Sunday, May 06, 2007

I *heart* Kansas

The Kansas Sampler Festival was here this weekend. I love the Kansas Sampler Festival, and Kansas, and Kansas Explorers, and Marci Penner, and living in Garden City. We spent the past two days at the festival, talking to people from all over the state, finding out fun things to do, learning about Kansas, and getting all excited about loving where we're from.

I love it that I'm from a place that raised $1200 in 6 hours, just by putting a jar in the Greensburg booth.

I love it that this morning at the Kansas Explorers meeting, we all sang "Home on the Range" together-and I wasn't the only one who was teary.

I love it that I live in a community where I can't walk around a festival for 30 minutes without seeing 5 people that I know. At least!

I love it that I got to eat Indian food today, and watch Indian dance, and that the community response to this first offering of Indian culture was so great that they ran out of food by 1:00, and there was an enormous crowd there to watch the dancing.

I love it that on Friday night, I got to see a delightfully funny and impressive GCCC show, that Matthew got to play drums for, and that lots of my former students were in. I get to see at least one play every year, and the Garden City Symphony, and at Easter, Handel's Messiah, and band concerts in the park in the summer. All of these things are made up of people in the community. They are always wonderful, and I don't think I would enjoy anything else as much as I enjoy seeing our people perform. Even if it were a big fancy symphony, how much better could it be?

I love it that we have a Strings Professor at the college who played with a big fancy symphony for 30 years, and is now here, to play with us and start the Southwest Kansas Music Academy . Abby gets to sing with a fantastic children's choir (accompanied by the big fancy violinist), and in 2 years, if we like, we can sign Anna up for "Violin for the young child" and she'll get ridiculously early exposure to playing music.

Honestly! What a wonderful place!

5 comments:

malh said...

Betsy--I think G.C. is full of exceptional people, too. I do not see too many productions in Wichita, but the few I have seen couldn't hold a candle to a Skip Mancini production.

linda jean said...

very sad i missed day 2. i didn't really see very many people i knew on saturday.

betsyann said...

Sadly, Skip is retiring this year, but I know she'll still have lots to do with theater in town, and I trust GCCC to hire someone great.

Too bad you were sick Linda-the Explorer Meeting in the morning was neat. Quite a few people, but we still were the babies by far.

mllr said...

Yay Garden City and Kansas and I miss you all...I got teary singing "Oklahoma" last night though, can you believe it?

betsyann said...

I'm always a fan of loving where you are. You can love both Kansas AND Oklahoma, it's OK with me.