I'll start with a list:

1. I'm a retired printer and machine painter. There is a notable and odd connection between oldtime music and printing. Brian Bagdonas' wife, Rebecca, is putting together some information on the very subject.

2. I'm an addicted reader, currently deep into books on 19th Century fine art painting, and I'm a closeted artist.

3. Favorite TV? The League of Gentlemen, The IT Crowd, and Last of the Summer Wine. Sadly, I'm currently hooked on the Australian horse opera, McLeod's Daughters.

4. I'm practing playing tuba for Elliott Johnson (Cababi) fiddle tunes, Swiss accordian music, and Polish folk fiddle tunes. (Its a story in itself!) in anticipation of a trip to Switzerland in October.

5. I called a square dance with the Great Wall of China in the background. How's that for a tidbit?

6. I've played guitar since 1960.

7. I drive a 1963 Ford pickup that the neighborhood association doesn't like.

8. I quit the Boy Scouts after one meeting.

9. My mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse here where the cows would stick their heads through the windows to watch the kids. Her dad's car didn't have first gear so for years he backed the humiliated family up hills.

This is good stuff. I'm sure you can really use this. Wow! What a goldmine of fascinating information. I learned to tie my shoes in... I forget.

I am inspired by magical memories of my two fiddling uncles and family stories about my fiddling grandfather and his roaring twenties dance band. "Judas Priest! Pipe down on that banjo!" is a family joke, heard many a time by the plectrum banjoist in Grandpa's band.

My family is large, one girl and seven brothers. Tom and I are the closest in age and we got excited by, and learned to play, folk music together in the early sixties. Dad was very nervous and couldn't tolerate music in the house. But Mom was a real booster. She played the piano in her dad's band in the 1920s and she sang to us throughout our childhood. An early memory is Mom singing a lullaby as she rocked me to sleep in the shade of the backyard elm tree.
 
Tom and I sat in front of the big floor console radio and listened to old school gospel singing on The Shut-In Hour and bluegrass on The Grand Ole Opry. Today Tom, brother Joe and I perform as The Martin Brothers bluegrass band in which I play guitar and dobro. We were most definitely jazzed by our farmer cousin's rock band The New Tweedy Brothers, named after the band on one of Grandpa's old 78rpm records. Those boys had a short, brilliant and self-destructive fling in San Francisco' Summer of Love. My main musical interest right now is oldtime guitar fingerpicking and learning early dobro sounds.

I got a real intense introduction to oldtime music when I met and married a banjo pickin' gal, Nancy. Nancy and got into the Irish and contra dance and music scene in Portland, and were involved for years. One year in the early 1990s I got stung by the southern mountain big set square dance bug at the Fiddletunes Festival. I became consumed with finding everything I could on that old style square dancing that fit our oldtime music so well. That led to my role in sparking a new interest in old-fashioned square dancing to live music in Portland.
 
In the 90s Portland's oldtime community barely existed, just a few of us leftovers from the 70s. Nancy and I had the idea of organizing a website that would be a clearing house for local oldtime music, a way for people to connect with like-minded folks, to see where the gigs and jams were. The idea was to help foster a larger community by connecting us all together. Thus the bubbaguitar calendar and the newsletter, Old-Time Music in Portland, which have played a major role in the development of a traditional music and dance scene in Portland. I am a founding and current member of the Portland Old-Time Music Gathering and its sponsoring organization, Bubbaville. [Shee-it! Writing all this I'm starting to impress myself! That's not good...]

As I recover from the stem cell transplantation I am becoming active again as a square dance caller and mentor, organizing calling workshops here and at festivals, and performing with The Martin Brothers and on cello with Dave Mount in the Uncle Wiggily oldtime stringband.