TSS Athens

In our first year, getting started, we planted some community outreach seeds in Athens, feeling our way along the learning curve to the right in the Möbius-strip diagram. We didn't touch all those kinds of places, just a few. We formed our first TSS/ATH quartet consisting of two UGA graduate students who played in Marie's funeral quartet — Serena Scibelli (violin) and Noah Anthony Johnson (cello), plus two Hodgson School professors — Margaret Audrey Snyder (viola) and Michael Heald (violin). In their very first concert they raised almost $2000 for a young Montessori student who needed serious cancer surgery; it was a great and heartwarming start, added to later by learning the surgery was successful. This first experience pointed us with greater certainty toward what we wanted more to do — help realize Marie's 'Better World' from all sorts of her 'street-corner' places. Continuing through year 1, the group mentored high school orchestras' students and performed at nursing and senior-living facilities. It is heartening to see ailing and elderly people in hard stages of their lives light up and smile, sometimes through depression or pain, at live beautiful music the likes of which many of them never heard before. It makes it hard not to want to continue.