Thanksgiving for the homeless

My article on the El Camino College Circle K club's Thanksgiving service project had me scrambling to get any quotes I could get.

I was pretty nervous, because the club president didn't respond to the e-mails I sent to her. Thankfully, they read the e-mail before I arrived at the club meeting in the music building.

I had to make sure that I interviewed some of the members before they left the club meeting. Somehow, I just knew that many of them would leave as soon as the meeting was over.

The vice president, Daniel Valdivia, said that I should hold off my interviews until after the meeting. I really didn't know whether I'd get in all the quotes I needed for the story. Fortunately, I interviewed him and two other members before they left the room.

Valdivia had quite a lot to say about the upcoming event. He also told me about the weekend service project, where they would be helping at the Hermosa Beach Kiwanis Charity Tree Lot.

According to Valdivia, the members would mostly help move the trees around to sell them to people. Although the club members didn't have as much to say about the tree lot, I thought it was interesting enough to mention in a brief link.

The main conversation, however, was about their service project at the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. The club members were going to organize canned holiday food into bags. The food bank workers would then distribute the bags to the homeless people.

It's a worthy cause. The only problem is that the food bank ended the registration period early, so not as many Circle K members were able to sign up. I would have liked to find out how many El Camino members were actually going to the food bank.

Anyhow, I pretty much worked with everything that I had.

Click here to see my full article on the Circle K club.

Boring leads, not-so-boring concert music

I've struggled to write good leads for my articles all throughout the semester. I had the toughest time writing the lead for one of my preview articles on a concert band performance.

I didn't have a problem writing the entire article. However, the lead was boring for a web article. It read: 

"The El Camino College Concert Band plans to offer a variety of music for everyone at their Nov. 21 concert, according to its director."

Since this was a preview article, I figured this would pass as a lead. However, my professor rightfully has issues with dull leads. She suggested that I could make the lead more interesting with an anecdote from an actual student.

To tell the truth, I wasn't in a very good mood at the time I wrote this article. I had to interview many of the students before they started their practice session. I had to try and listen to their responses over an incredibly noisy warm-up session with all the musicians trying out their instruments.

Looking back on it all, this assignment was a good experience to prepare me for the worst possible scenarios, where I'd have to interview people in awful situations. However, I have to remember those anecdotes when I write a lead.

I also probably should have started with the perfect anecdote from one of the students. My favorite quote comes from Lillian Hernandez, a 19-year-old trumpet player. She had a lot of good things to say about the upcoming performance.

"I think it’s going to be really fun and the crowd’s going to really enjoy it," Hernandez said. "There’s a lot of pieces that are very musical. It’s not easy music, so they’ll be able to appreciate it. And a lot of it is loud. Kind of in-your-face. And some of it is softer. It varies a lot."

That quote says it all about concert band. No matter who you are, all incoming freshmen students will always be surprised by the high quality of the instrumental music in college.

I also heard some interesting quotes came from the musicians. One of the percussion players, 20-year-old undeclared student Steven Davis, had some interesting things to say about his part in the performance.

"In 'Xerxes,' I have to play a part really quietly," Davis said. "It’s a percussion solo. It’s really, really gentle sounding and there’s an ambience, so it’s tough to keep the dynamics at a lower level, you know. It’s pretty hard strokes, but it makes it pretty interesting."

I always had a tough time handling all the dynamics, back when I played piano in college. My instructors had to lecture me over every single nuance of my performance. I can only imagine how tough it is to play a soft percussion solo.

Next time I write one of these concert articles, I'll get everything right. From now on, I have to remember to use anecdotes. Someone should slap a Post-it on my head which says "Anecdote!" Then maybe I'll remember.