And the winner is…..Christopher Minarich!

ACMP’s 3rd annual Holiday Caption Contest was a success, with 61 captions from 32 ACMP members. This year’s cartoon was particularly complex, so this was not an easy task. As usual, I draw without any preconceived notion of what is going to come out and I am not sure I would have been able to dream up a caption for this one! So – kudos to all of you who exercised your wit and imagination to come up with a wide array of fun interpretations of my cartoon.

There is literally nothing as subjective as humor, and from my perspective, everyone who sent a caption (or up to three) was a winner. Moreover, you all made my day! Thanks to all who submitted captions and to the team of people who helped choose this year’s winners.

And stay tuned – soon you will be able to purchase ACMP holiday cards and cocktail napkins with this year’s winning caption in the ACMP Store.

About the Winners

Christopher Minarich

Christopher Minarich teaches Music at The Episcopal School in the City of New York, an independent preschool on the Upper East Side, where he has the delight of teaching Music to over 200 two-to five-year olds. He enjoys playing violin and viola in chamber groups and orchestras, including the Bloomfield Symphony Orchestra, where he is Concertmaster and Assistant Conductor. Christopher plays Baroque violin in a period-instrument ensemble that explores unpublished works of the 17th century. Besides Music, Christopher enjoys foraging mushrooms, cooking, baking, and foreign languages.

Connect with Christopher through the ACMP Players Directory

Ben Flanders

Baritone Ben Flanders is an active performer in opera and oratorio, as well as art song and choral settings. Mr. Flanders has been a member of Cincinnati’s Vocal Arts Ensemble since 2013 and has performed with Cincinnati Opera, Dayton Opera, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles in the Cincinnati area. As the founder and artistic director of “Slavic Voices” which specializes in the classical song repertoire of Eastern Europe Mr. Flanders performed at the Kharkiv City Day celebrations in 2018 and 2019, among other appearances in Ukraine. Recent recitals include the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota, the University of Vermont, Idaho State University, and the world premiere of the song cycle “Sometimes it Happens So” by Kile Smith at the Cincinnati Art Museum. For more information about Slavic Voices please visit www.slavicvoices.org.

Connect with Ben through the ACMP Players Directory

Susan Alexander

Susan Alexander, pianist, got hooked on collaborative music making in the pit of her high school’s production of Anything Goes. She has played chamber music in numerous forms around the DC area, and continues to refine her pianism under Taubman method master, John Wickelgren. A shared interest in enabling people to keep playing together during the pandemic led Susan to join the ACMP board of directors in September 2021.

After Anything Goes, Susan went on to not major in music at Yale. She did some more musicals, the pinnacle of which was probably musical direction for Sondheim’s Company (“look, Mommy, there’s a lady conductor!”), and composed incidental music for The Glass Menagerie. After graduation, she moved to DC where her interest in ancient, unreadable languages led to a career as a cryptanalyst and later, as a senior executive in the Intelligence Community. There was no longer time for the grueling life of the rehearsal pianist, and when a colleague invited her to form a piano trio, she found chamber music was an even better medium than the theater through which to channel her love of musical collaboration.

Although Susan had been a member of ACMP since 1998, it was the pandemic that finally brought her to the Board. Socially-distancing on her own, she was fortunate to fall in with some technologically-savvy musicians who had figured out how to play together online in real time. Now instead of feeling alone and isolated, she found her dance card had never been so full. Grateful for the lifeline that had brought renewed meaning to her world during this bleak period, when the opportunity arose to partner with ACMP to bring similar opportunities to more people she jumped at the chance. And though people are playing in person again now, the mission for ACMP that became so clear to her during the pandemic remains, that is, to create a welcoming community that transcends physical distance and gives as many people as possible the chance to connect with others and develop as chamber musicians.

Connect with Susan through the ACMP Players Directory

Congratulations to all of our winners and to everyone who came up with an original caption for my cartoon!