In 2003, Billy and his wife, Thya Merz moved from Silver Spring, Maryland to Brooklyn, New York. Thya became Head of School of the Corlears School in Manhattan. Billy kept an office in Maryland which was run, as it had been for twenty years, by Betty Truszkowski. Betty retired at the end of 2004 ( or so she claimed, a friend asked her for some help and now she seems to be working many hours a week once again, that’s what happens to intelligent people who know how to work hard, they are are a helpful addition where ever they go ) . So Billy closed his Maryland office and now is a full time Brooklynite. Will Cosby, a long time business associate and friend, is helping Billy introduce himself to the New York Area.
Nature in the City is a new live show and soon to be CD featuring original songs about the natural world as it thrives in the urban environment. Billy has been working with the good folks from Centers for Nature Education, headquartered in Baltimore Woods, Marcellus New York, in developing the project. He has already presented the live shows in a number of Syracuse schools. The Centers for Nature Education has been developing accompanying lesson plans for teachers which can soon be found at www.takeahike.org .
Inspired by the number of Peregrine falcons and other birds of prey now living in the skyscraper/canyon environments of the city, Billy has created a song and audience participatory dance called
“It’s There Again, The Peregrine”. In hip hop fashion Billy and the kids act out the lyrics, “Pow, the pigeon, explosion, Pow, the pigeon, quick death motion, Pow the pigeon, caught from above, Pow the pigeon, just because……it’s there again, the Peregrine”.
The CD will feature the Peregrine song as well as a song Billy has been performing for years but has not recorded, his parody of “Men in Black”, “Flies in Black”. In performance this song is introduced after a street sense monologue on water quality as determined by the “macroinvertebrates” or insect larvae living in the water.
Birds migrating through city parks, winds whipping between buildings , flower gardens, animal and insect adaptations, rivers, and basic environmental civic responsibility are presented with humor, rhythm and a daily awareness of Nature in the City.
Once every seventeen years an amazing emergence happens in the Mid-Alantic States of America. Billions of black and orange cicadas come up from the ground, transform into their adult stage, reproduce and die. This group of cicadas is know as Brood X. Their intense experience all happens in a few weeks.
In 1987, the last time Brood X had emerged from the ground, Billy and Paul Seydewitz wrote “The Cicada Song”. Although there were some recordings of the original song, Billy was unable to find them due to his recent move to Brooklyn, New York. Many of his possesions are still in boxes.
Billy remembered the part he wrote, the chorus, but he couldn’t remember the verses that Paul had written. Being unable to contact Paul, Billy rewrote the verses with a little help from Steve Murphy.
Steve and Billy produced and recorded the new version and performed it as a music video. Steve put in the many hours of video editing it took to capture and document this amazing natural event.
Billy would like to thank Will Cosby and Micah Baskir for their camera work and Micah for his effective directorial ideas. Also, Billy would like to thank Michael and Kathy Moore for the use of their home for the video shoot.
This show, like all of Billy’s elementary shows, has a primary grades version and an upper elementary version ( due to the level of science concepts ) . When Billy gets, as he does here, the entire school in one audience he directs the first song towards the older students. This prevents the classic ‘psychological separation’ older students feel when they think something is too babyish for them. The spoken intro ( which is not included here ) allows Billy to introduce the concepts of The Big Bang, element creation in stars, the clumping of matter in space because of gravity and the subsequent creation of stars and planets. The Big Bang song and dance then reinforces these concepts visually and comically.