Ben Scharff

The Proverbial More, Part II

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Tonight I’ll be at Monarch Academy, along with Nikki, our colleagues there, and their students and families, to celebrate the end of another school year.

Being part of the Monarch family – and it really is a family, by choice and emotion if not by genetics – has been an experience I’m still trying to put into words. As a writer and as a human being, you always live with a certain hope that what you do, what you say, can make a positive difference. But you don’t always get to see it happen right in front of you.

It’s a gift, a blessing, that in the last year, I have.

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Going Out In A Blues Of Glory

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The thing that made the Blues Brothers so special, of course, was their total commitment to their personae and to their music.

Jake and Elwood may have been the brainchild of two comedians in their prime.  They may have been born of a Saturday Night Live sketch that saw John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd dressed up as bees.  And their film may have come as close as we’ll ever see to a Road Runner chase sequence rendered in live action. But they were no joke.  Neither parody nor tribute, the Blues Brothers succeeded as real musicians, with a real band behind them.  (In naming some of those band members – Steve Cropper, Paul Shaffer, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, North Texas alum “Blue” Lou Marini, the late great Alan “Mr. Fabulous” Rubin and Donald “Duck” Dunn – I’m only scratching the surface of their legend.)

So when I learned that the Overtime Theater was trying to recapture their magic, this was something I had to see and hear. Continue reading →