The best part of having multiple blogs is that there’s always one of them that can handle pretty much anything one wants to write about. Since I seem to have turned into a 6-month blog writer for this one, I figure I can get away with writing about some of my history as it pertains to my hoping to gain glory and professional accolade, while also trying to keep up with the really big time musical and content stars. How’s that for a preamble? It’s going to be long, but probably not as long as one of my blog posts on a different blog (just under 6,000 words); it’ll definitely have more pictures.

Me at 13;
I was gonna be a star!

Although my overall quest for fame and glory started when I was 13, I actually started taking piano lessons months before I turned 11. I was living in Kansas City, MO, and my grandmother had an old, un-tuned piano that I loved picking tunes on. We didn’t have any sheet music, but Mom thought I might have the possibility of learning how to play, so she found a piano teacher somewhere in the city near a shopping mall we never went to, and I started taking lessons. They only lasted 2 or 3 months because Dad came home from Vietnam, Mom couldn’t take me anymore because Dad was in rehab (which I didn’t know at the time), but the last thing my teacher told Mom is that I might have talent if Mom could find a good teacher wherever we moved.

In December 1970, we moved from Kansas City to Limestone, ME. The day we got to Maine and had to stay in a hotel because it was late at night, we stayed in Houlton… which began our winter challenges. When we left KC, it was in the low 60’s; when we awoke the following morning in Maine, the temperature was -32°… and the car froze up. It had to be put into a heated garage for 24 hours to thaw it out… that poor car! The day after that we were in Limestone, which was famous for 3 things: Phish, a famous music group that I never heard of until the mid 2000s, started performing there in the late 90s; President Nixon stopped at our military base from one of his last trips to China (months later he resigned in disgrace), and it was the home of nuclear bombs and radar… and if you don’t believe that part, watch the movie War Games, at least the last 5 minutes of it). Who said small communities never get any attention?

Two months later, Mom had found out about a piano teacher who lived on base; her name was Mrs. Maine (I’m not making that up). I hate to say this, but she was the first person I ever met who’d be considered white trash; 12-year old me wasn’t used to someone screaming at her kids during lessons, living in the opposite of an immaculate domicile, and occasionally screaming at me because what I played sounded differently than she played the same songs, even though I had records where the songs sounded like I was playing them. That lasted for 8 or 9 months until her husband decided to retire in the area. I thought I’d been rescued until two months later when Mom said the teacher had been given permission to come onto the base and continue my piano lessons. It only lasted one visit, when Mom heard the teacher yelling at me in our apartment; Mom wasn’t having that, so it was over.

Over with her, because 4 or 5 months later I had another teacher whose husband was an officer. Young, pretty, and a bit picayune; she was horrified at how the previous teacher was “educating” me, and she made it her quest to work on getting me to stop doing all the things the previous instructor didn’t care about (she only cared that I hit all the right keys lol).

I was finally allowed to stop taking lessons totally after I performed at my first music recital. I don’t remember the song I played, and I don’t remember playing it. Absolute truth; once I began playing, I started watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon in my head. When the cartoon stopped, I stopped playing, and I got a standing ovation. The tutor was proud of me, I grabbed a cookie, rode my bike all the way back home (enlisted personnel and officers lived on different sides of the base), walked in the house and said I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, and that was that; whew!

No more piano playing for a long time, but other things were popping into my head. For some reason, I decided I wanted to write poetry; this is the first thing I ever wrote, between 13 and 14 (talented, right? lol). You probably can’t read it, but it says”

“The earth is like a molecule,
Floating in space like atoms in air,
And the earth, stars and heavens,
Might be molecules, somewhere out there.”

first poem

But that’s not the only thing. I started writing stories with my friend Darryl. They were our version of science fiction, but it’s obvious we were spurred on by Star Trek. BTW, my name will be blocked out on some of these things because I don’t want my actual full name in the open; I wasn’t as worried about it at the time:

not the first story, but the last at the time

I wasn’t sitting still; I got into scrap booking because I wanted to keep an eye on history, in case something came up that I could come back to look at and use in some way later on; kind of like this country now, which seems to have gone into a 180° cycle at this time in the United States:

wishful thinking…

In the summer of 1975, Dad was retiring from the USAF, so we were ready to finally leave Maine. We stopped at my uncle’s house just outside of Boston, and my parents left me there so they could come to central New York to find a place to live (Mom wanted to retire in this area because we lived there from the summer of 1966 to autumn 1969, and it’s the only place she ever enjoyed living). My uncle and cousin were good tennis players; I had a racket, but didn’t have a real idea of how to play, so they left me alone so I wouldn’t get in their way. Luckily, my parents came back just in time to watch Arthur Ashe beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, the first black male to do so; guess what I wanted to do next. 🙂

the champ!

We moved into a townhouse, which in a way was a lot like living in base housing… only new and much cleaner. It was summer, and I really wanted to learn how to play tennis. But there weren’t any other kids around, and it’s hard to learn anything on your own. Luckily, Dad bought a tennis racket for himself and Mom bought me the same racket Arthur Ashe used, and we played every evening when it didn’t rain and twice on the weekends.

It might be hard to believe, but we got really good very fast; Dad was a champion ping pong player, winning the national Air Force tournament twice (wish I could find that). We played tennis like he played ping pong, and when we started playing doubles against other people who showed up, they weren’t ready for us and we went undefeated. Near the end of August, my uncle and cousin came for a visit to see where we were living, and of course I challenged them to a game. I beat both of them twice, then Dad and I beat them in doubles… and we never played against them again; sweet! I played another 2 1/2 years and stayed undefeated until I lost to the 2nd ranked player at the college I went to, SUNY Oswego. 6-2, 6-2. My streak was over, and I never played tennis again; not because I lost, but because it was hard finding people to play against and it wasn’t worth my time.

This one might shock you…

Manilow music book

Before we left Maine, a radio show came on every Sunday called Casey Kasem’s Top 40… or something like that. I was fascinated, as I was hearing all sorts of music that I wasn’t educated on. I heard a few piano songs by this guy named Barry Manilow, and I loved them. A few weeks after we’d moved to the Syracuse area, Mom and I were leaving a grocery store when we passed by a music store and I asked her if we could go inside and take a look around. I discovered the book above and I wanted to see if I could play any of the songs inside, as I’d never played anything except classical music. It was much easier to play than most of the classical pieces, and I found my love for playing again; thanks Mom!

At the end of my senior year, it was time to go to college. I almost didn’t make it; I’d won some awards at my high school that other students weren’t happy about (who cares lol), along with a couple of national awards, and in February the guidance counselor asked me what schools I’d applied for… and I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d been offered 3 scholarships; one in the Albany, NY area, one in Oberlin, OH, and one somewhere in Florida in a field of study I’d never heard of, so I had to scramble.

I went with my friend Chuck to see the College of Saint Rose, a small women’s college that were taking males for the first time. They didn’t have facilities for men, so they’d bought up a bunch of small houses… Mitchell wasn’t living in any of them! lol We also took a look at SUNY Albany, which was stunning, but we were way behind in applying there. We also visited SUNY Oswego, another place I’d never heard of, but can you imagine driving over a concrete hill and diving into a small city and seeing this:

we didn’t have smartphones in 1977 and hardly
anyone carried cameras around with them

I was immediately in love, but I didn’t have high hopes. As a state university, they had plenty of students who had already applied, but I applied anyway in 3 financial fields, hoping I could at least have a shot at it. I won an invite, and I had to visit the university to take an English aptitude test (glad I wasn’t the only one; I might talk about this particular event another time). My parents were astonished by the lake and thought the college looked nice enough. Eventually I got a letter saying I’d made it into the university, but I couldn’t major in any of the 3 areas I’d picked because they were already filled (I picked finance topics because in my mind I didn’t think anyone would want to do that kind of work; shows what I knew). The letter said I’d have a full year to pick a different major; didn’t care, I was in!

I moved into the university a few days before classes started and a week before I turned 18. Because I didn’t have a major, I had to go… somewhere… Monday morning to select classes I wanted to take. One of those was piano studies; yes! I was scheduled for Monday afternoon to meet him, and… well… let’s just say that he was the first of classical music teachers I’ve met over the years who were kind of snooty when it came to what they were going to raise their noses to.

He asked me what I was going to play and I said the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, which I knew well because Dad and I loved it. I played perfectly, no wrong notes, and when I finished I thought he’d be impressed; he wasn’t. He stared at me for about 20 seconds, then asked “who did you hear playing it like that?” I said Glenn Gould, because Dad had bought his album, being a Beethoven fan. The teacher said “he doesn’t know anything about Beethoven, he only knows about Bach”; okay… Still, he took me as a student, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it, but I was going to give it my best try.

My best try only lasted the first semester, when he decided I wasn’t up to his standards, and I wasn’t certain what I was going to do. The first teacher I talked to said his student list was full, so I went to the next teacher; there were only 3 piano teachers, and I’d never talked to her before. She was nice; she took me in and… well.. whew! Over the next 3 1/2 years, sometimes I was good, sometimes I was horrible, but I passed… whew again!

So, piano playing in my first couple of years of college weren’t spectacular; however, somehow along the line in my freshman year, I ended up singing in college choir, going on a trip to Washington DC and Baltimore for the first time, and walking through the ghetto in DC, which I didn’t know existed. For the next two years, until the end of my junior year, I did my thing in choir, mangled all of the foreign words, but I nailed this one to a T!

I didn’t steal it; I didn’t know I still had it
until about 18 months after I graduated, when I found
it in one of the boxes I hadn’t opened yet

I started playing songs in the girl’s dorm next to mine, because we didn’t have a piano in mine. I’d bought a couple more pop music books so I had more songs to practice with, and I developed a small following… all girls, so that was sweet! 🙂

I graduated in May of 1981, and I made the dean’s list both semesters of my senior year, when the only music class I could take was piano (turns out my original counselor didn’t tell me about electives outside of music; ugh). It worked out well because the thing about taking music is that a lot of what you do is subjective to how teachers like what you do, whereas things like history and science have specific answers. The last year boosted me into the Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges (I got a letter, because I didn’t know it was a thing; I’m probably going to say that a lot here), that went along with Who’s Who Among High School Students from 1977 (it’s around here somewhere; it’s a big house, and I just remembered that I was in it).

I moved with my parents to the new house they had built, and started looking for employment. I learned a few lessons really fast; a college degree doesn’t guarantee you a job, don’t listen to job placement services if you’re already making money at a temporary job, and without “real” money there’s little you can do on your own or with your friends. I still played a lot of piano during the day when I was out of work, but my heart wasn’t into it. Still, I wrote a song that, in my mind, wasn’t all that bad (luckily, I got better):

Journey To The Stars

It doesn’t look like much, but for a first song I thought it was brilliant. I thought I’d take a chance and enter it into a national song contest. I had to record the song on a cassette, and the entry fee was $25. Somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks, I got notified that I finished in the top 600 out of 25,000 songs (I lost that letter; heck!). I was elated, but in retrospect, I think I might have been scammed, but my songwriting career had started. Luckily, just in case I decided to copyright the song, my first:

Copyright of first song

Then I became a member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, for two years. I knew about them because I used to buy Billboard magazine monthly; it shared all the lists of top 100 or 200 music categories, and had a lot of advertisements in the back pages. Every professional musician, songwriter or producer’s in it, and I wanted to be at the party.

ASCAP

After a couple of years at jobs that didn’t pay well and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, I got a chance to work at a local hospital, since I passed the math test at 100% and typed 60 words a minute (I got faster as the years went on).

I’d never been in a real hospital before. On military bases, most of them have what they call dispensaries, and they’re relatively small. I guess I was born in a hospital at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, TX, and maybe I got my vaccinations there before we went to Tokyo, Japan, but obviously I don’t remember any of that. At that point it was the biggest building I’d ever been in, over 650 beds, large halls, and a big cafeteria. I felt out of my element for a week, as I’d never sat in front of a computer before, but I told myself that if everyone else can do the work, I can do the work; self pep talks can work wonders.

After working there a couple of years, I decided it was time to move out to my own apartment. In a way, it was like base housing, and I was a happy guy for a while. I didn’t have the money to go out to clubs, and I rarely went anywhere except to my parents house, so I started playing the piano every nice for 4-5 hours, not watching TV, not doing much of anything else. I got better, wrote a lot of songs, and bowled 4 or 5 times a week (bowling was my other thing). I got promoted twice, which meant being paid more; I was holding nothing against anyone.

One day, the office administrator’s secretary mentioned that she was getting married. I knew the guy she was marrying, and out of the blue I said “Hey, I wrote a long song and I’d love to play it at your wedding.” She wanted to hear it, so I went home, recorded it onto a cassette, and took that and the lyrics to the office the next day. She said she wasn’t sure about the song, but asked if I’d sing at her wedding… gulp!

We Are Love

As you can see, I not only kept writing songs, but I was writing script; I didn’t do it for the first song, but I did it for all the other music I copyrighted, proof that I wrote all of it. However, since she wanted a different song, I asked her to pick one or two and I’d give it a shot. I don’t remember the second song, but the first was Follow Me by John Denver… which started acapella (which means without music), then the music comes in later. I had to go to a friend of mine who was a trained music and voice teacher. The wedding was a few weeks later, I pulled it off, and suddenly I was a wedding singer… half of the time I actually got paid!

The next problem arose when I realized I couldn’t take my heavy wooden piano around with me, because some places didn’t have pianos. So I sold that piano and used the money to buy a professional traveling piano, the higher end of the scale, a Yamaha PF85, because I got a great deal from the music store I used to work at. It was 75 pounds, but I could carry it with one arm; it was a savior for my career, because many regular pianos were out of tune, and I already mentioned that some places I performed at didn’t have a piano.

Me in wedding party; someone else was supposed to sing
with the band but called in sick; you know what I had to do

Over the next 13 years or so, I performed at a lot of weddings, always a singer, but one time I was part of a duet performing Endless Love at another wedding, where I was also in the wedding party. I wrote a bunch of songs, copyrighted a lot of lyric albums… and somewhere along the way my friend Scott and I wrote a science fiction story called Return of Icarus. We submitted it to a couple of science fiction magazines and we didn’t land a spot; one of the magazines told us our science wasn’t correct… those weasels! lol

Return of Icarus

Also, during those 13 years I left two jobs, lost 3 jobs, and decided to become an independent consultant. A week after I got my business license, I not only got a short time gig up north somewhere (I can’t remember the name), but I decided to write a book on leadership. Blogs weren’t available back then, but I bought some IBM software so I could put the book together faster; even though I typed fast, I knew it would take longer to finish the book.

Then the country dealt with September 11th, and I called my wife to tell her I was on my way down to NYC, until I heard that all bridges and trains were being shut down, and I didn’t go; heck! Like most people I pretty much shut down mentally for a while, and unfortunately it took hearing about how sick my dad was brought me back to life and I decided I wanted to finish the book so that maybe he could read at least some of it.

Then, two things happened.

One, I met a guy named Ken Blanchard, who wrote a book called One Minute Manager and Fish!: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results. A local guy I met at a Chamber meet and greet invited me to be his guest at an event he was putting on in a town called Skaneateles… which is gorgeous! I got to talk to Ken, told him I had written a book on leadership (which I’d finished a couple of weeks earlier), and he asked if I could send him a copy… which I did, on copy paper, because I hadn’t been to a printer yet (which came a few years later). I had to put it in a big envelope, then sent it via a higher level of postal mail. He sent me a letter two weeks afterwards, saying that he thought it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t his style of writing. I was… ecstatic! He didn’t hate it, and that’s all I needed to hear.

Embrace The Lead, table of contents page 1

Two… Dad got much worse, but he was still able to read about 25% of it before he couldn’t go any further. Four months later, on Father’s Day, he passed away in a hospital in Rochester, NY, which was also the last day of a Mitchell family reunion that we couldn’t go to. A weird sidebar is that one of the younger cousin’s I’d never met supposedly said at the same time “Uncle Lloyd passed away” (he didn’t say “passed away”, but I can’t bring myself to say the actual words). I found out about it when I called my aunt 15 minutes afterwards; weird, right?

Before I got my first really good paying project, I started doing seminars on leadership, diversity, motivation and health care billing and procedure coding (don’t worry about the last one; most people have never heard of it). Most were around the city of Syracuse, but I also traveled to other places such as Ohio, Washington DC, Virginia and Nebraska. I was also writing a weekly newsletter on both of those topics and things related to them, which I kept writing for almost 10 years on the dot. In my own way, I accidentally became a professional speaker and writer. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t sustainable long term. I never got good at marketing myself, but at least I did reach a bunch of people in many ways, so I’m happy with that.

Embrace The Lead; I made my money back, so I got rid
of most of the books and only have 5 or 6 left in the house

When I got my first great gig, it was paying me enough so I could take my book to the printers and paid for 200 copies so I could sell them at my seminars or from my website and blogs. After all these years, I ended up even, but I still felt good about it. I wrote two other books that I never actually published; one is called Leadership Is/Isn’t Easy, the other called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool. I put together some smaller pamphlets and other products, which are still listed on my business website.

The last thing I’m going to talk about are all the blogs and websites I created over the years. I started my first blog in February 2005 called Mitch’s Blog, because of course it is. 🙂 I had to put it back together when the company I was using as a host crashed, and I lost everything. Luckily, I knew where to go to find all those articles, otherwise I might have given up blogging for good. My next blog is called I’m Just Sharing, which I started in December, 2007 (look to the right; you’ll see links to both of those blogs). Then there’s this blog; you know what it’s called because you’re on the page.

Over the years I’ve created and removed 7 other blogs, 4 other websites, wrote for others both for free and for pay. I’ve written over 6,600 blog posts and at least 3,500 articles for others who paid me, on many different subjects. I gave up singing at weddings in 1999, when I not only performed 4 songs (one of which I had to go back to my friend the voice teacher because it was a song from Phantom of the Opera, and it was slightly out of my range), but the last song was We Are Love, which I’d always thought I would sing at my wedding, but I finally got to perform it in public and I got my one and only standing ovation… so I went out on top!

These days I write some blog articles, but nothing like I did in the past. When I finish writing this blog post, I’m going to put a pile together and a lot of old material’s going in the recycle bin. There’s no family or friends to give any of it to that would be interested in getting it. Not married, no children… just me. I’ll keep a few things that I cherish, but it’s time to declutter so it’s not a burden on anyone else… whoever that might be. I stopped playing piano in 2002, but that will be someone else’s decision to make; maybe I’ll sit down one day and try to play some Beethoven… that might be nice.

The final question anyone who reads this might want to ask; why did I go through all this trouble in putting together this particular article? Well… I view this as my epitaph. Even when the blog disappears, it’ll be on the internet forever… or at least as long as the internet is still a thing.

For those of you who know me, I want you to know that as far as I know I’m not going anywhere immediately; I’m still relatively healthy, but age hits all of us eventually. Since I have no immediate plans to leave this earth, I’m not going to say goodbye; I just want anyone who reads this sees that I accomplished a lot in my life that I’ve talked about… and a lot more I’m not getting into, otherwise I’ll be here a week.

That’s it; that’s the article… and I’m still about 1,100 words from my longest article ever. Them’s the breaks; good night and goodbye to all of you!