Ya and Me in front of the Tree

At the Gala. Ya was my date since Cliff had to be in Houston to teach. Don't we look festive?

Party girl

Scott would be so proud of me. I actually went out last night to a club where the entertainment didn't begin until 11pm. But ironically, the entertainment had finals this morning and closed it down at 12:30. So I guess Scott is only partially proud of me since he usually rocks until 4. But hey it's a start.

I'm trying to cram in an entire semester of Denton night life in this last relatively care free week. I went last night to Dan's Silver Leaf again to hear Paul Slavens who does improvisational musical comedy. You give him some sort of song title wrapped in some dollar bills ( he plays the highest dollar amounts first and the rest in descending order) and he makes up a song on the spot. It's all good fun. And he is really excellent at doing this. He has a band made up of guys who just want to jam on a Monday night, all about my age and so they've been playing a long time and are really good. One of them is part of Brave Combo. Sometimes he ( Brave Combo Guy) brings in instruments that he made himself, which he did last night. He strung a bunch of empty booze bottles together and he plays them like a flute, like some sort of wacky Pan. It was fun. But one can still smoke in the bars here in Denton, so this morning my throat is sore and my hair and clothing smell like an ashtray. Ahhhhhh college life!

Rockin' to Brave Combo

NTIEVA ( North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts) bought all the Priddy's tickets to the Greater Denton Arts Council annual Gala tonight. We drank, and ate and danced to Brave Combo, which is a local Denton Polka band which just happened to win 2 Grammys and is up for another one. Check them out here . It was really really fun. All the Priddy's danced together to many cool tunes, including a few polkas, and I even took a spin on the dance floor with Dr. Davis, our host ( as Director of NTIEVA). It's a nice way to wind up the semester. 2 more classes and one more presentation to go and then HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ME!

Nearing the end. . .

Whew!

For one of my projects I had to profile a leader in Arts Education. The project was in three parts, a paper, a PowerPoint presentation to the class and a Pachyderm presentation posted to the web. If you would like to view my Pachyderm presentation on awesome art educator Olivia Gude, click here.

I am down to my last project which I think we will also be able to post to the web. It is a little program that allows students to compose visually and musically simultaneously. I present that on Weds.

This means I am basically finished with the semester. Wow. It flew. We have a Gala on Sunday night to wrap it all up and we are playing secret Santa this week in the lab. I've gotten tissues that look like 100 dollar bills and chocolate so far. So far so good. There is a party at one of the Fellow's home on Weds night and then I will leave for home for a MONTH on Thursday. I will see many of you then.

I'm not quite sure what to do with myself when I have nothing immediately due and demanding attention, but I am finding things to do, like filing all the papers that are taking over my apartment and, oh yeah, what's that called?. . . relaxing.

And now for something completely different. . .

It's fun having Maria as my cubical mate. She's not only a fabuloso flutist she is also the student co-chair of the Fine Arts Series here at UNT. So last night after a day of annotated bibliography Maria took me along to hear the campus Mariachi band. Ei-Yi-Yi !! that's some fun! And then tonight, after a day of laundry and grocery shopping with homework in between I was Maria's guest at dinner theatre. We chowed down on some yummy turkey and pecan pie while enjoying The Trammels who do song parodies. Tonight they were parodying Christmas song and the good old American commercialism of the holidays in general. It was a sing-along. Very funny and fun.

Tomorrow it's back to work, but then it really is Christmas.