The Milestone Round Up

A look back at the last two months, and a preview of what’s ahead

Soon after our family moved to Northern Virginia, I joined a gender mixed church softball team called “The Seekers.” It was not an “everyone gets a trophy” venture, but a friend at work had to promise that my innate lack of athleticism would not be a hindrance to my participation.

Every spring and summer for almost a decade, I faithfully went to the games and gave it the primary school try. Occasionally I’d make a decent play, but the enjoyment came from chatting with my teammates, a number of whom worked in government positions they couldn’t discuss. Our conversations were often benign, once in a while double-spaced, and always interesting.

The games also provided a nice outlet during a hectic and busy time in my family’s life — the kids were 10, 5, 4, and 4 when I started playing and in college/high school when I finished. Jill traveled for a couple of weeks every summer for work, and her conference always collided with the dance recital for Kate, Emma, and Ben.

During those times, I enjoyed packing the kids into the car so they could watch dad have some “me time.” The lack of bathroom facilities where the Seekers played occasionally presented some parenting challenges, shall we say, but we overcame them for the most part. The trio seemed to enjoy the after-game pizzas as well as those occasions when the summer humidity produced storms that forced everyone into the dugout.

The Seekers came to mind when we started having those pop-up afternoon storms last week and again on Tuesday when Jill left for her conference. Because the dates have been moved from June to July, it doesn’t conflict with the dance recital, which was held this year over Father’s Day weekend during one of the busiest periods I’ve had in some time.

I sometimes miss The Seekers and the long-ago friends who I now see only via social media. But despite the whirlwind of the past six weeks, I’m truly enjoying the here and now.

The Six-Week Swirl

How busy has it been, you ask? Since the beginning of June, I:

• Photographed six three-hour shows over the four-day Father’s Day weekend for Metropolitan School of the Arts, plus the Academy’s graduation ceremony.

• Shot the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) conference in San Diego.

• Did a series of headshots for another client in Washington, D.C. as well as photos for a college sophomore in Alexandria.

• Finished three freelance stories for two clients. I’m wrapping up a fourth this week and working on two more due at the end of the month.

• Note: The above list does not include a 27th wedding anniversary, or dealing with the logistics of scheduling and/or taking jet lag/butt lag inducing trips to upstate New York, central Virginia, and Texas during this same period.

Here are two dance photos I liked from the shows. I’m still sorting through the (literal) thousands that were taken, but thought these would provide a sampler of what’s ahead:

This year’s show concluded my 10th season of photography for MSA, a fact that boggles my mind. It also was a wonderful surprise to receive MSA’s “Champion of Young Artists Award” — an unexpected honor that was made better when I discovered Jill had brought Marley to the presentation. (Marley, BTW, made it through the three-hour show and tap danced on Jill’s lap for much of it. Not bad for a 4-month-old, but I guess it’s in the genes.)

Marley with her grandfather at the MSA dance recital on Father’s Day weekend (left) and playing in our living room on the Fourth of July.

Here’s a 90-second video provided to the client from GMAC’s San Diego meeting:

While at the GMAC conference, I learned two of my feature stories won top honors in the Feature Writing category for Association Media and Publishing’s annual Excel Awards.

Vital Connections, a story about the challenges facing Native American students in rural Oklahoma, earned the Gold Award. Moving Forward, the feature story written about the recovery from a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, received the Silver Award. (The profiles I did separately for my Substack page were not eligible to be entered.) Click on the links to read the stories.

The three new articles — one for the American Physiological Society and two for American School Board Journal — that were posted this week are now up on my 2023 Magazine Writing page, where I’ve put short summaries and links to them. You can find links to all of my freelance work in the “Magazine Writing” section.

Oh, I also marked a Substack milestone.

The 150th Post

If you’ve made it this far, you are close to the end of my 150th post since “Our Reality Show” moved to Substack during the pandemic. The vast majority of the posts have been new, but occasionally I’ll publish a revised piece from my old website or an updated interview or story.

If you go to the “Our Reality Show” homepage — http://glenncook.substack.com — you’ll find posts are organized into different sections by topic. One section is a series of “Conversations” — updated Q&As with interesting people I’ve interviewed over the years in the worlds of music, writing and education.

On the homepage, I also have compiled easy-to-access deep dives into Brown v. Board of Education as well as the Santa Fe school shooting, two still timely topics that I’ve worked on extensively over the years.

What the new sections look like on the Our Reality Show homepage.

Soon you’ll see more of these Conversations — a couple from the archives that look more deeply into Brown as well as a fascinating new interview with B.J. Barham of the music group American Aquarium. Barham, who grew up in Reidsville, N.C., and was in school there while Jill and I lived in Rockingham County, is one of the best songwriters in the Americana genre.

I also have interviews coming soon with author Rachel Louise Martin, whose new book A Most Tolerant Little Town looks at the mid 1950s desegregation of a Tennessee high school, and South Carolina civil rights photographer Cecil Williams, who plans to petition the Supreme Court to rename Brown after Briggs v. Elliott, the first of the five cases to be filed and the basis for most of the legal argument to end “separate but equal” schools.

In the coming months, I’ll be working on more of these types of conversations, and I want to get back to telling visual stories here as well. As always, any thoughts and feedback are welcome for ways I can continue to improve the site.

Thank you for being part of this journey and for taking the time to read my work. It means more to me than you will ever know.

One last note: In the interest of accuracy, I have to point out that this is the 151st post on the site. Cecile Holmes, my dear friend who died last year, wrote one of the stories in my expanded — and still growing — section on Brown v. Board. (Cecile’s brother and executor, Jim, gave me permission to reprint a shorter version of her 2004 piece on civic virtue and its role in the desegregation fight.)