August 7, 2006

Hey All-

I hope you all had a great summer and got some time to relax and enjoy the heat and maybe even pulled your instruments out here and there and practiced a bit! It’s that time of year again and Pure Gold will be starting up again next month so I thought I’d take a moment to write you all and see where everyone is.

This year should be a very exciting year. I have been picking music out for the fall and am excited about what we will be doing. I think a highlight of this year will definitely be our Christmas program I’ll Be Home For Christmas. We’ll play some great Christmas pieces written for band to tell a great story of being home for Christmas and then the original Christmas story. Along with the band’s performance in this concert we will have other students reading both poetry and verses about Christmas. It should be a very memorable event.

We will also be playing in the Santa Paula Christmas Parade again this year. This will be the third year that Pure Gold will have made an appearance in this event and we are looking forward to new ideas and a new float design that will be bigger and better than ever. I’m guessing we will have outgrown the flatbed truck from last year so please be thinking of an alternative and bigger platform for our float.

This spring we will have our second spring concert, which will be an evening full of Disney magic. We will play through some of the great Disney songs from the theme parks, movies, and even Broadway.

Those are the main events that I have planned for us this year but if you have more ideas for events at which we can play let me know. I have not checked into the home school arts festival as of yet and would love if someone would step forward and check that out for us. This year I would also like us to do some fundraising for both our shirts that we will have and also to pay for some of the music. We would also like to look into having rehearsals somewhere other than our living room this year. We are looking into rehearsing at Heritage Valley Baptist Church. If you have other ideas, please let me know. Finally, lets try to recruit more people this year. It would be great if we could double the size of the band for the Christmas concert and REALLY outgrow the living room we currently have been in.

I am hoping this will be a year of growth and new ideas. Please feel free to contact me with any of them. We are aiming at rehearsaing on Mondays from 4-5 PM at Heritage Valley Community Church in Santa Paula, CA. Please email me if you have questions.

Thank you in advance for all your hard work!

Robert A. Laird

Pure Gold Homeschool Band

Ps. Please pay your fees for this fall as soon as possible as we use that money to pay for music! The sooner I get the money the sooner I can get the music here.