RIP: Sharon Raymond

My Jr. High school choir director, and my high school choreographer, Sharon Raymond, passed away recently. Sharon and her husband Gene, who was the high school director, had founded the Mooresville Spotlighter show choir back in the mid '70s. It was one of the very first show choirs in the Midwest, and has gone on to become one of the premiere show choirs in the country over the past 40 years, and is still nationally known today.

I was a member of the Spotlighters for 3 years in high school, as both a guitarist and a performer. And I have had the privilege of serving as the emcee for the annual Spotlighter Invitational since its inception in 1993, an event they had dreamed of starting, and was ultimately launched a few years after they left Mooresville.

They had lived out of state for many years, but upon her passing, her family had decided to hold a memorial service for her back here in Indiana. They were kind enough to allow me to say a few words, as one of her former students. Here is what I offered at the service:

Like many of you, I met Sharon Raymond in 7th Grade. Initially, in my under-developed, adolescent mind, if you had asked me what I thought about her then, I would have told you that she wasn’t my favorite teacher in the world. She was loud, and brash, a little bit scary, and not in any way afraid to let you have it when you weren’t doing things as she would like them done.

But it didn’t take long, even at that young age, to begin to appreciate her love and passion for her job, and for her students. And for some reason, she saw a talent in me that I’m not sure I even knew I had at the time. By the next year, she had placed me in the select choir in 8th Grade at Paul Hadley — PH Factor. She gave me my first solo, a number during which I was supposed to sing and shimmy, like Elvis.

Prior to performing our first show for our parents, we performed that show for the rest of the students at school during lunch. I was ready — I shimmied up to the microphone stand, grabbed the mic like Elvis would do, and promptly smacked myself right in the teeth with it, causing the sound system to screech as though it had frapped out. I don’t know how many of you here today might remember that, but as I do not embarrass easily anymore, I can assure you I remember it well.

My freshman year, I met Gene for the first time. I was in the Freshman choir and found out soon enough that not only did Sharon teach at the Jr. High, but she choreographed all the choirs at the high school. Like most Freshman, after I saw the Spotlighters for the first time, I knew I wanted to be in that group.

My sophomore year, I joined the group as the guitar player. Some of you might not remember that, because I wasn’t very good at it. But I was the only Sophomore male to make the group that year. I felt pretty cool. Until, that is, I had to go to my first Spotlighter class and sit next to Tony West and Mike Bridgewater. THOSE guys were cool, and I was instantly humbled.

The next 3 years were some of the best years of my life. Being in Spotlighters, and spending my junior year in Gene’s music theory class provided me with some of the best memories of my teenage years. And as I’ve continued to earn at least a portion of my income over the years as a musician and entertainer, the lessons I learned from Gene and Sharon during that time have been invaluable to me as an adult.

Being in high school, we obviously spent more time with Gene than we did Sharon over those years, seeing her only on the few days she would come to class during the day to teach us our choreography, and again at our evening practices and our performances themselves.

Most of my memories from that time center around the interaction I had with my friends and fellow Spotlighters. I could probably share with you 20 or 30 stories about Sharon, and probably have forgotten 20 or 30 more. But here’s something I think we all remember:

She was a crier.

Not a wailer, or a bawler, mostly just tears and sniffles. But she would cry at the drop of a hat. She’d cry when we did a particularly good performance, and she’d cry when we stunk up the place. She’d cry when she had to yell at us for something, or she’d cry when we nailed our ballad. She’d cry when she talked about her kids. She’d cry telling us about a song she’d heard, or a movie she’d watched that moved her to tears. I can still remember the day after she’d seen the movie Dirty Dancing for the first time. She came to class raving about the dancing and choreography in the film. She told us all to go see it right away. And she cried the entire time she told us about it.

You could carry on an entire conversation with her, with tears streaming down her face, and her sniffling away.

Most often, we, as students, have to grow up, graduate and move on before we are able to see our teachers as the humans they are, before we realize the love and the passion they have for what they do, and to see how cool they really are.

I was fortunate to have a close relationship with several of my teachers, that was able to reach beyond the barriers of the normal parent-teacher relationship. Gene and Sharon weren’t just my choir teachers. They were my friends. But many of you in this room today had that same type of relationship with Gene and Sharon that I did. Because it is what they allowed us to do. They invited us into their lives and shared with us that passion they had for the perfect song, the perfect move, the perfect performance.

We CALLED them Gene and Sharon, for crying out loud. How many teachers did you address by their first name? I don’t remember many of us at all calling them Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. But then, maybe we should have after all.

All those tears Sharon used to cry… we all saw it pretty quickly. It was her passion. That’s really what we’re all here to celebrate today. A life FULL of passion. And she passed that on to all of us. Look around you. We’re not here because of some great dance move she came up with. We’re all here because she placed something into each of us that we’ve never been able to shake.

I’ve seen Gene and Sharon maybe 3 times since they moved away. Only the few times they’ve come back to serve as judges for the Spotlighter Invitational, an event I’m so thankful I get to be involved in every year. I bet some of you haven’t seen them for 30 years or more.

And yet, here you are. Why? Because she means something to you. She means something to all of us. She instilled something in us — her passion and her love for what she did — and that will be with us forever. We will never forget it, and we will never forget her.

I’m thankful they were my teachers. I learned and trained under the absolute best. But I’m even more proud to call her and Gene my friends. To all her family, I’m so sorry for your loss, and my wife and I offer you our deepest sympathies. Thank you all for allowing me a few minutes to honor such a wonderful person. Like you, I will miss her.

Donald Trump: Yea or Nay?

First, I want to say clearly that this is not my endorsement of Donald Trump. My goal with this is to first explain why he is winning and continues to resonate with so many voters, and second to suggest what we, as Conservative voters, should do when and if Trump wins the nomination.

To begin, I believe the best two candidates for the Presidency were the first two men to drop out of the race -- Gov. Scott Walker from Wisconsin and Gov. Rick Perry from Texas. Those two men had the most experience -- and the most success -- doing the things in their state that so badly needs to be done on the federal level. And one of the bottom dwellers still -- Dr. Ben Carson -- would make a fantastic President.

Moreover, I believe fully that any of the Republican candidates so far -- including Trump, Rand Paul and Chris Christie -- would have made fine Presidents, despite any individual faults, and certainly would have been far better than Obama, or Hillary or Sanders could ever hope to be. I believe this to be one of the best crops of Republican candidates we've had in some time, as an overall group.

The reasons for Donald Trump's ascension in the polls, and his position atop the GOP ladder right now are very simple. So simple, in fact, that I've been shocked at even the media dope's inability to figure it out.

He's not one of them. Nothing more, and nothing less.

He doesn't fit in the box. He's an outsider. He's not a political insider, and he's not a media darling, at least not in the sense that they control him. Never has been. He plays by his own rules, even if those rules change on a daily basis. If they do, Trump himself decides the changes, not anyone else.

Rush Limbaugh has been saying for years that there is an extreme disconnect between the Washington elites and the rest of us "out there." And he's right. The Washington establishment -- Democrat and Republican included -- have simply lost touch with he people. As a collective group, they truly do not know what's going on out in the real world. They spend their election cycles bashing each other, and when they get elected, they quickly forget that they work for the people. They are not elected to go further their own agenda; they are elected to further their constituents' agenda.

Which is why all the talk about "getting along" and "reaching across the aisle" and "compromising for the greater good" is all horse-puckey. We all, no matter who we are, elect our representatives to go do what we want them to do. Not to compromise with the other side. I don't want my representative, Todd Rokita, to "work" with Obama. I want him to defeat Obama's agenda, because I think it's bad for America. And if we can all be honest, that's what we all want our reps to do; defeat the other side. It's been that way forever.

But the problem increasingly has been that once our representatives get to Washington, they seem to have a brain fart and forget what we sent them there to do. Once they become a part of the establishment, they begin acting and voting the way they think THEY ought to, rather than the way their constituents mandated them to. (See: GOP landslide win in November, and Obamacare.) And without Congressional term-limits, they're pretty much left to their own devices, because most voters don't see the problem in their own guy or gal, but rather believe it to be a problem with all the others.

And there's an additional issue at play as well. Voters, especially Conservative voters, are simply fed up with all the political-correctness, the dumbing down of society, the absolute bone-headedness of the left (See: A washed-up, old, transgender whacko who hasn't competed in anything in nearly 40 years wins a sportsman courage award) and the entitlement-mentality that has permeated and denigrated our society almost to the point of no return. Cops can't do their jobs, illegal immigrants get free and better healthcare than our veterans, and you can't say or do ANYTHING that doesn't offend someone else. We're sick and tired of it all.

Enter Donald Trump. FINALLY, someone saying the things, and often DOING the things, we all really want to say and do and yet don't have the guts to pull off. Trump doesn't care. He simply does not care who he offends, who he ticks off, and who doesn't like him. He may often be wrong, but he's gonna say what's on his mind and what he believes. And that is resonating with the vast majority of the Conservative voters "out there" who have come to believe that no one in Washington speaks for them anymore.

That's why they ignore all his faults and slip-ups. Because the truth is, ALL the candidates have faults -- some more than others -- but they are willing to overlook those with the one guy who seems to be telling it like it is, and not speaking in the same old tired Washington-ease. The voters are fed-up with the Establishment, and they're letting it be known.

You may say he doesn't speak for you, and that's OK. But in a way, he does indeed. You see, before he was a viable Presidential candidate, you made him into the billionaire he is. You bought his products, you stayed in his hotels, you gambled at his casinos, and mostly, you watched his TV shows, and fed the advertising that fueled every media outlet who covered his every move. You did all this because you were OK with him being a sideshow. You never thought that sideshow would someday try to run the country.

And it is now that sideshow that is fueling his campaign bid. He's played the whole thing like a genius. He boasts about how he has spent the least amount of money of any candidate. That's because the media has whored out his every move, his every word. He doesn't HAVE to spend money on advertising because the media splashes every little thing he says or does across the front page every day. And moreover, they've turned every campaign issue into a battle between the candidates. They don't care about the candidates' position on an issue. They care about what Trump has to SAY about the issue, and what the other candidates reaction to his statements will be. They don't care about a wall; they care about what kind of wall Trump wants to build, and they care about what the other candidates think about Trump's wall. It's reality TV at its finest. Trump knows it, and has played it to the hilt, far better than all the other candidates.

That's why I stopped watching the Republican debates. Not one of them -- NOT ONE -- has been about the issues. They have all been about whatever Trump has said about the issues, and the other candidates' reaction to Trump's thoughts and words. Never did a moderator ask, "Mr Bush, what do you think about immigration?" Instead, they asked, "Mr Bush, Donald Trump said {this} about immigration. What do you think about that?"

And Jeb Bush took the bait, to his detriment. And so have all the others. They all spent all their time fighting with Trump, just like the media set it up, to the point that they never got their own message out. I like Jeb Bush. But he cut his own throat but worrying WAY too much about Trump.

Does anybody REALLY care about what Donald Trump thinks about David Duke? (I bet half of YOU don't know who David Duke is.) No, they don't. But it makes great TV.

I quit watching after the third debate because I saw what it was all about. There's been 10 or so now because they're the best Reality TV on the air, and the networks know it. And so does Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the rest of the candidates still haven't figured it out.

So, where does all this leave us? Well, as I write this, it is Super Tuesday, and Trump is more or less lapping the rest of the field. It's a pretty sure bet that at this point, he is going to be the GOP nominee. (There still could be some shenanigans behind the Republican scene that will try to pull the rug out from under him, and if that happens, there's a good chance Trump will go independent, but lets ignore that for now.)

If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, I will vote for him hands down.

Let me be clear, he's not my first choice, not from the beginning, and not now among the remaining candidates. Given the chance, I will vote for Ted Cruz, for many reasons. But being from Indiana, our late-in-the-season primary will likely ensure that I won't get that chance, or at least that chance won't matter much, as the nomination will likely be locked up before I get to cast a primary vote.

But if it is indeed Trump, I will vote for him.

No, not because I'm a die-hard, tow-the-line, Republican. I will do so because I believe, despite all his faults, that he is considerably smarter, and far more qualified for the job that needs to be done at the federal level than Hillary or Bernie Sanders.

Trump is infinitely more qualified now for the job than was Obama when he was elected in 2008. Obama was as clueless about things as Trump is on many subjects, AND had far less experience in running a business and global finance issues than does Trump. In fact, Obama had no experience in ANYTHING -- at all.

And remains clueless about most things almost eight years later. Hillary is Hillary. She's no different today -- aside from adding criminal, felonious activities to her resume -- than she was eight years ago when she couldn't beat a nobody from Illinois with zero experience. And Bernie Sanders? Please. Did you ever dream that we would actually be considering an admitted socialist as the President of the United States? Ever? I have to re-read that sentence just to remind myself that its actually really happening. A socialist! Yeah, like the one in Germany some years back.

The truth is that this election really might come down to the lesser of two evils, if indeed you see Trump as evil. But here's the problem: I've had friends -- good, intelligent friends, who are smart -- tell me that they cannot and will not vote for Donald Trump. Christian friends of mine have shared the fact that we can't vote for a Godless man like Trump. (Which, of course, presumably means they cannot vote for Clinton or Sanders either.)

And so the question is, who do you believe will do the least damage? A good friend of mine stated, "The choice seems to be slow poison or the electric chair," which, at the end of the day, may sum up our options. Then again, what if Trump is for real? Because the truth at this point is not so much that he's saying the wrong things, as far as Conservatives are concerned, but rather what he's saying doesn't jive with the things he's said in the past.

The basis for his non-Conservative support seems to swirl around the idea that he's not really a Conservative at all, and we're all falling for his schtick, which is just a ploy to get elected. Tickle the itching ears, as it were. But my answer to that is this: If he just wanted to get elected, he could just as easily have run as a Democrat. You don't think Trump would be slaughtering Hillary or Sanders right now? He'd win the Democrat vote in a heartbeat, because 1) Liberals LOVE guys like Trump usually, and 2) Liberals will vote for whoever you put in front of them.

Trump would never have had to deal with what he's dealing with now on the Democrat side. So why travel that road? Is there a chance he's sincere in his beliefs, and his "conversion," as it were? Is it possible he has seen the light and truly believes in the Conservative tenets he's so earnestly trying to adhere to now? Reagan used to be a Democrat, you know. (Please, don't plaster me with the stupidity of trying to compare Trump to Reagan. I'm not.) I'm just saying that it does happen. People do switch sides, and often times for very good reasons. Maybe Trump believes in what he says after all. We can look at past behavior all we want. If choosing him is thrust upon us, what else can we do but hope he is being sincere now?

I'd rather take my chances with someone who, though he has some question marks (as do all the other candidates), has so far has been willing to fight on my side, rather than someone who I KNOW stands against everything I believe in, and who's stated policies, beliefs, and intentions have NEVER done anything but topple nations. Hillary and Bernie have both had their chances in Washington. Has either of them done one thing to help the country?

Not voting at all is simply not an option. (I'm of the opinion that everyone of voting age should be required to vote.) Because not voting at all is casting a vote for the other side. (5 million registered Republican voters did not vote in 2012 because they didn't like Romney. Obama's win in the general election was barely over 3 million votes. You do the math.)

And for all his faults, Trump does indeed bring some things to the table that Hillary and Sanders do not. And as a Christian, I vote my morality as much as I possibly can, but I've also long believed that our government should get out of the business of trying legislate our morality. (Our founding fathers did a nice job of establishing moral principles for us. Most everyone else along the way has screwed it up.) If I can't vote for someone who shares my Christian values, all things being equal, I'm going to vote for the person most qualified for the job. I can't fathom that anyone could truly believe that Sanders or Hillary is any more qualified than is Trump.

So yes, I will vote for Donald Trump if he is the choice I have.