All that jazz

Kimberlyn King-Hinds, Chair for the Board of Regents of the Northern Marianas College, swayed into the stage at the Taga Royal Hall of the World Resort Hotel Saturday night to declare the Board’s unequivocal intent: “to make NMC the first choice for the Commonwealth’s brightest.” This will happen, she said, not by depending on what the government will do, but on what community residents will do. “We are all responsible,” she declared.

NMC’s Board of Regents celebrated the College’s silver anniversary with a Gala Dinner Saturday evening to raise scholarship funds to be offered to top rank graduating students from Saipan, Tinian and Rota.

Clearly in the “Amen” corner was royal Samoan Dr. Failautusi Avegalio, Jr., endearingly referred to as Professor Tusi, director for the Pacific Business Center Program of University of Hawaii’s Business School. Leading an institution committed to help communities strengthen their economies through local capacity development, his regal presence believes in building on existing traditional strengths, mutual respect, and collaboration.

The same sentiment would be echoed by NMC Foundation President Jerry Tan whose known creativity for program development extended this evening to musing about raising more funds by having Ms. Hinds’ model her attire on stage and auctioning the same, perhaps, in eBay, “where it might originally had come from,” he muttered. The call for collaboration, particularly among members of the business community is Mr. Tan’s known mantra. Creating a healthy and hefty endowment fund for the college was an expressed high priority on his list. “Guam’s endowment fund sometimes get seven figures,” he rued with envy, “we are happy when we get five thousand!” Mr. Tan is graduate of the University of Guam and is passionately committed to advancing the cause of his alma mater and his new educational “mistress” in the CNMI. With Mark Mendiola, erstwhile of Tinian, now executive director for the NMC Foundation and special assistant to the Board of Regents, has his work cut out for him. A PSS’ loss, Mark is NMC’s gain.

Dr. Harold L. Allen, UoG President, took a similar line when he affirmed that a community’s strength is reflected on its ability and capability to support and sustain a post-secondary learning institution that provides qualified members of its local workforce. Withmembers of UoG’s Board of Regents, Dr. Allen brought to the occasion a Board resolution congratulating NMC on its 25th year anniversary and affirming their desire for continuing collaboration and fruitful partnership between the two institutions. Also, a carved ifit hard wood in the geographic form of Guam and an installed clock was tendered to grace the NMC president’s office.

Patricia Coleman and Ed Probst, giggly, giddy, and nervy podium directors, particularly in the ritual of recognizing distinguished guests, had to rationalize the segmented utterances of the requisite chant. In the democratized space of academé where calling people by their first names is not uncommon, and where it is recognized that the task of education as key to community advancement is everyone’s responsibility, setting aside certain personae above the common station is, at best, an ancient relic, not unlike the medieval gown worn during graduation exercises. So. Patty and Ed will be forgiven their sporadic cadence in the recognition game.

Indeed, members of NMI’s crème de la crème, its literati, luminari and gliterrati, dressed up to the nines to be recognized in an evening laced with Epicurean delights and buzz-generating open bar libations. World Resort’s GM B. K. Park personally supervised the serving of a six-course dinner, graciously minimalist in content compared to the heaping-full helpings we generally get in such social occasions, but delicately tasteful in presentation and style. Though Starbuck-addicted gastronomes may have something to say about the after dinner caffeine, nevertheless, the orchestration of the shrimp cocktail, clam chowder soup, Caesar’s salad, broiled lobster tail and tenderloin, topped by chocolate decadence with raspberry sauce, and washed down with unlimited juices, soft drinks, wine, liquor, or beer, still spelled heaven.

The evening’s air-filling and aura-fulfilling ambience was audiologically defined by Pat Palomo’s Jazz Band. The self-taught jazz pianist on the keyboard sailed smoothly into the nooks and crevices of our auditory domains, and insidiously installed itself on the tap of our toes, the occasional snap of our fingers, and the undulating hum that lingered on cradle of our throats. Like an invasive dampness of valley fog, the crowd was held captive by the music’s engulfing effervescent presence.

“Just the way you look tonight,” seemed tailored to Ms. Hinds’ strutting up stage on her shimmering ocre’d dress; “The Girl from Ipanema,” was clearly hands down Eloise Furey strolling down Saipan lagoon beach. Members of the Board of Regents came to be regents!

Jazz as American contribution to music, which evolved from the improvisation on rag, is an altogether appropriate mode of operation for attaining the lofty heights Ms. Hinds and the NMC Board of Regents have set their sights on to. The good thing about improvisation is talents’ reliance on intuition and experience. As the brothers’ of the pre-Katrina days would say, “You gotta dig deep to the soul to make jazz.” Focusing on the challenge not only to make the CNMI a gateway for English-based higher education, but more importantly, a preferred first choice for the brightest and most promising among its very own, is a tall order. Jazz takes a familiar tune, sets it as an opening strain, and then “jazz it up.” Professor Tusi would easily seque from this into appropriating traditional practices and strengths, of our revered practices and choices-that-work, and then jazzing them up for shared vision and mission in the field of educational excellence in the new globalized CNMI.

Beauty queen Grand Marshall of the last Liberation Day Parade, Agnes McPhetres, might have quietly hummed along as the band crooned “I’m in the mood for love,” scanning the crowd with pride for her progeny and taking her place as the populist President Emeritus of the College. One might guess though that the “love” she felt this night might very well be directed to her Rotary Club’s “Las Vegas” fundraising effort in February.

Ditto for the legal luminaries in the audience who would have heard by now that the Light of the Eve’s Pineapple Ball in February will benefit the beleaguered and local fund emaciated Micronesian Legal Services.

Money does make the world go round. And there will be a lot of jazzing it up to get it! Keep the attire dry cleaned quickly. Another gala function is coming down the bend.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School