WHERE THE WILD THINGS

HutchCC Wind Symphony stuns at Sunday in the Zoo.

Rachel Wilson, Reporter & Designer Where the Wild Things Are

Photo by Rachel Wilson

Emily Earls, Hutchinson, sits on her mask to keep it from blowing away while playing baritone saxophone.

Photo by Rachel Wilson

Jacob Younger, Hutchinson, stays focused while playing french horn.

Surrounded by animal exhibits and spectators, the Hutchinson Community College Wind Symphony performed in the Hutchinson Zoo while the wind blew and leaves crunched under foot.

“Each year, I try to have the Wind Symphony perform off-campus in a nontraditional performance venue; this is an important part of our community involvement with this band, and one that our students typically have a great experience with. In the past, we’ve put on concerts at the Kansas Cosmosphere and the Strataca Salt Mine,” said Chris Miertschin, Music Instructor-Band Director.

He brainstormed to find the perfect venue this year, with the pandemic and public safety in mind.

Miertschin said, “My primary goal was to have the band perform off-campus as we do each year. The secondary goal this year specifically was to find an outdoor venue where both the band and our audience could spread out safely and not worry so much about the spread of germs from person to person. My work as Assistant Conductor of the Hutchinson Municipal Band put the zoo on my radar as a potential venue as that group put on a few concerts just outside of the zoo last summer, and then it happened to work that March 7th was a great open day with largely good weather for an outdoor performance.”

Another goal was what he hoped the audience would take away from this performance.

“Hopefully they enjoyed themselves and learned a little about some of the music we performed; I tried to pick a variety of largely animal-themed literature that would be very accessible to our audience. It’s also my hope that our off-campus performances will draw potential new listeners to our more traditional concerts in Stringer Fine Arts Center,” said Miertschin.

The students performing at the Hutchinson Zoo faced challenges that came along with the outside experience.

Miertschin said, “For them, the challenge in a performance like this is to quickly adapt to new circumstances both in the things they hear around the band and of course last week with the added wind! The students showed great ability to adapt to the circumstances both in terms of what they could hear outdoors versus in the band room and in terms of using whatever means necessary to hold down their music. I hope this concert inspired some of them to realize that bands aren’t limited to indoor concert halls.”

One student interviewed agreed that performing outside provided new challenges.

“Performing outside rather than Stringer has its challenges just because there are no walls for the sound to bounce off of and it’s harder to hear the other parts, but we had warmed up and fixed balance before we played that afternoon,” said Emily Earls, Hutchinson.

Earls has been playing the baritone saxophone for two years, as well as the clarinet and trombone, and this is her first year performing in the Hutchinson Community College Wind Symphony.

Earls said, “My favorite song was ‘The Whistler and His Dog’ because I thought it was fun for the band.”

The Wind Symphony whistled and howled during the piece. There were many other animal themed pieces played during the performance.

“I first immediately thought of Camille Saint-Saens’ ‘Carnival of the Animals’ which we played an arrangement of toward the end of the concert,” said Miertschin. “I also looked through our band music library just to see what sort of animal/outdoor themed music we had that would be approachable by our ensemble. You can’t go wrong with a Sousa march, and his ‘Pride of the Wolverines’ was a great concert opener. In a similar vein, Percy Grainger’s music, some of my favorite music, and ‘Country Gardens’ is a nice, light-hearted piece that fit the concert pretty well.”

Photo by Rachel Wilson

Chris Miertschin, Music Instructor-Band director, conducts while the Wind Symphony plays on.

Photo by Rachel Wilson

The crowd applauds as the Hutchinson Community College Wind Symphony finishes playing a piece conducted by Miertschin.

The poster created to advertise the Sunday in the Zoo with Winds was animal themed as well as a creative team effort.

“I worked with our marketing team, specifically Janae DeWeese. I was fairly involved with the initial concept, and Janae took it away from there,” Miertschin said. “I asked if it would be possible to do a take on the Georges Seurat painting, ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ in homage to the concert title’s namesake, the Stephen Sondheim musical ‘Sunday in the Park with George.’ Janae took that and ran with it quite well.”

Miertschin had a creative hand in the concert in multiple ways, including his favorite piece.

“My favorite on this concert has to be the one I wrote for the band, the arrangement of “Sunday” from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. I arranged it specifically for this concert and for this band and they played it very well,” said Miertschin.

The Wind Symphony prepared for the concert for about two months, receiving their music the first week of classes in January.

Miertschin said, “We do not repeat music from concert to concert throughout the year and rarely do we repeat a piece of music at all outside of the occasional holiday tune for our December concerts. Our audiences love that they always hear something new at our performances instead of the same tunes all year long.”

The audience as well as the symphony all seemed to enjoy the concert, with Miertschin enthusiastically conducting and addressing the crowd.

“I’m happy to say that despite the wind, this was a very successful concert for us and it also seemed to benefit the zoo,” said Miertschin.

The windy concert may have come with some challenges, but the symphony prevailed, while gathering a crowd and donations for the Hutchinson Zoo.

Photo by Rachel Wilson

As the crowd watches, Miertschin stays focused to keep the symphony on track.

▲ Artwork by Janae DeWeese ▲ Assistant Director of Marketing and Public Relations

Photo by Regan LaRue

The front entrance of Sugar Creek Boutique sparkles in the Hutchinson Mall. The store planned to transfer for just the holidays but has now found their place to stay.

Building a Business

Along with the task of coping with the recent COVID pandemic, Shelby Harner strove to get her business off the ground.

▼ Photo by Regan LaRue ▼

Shelby Harner, Sugar Creek Boutique Owner, tends to her storefront. Harner spends almost all of her freetime tending to her business.

▼ Photo by Regan LaRue ▼

Harner rearanges her inventory while the store is calm. Harner always strives to be as prepared as possible for the next rush in her store.

After the rough patch of 2020, small businesses hope to thrive in 2021.With the everyday use of technology people began using their quarantine time to focus on their side project of starting a business. Though these small businesses did struggle through the pandemic, many used these hardships to their advantage.

Sugar Creek Boutique is just one of the many small businesses within the community of Hutchinson. Sugar Creek is owned and operated by Shelby Harner. She founded the boutique in 2019 right before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

“I knew I did not want a storefront, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to travel.” Shelby Harner, Sugar Creek Owner, said. “I wanted to go to the stock shows and the rodeos so that’s where we started out.”

Harner was born and raised in Partridge, and graduated from Hutchinson Community College with a degree in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship. She began her college journey with the intentions of graduating with a major in Ag Communications.

“About halfway through my college career I decided that’s not what I wanted to do. So I dropped out all together,” Harner said. “Worst decision ever but ended up being the best decision.”

Harner then worked in radio advertising for a short period of time before working at Maurices full time as a manager. That was when she discovered her love for retail. Both of her parents were self employed and ran their own businesses so it just came naturally to Harner. She then went back to college to begin her new career path.

“I wanted to go back to school and get my two years done. So I left Maurices to become a full-time student again, and graduated December of 2019 right before the pandemic began,” said Harner.

She began her career hoping to become a traveling distributor with her newfound company Sugar Creek Boutique. Named after her family’s ranch that she had grown up working on her entire life.

“My brother came home from college, and we were getting rid of the H&S name and he said ‘well, what about Sugar Creek Ranch,” Harner said., “So then my brother wanted to sell farm equipment so he did Sugar Creek sales, so when I did this it only made sense.”

Though the plan to travel was shortlived due to the pandemic beginning shortly after the start of her journey. When 2020 came around, the company was fully booked on trips for the year, but in March of 2020 while at the Oklahoma Youth Expo in Oklahoma City that’s where they were sent home. Though the company had to persevere so Harner got to work on the next step.

“I just thought about what I was going to do and built a website and became very successful on the website,” Harner said.

From that point on Harner began the next step in their company by starting up a store in the Hutchinson Mall where they are now located. Her company then began to thrive within the mall.

“The store is busier, like busy enough to the point I barely update our website, I don’t have the time to,” Harner said. “The minute things come in it sells and it’s great I just love it.”

Harner plans to continue expanding Sugar Creek Boutique hoping to hire employees to help out along with one day making the store into a chain business.

“Our biggest goal is to be able to afford employees to be able to be open everyday of the week,” said Harner. “Then after achieving a warehouse I’d like to have more than one location.”

Harner shows all the strength it takes in order to learn how to thrive within hard economic times. Strategically planning her next move beforehand and doing what it takes to get Sugar Creek to the next level allows her to continue persevering even with all the odds against the store.