Conquering Stage Fright

Getting married to someone in the Midwest? Know someone who is? Well, I can sing at their's or your wedding.



Which leads me to my next topic.

Singing in public.

People tend to get scared when it comes to performing in front of a live audience, and understandably so. You're basically in front of a bunch of people listening and watching you, judging and crtiquing your every note and move.

That's Intense.

There are tricks of course.

Be prepared.

Close your eyes (but not too much)

Take a public speaking class.

Pretend everyone is naked (not usually the appropriate route and probably very distracting).

Pretend everyone is your parents (yikes! Great, now I have a ton of mothers telling me I'm doing something wrong).

The above options are great (for the most part), but what helped me was camp. Yes, I said it. Camp. As in day camp during the summer months. You see, we had something in camp called S&S (Skits & Songs), where we were forced to be actors in skits and dancers in choreographed songs.

The first song I ever danced on stage to was Hearts of Gold from the Solid Gold 3 album (linky for album). You can actually see me in this video (linky). At 2:50 into the video was my bunk's performance.

We've gotten better over the years at S&S and I went from camper and dancer to counselor and choreographer. Here, I continued to grow and helped campers overcome their fears of stage fright and learn teamwork. You can see the bunk I choreographed in this video at approx 13:30 minutes in (linky).

Now I no longer do either, for I had accomplished my fear of the spotlight and I act as the videographer and head counselor, helping other counselors assist their campers in overcoming their fears. This video was actually done by me (linky).

The name of the camp in the videos is Camp Achdus of Philadelphia (linky).

I'm actually in the process of redesigning the Camp's website, I just need to find someone affordable to develop and code it to make it work! Below you can see a preview of the new site.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment! Until next time.

Joke of the day: So I kept wondering why the object in the air was getting bigger and bigger... then it hit me.

Designing for Jews Worldwide

And now for my first non-music related post. I'm so excited! Can't you tell?

Okay, so a duck walks into a drug store and says "Gimme some ChapStick! And put in on my bill!"

Sorry about that.

Right, designing for Jews worldwide... I am one of the lucky few who has the opportunity to create designs on my computer at work for chinuch purposes. There's a lot more to it then you think. You might think that I can just create a cartoon of a boy and slap a kippah on him and BAM! He's Kosher. Not so fast my friend, we are dealing with some serious issues here. Your design is completely dependent on what sect of Judaism it's for.

Here's the list:

(C)Hassidim - Long Peyos for kids. Long Coats and Fur Hats for men. Also, you need to have Yiddish.

Sefardi (Israeli's) - Sefard verses for any "Brachot". That's right you need to use the tuf instead of the suf as well.

Ashkenaz - Ashkenaz verses for any "Brachos".

Modern Orthodox - Standard designs with colors

Charedi - Black and white, no mixing boys and girls

The list actually goes on further, but I don't want to bore you with the details. Designing for Jews of all affiliations requires patience and most importantly, it requires many many versions.

For those of you think that there should be no change in details, no matter who you give the design to, your insane!

Welcome to the world.

I'm not just talking about the Jewish world.

I'm talking about this crazy political society we live in.

Mainstream designers will design specifically for ethnicities or religions all the time. You will find in posters with Spanish text, that the majority of the people in it are, can you guess? Hispanic. Everyone has to gear to their target audience, I'm just lucky enough to do it for my own people :).

Believe it or not, I'm not complaining, I actually do enjoy what I do a lot. Here's a sample of my work. And no, I did not create many versions of this. (Click to Enlarge).