This is not the card. Click "See The Card" to see the card. Welcome to my 2023 Holiday Greeting.

Daffy's stamp from last year, a tribute to her wonderfulness.An Attempt to Explain this Year's Card - "Zoom Brain"

I recently attended a "play-along" Zoom session to celebrate the third year of the Klezmer Institute's Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP). You can read more about this fascinating project in my letter, and still more on their website.

It featured two wonderful musicians, Susi Evans and Szilvia Csaranko, playing some of the tunes from the collection that they studied, arranged and published. You can learn more about Susi and Szilvia and the wonderful book and CD on their website, Shades of Folk. The scores for the tunes they played were available for playing along. Of course, I purchased the pdf of the entire book.

It was excellent! But it left me with "zoom brain": fried circuits. I can tolerate a certain amount of Zoom, for example for my yoga class, but it usually makes me want to stick pins in my eyes. There was a recent article in the Washington Post — sorry , there's a paywall — reporting on the negative effects of Zoom on the brain and body. Yup.

I started thinking about how I wish Zoom would look. This year's card is the result, random and silly as ever. The key will explain what's what and who's who, but won't give you much of a clue about why. I just mashed together a bunch of my favorite images over some of my favorite photos. Daffy shows up twice, as does Godzilla.

Don't expect this to make any sense. I had fun with it.

Happy Holidays!