Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is a personal post. For those of you who are just in it for the photos and the toys, you might want to go back to finishing the holiday cards (ours coming up next weekend!), but for others you might want to get that second cup of coffee and settle in.

As I have alluded to in recent prior posts, I am finishing my last few days at Jazz at Lincoln Center. For almost seven years I have been their chief fundraiser and occasionally chronicled my work life here. The early days of figuring it out, nascent traveling with the orchestra, learning the rhythms and pace (very fast) of the place. I have likened it to leaping onto a speeding train.

Tonight I will attend my last Big Band Holiday concert as staff. Early in my work life I toured with the orchestra for Big Band Holiday, through Florida and much of the southeast. (That post can be found here.) I had made a nascent trip to Shanghai (and wrote about that here) in the first few months, but it was the Big Band Holiday tour that really made me understand what it was like for the orchestra when they were on the road and what was and was not going to be possible in terms of fundraising on those trips.

I wrote occasionally about the long Zoom-filled pandemic days – especially hard at a performing arts organizing which can no longer perform. I had to dig deep into my creativity to fundraise successfully, always hand in hand with Wynton Marsalis who proved to be an invaluable leader. Coming out of those pandemic days have been hard on managers. We are expected to mitigate both the needs of executive leadership and our staff. First the Great Resignation as folks settled into new careers and lives sometimes across the country from where they started.

The longing to return to a pre-Covid office life is understandable, but not entirely practical as our staff has become accustom to more flexibility. Ours was a great office culture before Covid so it has been sad to see the office anemically filled, no longer teeming with musicians and bustling with energy. Sadly, longing for something doesn’t make it so. You need to create something new instead. A September mandated five day return to office was not the right catalyst.

As many of you know, my time there also morphed into the period I cared for my mother who had her final illness in New Jersey over the first four months of this year. I am beyond grateful for the thoughtfulness of Jazz at Lincoln Center and my colleagues while I traveled back and forth, frequently working days from there weekly until for a period at the end when I stayed in New Jersey. (Those days and that unusual time is in posts here and here.)

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Mom died in April and left me her house with five cats (plus Hobo, our outdoor pal). With the addition of Cookie and Blackie (the New York cats) that bring us more or less to eight. I became a crazy cat lady overnight – but I like to say mom had me in training for years! Kim and I packed the cats up and we spent five weeks in Jersey at the end of the summer. (A few posts about our lazy summer days can be found here and here.)

Without realizing it, I guess this brought me to the end of one period of my life and to the threshold of something different. I am not sure I knew that until late this fall someone put me in touch with the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center which was looking for someone to develop its fundraising arm. As I spoke with them I began to get excited about the opportunities I could see for them and my brain started shifting gears.

Some of you will remember that a year ago, Blackie was very sick and spent (and very expensive) week there while they saved his life after a dramatic infection suddenly took over his body. Although I mentioned it, I never posted about the very dark week we had while he was there. He was, in their words, a very sick kitty indeed and we are of course very grateful patients.

The Animal Medical Center was founded in 1911 by a group of women who were volunteering for the nascent ASPCA and recognized the need for veterinary care for animals as well as their welfare. I plan to dig into this lore and I’m sure I will be sharing tidbits over time.

Today it is the largest animal hospital of its kind in the world, serving more than 50,000 animals a year. It is an elite veterinary facility where young vets train and research is done. I hope to help them expand what they do in these and other areas, including funding the free services they offer to the City’s police dogs and horse, our zoos and rescue animals which need surgical intervention.

I will miss my colleagues at Jazz, especially the endlessly talented musicians in the band, not to mention the nights at Dizzy’s – listening to Bill Charlap while the summer sun sets over Central Park – and the concerts in the hall. Dinners planned around the music and the stunning views of Columbus Circle. I will miss the daily encounters with folks who know me and I know them and we are part of a well-oiled machine together.

I find change painful and as I navigate the first holidays without my mom, this additional parting of the ways has sometimes overwhelmed me. Change is hard. Growing is hard, but you need to pay attention to the voice that urges you forward to the next thing.

Tonight, a final Big Band Holiday concert in the hall. Then we head to New Jersey for three weeks at the end of this week. Obviously I will post from there, but I am hoping it can be a few weeks of cookie baking and reflection. The new gig starts mid-January. So we gently close one chapter and head to the next.