corycullinan.com

Welcome to the liner notes for my new free download album, Soundtracks, featuring highlights from my work as a film soundtrack composer.  It is my 2008 holiday gift to all who have supported me over the years. Perhaps one day I will put these notes together in a more visually arresting package, but for now, I’m simply posting them to my blog.

I worked primarily in documentaries and multimedia videos.  I also had some song placements in major film and television productions, but those tracks are not included on this compilation.  Everything on this album is music that was composed directly to the action onscreen, as opposed to songs written independently of the film and simply added to the picture.  Some of my favorite music I’ve ever written is included on this album.

1.  Offshore…  This short and introspective track was written for Kristen Nutile’s documentary short of the same name.  The film was about a boy who grew up on Alcatraz Island while the prison was still in operation.  His father worked at the prison.  I played piano on this track, and played all the instruments on subsequent tracks unless otherwise noted.  I also engineered, mixed and produced the recordings unless otherwise noted.

The Corner Store Suite (Tracks 2-5)

2.  The Corner Store…  This bittersweet documentary by Kristen Nutile captures a piece of Americana that is rapidly disappearing. Fountain City, WI is one of the last authentic river towns along the Mississippi, and Francis Lettner’s Corner Store is one of the last remaining gathering sites for the local town members.  Listen closely and you can hear the train passing by and the sun setting on an antiquated way of life in this small town.  I played the keyboard guitar on these tracks and was thrilled to be joined by the great Nathan Rubin on violin.  Working with Nathan was a career highlight for me (he also played on the My Oyster album).  He is a brilliant musician.  This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written and recorded, and I would never have done so without the inspiration of this poignant little film in front of me.  Nathan’s violin recordings were engineered by Bill Hare in Milpitas, CA.

3.  We Got Married…  This track underscores a fantastic senior couple reminiscing about their wedding.

4.  Everybody Shopped In Town…  We hear Nathan’s solo violin at the start, underscoring both the former Wild West nature of the town and the sense of longing for a time gone by.  Then we travel deeper into the town as it is evolving now.

5.  Haven’t Changed Much…  The title of this track refers to a comment by the narrator, who says that she understands that the world around her is changing, but that she herself hasn’t changed much.  We then hear her whisked back to her dance hall days, with an old-fashioned semi-professional band playing behind her.  The track closes with the train once again going by and the sun setting on another day, and soon this very way of life.

6.  Air Force Vectors…  This adrenalized track was written for a United States Air Force training video.  They requested something “masculine but technological.”  And you know I’m all about that.  It gave me an opportunity to play with sounds through various production techniques and effects.  As an example, listen to the drum tracks and how their sound evolves and morphs over time.  I had a lot of fun with this commission.

Secret Mechanisms Suite (Tracks 7-9)

7.  A Particular Order…  This experimental film explores issues of control, anxiety, and fear intertwined with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Designed as a cinematic poem, the film creates a mental landscape through abstract imagery and disassociated voices.  The filmmaker, Kristen Nutile, had a clear vision of the sound she wanted, and I wrote and recorded three complete drafts of the score until I got it right.  The final version is much more subtle and scaled down than my original version, and Kristen was right — it serves the film well.  Next year, I will release an album called Soundtrack Sessions that will include some of the musical drafts from this film that did not ultimately make it into the final cut.  The initial drafts were more interesting, rich and compelling musically, but they did not serve the images in the film as well as these final versions did.  It was an interesting lesson for a relatively new film composer.

8.  In My Head…  Due to the film’s subject matter, the musical themes here are intentionally repetitive and structured in a simple upwards/downwards chord progression that is barely functional harmonically.  It is as if we are inside the narrator’s head and experiencing the repetitive, only slightly evolving thoughts there.

9.  Secret Mechanisms…  This is the final section of the film, leading to the credits.  We hear a simple and repetitive two note theme, with the chords underneath occasionally venturing in unexpected directions, but ultimately always returning to the same place.  We also hear cold and sparse percussion.

10.  Green By Design…  Greatly contrasting the previous suite, this soundtrack has a light and fun groove that keeps the film progressing in a buoyant direction toward a greener planet.  While discussing serious issues and ways to conserve energy, the filmmaker wanted a musical vibe that prevented the film from feeling like a lecture.  Essentially a series of interviews of one environmental designer and his clients, the music is intended to bring some levity to a subject that sometimes scares people off or simply bores them with technological jargon and seemingly insurmountable issues.  Fun stuff to compose and a good idea for the musical style by the filmmaker.

11.  Police Blotter…  This film is an experimental documentary that humorously and insightfully explores crime in two neighboring communities.  The first community is a wealthy gated community in Silicon Valley, CA.  The second community is directly next door, but one of the poorest and most crime-ridden in the state, with a completely different demographic.  The film passes by the neighborhoods through the window of a car as we see different entries into the police blotter on the same day for the two communities.  The mood is supposed to be ethereal, detached and otherworldly, but with a touch of the absurd.  The twangy guitar over the top and the pizzicato strings represent my goofy commentaries on the serious and respectable music underneath.  Ironically, I was paid in full for this soundtrack and told it was what had been requested, but the filmmaker ultimately decided to license the temp music, which by that time had become intrinsically imbedded into the film for its maker.  But I really love the goofy but insightful mixed message of this track and the film, so I included it here anyway.

12.  (The) Sound Of Courage…  This was commissioned for an animated short film called Razzle Dazzle by Christian Lowe, Doctor Noize’s artist and animator. He specifically requested “’80’s Power Cheese,” with laser and thunder sounds. He also requested that the lyrics be a string of inspirational masculine clichés. Undaunted by groupies, I channeled my inner Whitesnake and yelled the vocals really loud. This was one of the funnestest things I’ve ever recorded, and the whole thing was written and recorded in a few hours — leaving me longing for more work to do.  Perhaps a big haired “cheese rock” album is in my future?  God I hope so.  My two little girls insist on playing this song over and over again when they hear it — they get the joke and think it’s hilarious.  They like to dance to it and sing really loud along with the high parts, then break down giggling. It would be impossible for me to love this track any more than I already do.  Somebody please commission me for another one.

13.  Go West, Young Man…  The Soundtracks album closes with four tracks from the most intensely personal film — for both the director and the composer — I worked on.  Kristen Nutile’s film Loss is an intimately emotional and autobiographical tour de force that examines grief and memory years after the death of her father.  This track is from a section in which her father (who narrates part of the film through old cassette recordings he occasionally made to record his thoughts) moves to the west coast to pursue a better life.  The fine Bay Area guitarist Tim Roberts plays guitar on this track; I play the piano.  It was engineered and recorded by Jay Kadis at Stanford University.

The Nutile Sonata (Tracks 14-16)

14.  Memories Fade…  The music, emotions and ideas this film brought out in me were so intense and personal that, after completing the film’s soundtrack, I arranged the themes from the film into a three movement piano sonata roughly corresponding to the start, middle and end of the film.  Kristen wanted a solo piano score for Loss, probably to emphasize the intimacy, loneliness, and delicate beauty of the film.  This is the first movement of the sonata and film, exploring an idea that’s often unspoken:  As the years progress following the death of a loved one, it’s often hard to remember exactly what that person was like in detail.  The image becomes… hazy.  The music for the first movement is dreamlike, sweet, but doesn’t completely grab you emotionally — it is beautiful but distant, like the memory it represents.  Appealing but amorphous and hazy.  The Nutile Sonata was engineered and recorded with assistance from Jay Kadis at Stanford, and I am grateful to Stanford both for the use of their studio and their fine piano.

15.  Loss…  Unlike the first movement, this section won’t allow me to bathe in vague dreamlike emotions… It grabs me and does not let go.  The emotions are heartfelt and very present.  For me personally, this piece is one of the most intense I’ve ever written, and I hear this every time I listen to it.  One day I will write a much longer accounting of the intense events and ideas surrounding the composition of this movement, but here it is in a nutshell:  My brother died of a brain tumor when I was in high school.  My father became very depressed about this and killed himself less than a year later.  One of my closest friends died of a brain tumor a few years later, leaving a six month old child behind.  Eventually I had children, and I love my girls — my two daughters and their beautiful mother — more than anything in the world.  One sunny day I went to a doctor for a slight case of tinnitus who (incorrectly and rather incompetently) told me I might have a brain tumor.  I was crushed, thinking of leaving my family behind without a dad, like my dad did.  The next day, I opened the film I’d been hired to write the music for — Loss — and it was about a filmmaker grappling with the difficulties of losing a father to a brain tumor when she was still a girl.  An intense coincidence, to put it mildly.  I spent the next few days composing this music, hearing about the difficulties faced by the family this man left behind while watching sections of the film over and over again, and simultaneously getting tests done myself which confirmed that I didn’t have a brain tumor.  False alarm.  But a totally freaky convergence of things.  So you could say I was really locked in to the subject matter of this film while composing the music.  This piece reflects my feelings of sorrow and my realizations of the fragility of life — both my own and that of Kristen’s father.  It has become one of my favorite pieces — forging something meaningful out of real loss, potential or permanent.

16.  Here’s To Life…  This movement is drawn from the final act and credits of Kristen’s film.  I remember she said she wanted it to evoke the same kind of feelings and emotions as parts of the score from Kiera Knightly’s Sense And Sensibility.  To me this piece sort of represents the triumph of the human spirit — Kristen’s, her father’s, my own, my brother’s, everyone who experiences a loss and ultimately forges on with real passion — over hardship, loss and fear.  Considering that, while composing this piece, I was as melancholy as I have ever been due to the above strange sequence of events, I sort of wear this piece as an emotional badge of honor.  It sounds truly uplifting to me, and composing it helped me focus on positive energy in a time when I needed it.  The optimism of the piece sounds effortless, but it was not, and as clichéd as this may sound, it reminds me that there will always be a well of optimism in me — and anyone who chooses to dig for it — no matter what the situation.  This is one of the beautiful aspects of Kristen’s film as well.  She essentially achieved triumph over turmoil by making a poignant tribute to a fine man who died early.  And it’s a tribute from the one person any father would want a tribute from most — his child.  Here’s to the hope that we can all be so lucky in defeat.  Kristen is not a sentimental or sappy filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination, but if one steps back from this film and looks at the big picture, it’s not too hard to reach the fulfilling conclusion that in the end, love conquers all.  And so with this piece I close both my Soundtracks album and my career — at least for now — as a film composer.  Writing the music for Loss left me emotionally drained, yet inspired and ready to go out and devote my full attention to Doctor Noize — a musician and author for children in a world whose characters all have an indomitable spirit.  After completing The Nutile Sonata, I have not sought or accepted a film commission since.

Thanks for listening and reading, and I hope you enjoyed my Soundtracks. For more info on Kristen Nutile’s fine films, visit Soft Spoken Films — and send my regards.

I have a great story to tell you about how totally rad my daughters are.  It is yet another story about how my beautiful little ladies take care of me when I need it.  I thought I was going to have time to write this now, but little Mommy showered and got dressed for our hot date faster than I anticipated, and she just materialized here in the kitchen, so I’m gonna postpone this temporarily for a date with a babe.  I will return to tell this story tomorrow…

We have just gone on our first long road trip with our girls.  We drove all the way from Colorado to San Francisco, with stops in Salt Lake City and Reno on the way.  We were slightly afraid of this impending trip, because we had heard horror stories from parents about screaming kids in cars for three days straight.  So, as a preventative measure, we considered several different “child muffler” options before our trip.  We settled on one that broke one of our pretentious previous parenting principles (”the four p’s”):  We bought an in-car video system.

Now, those privy to the Cullinan Family Internal Family Principle Strategy Meetings circa 2005 are aware that this was a big issue surrounding the purchase of our first new car, a gold 2005 Honda Odyssey minivan.

(Editor’s aside…  My deep feelings for my minivan are perhaps the most perfect representation of my complete domestication and emasculation to date, and here’s why:  I LOVE my minivan.  I love it like guys are supposed to love their Porsches.  I get in my minivan, with its ample space for children and family outing items; its iPod dock for family-approved playlists; its front and back seat climate control; its “check your brain at the door” automatic transmission and cruise control; its gold external color, carefully chosen so as to show the least amount of dirt and dust and therefore require infrequent washings; its winter-approved ass warmer button for both driver’s side and passenger’s side seats; I could go on, but I won’t — and I think:  ”Yes, there is a God.  My minivan is where I want to be.”  Contrastingly, when I think of a Porsche, I think of not enough space, the annoying need to shift gears, and the dangerous temptation to secure a well-earned speeding ticket.  I do not hold up this mentality as something to be admired.  I merely hold it up as truthful and self-evident.)

Back to the Family Principle Strategy Meetings of 2005…  The big debate was whether to get the DVD system in the minivan.  My wife and I came in with a resounding and self-important “NO.”  That’s NO in all-caps.  This is because we are too cool for the in-car DVD player.  Our children were going to experience the world, not be mindless and narrowly focused zombies, so the narrative goes.  In fact, we had to pay MORE for the car to get it with the navigation system but WITHOUT the DVD player in the back seat — it became a custom job.  But we did just that and paid more because, well, we were just too intellectual and purposeful and cool for the in-car DVD system to poison our children’s adventurous souls.

Fast forward to last week…  We are about to go on a long driving trek with our kids, and we’re thinking:  Why the hell didn’t we get the DVD system?  What are we, communists?  Needless to say, our “Home Away From Home” Target Greatland was there to take care of our needs at an exceptional value — $159.99 for a double video screen system mounted behind the front seats by some technological-sounding company I’ve never heard of (we saved $20 by buying a “non name brand…”).  If these screens and this new perspective lasted all the way to California and back without breaking down, we would consider it a victory.

Well…  As I write here from California, we are halfway to victory, but under no conditions counting our chickens before they’re hatched.  One thing that parenting teaches you is that absolute principles are impressive in theory, and resisting the urge to buy video screens for the minivan sounds good and admirable on paper…  But the reality of life is sometimes more nuanced.  Sometimes it’s nice to be able to bend the principle a little bit and bust out the portable video screens every once in a while.  You know, taking a break from perfection for the good of the journey.

Just don’t tell anybody about the portable video screens.  It will be our little secret.  Our public policy will be the same:  We don’t have or need no stinkin’ built-in video screens.  (Read that sentence carefully and you’ll find this is still technically true.)  Built-in video screens are for sissies.  And speaking of sissies, please don’t put any Barney or Caillou DVD’s in our travel video bag.

I had a dream date weekend with my two dreamy daughters.  Mommy was in Los Angeles for work, and the girls and I attended not one… not two… but three soccer games.  Then we ate dinner in front of the TV in the loft (we never do that) and watched the Broncos beat the Chargers 39-38.  We also went to a birthday party and went swimming.  All in one weekend.  Now that’s a Daddy’s Girls Dream Date Weekend.  Yeah baby.

About the soccer games…  We first went to Sidney’s game.  As a previous blog (”Betrayal Of A Pink Princess”) has described, I am the Assistant Coach on Sidney’s under 6 soccer team.  Sidney’s team won 9-4, and the result would have been much worse if we had not voluntarily played a player short (3 on 4) for much of the second half.  Her team won their first game 12-0.  Ouch.  Sidney has scored seven goals in her first two games.  That’s my girl!  Because I have unbridled, disreputable and overly competitive pride in this, I try to mask it by acting like it doesn’t matter who wins or loses or scores the goals.  (Right!  As if anybody who has ever played soccer with me or watched me coach my high school boys team would believe this…)  Actually, that’s true, what’s important is to play your hardest, play with class and skill and sportsmanship, and accept the results.  And by accept the results, I mean of course that you should humbly congratulate everyone on a good game, and then get in your car and either (a) internally gloat and relive the glory that was your dominant athletic victory, or (b) feel an immature sense of anger and frustration that you did not destroy and dominate your opponent.  So, as you see, based on my competitive nature regarding soccer, it is best that I’m the assistant coach rather than the head coach of a team of five year old girls.  Until…

I received an email from a friend whose 3 year old girl (and one of Riley’s best friends) was enrolled on a soccer team that had no coach.  The team was not going to get to play their inaugural season unless a coach could be found within a week and a half.  Riley loves soccer (she practices with Sidney’s under 6 team!) and frankly does not get herself as much exercise as Sidney naturally does.  So, you guessed it…  I’m the new head coach of the Real Colorado Cubbies 3 year old girls’ team, the Unicorns!  (The girls themselves named the team the Unicorns, which I think shows great promise — would you want to play defense on a unicorn that put her head down to watch the ball and dribbled it straight toward you?  I didn’t think so.  So the name itself intimidates teams to give up on playing defense against us.  Way to go, girls!)

Needless to say, my new head coaching position presents some challenges for a former competitive soccer player.  Challenge #1:  Don’t be an asshole.  It’s okay to be an asshole who talks nice but really wants to destroy your team when playing with other adult men.  In fact, it is considered a rather admirable trait in such circles.  But with little girls just learning the game, it’s all about the love of the game and fun.  So I have to monitor that.

Challenge #2:  Teach the girls the basics of the game.  At the first practice, we did a whole bunch of games and drills featuring things like imaginary ice cream factories.  We did these things because the Real Colorado coaches’ manual implored us to follow their regimen.  But then, at the end of the practice, I tried to run a little fun scrimmage.  The girls looked at me like I was speaking Martian.  They didn’t get it at all, except Riley, who scored a bunch of goals because she practices with Sidney’s big girl team and knows what to do.  But for the other girls, I suddenly realized this was their first time playing soccer, and they don’t go to pro soccer games with their daddies, and they didn’t even know they were supposed to try to score on the goal!  So next practice, we’re throwing out the Real Colorado coaches’ manual for the first part of practice, and just learning the core concept of the game, which is to try to kick the ball into one net as a team and keep it out of another net.  And prepare yourself for glorious dominant victory over others down the line.  Oh sorry, not that last part.  Everybody wins.

On another note, here is the funniest thing I have heard all week:

Mommy has been talking to the girls about childbirth.  I can’t remember why.  The girls learned that Sidney was a natural birth and Riley was a C-Section.  They are fascinated by this.  They talk about it all the time, and ask questions like, “What did they use to cut you open to take Riley out?”  (My interjected answer:  A bread knife.  Mommy corrected that one.)

(Here is a gross thing I just remembered, on that note.  Squeamish readers should skip this part, but I find it fascinating:  I have seen my wife’s guts.  Her actual guts.  I swear to God.  Even though I’m agnostic.  When Riley was born, I was in there with them, and I saw them cut my wife open and take Riley out.  I am such a pansy, I have no idea how I kept from fainting when I saw this.  But I was there and holding Janette’s hand after they rushed her in for an emergency C-section when Riley suddenly got wrapped around in the umbilical cord and was dangerously close to choking.  Janette was incredibly scared and incredibly strong through all this, and somehow I managed to hang in there too.  And it created an opportunity I will never forget:  While they sewed Janette back up, I spent the first 30 minutes of Riley’s life with her, just the two of us, me holding her little tiny hand.  And I will never forget how Riley was remarkably calm for that whole thirty minutes, after experiencing something indescribably traumatic.)

Short version of the above stories:  All my girls are ass-kickers.

Anyway, back from that long and gory tangent, my girls have recently been fascinated about the childbirth process and the fact that they were born in different ways.  They want to see Mommy’s C-section scar all the time.  They want to know if they were in Mommy’s tummy with the food.  The questions go on and on.  They realize that they understand how Riley came out when they cut Mommy’s tummy open, but they don’t really get how Sidney got out through natural childbirth.  They ask:  Where’s the place that Sidney came out?  Mommy tries to explain to them in several different ways.  I won’t go into detail on these explanations in a rare moment of blogging restraint on my part.  However, I will get to the greatest moment in this conversation, as a deeply contemplative and curious Sidney sat back and tried to comprehend the biological details her mother was explaining to her, and opened her wide eyes in an “a-ha!” moment, and breathlessly and triumphantly asked her mother:

“Did you poop me out?”

Back to the biological drawing board.

I have a lot of admiration for my daughter Sidney, who is five years old.  I have never met a more naturally kind person — she is always looking after her little sister Riley, who can be a handful, and she makes close friendships at a young age with both other children and adults.  Sidney’s wonderful little girlfriends at her preschool — Reagan, Sammy, Kendall, others too — have been a great gang at school for the past year in Ms. Theresa’s class.  Now, they are all heading off to different schools for kindergarten.

I have been amazed at the maturity Sidney and her friends have shown through this dramatic transition.  They are leaving their friends behind and going to completely different worlds, and they really love each other, but they are handling the transition better than most adults would.  They show true friendship and an appreciation of both the friendship and the upcoming change:  For the last few weeks of school, whenever I would arrive with Sidney at preschool, her wonderful little friends would all yell “Sidney!” and they’d all run and hug each other, as a group and then one by one.  Then they’d play.  They would talk openly to me about the different schools they were going to and say they wanted to have playdates.

I thought Sidney would be distraught over this — leaving her friends, her preschool of the last two years, her teacher who she adores — but she has been an absolute champ.  I have asked her several times about her feelings about changing schools, told her I would love to talk to her about anything that might scare her about it, and leading up to school, she’s repeatedly said:  ”I’m gonna miss my friends and Miss Theresa, but I’m excited about going to kindergarten.”  And she’s totally sincere.

I am so proud of her confidence — my big girl knows that her new teacher will appreciate the person she is and that she will make friends.  She knows it.  I remember, over three years ago, when we started our first preschool in California, Sidney was very nervous and shy and serious.  Not anymore.  She’s composed and confident.  She truly inspires me to be more poised and confident in challenging situations.  She knows she can handle it, and she’s only five.  I think of her when I’m nervous about anything — which admittedly is not too often — and it makes me smile and relax.

So…  The first few weeks of elementary school have gone great.  Sidney doesn’t have super close friends there yet, but she is game to go every morning (three days a week for kindergarten).  She has had concerns about the bus that have been difficult to pin down — she likes the bus, but somehow she has seemed afraid that she’s going to miss the bus on the way home or that I don’t know where the bus goes when she’s on it.  So we solved that problem together:  I followed the bus in my car, both to school and from school one afternoon, and then we talked about everything about the trip.  Now she seems more relaxed about it — I think because I know all the places she’s gonna be — and I’m glad she told me about her concern.

Nonetheless…  Despite Sidney’s excitement, courage, and brave face, Janette and I have noticed more nervous stress indicators in Sidney over the last few weeks.  She chews on her hair.  She fidgets.  She is thinking about things and occasionally absent-minded.  We ask her if she’s okay, and she confidently says:  ”Yes.”  We ask her if she likes school, and she says “yes.”  But tonight, she did a very uncharacteristic thing for her:  She just broke down and cried and cried and cried, for almost twenty minutes, about her decision to get out of the bath a few minutes early.  (Daddy and Riley and Sidney were taking a bath in the big tub, something we do a few times a week — a joy to describe on another day in this blog.)

She regretted the decision and was crying, crying, crying about it.  She was inconsolable.  This is unlike her.  We hugged her and got mad at her and hugged her and told her to let it out and told her to stop and hugged her and got frustrated and tried to make her laugh and hugged her and finally something worked.  (As you can see, we were not altogether consistent or impressive in our response to Sidney’s extended emotional outburst, in part because we haven’t seen much like it before.)

After she calmed down, we put her right to bed.  I told her what I often tell her beaming and proud and loving face as the last thing before I leave her room:  ”Sidney, there is no one in this world I admire more than you, because you are smart, you are fun, and most of all, you are kind.  I don’t know how you do all that at such a young age.  Thank you for being my best friend and for inspiring me to try to be those things too.  I am the luckiest daddy in the world.”  And she smiled that impossibly sincere and appreciative smile — the one she gives me every night at bedtime — and said, as always:  ”I love you Daddy.  You’re the best daddy in the world.  I want you to always be my Daddy.”

And I left her room, thinking:  Even on Sidney’s worst night, when the weight of a world-changing transition is suddenly hitting her, when she doesn’t understand her own emotions of fear and anxiety, when she thinks she’s sad about the tub but she’s really sad about something so much larger — having to change her school, her circle of friends, her methods of transportation, her five year old comfort zone — even then, this extraordinary girl with a heart of pure love and courage will look up at me after pretty much her longest cry ever and tell me that she just wants me to know that I’m the greatest.

How many people will ever give you that kind of love?  I’m the luckiest man in the world.

It’s Independence Day!  That’s July 4th for those of you who are not American history scholars.  And as a father of two wonders and husband of an additional wonder, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that while independence has its merits, it is certainly not all that it was cracked up to be by our Founding Fathers.  If I was independent of my three babes, my life would be far less meaningful, far less rewarding, far less loving, and far less fun.

On the plus side, I’d get to watch more movies with either Will Ferrell or hot naked women.  But all in all, I’ll take fatherhood, husbandhood, and my lack of independence any day.  (As further clarification, by “any day,” I mean “on most days.”)

Today we are going to our city’s Independence Day parade and celebration, and then Sidney and daddy are going on a dream date to see the Colorado Rapids (the local Major League Soccer team) play in their beautiful brand new stadium.  After the game will be a giant fireworks show.  Sidney and I went to the July 4th game last year too.  Sidney’s on a soccer team now and truly shares her daddy’s love of soccer — both playing and watching it.  That is so awesome.  God I love that girl.  Riley will come to the games in future years too when she’s older.  Returning home at 11 PM is probably still a stretch for Riley.

Our love of soccer segues into a story I would like to share with you.  This is a soccer story.  It is also a “man wearing a pink princesses shirt” story.  And it is a story of betrayal.  So listen up Coach Steve:  I’m calling you out!  But don’t worry, I’ll still be your assistant coach next season.  I’m just that big a guy.

Our story starts on Sidney’s first day of soccer practice.  She has joined a team for the first time (at age five), and I have volunteered to be her assistant coach.  Once upon a time, I was quite the ambitious soccer guy.  I was a successful high school varsity boys soccer coach for three years.  Before that, I was actually on the varsity soccer roster at Stanford for a time, a distinction I enjoyed obtaining more than I actually enjoyed playing on the team, which was very time consuming and prohibited me from the proper time to chase music and girls in college.  So I retired early from college soccer.  At this point, my job as an assistant coach for the Pink Princesses consisted entirely of showing up most of the time to practices and games and doing whatever Coach Steve told me to do.  And I was very fond of that level of job responsibility.

Anyway, on Sidney’s first day of practice, Coach Steve’s wife gave every girl a pink T-Shirt that had a soccer ball and the words “Princesses” on it.  Also, the image of the soccer ball had a pink crown on it.  A nice touch.  Practice jerseys.  Cool.  The girls loved them.  Oh my god did they love them.

Then came the unexpected:  She pulled out two adult size pink princesses soccer shirts.  One for me and one for Coach Steve.  ’Okay,’ I thought, I’m dedicated enough to my girls and comfortable enough in my incredibly pronounced masculinity to take one for the team and wear a pink princesses shirt that is several sizes too big for me — thus emasculating me in just about every conceivable way — in public.  Coach Steve put his on.  Hey, I thought — if Coach Steve is gonna wear his, I’m gonna wear mine.  No problem.

So each Wednesday night for practice, and each Saturday night for games, I could be found prancing about in public in my pink princesses T-Shirt.  Coach Steve did too.  We always wore our pink princesses shirts.  I got quite used to this.  Unified in our selfless support of our girls.  Our family would often stop at the Whole Foods Market, that Lola Granola haven of grocery stores, on the way home from games on Saturday to get groceries and have lunch, where I would proudly don the pink princesses shirt I was swimming in for all to see.  No problem.  I didn’t even take it off between the game and the grocery store.  I waited until we got home.  Because I’m such a man.

And now for the betrayal:  picture day.  We show up on the morning of the game that team pictures are being taken.  It’s a bitterly cold Colorado winter morning; everyone’s wearing coats, hats, and mittens until the last possible moment before the pictures.  Our team gets up to the photographer.  Time for the team photo.  The jackets come off and we all rush to the team photo spot.  The girls are all wearing their game day uniforms.  I am wearing my gigantamongous pink Princesses shirt the coaches always wear to practices and games.  Last thing, Coach Steve takes off his big jacket and sits down on the other side of the picture from me beside the girls… in a very manly and perfectly fitted red collared shirt with a macho official soccer coaching logo on it.  What? my mind is thinking as the photographer tells us to look forward and smile for the picture in the frigid cold thirty degree temperature.

“Steve, where’s your pink princesses shirt?” I ask him immediately after.

“Oh, I um, forgot it,” he says with a sincere lack of conviction, after approximately ten straight appearances in the pink shirt.  The referee blows the whistle.  We start the game.

I will be bringing Coach Steve a very special scarf, necklace and flamboyant hat to wear for next season’s team picture.  Until then, please enjoy the following team photo:

I knew Riley had woken up from her nap one day this week because she immediately began joyously singing one of the many great songs by children’s musician Zak Morgan. Zak is one of the world’s nicest and greatest people, and Sidney and Riley watch his DVD for their “Learning TV Time” whenever they get the chance.

You can get his DVD and albums at his website, www.zakmorgan.com. Or at Wal-Mart starting in May. And you know, if it’s at Wal-Mart, it’s gotta be cheap good.

Anyway, Riley, Sidney and I love his DVD. As you will see upon watching it, Zak is very creative and almost as talented as his grandmother. (Watch it, you’ll see.) One of his albums was nominated for a children’s music Grammy in 2006. He probably would’ve won it, too, if he had thought to ask Riley to sing this song on his CD. Not to worry, though. You don’t know who won the children’s music Grammy that year and either do I. In fact, I’m fairly certain that the only person who knows who won the children’s music Grammy on any given year is the person who won it.

So, without further ado, I now invite you to click on this link to see Riley wake up to sing Zak’s great song. She actually knows all the words to the song, but as you’ll see, she’s pretty focused on this one line she really likes from the chorus at the moment. I would imbed the video into this blog directly, except I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do that, and it’s too late in the evening to call Weldon, my Apple genius geek buddy. But I’m fairly certain you won’t regret it if you click here.

Thanks to the creative genius tandem of Zak Morgan and Riley Max Cullinan for this collaboration.

That’s right, families who sinus rinse together stay together. This is primarily because sinus rinsing is so intrinsically disgusting that nobody else wants to hang out with you when you do it. I’ve seen the babysitters faces when they see us sinus rinse. They never want to come back. So sinus rinsers stick together so we won’t be alone.

What is a sinus rinse, you say? Ah, you naive non-allergic, non-nasty-Colorado-winter-cold simpleton you — I envy you. A sinus rinse is basically a little plastic bottle of water and some salty tasting mix that you are supposed to shove up your nose and squeeze hard until the water (and all the snotty guck that’s stuck in your sinuses) comes out of the other side of your nose and your mouth. Spit, wipe your face, repeat. That’s it. It’s lovely. The doctor has commanded that we do this after our fifth — FIFTH! — cold of the winter season.

It really is nasty and it really does work. It clears you up good for a while. My girls are troopers. Let’s be honest, sinus rinsing sucks, but they do it — even my three year old. She likes it when we do it together and trade off. She doesn’t enjoy the process much, because she’s sane, but she likes trading turns and the joy of conquering a difficult task. And my five year old is quite possibly the World’s Greatest Sinus Rinser, a title she wears with great pride, which is nice, because probably nobody else would. I love her so much for this. “Daddy, look! It’s coming out the other side of my nose! Look at all the mucus I’m getting!”

Ah, the beautiful words only a father would love you for. And I really do love her for them, too. She is such a good girl. Anyway, anytime your family would like to come over to our bathroom for a sinus rinse playdate, give us a buzz. We won’t stay up waiting for the phone to ring.

So we all got bronchitis last month! Here’s to bronchitis and all the havoc it wreaks. Sidney, my five-year-old, got it the worst. She had to go on a nebulizer machine four times a day because her air passages were so congested and blocked, and she was wheezing. Sidney is such a trooper that we didn’t really know how sick she was. I took the girls in to their pediatrician for something else — their yearly checkup — and didn’t really even mention the cold. Anyway, the doctor examined her and then scolded me for being such a bad parent that I didn’t bring her in for her cold. She especially thought I was an ass because we had all had the cold for about a month. She was like: “Dude, you’re a moron, colds don’t last for a month, it’s something worse, you gotta bring her in, you total dumbshit.”

Okay, so that’s a paraphrase and not a direct quote, but I could read between the lines, if you know what I mean. She thought I was a dumbshit parent. But we knew so many people in town who had this nasty cold for about a month that we just kinda thought everybody was doing it.

It was only after this that the weirdness happened. Apparently, this doctor decided that I was the kind of parent who would ignore all signs of illness in my children, so she had to whip out the scare tactics. (This was very ironic, because I am actually the pansy parent who usually takes his children in at the slightest trace of a medical problem.) So the pediatrician says, with my 5-year-old and 3-year-old in the room: “I’m not kidding, you have to take them in when they’re like this, they could DIE FROM THIS.”

I glance at my kids, who are taken aback. Great, thanks for sharing, doc. I say to her: “I get it, we need to come in earlier next time, we’ll do that.”

But she continues: “I’m serious, I had a young patient die just a few months ago because the seriousness of her condition wasn’t recognized and we didn’t get her on the nebulizer early enough. This is serious business, dad.”

Okay, I tell her, I got it, we heard the extreme worst case scenario, we’ll come in earlier next time, so now let’s talk about how to treat the normal manifestation of this illness, like we have here. But she obsessively continues:

“I went to the kid’s funeral.” I look at my two children, who are handling this situation much more responsibly than their pediatrician. It has suddenly become obvious that this doctor feels guilty about her patient who died, and is presently focusing more on working through her horror over that tragedy than on the situation at hand with my children. I square the pediatrician in the eye:

“We get it. Move on.”

As soon as the pediatrician leaves the room, Sidney turns to me: “Daddy, I don’t want to die right now.”

“You won’t, honey, we’ll take care of you,” is what I say. ‘FUCK that doctor’ is what I’m thinking. I give Sidney a big hug and tell her for the millionth time what a wonderful and mature girl she is. On the phone, later on, I let the doctor’s office know that I never want that ridiculous scenario to happen again — if they feel the need to scare me into taking my kids to the doctor earlier, or work out their anguish over a patient tragedy, they can talk to me about it when my kids aren’t around. What I didnt’ say is this: Better yet, maybe we’ll get a new doctor.

So Sidney’s been on the nebulizer for almost a month, and after many weeks of hard work on it, she has gotten better. She has been absolutely fantastic about it. It has been a huge drain on all of us — 20 minutes four times a day is a huge chunk of time out of our schedule. It’s been an especially weird thing because, frankly, it never seemed to be that bad of an illness. Sidney has been in good spirits the whole time, she always wanted to go out and play, she has as much energy as usual. But we played it safe and reduced our activities the last month. God, I love that girl. She is so strong and positive. Totally my idol, totally inspiring.

Something else happened in the last couple weeks. I’m trying to remember what it was… Oh yeah, Christmas. We had a beautiful white Christmas here in Colorado. Santa came and brought a big-ass Barbie dollhouse, which, frankly, was not at all what I wanted. But there is a happy ending to that misunderstanding, because my daughters really seem to love it. Or maybe it was intended for them in the first place. I’ll ask him next year if I see him when he stops by.

Happy New Year!