Celebrate Strings!
I have always been an avid singer–a choir geek through and through. Being on the road with the Mobile Booths makes it somewhat difficult to be part of a musical ensemble, since I am jumping from city to city every month. Therefore, I often live vicariously through StoryCorps participants who come in to talk about their own musical experiences. I was overjoyed when 10-year-old Julian Picazo came to the MobileBooth in Reno, Nevada with his violin teacher, Caroline Karl – known as “Miss Karl” to Julian.
Julian picked up the violin in second grade. His father, who plays the guitar, encouraged him to play. Julian remembers, “When I started the violin, he told me not to quit because he knows that it’s really fun. And so do I. I said don’t worry, I’m not going to quit. I love playing the violin.” Now Julian and his father teach each other songs, and Julian has even started teaching his little sister to play the violin as well.
Julian’s love of the violin is abundantly clear. As he tells Miss Karl, “I don’t want to miss any single day I can. I don’t care if I’m on vacation or not, I just want to go to violin class. I remember this day I was really, really sick. I didn’t go to school, but I did go to violin class!”
The Biggest Little City in the World
After bidding farewell to sunny Fresno, CA MobileBooth West traversed the Sierra Nevada and Donner Pass to land safely in Reno, Nevada. “The Biggest Little City in the World,” Reno is famous for its bedazzling casinos and breathtaking landscape. In the midst of this city’s bright lights and April snowstorms, people came downtown to record conversations.
MobileBooth West in Reno
For one of the first conversations of the week, Reno local and Moscow native Sacha Gousev came with friend Kim Palchikoff to talk about his life-long circus career as a master juggler with the Moscow Circus.
Sacha Gousev and Kim Palchikoff
Sacha fell in love with the circus at the age of five when his parents took him to see his first show. “Moscow Circus is a little different than American circus,” Sacha explains. “It’s kind of like . . . du Soleil, you know? It’s a big, big production. It’s not like here, with clowns walking around and selling ice cream and stuff. I was pretty amazed. I remember jugglers. Especially jugglers.”
Posted by Lilly May 7, 2010 2 Comments