This is part of a text I shared with a new on-line friend and fellow Quiet Room watcher, Alice. I really look forward to the Quiet Room. I said to my new friend:

I especially enjoyed “Ashokan Farewell” this past Wednesday night. My music club in Michigan (Saginaw Subterranean Strings) always played that one and it was the audience favorite.

We were a 50-member performing hammered dulcimer club. Usually we had about 20 or so playing with us at gigs around Michigan (with hammered dulcimers, fiddles, guitars, etc.) My husband was the lead instrumentalist (on hammered dulcimer) and I was the emcee, organizer and provided a beat with my autoharp.) It was fun. We played at two events for OVER 20 years — We had summer monthly free concerts in Haithco Park that drew hundreds of watchers and a February two-day (Saturday and Sunday) Sno-Fest event in an old opera house (Fischer Hall) during the national ice and Sno-Fest snow sculpturing and ice carving contests in Frankenmuth, MI.

When we decided we couldn’t do Sno-Fest any more (especially because we’d make the trip back and forth from Florida in February despite the weather) we passed it on to an excellent musician who has kept it going most years.

No one got paid, but we would accept donations from our audiences and that money went to the museum which was adjacent to Fischer Hall where we played.

It was a lot of work for us. We invited not only our club members but all the best traditional musicians from all over. We even had one player who came with his wife from Minnesota!

John and I would provide the sound equipment and feed the musicians for the two days. About a dozen who came a distance stayed at our house. It was fun but exhausting. We’d feed them a huge breakfast feast.

Eventually we realized it was just too much for us and John’s terminal illness was progressing.

That was when CDs were really popular and many of our musicians had their own CDs to sell.

I’ll tell more later.