Family Night at the Odeum!

Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Harold Ambler, and I'm the latest-blooming songwriter you have ever met. Burdened with stage fright and crippling shyness that make early career Neal Diamond look like Sid Vicious, I dared to put words and melody together for the first time when I was in my late twenties. I dared to do it in public for the first time in my early-thirties. 

It was like chewing hot glass. 

That's how self-conscious I felt. 

But, strangely, I was being "visited" with songs a little more regularly before long. I wanted to get over the stage fright so badly that I forced myself to play for people on the subway platform where I lived in Brooklyn. Most of that, for a good year, was torture, too. Me staring into my guitar box, for the most part, doing the best I could to be heard over the screaching trains entering and leaving the Seventh Avenue D-Q station in Park Slope. 

But there was a glimmer of hope in the darkness of this time for me as a budding songwriter, and that glimmer was kids. The little ones standing near my case or literally at my knee as I played did not care that I had no stage presence. They also didn't care if my fingers shook, my voice cracked, and I was overall just kind of lousy. 

They thought what I was doing was amazing. It was in their wide eyes and their smiles and the insistent way they asked their moms and dads for change to put in my guitar case. In them, far more than in myself, I saw, and I suppose relearned, what music was. It was unexpected, and profoundly healing. 

Fast forward a few years. I'm living in Austin, Texas, with my wife and our own beautiful child. I play more gigs than I used to in Brooklyn, but, honestly, not all that many. Enough to get a small following, enough to get some songs up in iTunes, enough to finally transcend practically all my stage fright and to finally enjoy singing in front of people. 

And the people I love playing in front of the most, by quite some measure, are families with children: picnics, benefits, barbecues, school functions. Can't get enough of it! If you get a knot of kids standing up front dancing while you play you have officially gone to heaven on this earth. That's what it's like. 

Why am I telling you all this? Funny you should ask! 

Tomorrow night (Saturday, April 6), right here in gorgeous E.G., I'm playing a family friendly gig at our very own, very beautiful Odeum Theater. I play at 6:30, which makes the show especially family friendly. Here's the deal, though, to make it affordable for families, you've got to go to this link -- http://anothertequilasunrise.ticketleap.com/odeum/ -- and type in "ambler" in the discount field. By doing that, you'll make the tickets $6 (instead of $24). If you listen to one of my songs on iTunes and understand why children frequently like my music (I know both my young daughters do!), I hope you'll come out. If not tomorrow, then another time. No kids? No problem. I play for non-parents, too! 

It's odd, gray-haired as I have become, I keep getting just a little better at the music thing every year. It's actually one of the strangest things I've ever witnessed. And a great, great blessing.