September was an eventful month for the San Diego Branch. Our Annual Fall Breakfast was held on Monday, September 23. In this annual meeting, we said goodbye and gave a warm thank-you to the immediate past branch President, Miriam Cole and her Board of Directors, and gave a hearty welcome to the new President, Yuko Maruyama and the new Board of Directors. The new Fall Breakfast venue, Elijah’s Restaurant, was appreciated for many reasons. The organizational flow of the event gave ample time for all updates and reports, for browsing the music exchange table, and for connecting with new and old friends. The gratitude of all teachers in our branch for the excellent leadership we have was shown in the frequent, enthusiastic applause for the leaders and their reports. A special thank-you goes to the 1st Vice President, Brian Goral and the 2nd Vice President, Chutaphin Yeager, who created the fun take-home mug filled with information and for the enthusiastic kick-off of the CM season by Eleanor Hum.
Five days after the Fall Breakfast, Yuko Maruyama and her jazz group, The Mercantile Alley Band, presented the KIM Scholarship Benefit Concert at the Rancho Bernardo Library, Saturday, September 28. The concert was an incredible gift to the community and to the Goodlin Fund’s KIM Program. Admission was free and online donations to the KIM Program were encouraged. In attendance were MTACSD teachers, KIM students and parents, KIM teachers as well as many library patrons. Yuko’s creativity, musicianship and skills in playing, composing, and arranging are so superb that those of us who attend one of her concerts always look forward to her next one. Yuko’s daughter Risa, a senior in high school, sings with the group and from the first sounds from her voice we delighted in her velvety, rich, strong tones. We all enjoyed hearing her on the accordion, and on the wide array of percussion instruments she played such as a slide whistle, bar chimes, vibraslap and the Kawai toy piano!
The benefit concert brought in some online donations for Kids Into Music (KIM), our outreach music lesson scholarship program administered by the H. B. Goodlin Foundation. We are thankful for that and we want to thank each of you who gave a donation at the Music Exchange Table in the Fall Breakfast. Those donations also go into the KIM fund. The Goodlin Board is pleased that our branch can offer lessons to children of limited means. If you would like to contribute to the KIM program, please follow this link to the KIM donation page: https://mtacsd.org/donations/support-kim/