Cousin Nancy’s Bucket List

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - 11/17/10


PHOTO: Cousin Nancy uses Club Ed to whittle down her personal “bucket list.”

What’s on your bucket list?

You know about the bucket list - that term made popular by the movie of the same name. It’s a list of things you want to do in life before you “kick the bucket.”

Cousin Nancy has one. And Club Ed is helping her cross off many items. At the top of her list? Playing drums.

“I was always fascinated by drumming,” she admitted. “It was on my bucket list. I just turned 59, so I said, ‘I’m going to do it!’”

Not that she didn’t have second thoughts.

“When I got ready to take the class, I thought if it’s all 15-year-old boys I’m walking out,” she said. “Fortunately, there were folks my age and the class was a blast.”

Of course she did drumming - like she does everything in life - in her own style. She brought her own drum pad, which she had painted lavender with pink bows, and her own drumsticks, which she had “Nancy-ized” by painting bright pink and adding glitter and feathers. (Visit her blog to see a photo: cousinnancy.blogspot.com/2010/02/donna-drummer-schloss.html)

“I looked like an absolute idiot when I walked into class with my little outfit,” she said. “It was great. I told everybody, look, it’s a bucket list deal.” She laughed.

Cousin Nancy laughs a lot.

Cousin Nancy’s real name and role is Nancy Parker-Simons, Executive Director of Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch. She, husband Tony Simons, and the uncategorizable Kinky Friedman started the organization to “rescue every animal we can.”

They primarily save dogs on death row. They spay, neuter and give them shots, then keep them at the Rescue Ranch until they find a home. The facility averages 50 dogs in residence. (“Ask everyone to come to the Rescue Ranch and adopt a dog... we have fabulous dogs.”)

Back to that bucket list. It doesn’t take long being around Cousin Nancy to figure out she has a heck of a huge bucket. In addition to working as a business owner and executive director, the Texas native plays spoons, sandblocks, and guitar, was in drumming circle, and played in a jug band. She has rubbed ribs with celebrities from Dwight Yoakum to Willie Nelson to Martha Stewart. She blogs and has written two books - The Road to Utopia: How Kinky, Tony & I Saved More Animals Than Noah, and Meanwhile, Back At The Rescue Ranch: The Dog Days of Cousin Nancy. Yet she is that elusive combination of down to earth and upbeat.

Her affinity for Club Ed goes back a few years. The first course she ever took was our popular Instant Piano for Hopelessly Busy People.

“I really enjoyed that class. I always liked learning how to do stuff. I think I am a jack-of-all-trades but not that ‘skilled.’”

Not that that holds her back. Recently someone gave her a book that featured watercolor. Cousin Nancy couldn’t stop staring at it, so she decided to go to the craft store, buy painting supplies, and create her own art.

“My first painting sold for $57.77 on eBay,” she said. “So I decided I’ve got to go see how they do portraits.” So she signed up for the class. “It said ‘no skills required,’ so that was a selling point.” She laughed again.

“I wish I could come to a bunch of your classes,” she said. “I’d like to learn how to weld, and would take any of your art courses. I am a major fan. I love Club Ed.”

And Club Ed loves Cousin Nancy.

xxx

Visit Cousin Nancy’s blog at cousinnancy.blogspot.com. For information on Club Ed, click www.clubed.net, or call 830-895-4386.

Paint dreams

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - Nov 10, 2010


I remember the year my dad took a painting class.

It changed the way I looked at grownups.

This happened around my sixth grade year. My dad would have been in his early 40s then... a very old person in my worldview. At dinner one evening, he mentioned that he had signed up for a painting class at the nearby university’s community education program.

Up to that point, I couldn’t envision my parents doing anything outside their roles of breadwinners and caregivers. We had grown up in a large family on a farm. As one of nine kids, my main interaction with my parents was when I needed discipline or a haircut.

For kids, parents were nebulous bodies that orbited around our fantasy universe, like Neptune or the Orion constellation. We knew they were there, and were comforted by their presence, but we never really looked at them as individuals distinct from other celestial mysteries.

So when my dad told us he was taking an art class, it made me see him as something else... a person.

School and learning was for kids. I knew that as a fact based on all my worldly experience. Getting out of high school - which to a 6th grader seemed an impossibly long way in the future - was emancipation.  I was not really sure what lay on the other side of graduation, but I knew it did not involve going back into a classroom. Especially for 40-something fathers.

For the next several weeks we watched as this new person in our family dutifully went to art class every Thursday evening. That in itself was unsettling, as dad was always, always home in the evening. For him to be out on a weeknight left us all a bit off balance. We looked on with interest as he brought home sketchbooks filled with his exercises. He really was quite good at drawing, a fact that made me proud for some reason.

The culmination of the class was to complete a landscape in oil. He chose to paint our family farm, a fitting subject that perhaps made his foray into the art world less avant garde.

When he brought home the finished piece, we were duly impressed. It was a painting that looked like our farm. And it was painted by our dad. The old dog had learned a new trick. At some childish level, that gave me hope that we could learn new things forever, even in our dotage.

The painting was hung with pride above the Lowry organ, which represented another new skill our dad picked up in middle age. Some 50 years later, the painting still hangs on the wall of the family farmhouse.

For me, now past the age my father was when he painted that picture, I try to master the violin, along with tap dancing, and twittering. It is interesting that the young boy who couldn’t envision school past the 12th grade now works with lifelong learning programs that accommodate 3000 local adult students and touch half a million Texans throughout the state.

So if you have always wanted to learn to dance, or paint, or weld, but just haven’t got around to it, please reconsider. Do it for yourself, of course. But do it for someone else, too.

You never know who might be paying attention.

XXX