In all my travels and moves around the country, I have discovered that I am firmly a Rapid City girl. I grew up climbing the Black Hills, and my dad often took me on assignment with him for the Rapid City Journal. My mom turned over rocks, helped me press flowers, and always took us to the Hills to search for a Christmas tree we could cut ourselves.
I graduated from Augustana College, in Sioux Falls, SD, with a degree in international politics and Soviet and Russian area studies. I have lived in Colorado Springs, San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas, Fort Worth, Mississippi and Alabama. I view life not just as a South Dakotan, but specifically as a girl whose heart will always be in Rapid City.
I’m more pine trees than sand.
More jazz than pop.
More Friedman than Keynes.
Definitely more Hobbes and Locke than Rousseau.
Classic rock and classical with a bit of everything else thrown in.
The Wall Street Journal over The New York Times, but each has its place.
More honesty than propriety.
More noise than quiet.
More mountains than plains.
Definitely more laughter than tears, but I have introspection licked.
Focused conversations with friends over large parties, but there is a time for both.
Ridiculous amounts of research combined with fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants improvisation.
I started making songs on an old upright piano that was purchased from a bar in Piedmont, SD, and I continued to sing and play even after the half-ton upright was replaced with a Baldwin and then a Yamaha grand. My childhood home was filled with the sounds of Strauss, Copland, and Tchaikovsky as well as the percussion of pressure cookers canning produce from the family garden.
Steinbeck, Carl Bernstein and Laura Ingalls Wilder kept me company in my youth, and weekend excursions as a family are a treasured childhood memory. I came up in the Rapid City School district, and I enjoyed choir, orchestra and band with the inimitable Anella Southwick, Bill Evans and Milo Winter.
I write. I read. I make music. People and their stories interest me, and I am especially intrigued by the cultures, personalities, circumstances and hardships that make people who they are.
I like Rapid City Girls. We should meet…