Joe's Odyssey

I've written about how I remember every performance of the Odyssey.

And that is as true as anything an Odyssean bard might say.

But while I remember bizarre and trivial details of each show and my corresponding travels, sometimes…

There's a joke that goes like this:

Q: How do you get a musician to complain?

A: Give him/her/them a gig.

And let me tell you, it is indeed funny because it's true. 

Readers of my writing here will undoubtedly…

This is my fifth academic year of performing for students at UIC and a virtual show on a beautiful fall Wednesday was my 8th total over those 5 years.

I thought it might be interesting to look back at this…

Now that my life around the Odyssey is virtual performances from home for the foreseeable future, I'm starting to find interesting aspects of in-person shows of which I was not aware while they were my only reality.

For instance, it's…

Until last spring, each of my 300 plus performances to sing about the Odyssey included an odyssey of my own. Some shows took me much farther than others but even local shows required me to leave my home, travel to…

My relationship with the National Junior Classical League began in 2012 when I performed at my first national convention at Wake Forest in North Carolina.

In 2013, the convention moved to UNLV in Las Vegas and I was there. In…

My first online Odyssey performance (in March, shortly after the nationwide coronavirus shutdown) was… 

Eventful. 

I wrote about it here for the wonderful Sententiae Antiquae website. 

So more than a month later as I embarked upon my second full online…

My Odyssey is an incredibly effective vehicle for an examination and appreciation of the most human of instruments, the voice. 

I previously wrote about the Glenn Hansard quote “The voice just shows up” and the sentiment I expressed in that…

After three days in Texas and four in Hawaii, I awoke as my plane landed in… Denver, Colorado. 

Talk about Odyssean travel routing. 

I checked my phone and noted that it read 80 degrees colder than the last time…

The influential philosopher Φέρις βυέλληρ once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” 

Doing my Odyssey performance as much as I do, traveling a much as I do…

My first Odyssey performance took place in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002. 

My 300th Odyssey performance took place in Arlington, Texas, in a lovely parlor-style room in the University of Texas-Arlington library, on February 14, 2020. 

In…

It's a brisk rainy fall Monday morning as I pull onto the campus of Pomfret School, a small (mostly) boarding high school in eastern Connecticut. 

I spent the previous night in Providence, Rhode Island, exploring a city I'd only briefly…