September 2023

Elizabeth Lachowicz's son Thomas will be separating from the Navy after 5 years of service. He's actually in the Washington state area and got to see their friends Rick and Kathy Thomas.

Peggy Karr has been getting her house restained and it's been an interesting experience and she felt the guys are doing a great job.

Sam Edelston will be running the Nutmeg Dulcimer Festival, Fri-Sat, Oct 27-28, in Milford, Connecticut. He just announced the workshop schedule  shortly before the Board meeting started. He also added that he has recorded almost all of the stuff for his CD, and he can see the light at the end of the tunnel. They started mixing stuff last week.

Todd Dennison said that because of our heat wave here, he decided to find out how hot it would be in the Midwest, so he volunteered for a fun road trip with Bob McNally driving out to Winfield, Kansas for the Walnut Valley Festival. They will  be driving in Bob's 50 year old white band with filled with Strumsticks and so it should be a lot of fun. He's not playing, just competing with Bob to see who sells more strum sticks.

Mark Schaffer was proud to announce that they managed to marry off their fourth and final daughter this week. The good news is they've managed to have two very fancy weddings and two elopements. She did have a nice engagement shower, but the plan was to elope.So they got married alone. Todd had challenged him to write a nice song instead of the joking songs he normally writes, so he wrote a nice song about eloping and to hell with all the guests. A very nice love song inspired by Skylar and Abe's wedding, but when he sings it he thinks of Robin. He also  wanted to say something nice about Sandy Jackson. He'd taken out about five or six ads in the Music Alert for help and she was the only one that ever answered. She's been helping him for a year. She loves the folk project and all we do. She's not a mobile person so her way of volunteering was helping him. He added that she was not a computer person, but her attitude was "if you'll tolerate me, I want to learn this". She saved him about 20 minutes two times a week. Loretta Brooks has taken over and Sandy's retiring, but it's just one of those special things behind the scenes that says what we do and what we mean to others. She's retiring after a year so he wanted to publicly thank her.

John Lamb  reported that he just returned from two trips. One was to Massachusetts to attend his grandson Julian's first birthday party.That was just a few days. Before that they spent two weeks in Norway. They took about a dozen cousins from New Jersey, Minneapolis and San Francisco over and met with many more relatives over there. They sailed on a tall ship for about a week that was owned by the family, and visited an island, was owned by the family. They then spent another week in the mountains. So, all in all, a wonderful trip.

Tina Ross took her mother out for lunch for her 93rd birthday at Pier 701 in Piermont, a very nice restaurant on the water. They were sitting and eating, and she left to tell the restaurant staff to put a candle on a piece of cheesecake to give to her mother. When she come back and there was a woman from another table sitting down with her and they were talking. The woman gets up and goes back to her friends and was pointing to Tina's mother and saying, "She's 93, Can you believe she's 93?" Tina said that her mother really looks great and she still dances and she's amazing. When they finished lunch and she asked for the check, she was told that someone had actually paid the check for them. Tina was just so stunned by that and while they told her that the the person wanted to be anonymous and she didn't want to tell them. But she figured it out and went up to the other table. It turns out that these women were just so enamored with her mother. One woman had just lost her own mother three weeks ago and Tina's mother reminded her of her mother. The whole interaction was so sweet and no one has ever done that for her. 

Mike Agranoff got a new roof. He also thanked Loretta Brooks who has been handling uploading photos to the Troubadour web site.