Jazz Night

Part of my job as a Resident Manager in Family Housing is to work together with my team to organize events for our residents.  Honestly, we typically struggle to find stuff that appeals to the variety of cultures and lifestyles that exist in our community and it's often very frustrating for us.  Sometimes we get big crowds and sometimes we get literally zero people and it's hard to predict what will be successful and what won't.  People come and go so often here, so it's hard to say what the particular combination of residents at any given time of the year will want to come to.  Plus, so often  folks are busy studying and/or working that frankly I'm not sure they even have the time to  do anything extra.

That being said, we were thrilled this month to have hit on something that  I think has the potential to be successful often:  live music.  We got in touch with the music department at up at CU and got paired with a couple of guys that came and played some New Orleans style Jazz (a percussionist and a saxaphone player) and they were great.  We saw people come out to enjoy it that we've honestly never seen come to any past events, including people without kids (a group of folks we have a hard time enticing in particular) and people from other parts of  Family Housing.  People brought picnic dinners and we provided ice cream and lemonade...kids and adults alike were dancing and having such a nice time.....yay!

Setting up...Issac (the drummer) was really really awesome with the kids.  They were so curious and he seemed almost excited to be showing them all his stuff and teaching them what everything does.  Perfect!

 I'm not happy with any of the pictures I tried to get of the kids dancing.  The musicians had a big group of  kids dancing away right around them..it was pretty cute...