Friday, January 22, 2016

Meet Susan Brozek Scott, 2016 Ambassador Camp Director

2016 I Want to be an Ambassador!
Camp Director, Susan Brozek Scott
by Beth Dolinar

It would be difficult to watch a parade marching by without seeing the work of Susan Brozek Scott. In her roles as producer, organizer and, yes, marcher, Susan has left her mark on parade routes all around the Pittsburgh area.

Susan, who will serve as Director of Luminari’s I Want to be an Ambassador! Camp for summer 2016, has a rich background of experience working with young people and the community. For much of her career, Susan was a reporter and producer for television stations in Pittsburgh and other cities. Eventually she landed at Pittsburgh’s WPXI-TV where, for 13 years, she produced the broadcast of the annual “Celebrate the Seasons” parade. If you’ve ever watched the festivities, you were seeing Susan’s keen talent for painting vivid stories for television.

It’s no surprise, then, that her next endeavor would lead to parade routes, too. In 2008, Susan began “Afterschool Buddy, Inc.,” a children’s multimedia programming and production corporation. The cornerstone of the company is a children’s performance group—a colorful troupe of costumed characters and talented kids—which performs songs, dances and skits at community events and, yes, parades around the area. The smiling character in the ridiculous hat? That’s Aunt Junk, the character played by none other than Susan herself. That hat is big, and in summer it’s hot, but it’s all part of Susan’s effort to connect with the kids.

“I don’t have my own children,” said Susan. “I felt that this was a way to pay it forward. I think we can teach them things by telling stories in entertaining ways.”
Afterschool Buddy Mascots

The mission of “Afterschool Buddy” is multi-faceted, and aims to broaden the perspectives of teens and pre-teens.

One teenager who has been with Susan since the start of the company is Jason Starr, 17, a junior at Mars High School. He has been a member of The Rainbow Kids, the “Aftershool Buddy” performing group, and now works to help youngsters, both in and out of the performing group, navigate the challenges of life. He credits his leader with preparing him for that role.

“Susan is very patient,” said Jason. “She helped me to grow as a teenager and as an individual.”

“We want to teach them life skills, like goal setting, discipline and responsibility,” Susan said. “And teamwork, too. All the kids want to be a star (in the performance group), and I’m old school in that you have to have a firm foundation for your life, and learn that you need others to accomplish your goals.”
WPXI Holiday Parade in November 2015. Afterschool
Buddy and La Roche College partnered on the float.

In that way, Susan’s mission for her company aligns perfectly with Luminari’s mission of mind broadening, innovation and cultural understanding. Her new role will allow her to extend her teaching work beyond younger children to teenagers of middle and high school age.

“I’ve always been interested in connecting the dots for people. I love the diplomacy of helping the kids appreciate the diversity of our community.”

Susan is a Pittsburgher, through and through. A native of Springdale, she earned a degree in Communications and Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh. She’s married to the police chief of Cheswick, Pa.

Susan will preside over the Ambassador camp, to be held June 14-22, 2016, part of which includes a trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with leaders in the diplomatic community.

Her goal for the camp is to help the teens understand that a lot of divisions in our society can be bridged if people are willing to go outside their comfort zone.

“People tend to live in their own space,” Susan said. “They’re not always willing to venture outside of that. But teens are at a very impressionable age. They are very open to influences, and I want to help them move outside their comfort zones.”

At the Ambassador camp, the goals will be for the teenage students to learn about the lives and perspectives of people from other worlds and other cultures. As she prepares the invigorating slate of activities for the Ambassador camp, Susan finds herself becoming more and more excited about the possibilities the students will face.

“I’ll enjoy seeing the kids learn and be exposed to all the different cultures and lives and ideas of the people they’ll meet,” she said. “I love diplomacy.”

***

Luminari Coordinator, Beth Dolinar brings her talents and experience as a writer, Emmy-award producer, public speaker and deadline driven multi-tasker to our team. She writes a popular column for the Washington "Observer-Reporter." She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics and currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly -- because she likes a really good sentence.



What's That Sound? The Valiha

by Beth Dolinar


We at Luminari love music of all kinds: folk, symphony, hip hop, jazz, blues, country, marches, gospel, rock and roll—we enjoy all of it.

Because our mission is to broaden minds and promote innovation, we think it’s important—and fun—to open our minds to the possibilities of the world beyond our own doorstep.  And what better way to do that than to learn about the music of other lands.


Starting in this edition of Lumos, we will be offering regular features about the unique and unusual (and sometimes downright strange) instruments we’ve never heard. And since we can’t really understand an instrument until we’ve heard it being played, we’ll offer links to sites where you can hear and see a performance.

We’ll step off into our musical venture with the story of the valiha, the national instrument of Madagascar.


Does it strike anyone else as interesting that this instrument is made from bicycle parts?
***

At first glance, the man looks like he’s holding a bassoon. The valiha is a long, thick tube the player holds vertically.
Valiha

But look again and you see there’s no mouthpiece. The valiha is not a wind instrument, but a kind of zither.  The sound comes from plucking and stroking the strings.

The valiha is ancient, and long considered the national instrument of Madagascar. For centuries, the valiha was played solely for ritual performances, and only by men. In recent decades, the valiha has entered the realm of popular music, and women now play it.

The valiha is a long tube, usually made of bamboo or a light wood. There are 21 to 24 strings, which in modern times have been fashioned from bicycle brake cords. When the cables no longer stop your bike, they move on to their next lives in the arts.


For centuries, the valiha was played to summon kind spirits to the Madagascar island. Now, the valiha is played for equally life-affirming reasons—to make lovely music.

Listen for yourself:




***


Luminari Coordinator, Beth Dolinar brings her talents and experience as a writer, Emmy-award producer, public speaker and deadline driven multi-tasker to our team. She writes a popular column for the Washington "Observer-Reporter." She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics and currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly -- because she likes a really good sentence.

Resolutions

by Gina Catanzarite

Quite by accident, as I was doing research for a work project, I stumbled upon two quotes that set the tone for my 2016 New Year’s resolution.

Quote Number 1 is by Saleem Sharma:
“A thousand moments lost because you took them for granted, just because you expected a thousand more.”
Quote Number 2 is an excerpt from the book Belles on Their Toes by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey:
“In a person’s lifetime, there may be not more than a half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.”


At first, they may seem unrelated but the more I contemplated them, the more I saw that the first quote does connect very certainly to the second one.

I take so many moments for granted. We probably all do, so focused are we on engineering our futures. After all, that’s what New Year’s resolutions are about, right: Resolving to change, to correct the wrongs and live with greater intention. And we naturally expect that we will be granted “a thousand moments more” to accomplish these resolutions.

Humans are funny that way, assuming we have all the time in the world, assuming we have unlimited chances to make our lives happy and complete sometime in the future.

So how does this all relate to Quote Number 2? I realized that I spend a lot of time— far too much time – thinking about what I’ll do to make myself happier in the future. But this second quote startled me into examining my past for moments when “there was room for nothing but happiness in my heart.”

Some are momentous, obvious. . . like the moment a beaming Russian orphanage worker plunked two little babies into my arms and told me, in careful English, “Now you are a mama.”

But some sneak into your heart, extraordinary because they are so pure and unplanned and uncomplicated . . . like the time my friend and I sneaked away for a day at the beach and a bold seagull swooped down and stole an entire donut right out of her hand, just as she was about to bite into it.

And the spontaneous road trip with co-workers, when we belted out the John Denver song Country Roads while driving, hopelessly lost, through the hills of West Virginia.

There are probably more and they’d come to me if I gave it some thought. And that’s the problem: We don’t stop to appreciate the miraculous “little moments.” We live so quickly nowadays that moments flash by with all the staying power of a pithy tweet or Facebook status, forgotten as soon as the next post pops into the digital feed.

And so my resolution is this: I will stop expecting a thousand moments more. And in doing so, I will be present to appreciate the little moment I’m in. If I am paying attention, I may just realize that it has all the capacity to be miraculous and happy, too, if only I have the patience, and the gratitude, to name it.

***

Gina Catanzarite, owner/operator of Arania Productions, and an award-winning television producer, author, media consultant and teacher who has worked both nationally and locally in her fields since 1987.

Gina is the instructor of Luminari’s Teen Writer! camps, being offered June 27 – 30, 2016, in Pittsburgh, PA.