My kids dabbled briefly in a few different team sports during their younger years, but never soccer or hockey, so I have never held the title of soccer mom or hockey mom. Theater has been a popular activity for all three of my kids, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a stage mom, and I am way too laid-back to be considered a tiger mom. However, thanks to Sebastian I have a new descriptor that fits a fairly small group of women, percentage-wise: I am an Eagle mom!

Sebastian received his Eagle Scout Award on Wednesday evening, in a Court of Honor ceremony at Severance Great Hall on the Carleton College campus. It was the culmination of a goal he set soon after joining Boy Scouts back in fifth grade.

Yee-haw! I am excited to announce that I am giving two encore presentations of my Montana Cowboy Band talk on Monday, November 14. Both presentations are free and open to the public. The events are sponsored by the Vintage Band Festival (VBF).

The first talk will be at 3:30 p.m. at the Northfield Retirement Center Chapel (900 Cannon Valley Drive West), and the second one will be at 7 p.m. at the Northfield Senior Center (1651 Jefferson Parkway). Each will last about 45 minutes.

The clues are everywhere I look today: the carpet of red, yellow, and brown leaves in the front yard, the blushing hydrangeas in the back yard, and the unopened bags of Halloween candy that whisper temptingly from their (not-so-hidden) hiding place next to the back door. But a glance at the calendar confirms it; it is indeed mid-October, which seems like an appropriate time for me to provide an update on the status of my book-in-progress, Finding My Musical Family.
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I did not intend to take such a long absence from my blog. But the past seven weeks were so filled with activity, I had to move blogging way, way down the list of priorities.

Now that Louisa and Sebastian have both flown the nest for college, and Elias is settling in to his sophomore year of high school, I am hopeful that I can manage a more regular posting schedule — even if it is just once a month.

The Vintage Band Festival is here! Get yourself to downtown Northfield today for Crazy Daze and an afternoon and evening of free concerts by international, national and Minnesota brass bands. We also have concerts going on tonight in the nearby communities of Cannon Falls, Faribault, Owatonna and Red Wing. Check the Vintage Band Festival online schedule for up-to-date times and locations.

The 2016 Vintage Band Festival kicks off on Thursday, and I could not be more excited! If you have not previously attended the multi-day music event (held in Northfield, Minn., every three years) you have been missing out on a great time. But it’s not too late to make plans to attend this year; the free, family-friendly event officially begins Thursday, July 28, and runs through Sunday, July 31.

If you are in or near Bemidji this Saturday, June 18, please consider yourself invited to my presentation at the Beltrami County Historical Society (BCHS), 130 Minnesota Avenue SW. It is free and open to the public, and there will be music!

Starting at noon, the Bemidji High School Marching Band will kick things off by performing “Night Watch” outside the museum, which is located in the restored railroad depot.

There is no rest for the almost-graduated, at least not in this house. Eight and a half hours after we returned home from a wonderful weekend in Arizona, where we celebrated the high school graduation of my niece Kayci, Sebastian rolled out of bed yesterday morning to perform one last time in his Northfield High School band uniform.

A Crookston woman contacted me at the end of March seeking permission to publish some Riggs family pictures as part of a series of newspaper articles she was writing about the city’s former bands and bandmasters. I was happy to discover recently that Janna Johnson Dinkel’s series has been running this month in the Crookston Times—the same newspaper that featured countless stories about the musical doings of G. Oliver and his wife, Islea, more than one hundred years ago.

One answer to that question is: me*. I’m thrilled to announce that I will give two presentations this summer about my pioneering bandmaster great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs—one in Bemidji and one in Northfield!

In Bemidji, I will be the featured speaker at the Beltrami County Historical Society (BCHS) annual meeting on Saturday, June 18. The event is tentatively set for noon and will include lunch and musical entertainment.
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