Megan Stielstra's Blog

Christopher got a forty-gallon aquarium for his birthday and read all sorts of books and after the freshwater plants developed spirogyra he got three Zebra Danio fish and three Red-eyed Tetras whose poop turned into algae which made the aquarium a sustainable environment so he says now I can get a black angel fish, which is all I really wanted in the first place. After he explained all this to me, I said, “Isn’t Spyo-gyra that band we saw at the Czech Jazz Festival?” and, being inquisitive as to why a Seventies smooth jazz band would name themselves after algae, we asked google and were told that the saxophone player had just written a paper on spirogyra for a biology class when some club owner asked him the name of his band. He said spirogyra as a joke, and the club owner misspelled it and that’s how they were marketed.

If I were to borrow from this process in naming my own (hypothetical) band, it would be called “Community-building through Storytelling: a proposed workshop for CCA’s Symposium on Art and Public Life.”

“Hey everybody! Put your hands together for Chicago’s own MEGAN and the Community-Building Through Storytellers!”

Not so catchy, huh?

I must admit that this aquarium is pretty great. Christopher sits in front of his tank watching the Tetras and says MOOM MOOM MOOM. Mojo sits watching Christopher, wondering if this is a new game. I sit on the couch and drink a martini.