2 WOMEN WHO CHANGED MY LIFE
There are two women I want to honor for International Women’s Day who shaped me in ways I'm still discovering.
Jean Kacanek was my piano teacher starting in elementary school, and a dear friend of my mom’s for decades.
One afternoon I walked to her house from school… through the tunnel under the busy road separating the school grounds from her neighborhood, the tunnel the older kids liked to prowl in… and I arrived at her door covered in orange juice, peels and seeds, and bruises. Some of my favorite bullies had been waiting on the other side.
Jean cleaned me up. She sat with me. She held me. I don't even remember if we played a single note that day. I just remember being seen and comforted by her.
I got to thank her for that kindness a couple of years ago, in person, on camera, during a visit back to Wisconsin. And that's when she told me something I'd never known: she and my mom hadn't been friends before I was Jean’s student. My mom, also a piano teacher, simply needed to find someone else to teach her son, because the two of us were too much alike to survive any more lessons together. Jean was that someone. And from that one practical decision, a friendship between them grew that lasted the rest of my mother's life (my mom passed in 2017). The friendship Jean and my mom built, all because of a simple search for a local piano teacher, is one of the most quietly moving things I've ever learned about either of them.
Stephanie Edwards ran the Discovery program at my high school in Waukesha, Wisconsin—a “gifted and talented” program for kids who were falling through the cracks of traditional education. And I was absolutely falling through the cracks. Diagnosed with ADHD but unmedicated, failing at nearly every subject, with no direction, no interest in anything happening in that building. I was nominated anyway, and Ms. Edwards quietly and gently saved my life.
She suggested I try being a camera operator at Waukesha School Board meetings. Your suspicions are correct… it was the most boring assignment imaginable, at least in content. But technically? The workflow after each meeting put me in a dark room with two video decks, a swipe controller, and a rack of blinking lights… and something lit up in me that has never gone out. Two or three years later I walked into my very first recording studio (at The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, OH) and everything snapped into focus. I've now spent the last 35 years in rooms that look an awful lot like that high school video edit suite.
Before I left that school, Stephanie wrote in a notebook I'd been passing around to the few friends I had and a couple of teachers. I still have those pages in a box of keepsakes… she wrote that I was intelligent despite my test scores, naturally artistic, and had a gifted eye for framing. School board meetings! Who woulda thunk it?
I’m so deeply grateful she saw something in me and encouraged me to stay creative.
Happy International Women's Day to Ms. Kacanek, to Ms. Edwards, and to every teacher who looked at a kid the world had written off and decided to look a little closer.
“No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half its citizens.”