On American Idol

I know this has been talk about ad nausium but WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?? Do these people have no one in their life that cares enough to speak the truth? Have they never heard a song on the radio let alone live? Now, I like to sing. In fact I love to sing.  I sing quite a bit... much to the dismay of the people around me. I can remember a high school friend casually raising the radio volume in the car as we drove and I was singing. I remember a beautiful little 4 year old girl in a VBS class I was teaching look up at me with the most innocent of eyes and ask me, "Mrs F, Why does it sound so funny when you sing it?" Ah, out of the mouths of babes (I failed the kid.)  My brother kindly (?) recorded my voice to show me what I sounded like. Now I can see the kindness in it, otherwise I might have turned out to be like one of those fools standing before "the Triad," causing viewers to cringe and hurting people's ears all over the world. All of this said, I have to admit that the show is much more interesting with all these wackos standing up and singing. I Just end up feeling upset for them, how hard it must be to have a dream, a delusional dream but a dream nonetheless, and to have it blasted so soundly. At least for me it would be, I am amazed that I can still be surprised as people leave the audition room and talk about how the panel have no idea. I am not sure but I might want to live in their world, it might be nice to be so sure of myself and my talents that I can ignore the opinion of professionals and go on with my dream.... Maybe they are not so crazy after all. Let Simon, Paula and Randy have their crooners... I am a newfound fan of the croakers. Keep on watching, I just might show up on the show next year- as long as I can ignore their age limit along with my lack of talent.

Namibia

I had my first meeting last Saturday with the group going to Namibia this June. I cannot believe I am really going to be able to go and talking with some of the others who have already been there just got me more excited, if that was possible. First off, travel will be a drag. You know the old bit, a person is up in New England and stops to ask for directions and the answer they receive is, "You can't get there from here (pronounced with an accent of course)." Well I think they were talking about Namibia. So far the tentative schedule is this, We meet in Phila. airport at 3 in the afternoon, fly over night to Frankfurt. We arrive in Frankfurt at 8 am and then don't leave Germany until 10:30 that night (I get a day to play in Frankfurt.) We fly overnight and arrive in Jo'burg, South Africa at 8 am and leave there at 11:30 am finally arriving in Windhoek, Namibia at 12:30 pm. From there we will travel a bit around the country visiting a few different congregations. One of the main things is visiting with the sister churches to our churches in NJ. We will get picked up by someone from the congregation we will be visiting and taken to their home. This can mean a short drive on a highway or a few hours ride off-road on dirt trails. Any questions I am hoping to go off road? One of the regions someone will visit is where their language is one of the ones where they use clicking of their tongue along with words. I am so hoping to go there. I heard that when they are singing praise it is like they are being accompanied with a percussion instrument. I hope I get assigned to that region. Another cool thing is that we will be able to go a safari for a day at Etosha Park, one of the top game parks in all of Africa. Can't wait for that. We will be visiting an orphanage- there are more than 1/4 million children in Namibia who have been orphaned by AIDS. UNICEF has reported that if things don't change drastically in Namibia that by the year 2021 it will be a country run by children. The ELCA in NJ has been supporting the orphanage that we will be visiting. We will also be visiting a seminary school and encouraging the students there. After close to 2 weeks of traveling around and visiting with people, we will head for the airport and deal with the travel back home, but after looking at our schedule, I think I will be sleeping the whole series of flights home.