Category: Tampa Bay

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Music Tampa Bay

I’m playing this Sunday at Tampa Bay Ukulele Day in Dunedin!

Tampa Bay Ukulele Day takes place this Sunday in downtown Dunedin! It’s a day of workshops where you can hone your uke skills, a “strum and stroll” event where you can see scenic Dunedin while playing, and see local talent, including Tom Hood and the Tropical Suns, which includes Yours Truly on accordion!

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The schedule

There’s a lot going on, and it’s happening all day. I’ll be with Tom Hood and the Tropical Sons at Dunedin Brewery at the start, then moving to Pioneer Park later on in the day.

WhenWhatWhere
10:00 a.m.“Plays Well With Others” workshopScottish Cultural Center
11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.Ladies of UkeNature’s Food Patch
11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.Anne Milanese, SpermWhale and D’Uke’LelesDunedin History Museum
11:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.Tom Hood and the Tropical Sons
(and me on accordion!)
play 3 sets:
11:30, 12:30, and 1:30		Dunedin Brewery
11:30 a.m.“Finding Your Inner Chord” workshopScottish Cultural Center
12:00 noonFree beginner ukulele lesson with Norine and friendsPioneer Park
1:00 p.m.Family concert with Julie Austin and Connie MasonPioneer Park
1:00 p.m.Percussion workshopScottish Cultural Center
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.Big Tiki and The Mai TaisHonu Restuarant and Tiki Bar
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.Jct 27Fenway Hotel
2:00 p.m.Dunedin Ukes lead a strum and stroll through DunedinStarts at Pioneer Park
2:00 p.m.Children’s Art Music ShakerPioneer Park
2:00 p.m.Emmitt Carlisle Uke the PlanetPioneer Park
2:30 p.m.Chris Tracy — funk to punkPioneer Park
3:00 p.m.Dunedin Ukes playalong jamPioneer Park
4:00 p.m.Renee and the RollersPioneer Park
4:30 p.m.Tom Hood and the Tropical Sons
(and me on accordion!)		Pioneer Park
5:00 p.m.Jay Nunes Jam BandPioneer Park
6:00 p.m.The Flea Bitten DawgsPioneer Park
7:00 p.m.Super Uke Dance BandPioneer Park

Workshops with The Flea Bitten Dawgs!

Improve your skills with these workshops hosted by The Flea Bitten Dawgs, a band who describe themselves as “ukulele jazz Americana!” The fee is $30 per workshop, or you can attend all three for $60:

  1. Plays Well with Others (10:00 a.m.): This workshop is created to help a group of players playing the same instruments to sound exciting to an audience. The challenge is to become a group with individuals playing separate parts of a song. We’ll break into different groups, with each group learning their section of the arrangement, and we’ll then put it all together to create the song.
  2. Finding Your Inner Chord (11:30 a.m.): This workshop is about think of chords as sounds instead of a form on the neck. You’ll learn how to make your songs interesting and how to get away from the habit of just strumming through a song. If you write songs, you’ll find a better voice for your chord progressions. While this is not a class about theory, we will touch on the basics of chord construction.
  3. Percussion Workshop (1:00 p.m.): Explore how different beats give a song its character. Learn how beats move the music and engage better with the audience. We’ll start with basic rhythms and work into more complex ones. Our goal is to move away from strumming four beats to a measure and dig into the structure of the song. While this is a percussion workshop, you can use this knowledge with any instrument you play. We recommend you bring a shaker, or small hand drum, but tapping on your ukulele will work. This workshop comes with take-home lesson sheets.

Register for any or all of the workshops here.

The Flea Bitten Dawgs are:

  • David Henry Spangler on ukulele and lead vocal,
  • Thom Pallozola on lead ukulele and vocals, and
  • Lee Kram on percussion and vocals.

Their song list crosses ten decades of music. They mix originals in with the covers they love. One of Thom’s songs was recorded by Supe Granda of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and two of David’s songs were recorded by the group for the Narrow Boat Sessions, Great Britain’s premier folk music organization. PBS produced a segment of Thom’s involvement with the ukulele which featured The Flea Bitten Dawgs.

Raffles!

You can buy raffle tickets — $5 each or 5 for $20 — to win one of the following:

Accordions and beer!

And of course, I’ll be there, with a couple of accordions, playing first at Dunedin Brewery from 11:30 until about 2 or 2:30, then at Pioneer Park around 4:30. Join me!

Categories
It Happened to Me Tampa Bay

My new headshot (or: Vadim Davydov takes excellent headshots)

Joey deVilla’s new headshot, showing him in a blue suit jacket and blue shirt holding his blue accordion, as seen from a MacBook.

I volunteered to help out at Masterminds Tampa Bay’s booth at the Synapse Summit 2023 conference yesterday, where Masterminds team moderator Vadim Davydov worked his photographic magic creating professional headshots for a long line of VIPs. It was my job to help get them registered and lined up for their sessions.

The Tampa Bay Masterminds booth at Synapse Summit 2023.

Masterminds Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” Mastermind group, a peer mentoring group aimed at entrepreneurs and techies looking for connections, support, advice, assistance, resources, and so on. Many metro areas have Mastermind groups, whose name comes from The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill, a book that’s nearly 100 years old, where he defined the Mastermind Principle as:

“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…

No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”

If you’re interested in the rest of Napoleon Hill’s definition of the Mastermind Principle, it’s summarized pretty well in this article. If you want to hear it in Hill’s own voice, watch this video:

Vadim’s lighting setup is a key part of why his headshots look so good…

A Synapse Summit VIP attendee getting posed for their headshot by Vadim Davydov.

…but more important are the instructions he gives you as you pose:

  • “Follow my finger!”
  • “Close your mouth!”
  • “More sexy! Okay, too much sexy! Less sexy!”
  • “Stretch your neck! Think turtle! Turtle, turtle, turtle, turtle!”
  • “Squeeze your butt cheeks! Shake your booty!”
A Synapse Summit VIP attendee getting posed for their headshot by Vadim Davydov.

The instructions may sound nonsensical and hilarious, and he gets you into poses that you’d never do naturally, but they work. I kept telling people to just do what he says and to trust the process. And he kept cranking out gorgeous result after gorgeous result.

At 4:27 p.m. after nearly 8 hours of shooting, the last person in line had come and gone. That’s when I asked Vadim “Can you do one more — namely, me?”

He smiled and obliged. The official photo isn’t done yet, but every photo he took was displayed on a couple of screens in the booth. I took a couple of shots of these screens, and even these previews are great:

Joey deVilla’s new headshot, showing him in a blue suit jacket and blue shirt holding his blue accordion, as seen from a MacBook.
Joey deVilla’s new headshot, showing him in a blue suit jacket and blue shirt holding his blue accordion, as seen from a large display.
Joey deVilla’s new headshot, showing him in a blue suit jacket and blue shirt holding his blue accordion, as seen from a large display.

I can’t wait for the official shot! In the meantime, these are my new profile pics.

Thanks, Vadim, and thanks, Tampa Bay Masterminds for taking me on as a booth volunteer!

And once again: if you need to look great in a headshot, you want Vadim Davydov!

Categories
Florida Tampa Bay The Current Situation

An idea that we should try in Florida

Banner: “Let's turn an old school bus into a mobile library, fill it with banned books, drive to conservative areas and give them to the kids. We could call it "Banned on the Run" (their parents might get it).”

…and hey, it’s easy to buy buses here in Tampa!

Need some context? See this New Yorker article, Why Some Florida Schools are Removing Books from Their Libraries.

Categories
It Happened to Me Tampa Bay

Earlier today…

Joey deVilla and Anitra Pavka in summery dress clothes at Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa.
Tap to view at full size.

Categories
It Happened to Me Tampa Bay

Dressing up as (and meeting) a triceratops

Anitra’s on the board of the Glazer Children’s Museum, and their big upcoming attraction is Big John, the world’s largest triceratops, who’s moving into his own exhibit in the museum at end of May.

Banner: “Big John the Triceratops - Glazer Children’s Museum”

Last night was the museum’s annual fundraising gala, and as people involved with the museum, we got a sneak peek at the 65 million year-old, RV-sized fella, and he was impressive.

More photos (including one with my ridiculous triceratops mask) later.

Categories
It Happened to Me Tampa Bay

There’s nothing like a hot glory hole on a Saturday afternoon date

Joey deVilla spins some glass inside a glory hole at Gott Glass glassblowing studio.
Seminole Heights’ seal, which depicts a two-headed alligator

We’ve just come from a “hot glass date” at Susan Gott’s glass workshop, which is conveniently located in our neighborhood, Seminole Heights. We opted to make a fluted bowl together, and I’ll post pictures of the finished work once it’s cooled off in the annealer.

As for “glory hole,” I’m using it in the glassblowing sense — it’s the opening for the furnace for reheating glass to shape it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably more familiar with the other usage of the term. Slate has an interesting article on the use of the term by glassblowing and other-kind-of-blowing cultures.

More photos (and video too!) later.

Categories
Tampa Bay

The world’s largest triceratops is moving to Tampa Bay!

Profile view of Big John, a triceratops skeleton.
Photo courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
Tap to view at fill size.

Big John, the largest triceratops skeleton ever found (he’s in the Guinness Book of Records) is making his North American debut by moving to his new home: Tampa Bay, but more specifically, the Glazer Children’s Museum!

Banner: “Big John the Triceratops — Glazer Children’s Museum”

Named after the South Dakota rancher on whose land he was found, Big John is 8 meters (26 feet) long, 3 meters (10 feet) tall, and about the size of an RV. He’s also surprisingly intact, with 60% of his body bones and 75% of skull present.

Walter Stein poses beside one of Big John’s bones in the area where the skeleton was found.
Walter Stein poses beside one of Big John’s bones.
Photo courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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Big John is a recent find — 2014! He was found by Walter Stein, founder of PaleoAdventures, who are in the business of digging up fossils for commercial sale.

A lab worker works on one of Big John’s horns.
One of Big John’s horns.
Photo courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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The Italian firm Zoic srl purchased Big John, after which they removed the rocks from his skeleton and replicated the missing bones using a combination of sculpting, casting and 3-D printing.

Head-on view of Big John, a triceratops skeleton.
Photo courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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Big John then went on display in Europe and was put up for auction in 2021. He was purchased by the Pagidipati family of Tampa for almost $8 million. Rather than have it sit in a private collection which almost nobody would see, the Pagidipatis chose to find a place where everyone could see it, and that place is the Glazer Children’s Museum, located right on Tampa’s Riverwalk.

Detail view of the skull and horns of Big John, a triceratops skeleton.
Photo courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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“Our interest in purchasing Big John and other specimens is first and foremost to make them available to
the public and for research,” said Siddhartha Pagidipati. We want to do our part to help the Tampa Bay area become the best place in our country for families to live and raise their children.”

Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: “Big John Reveal”.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: “Big John Side View”.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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You’d better believe there are big plans to show off Big John properly. He’s going to be the centerpiece of a brand new exhibit at the Glazer Children’s Museum, and I’ve included the exhibit designs in this article.

Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: A long hallway with displays about Big John.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
Tap to view at fill size.
Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: A long hallway with displays about Big John.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
Tap to view at fill size.
Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: A tunnel where visitors can see and touch dinosaur bones embedded in rock.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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Artist’s concept illustration of the Big John exhibit for the Glazer Children’s Museum: “Who Weighs More?” - a scale where people can compare their weight to the weight of Big John’s skull.
Illustration courtesy of Glazer Children’s Museum.
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You won’t have to wait long to see Big John — his exhibit at the Glazer Children’s Museum will open on Memorial Day Weekend (Saturday, May 27th)!

Want to know more? The Tampa Bay Times has an article: Tampa’s Glazer Children’s Museum to receive record-setting dinosaur skeleton for new display.

What’s the Glazer Children’s Museum?

The front of the Glazer Children’s Museum.
The front of the Glazer Children’s Museum.
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The Glazer Children’s Museum is Tampa’s children’s museum, located in downtown Tampa. It’s the home of a lot of interactive exhibits, hands-on activities, and space to run around, climb, read, and make friends.

Need a kid-friendly summary of the triceratops? Click here, or click the pic!

Children’s museums are important. They provide a place to learn and explore interests through hands-on experiences and activities. When you’re young, nothing expands your mind like interactivity that engages all the senses, and that’s something that children’s museums do very, very well.

The Glazer Children’s Museum’s mission is to serve the children of Tampa Bay by providing a clean, safe, and fun outlet for imagination and discovery.