Hey, all!  Here's the next chapter in my 2014 Adventure Saga!  Thanks for following!

Chapter two

After the Greensboro audition Kirt went out to the parking garage with our equipment and put it all back in the car, rather than unload it in the hall to our room again, and mom and I headed right back upstairs to our room and got on the computer and Googled Imagine Dragons! I, of course, live musically in the seventies, and mom in the fifties, so neither of us had heard any top forty for quite some time!  We watched a lot of YouTube videos of Imagine Dragon songs, and I liked “Demons” the best.  Mom decided to go back to Michigan rather than spend another night in North Carolina, and Kirt and I stayed because we had booked two nights.  If I had known that we would be finished at 10:30, we would not have spent an extra $200 on the second night, but we did not know that.  I was extremely anxious to get back and start working on an arrangement of “Demons”! So to kill some time we went out to lunch and then found a music store and bought a couple of Top Forty books.  “Demons” was in one of them.

We checked out the next morning.  Some time during the night I was attacked by chiggers (I think).  If there’s a bug in the building it will bite me.  My left arm had a dozen bites on it.  (I thought I should tell the management about it, so I did.  I figured for $200 a night, I should be in a bug free room.)  Anyway, it was too far for Kirt to drive all the way back to Reedy Lake in one day, so we again spent one night on the road.  We finally got “home” to our little Florida trailer on Friday, January 31^st. Then I got to work.

We got really lucky that the trailer we rented actually had room for 12 feet of bell tables and my keyboard.  We hauled everything in, set up my computer, and I started writing.  I really missed my studio at home.  I had not brought my piano bench with me, so I had to sit on the couch to play my keyboard, which meant I was sitting way too low to play comfortably—my arms were way up in the air!  So I got a box and a couple of pillows and tried to sit higher!  It worked okay, but it does get your back aching after a while.  I had also left the music stand for the keyboard at home.  I don’t travel with it because I don’t use it for my performances.  But I needed something to hold up my music!  So I got another box and cut it apart and made a make-shift music stand and taped it on the keyboard and tried not to put anything too heavy on it!  Also, when we left from Michigan we had decided not to take a printer with us, and now I really needed one.  So Kirt left me working on the keyboard and went to Lake Wales and found an Office Depot, or something like that, and bought me a new printer.  Just a little black and white thing, but the cost of this adventure kept adding up!  Printer, paper, toner--$100 just like that.  And I did feel sorry for Kirt.  It is very hard to be in a one bedroom trailer when the other person is playing top 40 pop on handbells!  He took off most days and wandered around Frostproof or Lake Wales, spent time at the library, and ran errands.  I also felt sorry for the neighbors, because the trailers were so close together in that park that you could hear conversations around the dinner table!  And here I was playing the same song over and over and over….  Also a problem, I was still on tour.  I would get half a song written and we’d have to pack everything up and put it back in the car and do a show, then come back and unpack it all again and I’d start writing again.  Got very frustrating!  It took me three or four weeks, but I managed to write an arrangement for Imagine Dragons “Demons”, Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally”, and Adele’s “Skyfall”, (which was my favorite).  Then we had to decide which 90 seconds of each song was the best for the audition, get it video taped, download it to the internet, and email it to Meg.

By this time I had received an email from Meg asking if I was still interested in sending a video of a top 40 song like I said I would.  I was so excited that she remembered me!  I answered right back saying YES, but it would be another day or two.  I had them written, but I had to get them video taped for her.

The video taping was a problem.  We couldn’t tape the songs in the trailer—there just wasn’t enough room to get the camera far enough away from the bell tables, and you couldn’t get a shot from the front because I had the tables tight up against the wall.  So I talked to the pastor of Lake Wales Lutheran Church (where we had a show booked in March) and asked if we could bring our equipment and tape the songs at the church or maybe at their school. Pastor and Sue Glamman were good friends that we made from our previous tours in Florida, and they were happy to help out!  We made hurried arrangements and ended up taping in an empty classroom in their preschool.  We decided to tape the songs with my smart phone, as we figured it had a fairly new format and should upload to the internet quickly.  The sound wasn’t that great, though.  The bells reverberated around that small classroom really well, but the keyboard sound didn’t travel as well, and you couldn’t hear it very well on the tape.  I had “Demons” and “Skyfall” ready to tape by then, so we taped our 90 seconds of each (which took about 20 takes each!), but we got it done! (The videos are still on YouTube.  Take time to watch them!)

We also had to do all this without any internet connection at home.  The only company in Frostproof to sell internet service wanted a huge set up fee and large monthly payments, and being a couple of starving artists, we decided to use the free WiFi at McDonalds or at the library.  But it was really frustrating!  The WiFi is so slow at these places.  Kirt said it’s because so many people are using it at once and they didn’t have a very good bandwidth, whatever that means.  But it took 40 minutes (minimum) to upload each song. 

It was funny—we got back to Frostproof to go to McDonalds to use their internet, but there was something going on there, because you couldn’t get within 2 blocks of the place.  Cars all over the place.  So we headed down to the library, but it was getting late in the day and they were closed!  But we did discover that their WiFi still worked at their picnic table outside!  Whew!  It took a LONG time, but we were able to upload the video files and email them to Meg. 

But next day we got an email back from her asking us to upload the files to YouTube, so they would be in a different format.  Argh!  So it was back to McDonalds, more uploading, more emailing, and about 2 hours later we had them in YouTube, copied the link to each song, and emailed them again.  Good grief!

I got more emails from Meg—my heart skipped a beat every time I saw her in my inbox—but I still didn’t know if I had won a place in the next round.  I hoped my audition tapes would clinch it for me.  Sometimes I felt so incredibly excited about the prospect of being chosen to be on the show, and sometimes I felt incredibly stupid to think they’d ever pick me!  I was on an emotional roller coaster that started to really tell on me.  I found it hard to concentrate during a show and ended up making small, silly little mistakes.  I was also extremely homesick—more than I had ever been while on tour.  It was partly because we had just bought a house in November, and it was hard to leave it for two months when I had so much to do there, and then all the anxiety over the audition, audition demo tapes, and trying to work in a jury-rigged studio, along with the “normal” anxiety of being on stage a couple of times a week.  Add to that the trailer we rented was kind of junky (the worst part was the little chameleon lizards—I couldn’t keep them out of the house!), and I spent most of our time there (figuratively) tearing out my hair and (not so silently) screaming “I want to go home!”

I started getting emails from other departments in the AGT system.  I got one assigning me an “account number” and one naming Meg as my personal producer, and one provided me with the dates of the New York and LA auditions (they would be the auditions for the celebrity judges), and one asking which airport I was nearest.  But I still did not know if I was a contestant.  Finally on March 3^rd I got the email that said yes, I had been selected to play for the celebrity judges in New York. I was so excited! Then relieved! Then I got nervous! I posted the news on Facebook, and then realized I probably wasn’t supposed to do that.  I double checked with Meg, and she had me take the post down.  They’re very secretive about things until you actually get on TV.  Once you audition and it airs, you can talk.  Until then—say nothing to no one!  You can be disqualified.

The next week I was flooded with emails from AGT.  One was about getting tickets for friends and family to attend the taping of the audition show in New York, travel arrangements, hotel info, and correspondence from Meg regarding approval of my accompaniment track and what I would actually play for the judges. I found out that I would not be able to play “Skyfall” because AGT could not get copyright permission from Adele.  I was disappointed because that was my favorite one.  But I still had two songs to play, and I was so anxious to get home to my studio, it was driving me crazy!  But I only had one more week in Florida, so we stopped bringing in the bells and setting them up in the trailer.  I took the week off from writing, and did my last 4 shows in Florida. And we were headed HOME!!

Once we got back to our home in Michigan and I had my studio to work in, I felt much better.  That is, until Meg emailed asking me to call her.  She wanted to talk about what I was going to play on April 4 for the celebrity judges.  She had changed her mind and didn’t want me to do a current top 40 song after all.  After all that work agonizing over three arrangements, writing in adverse conditions!!  Then she started giving me suggestions of songs to try instead.  They were titles from the 80s.  “Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, and “Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”.  I was confused, but anxious to do what she suggested.  I had to hope she knew what she was doing.  She thought “Demons” and “Unconditionally” weren’t right because the melody lines weren’t strong enough.  She was afraid the judges wouldn’t recognize the melodies right away.  She explained that you had to impress them in the first 10 to 15 seconds, or they could buzz you.  I wanted to play something “beautiful”—something like “The Rose”, but Meg didn’t recommend it.

While I had her on the phone, I asked Meg about some of the other procedures.  I found out I would not need more than 6 songs, even if I make it to the finals.  Also, there will be 4 final groups of 12 that make it onto the live shows.  The audition shows begin May 27, and they will be taped, and much edited before they air. The live shows start in July.

I should mention one more thing about the music:  that when I wrote the arrangements for the three pop songs, I thought I was still auditioning.  I didn’t realize I was writing for something to play for the next round for the celebrity judges.  And I didn’t realize I only had 10 or 15 seconds to do it or die.  So this time when I got to writing, I decided to write 90 second arrangements.  Because when I play a 3 or 4 minute song for someone, I usually play a verse and chorus to simply state the melody in the bells and counter-melody in the keyboard.  I like to work up to a musical fever pitch, and then bring it back down to end it by putting the audience in tears, or leave it way up there and end it with a hurray-type flourish.  But it takes me 3 or 4 minutes to do all this.  Now I realized I didn’t have the luxury of that kind of time.  I did the new songs one at a time, video taped them, uploaded them to YouTube, and emailed Meg the links.  It was certainly a huge challenge—I had never written like that before.  One thing I really wanted to accomplish was to make sure the arrangements didn’t sound like elevator music.  I hate that!

But by the time I finished them I had less than two weeks to April 4!  Meg said that the producers all whooped and hollered on “Like A Virgin”, so we decided to do that one for the judges.  It was so far away from what I originally thought I’d play.  And it wasn’t much time!  But it was only a 90 second song.  I figured I could do anything perfect if it was only for 90 seconds!

I practiced the song dozens of times per day for each day I had left.  I swear I could have played it backward if I had been asked to do so!  I did like the song, but I was apprehensive about it.  It just wasn’t my first choice.  But it was too late to make a change at this point.  The accompaniment track had already been sent in for approval, the copyright permission had already been secured, and I was as prepared as I was going to be.  No turning back!