A Look Back

     "It was a Sunday evening that I flew down to Arizona. It was the end of an era for me. College was awesome, I loved college, I had kind of a rocky start there at the beginning but I loved college, I loved everything about it, the studying, I loved the roommates, the music I was doing, the rehearsals every day, oh my goodness!  

      "It wasn’t always easy I had some tough classes – One of the classes I took my senior year, they call it scoring and we called it ranging – boring and deranging. But they start out – it was taught by Larry Smith –an amazing composer and arranger himself – and so what we would have to do, it was a 3 credit class, a lot of work we had to put in, it should have been a 10 credit class, but unfortunately there are some many classes you had to take and if they really gave you the credit for the amount of work you did, you could graduate in two minutes to get all these other classes in there. So it was only a 3 credit class we only met 3 times a week but the amount of work that was in there was amazing. 

     "What would happen is on a Monday, we would meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he would talk to us about scoring different things and if you were going to be doing this, you would have to do this and this is what you have to look for, look for the transpositions and the tambers of the different sounds and so every Friday was ensemble day. We would have to have and arrangement that we would have to have arranged by Friday. We would all bring our instruments in and we would get our different instruments to play the different arrangements and it was a different grouping every week. There was a clarinet trio that we had to do one time, there was a string quartet another time, a saxophone quientet another time, a flute trio another time, there was a brass quientet another time. 

     "Every week we would have to have another arrangement. It got to the point where we would do jazz band and we would do pep band and the final one was for orchestra. And so every week we had to come in there with the parts all written out like we didn’t have the computer program to print everything out, and so you had to do your arrangement on big paper. You had to write all the parts out, you had to have about 30 or 40 measures of your little arrangement, it didn’t have to be the full piece but enough so that the arranger could tell the teacher could tell that you knew what you were doing. That you could tell if your transpositions were right, they were correct, that he could tell that you understood because you had the melody move around from one part to the other.  You couldn’t keep the voicing the same the whole time with the trumpet always having the melody and the French horn always having the oomp-pa-pa’s and the trombone always having the bass line. You had to move the melody around so you could show that you were adept different voicings, scoring the parts that you were doing.  

     "I remember walking into – when we had to do it for the clarinets we would have the bass clarinet, b clarinet and two b#(actually it’s flat but I can’t find that insert) clarinets.  Sometimes the people would have the transpositions done the wrong way especially a lot of the sting players who were used to band instruments that have to be done. They would stand up there and start playing and it would be off and Dr. Smith would say, “Oops, forget… and  you wouldn’t even get to finish playing because the transposition was wrong with the alto clarinet it was a b flat instrument and went the wrong way, instead of writing a 3^rdup they wrote a minor down or if they wrote whatever was wrong with it and he just say, “forget that one” and you’d know you flunked that one and so fortunately you had lots of opportunities to do it.  

      "But just the devastating face of someone who had spent hours and hours on this assignment and they transposed it the wrong way. There was a lot of checking back and forth especially. I had a lot of people coming to me because they knew I played the strings but I also played all the band instruments and I had piano experience. The Piano majors, oh my goodness, they had a really really tough time with all the transposing, it was something they weren’t used to and weren’t familiar with it at all. 

     "I remember it got down to – I think I was successful on all of my transpositions  worked well. So it was coming up time we had a week and a half, two weeks to work on our orchestra arrangements and a lot of times we would pick songs that were folk songs because they had simple melodies, simple )) structures and then we could do all kinds of arranging, the different techniques to the parts.  It wasn’t just chords, we did some really cool stuff with this arranging. But it was really hard, and it comes time and we finally got the arrangement done and we started writing out the parts. 

     "That was the night(s) we were pulling all-nighters to get everything done. We could use the copy machine to make copys of our different things but we had to have the parts written out and we’d have 25, 30 measures of this arrangement ready to go for the orchestra because bless their hearts the orchestra was coming in to play all our stuff and so we had to be ready to go. So my friend Lynette and I, she was living next door to me, she was the Relief Society President that year, actually, yeah, one year she was living next door and the next year she was living with us. This point she was living next door to us, so we decided to keep each other company while we were writing out our parts, we were writing out our parts at about 3:30 in the morning, she was helping me, I was helping her right at the end to get those done and at this point you know I was good at writing out parts, I was good music transitionist, I could write things out really well, I was very familiar with it, it was just I had done a lot of it.  

     "We were writing out these part and got it all done and 1^stclarinet, 2^ndclarinet, all these different parts, there were probably 30 or 40 different parts you had to write out, we had all these parts and were ready to go and I went to go next door and it was locked and so I used my key and they’d put the dead bolt on. Really?! I didn’t want to wake them up at 3:30 in the morning so I just said Lynette I’m locked out can I sleep on your couch? Sure! So I slept on the couch that night, then I got up the next morning at 6:30 and I went next door because Tami Ra – her name was Tamara but we called her Tami Ra most of the time Tami, Tami was headed off to work at 6 am so I knew the door would be unlocked, so I headed on in and my roommates didn’t even know I had been locked out. 

     "One thing I didn’t even talk about was that some of my roommates, Annete Sager, Lynett Hoskin, wonderful, wonderful roommate. Been a neighbor for awhile, she was Relief Society president the year after I was. Just an outstanding personal friend and have stayed in touch all these years, she was great. Tami Ra was great. Tami was just working at Turf Jones she was the one who was friends with Trina who became my sister-in-law, Tami was always playing jokes and always having a great time and she had this little funny little thing she called the blue bunny, it had been a sock and stuffed with cotton and sewed at the top and then she put a little face on it and she would hide it places and we would find it and Ahh we’d go hide it in her place until she would find it and I remember I moved to Arizona and I was unpacking and I found Blue Bunny, and I was going, “Really!!?” So I sent it to her in a package and so she had Blue Bunny and the jokes that went back and forth were so fun! 

    "It was Tami who found in the paper that we needed to have a hug quotient and that they had found during research that everyone needed to have to be strong emotionally to feel love, but they needed to have hugs. So she put that on the back of our front room door. And whenever the boys from the downstairs would come up to visit or whatever, before they would leave to go, they were just hanging out and we just were good friends, and before they’d leave they’d say ok it’s time for hugs, so we’d give everybody a hug, so we all get the hugs we needed so we were emotionally healthy. Just amazing people. 

    "I’ve been in touch with Tami recently on Facebook and it has been wonderful to get in contact with her.  I was taking Kristy up to school and we went into Chili’s I sat down at a table and someone sits down beside me and I look up and it was Tami Ra. I was so happy to see her! Ah, her sweet face and her big hugs and she was exactly the same, we laughed and giggled, and I turned to my kids and said, “this is Tami Ra!” and they said, “She’s the one who did this and she’s the one who did that.” And Tami was turning to me and said they know me? And I said Yeah oh my gosh she is just awesome. Just awesome. 

     "I’m trying to think of some roommates. There was Norah, I can’t remember her last name! She married one of Keith Rommate, __ Christensen, Norah and Shella were the ones up with me on Darwin Avenue and they invited me to move  with them  down the hill. We had some other roommates who came in and out but those were some of the main ones I lived with for quite a while and that I kept in contact with and I haven’t had contact with Norah and Sharla  at all but with Tami and (can't make out the name), I’ve had some contact with them. Just great women and fun roommates andwonderful people and I find that the Lord has just blessed me greatly throughout my life with really great good friends that just bless my life. They are fun they are happy they are cheerful, they love the Lord,

     "Something that just crossed my mind that I remembered from Tami Tami Ra had gone on a mission to Tyler Texas, she was in the Dallas Texas Mission and she worked in Tyler it was her favorite town there, but anyways she had a roommate there named Bernice was a returned missionary but she was struggling with the church. And Tami talked with me one time and she said you know the thing that I have learned is that one of the things that will help you stay active in the church is if you are comfortable with the temple. And she said Bernice is just not comfortable with the temple. We’ll call her B, her name is Bernice but we called her B. Bernice is just not comforatable with the temple.

     "I have learned that the temple is the culture of the Lord and if you want to go back to his presence you need to learn to be comfortable with the culture of the Lord and in order to do that we need to go there a lot, so that we are comfortable and we feel at home and at peace with the Lords culture. The temple is his culture. That is always something that has stuck with me and it’s something that Tami taught me. Tami Ra taught me that in order to be comfortable in the presence of the Lord, we need to be comfortable in His house and we need to be comfortable with his culture and His temple is the Lord’s culture. And we need to learn to be comfortable there to feel at peace there, to feel welcome, to feel like we belong and that that’s important.