer.. Both are using their creative talents as avocations.)

Mazel tov, Salude, Bravo, Congratulations

Sandrashart is closed today and until after Labor Day. My son, Emerson Hart, the lead singer/songwriter of Tonic, is getting married this weekend and we will be closing up shop and celebrating this wonderful occasion with close friends and family.