Ladies Rock Camp & Valuing Every Person

Our band logo.

On Valentine’s Day weekend, I had one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. I wrote all of those feelings down after I got home on Sunday night and I am so glad that I did. I spent a weekend with other women catching lightning in a bottle and I am more grateful than I could ever express that I was able to be there. And cumulatively grateful that I wrote down what I was feeling while it was still fresh.

Here’s what happened. From the very, very beginning.

Ladies Rock Camp is an idea grown out of the Girls Rock Camp model. There are Girls Rock Camps in many cities around the US, and while they are not governed as a large-scale organization (Orlando Girls Rock Camp is its own music education non-profit), they are united by the Girls Rock Alliance. You can read all about these wonderful organizations here. Their primary goal is to bolster the self-confidence, self-sufficiency, and creative musical capacity of young women & non-gender conforming folks.

I had heard of this organization in the past, but the closest city that had one to me for many years was Miami. They’re doing amazing GRC work down there, but a three hour daily round trip in order to volunteer (with my own small child at home) just was not in the cards for me.

Then I moved (back) to Orlando, and within a week I got to see the Girls Rock Camp showcase at the coolest venue in town. I spoke to the organizers as soon as I could and sought to volunteer.

Suffice to say, starting a new job and teaching almost entirely new content took a great deal of time, so I wasn’t able to get out into the community with Orlando GRC folks. It took a lot of planning and a lot of emails & arrangements in order to get me to Ladies Rock Camp in February, but I was determined. I missed the first night of the event, mostly because my own daughter would never forgive me for not spending Valentine’s Day with her, but the GRC folks completely understood. When I arrived the next morning, they told me that I had “the best reason ever” for missing a night of “camp”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I learned more than I could have ever imagined.

I am so used to playing music to attempt to please or impress people. I think that it’s become such a part of what I do, in my professional or even my personal life, that I don’t even consciously think about it anymore. But I do it constantly. I want to impress my students & their families. I want to impress my boss. I want to impress my co-workers. I want my students to impress other people — adjudicators, colleagues, their families, etc. I want to not look like a fool once I tell people that I have multiple degrees in music. I don’t worry about it as much directly anymore, partially because I have spent many hard fought years attaining skills that impress at least some of the people some of the time. But for a good 25 years, I’ve been working toward a point of “are my musical senses impressive enough to get me this degree & this lifelong dream of mine?”

In turn, I’ve reproduced those same systems of pleasing the musical elders to countless kids. Sometimes I feel a sense of guilt that I’ve continued a legacy of this model & the associated anxiety, although I do know that along the way, I’ve tried to pass on as many wholly good things as I could.

Along the path of learning academic/classical music in the American/European music ed tradition, lots of kids, my past self included, develop a huge appreciation for the music that we’re reproducing. You develop a love for it. You develop a longing for it. Critic & writer Kate Wagner talks about this extensively in a recent piece about the failures of classical music, and moreso, about how easy it can be to fall in love with & want to devote one’s life to performing classical music. Whether it’s a love for the art itself (which can be hard to genuinely attain when you’re playing lots of middle school band music, let’s be honest here) or for the feeling of accomplishment & pride you have once you’ve put on a very satisfactory performance, you want to chase that feeling. Even when it comes with frustration, exhaustion, or lots of other less desirable emotions. There is an associated high, there is a feeling of yes! I’ve done something good, I’ve made a difference to people, I feel good about what I just did and even about what it took to get me there. That’s why so many of us stick around in the arts and in academic music.

But despite the enormous plethora of musical experiences I’ve had, no other musical experience I’ve ever had really compares to playing with my gals at Ladies Rock Camp. Maybe it was because we weren’t reproducing something. We made something entirely new. (Albeit influenced by other music — that’s how it works.) And everyone contributed to it. Each member of our band gave something very specific to what we produced. It coalesced in a way that I could not have imagined and that I never could have ever expected.

I played bass for the weekend. I wanted to. I’d always wanted to play bass, but never chased many musical goals for my own satisfaction at all. I’d often learned music in service to others, whether they were my school’s woodwind faculty or my unborn daughter. (This included lots of ukulele playing over a pregnant belly, and lots of cursing as I made mistakes while I was learning.) That’s not to say that playing music for these specified purposes has not created satisfying musical experiences. I have had enough satisfying musical experiences to sustain my interest & a career in such. But at Ladies Rock Camp, I got to fulfill my lifelong goal to be D’arcy Wretsky. Her role as a musician and as a person was something I’d always sought to reproduce; being maybe not the band member who shreds the most, but the one who genuinely keeps things together.

It turned out, I sound pretty okay on bass. I have enough rudimentary knowledge about the instrument itself along with enough theory knowledge that I can make it sound like I know what I’m doing (even though I do not). But that’s not what mattered. It wasn’t about my individual accomplishment — it was entirely about what the collective group could achieve. When we locked in and were jamming together, and creating new & unique moments within the structure as we were building it…I don’t know. It really was magic.

Oh also one of our guitarists was a yoga instructor so LOTS of stretching breaks & no aches & pains all weekend long!

Some of the organizers of the event said, “It’s this Ladies Rock Camp formula, and if we could put it in a bottle, we would.” The way in which everything coalesced was just amazing. And on my way home, I listened to our song through my car speakers, and it sounded even better than I’d realized.

Possibly the reason we had such magic and we had such success is that no one really had anything out there to prove. And given the framework that we had, and the community agreements we’d come up with, and the incredible, patient guidance, and considerate question asking of our coaches, we were all able to put aside our egos. We really listened.

Maybe that was the part that was so impressive. I’ve been a musical director for a good third of my life. The absolutely amazing part was to just listen, and genuinely let my guard down. The most important thing to know, that was communicated pretty quickly, even upon my late arrival, was that we all had each others’ backs.

We were all treated as though we had innate worth, too. We were not judged on our abilities, on our capacity, on anything. We were accepted at face value, brought together under common goals, and valued for simply being present. Sure, we did a lot of work, but it was very clearly communicated that we were valued simply because we were.

To me, it seems this is the magical, unbottlable formula that’s missing in so much of my outside musical life. Sure, it happens in choir — you’ve got someone else’s back when you’re singing. But truth be told, so much of playing musical in a classical sense, and very likely also in the commercial world, is about sizing up your peers and sizing yourself up as well. How do you compare? Can you do what they can do? Sometimes people will ask you that straight up, if you can play something they recently heard, or directly compare you to the person you’re playing next to.

While supervising standardized tests at a previous school years ago, I doodled out a sign for myself, which stated “Comparison is the thief of joy.” It’s an ideal that I’ve been trying to live by for years. In grad school (which getting to go to grad school was sort of a reward for meeting a set of standards put together on a competitive basis anyway?! ugh), we would have full classes where we’d discuss Ben & Roz Zander, and the difference between living in the comparative world and the world of possibility.

My experience at Ladies Rock Camp was the first and most genuine experience of playing music outside of the comparative world and entirely in the realm of possibility. For just under two days, we could make anything possible that we tried. We were guided with gentleness & grace rather than with expletives & frustration. It was an operation that encouraged us to live our best lives, be creative, take breaks & make zine page collages, and not work guided by militaristic discipline.

And yet, despite the maxims you may have heard from hard-working musicians about “no days off”, etc., we got so much accomplished. It was incredible and five women (plus our coaches) in a room together really did catch lightning in a bottle. Having taught absolute beginners to play Modern Band instruments and having poorly attempted to learn these instruments myself, I can fully appreciate how much we got accomplished.

This wouldn’t have been possible without feminism. How, you might ask?

Don’t get me wrong. There were men involved in the process. A man runs the facility we used, the amazing El Camino School in Orlando, and he was unbelievably gracious & inspiring in his own right when he discussed a vision for the place. Many men were helping out with photography, with food prep, ticket sales, loading gear when Gear Goddess Grace was otherwise busy, and much more. There were men that we left at home for the weekend (including my own husband) to care for the domestic duties. It wasn’t the men who were in our way, and to tell you the truth, it really is never the men who are in our way. It is the patriarchal ideas of competition, of triumph, of ordering, and of comparison that are in our way. The patriarchal ideas of sizing each other up. Those ideas that are inherently anti-feminist and women internalize them constantly.

Cooperation, gentleness, guidance, and listening, in my worldview, are feminist attributes. In so many aspects of feminist movements, these attributes are overlooked & underrated. The fact that someone can cook for themselves & others is also overlooked as a feminist attribute, but almost every volunteer & organizer who was at this event could flipping cook. We ate tacos & French toast casserole & the most unbelievable vegan chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever tried.

Furthermore, the mission of the organization was not to further anyone’s career. It was not to put a line on a resume and not to maximize advantage over another person. We were there to cooperate and there to live out long-sidelined dreams of ours. The biggest advantage of being a part of this event was being gathered into a community. Much more so that a line on a presentation at a conference, I now feel so much more welcomed into my community. I have hugged & thanked other women who, had I simply seen them at a show, would have seemed intimidatingly cool & beyond my own scope. But now we’re all one big happy family, and one that seeks to become more inclusive, more intersectional, more open, and more encompassing of the things that young women need.

Needless to say, it was an incredible couple of days. Another often tired platitude is, “Don’t be sad that it’s over, be happy that it happened.” I’ve experienced a lot of change over the past year and throughout all of it, I’ve been able to hold onto that ideal. On Sunday night, after my band was done playing together at our showcase, I moved to the back of the room with my bandmates and I started to tear up. We would never have that moment again, a moment that had been so special & so singular in my life. I can only hope to try to reproduce that in my classrooms in the future, much more so than I have been doing.

Suffice to say, if you’re on the fence about a Ladies Rock Camp near you, I’ll quote my own band and say “Get Outta My Town.” Go out find these people where you are and get involved with them. You will not regret it for an instant.

Also, we did this song in two-party harmony, “doo-be-dups” & all, in our vocal workshop, led by the incomparable Kim Acoustic. She told us that she learned to play guitar by taping the video for “Zombie” off of MTV and watching where Dolores put her fingers on her guitar to learn to play. Amazing. And we are so grateful for Dolores and the many pioneers who came before.