The Teresa Jennings Show

If nothing else – and you should learn a little something most days – I now know who Teresa Jennings is. She writes songs for kids: “She is most interested in writing music for children to sing, and her extensive work with jazz and rock has helped her develop a unique style,” avers Music 8-K magazine. “Beyond her wide vocabulary of musical styles, Teresa fills her music with emotion and strong values, though she always tries to remember that music should be fun to perform if it is going to affect the performer.”

This evening Lilly and the rest of the third grade – and, separately, the first and second grades – sang at the gym/auditorium of the junior high down the road, and the place was packed with immediate family members, Lilly’s sister and mother and father included. No fewer than nine Teresa Jennings songs were on the program, including “Big, Big Dreams,” “Make a Difference,” and “Feelin’ Good!”

That last one goes: “I wanna be healthy, I wanna be happy/I wanna feel good, good, good, good, good/Yeah, I wanna be cheery, I wanna be snappy… I wanna walk through my life with lots of style and with grace/and know that I’m always okay!”

I’d say Jennings has done well in the K-8 music realm. And I can’t say much more, because that kind of song is entirely too easy to make fun of. It seems like the sort of thing that The Simpsons, along with a host of lesser comedic lights, take on regularly. But I can’t help thinking – hoping, really – that when the self-esteem movement has finally passes out of fashion, songs like that won’t be sung quite so often in school auditoriums and gyms.