A cowboy working on the Drummond Ranch rounds up cattle to send to auction.
Photo by Nathan Harmon.

Itis perhaps the single, ubiquitous image of American culture, both in the subconscious of her people and in her global image. It has been glorified in literature and in film well before the latter had the benefits of color or sound. It’s the pejorative used by American critics but also the grudgingly admired singular image praised by people freed by U.S. soldiers’ blood in Europe. Twice.

“It” is the American cowboy, the drover, the romantic image of Americans’ conquering of the West and the lifestyle – real and romanticized – that sprung from it. From early figures like Gene Autry and Tex Ritter singing on the open range to Clint Eastwood and his award-winning work in the revisionist western, Unforgiven, cowboys and the work they do have been glamorized and heroes to countless children.

Today, though, the drover’s most archetypal responsibility – driving cattle from point A to point B, often across long distances and often through hostile territory – has been replaced by animal husbandry, by technology and by challenges more likely to relate to weather and government regulation than cattle rustlers and corrupt lawmen. Half a century ago, cowboys and the cattle ranching industry they support might well still have resembled those Hollywood-inspired images. Today’s cattle ranchers are as likely to be adept at composing feed mixtures, selective cattle breeding and utilizing computer models to plan adequate watering sites.

Ranching is, indeed, more industry than many would imagine; but less so than those who think it is entirely a high-tech, cookie-cutter automated process. Despite many changes, cattle ranching and the men and women who work in the industry still possess many of the same traits that have defined them since the challenge of the West: connection to the land and to the cattle, rugged individualism and a sense of heritage.

Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?

Quite a few cowboys remain in Oklahoma, if statistics are any evidence. According to the state Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry 2011 agricultural output, which includes cattle ranching, accounted for billions of dollars in total economic impact.

“Ranching, of course, supports other industries,” says Oklahoma Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Reese. “In 2011, there was about a $36 billion total impact from agriculture related industries. That’s based on the increase in cost of grain and fuel but also includes the added value expenses of buying grain, spraying pastures, etc. The last three years, it was much higher than that.”

Reese says about $7 billion in agricultural products are sold each year, including almost $4 billion in cattle in 2011.

“We’re an economy that grows $7 billion in new wealth every year,” says Reese. “Agriculture – ranching – creates wealth because cows are born and grow up. That doesn’t include the service industry and others that are supported by ranching.”

Michael Kelsey, executive director of the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, says ranching is one of the leading industries in the state “as a function of land mass and land use.

“Beef cattle is the largest sector within agriculture,” Kelsey continues. “Beef cattle is big business. What’s unique about Oklahoma is the tremendous heritage of ranching. There are so many ranchers that are fifth- and sixth-generation ranchers. Now that sixth generation might be in diapers right now, but they’ll be there. It’s a priority for a lot of ranching families to uphold that tradition.”

Still, the industry has changed dramatically.

“People who only see food at the supermarket might think ranching is the same as it’s always been, and it’s not,” Reese says. “It’s not even the same as it was five years ago. The way cattle are bred and raised is different. The industry is much more advanced that way, as well as in other ways.”

The market for beef cattle has also changed in recent years.

“It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen in the past,” Kelsey says. “It’s a new normal, or we don’t know what ‘normal’ is anymore. The cattle cycle ebbs and flows depending on the market. But the cattle cycle isn’t normal anymore. Draught and input costs have been huge influences in breaking the normal cycle. Traditional supply and demand is still important, and consumer demand is still important. But the market as a whole looks different. For example, the market isn’t responding typically when it comes to high calf prices. Typically high prices for calves stimulate people to raise more calves. Usually, this demand would prompt ranchers to keep more heifers, say increasing from 200 to 250. But calf prices are high and ranchers aren’t generally keeping more heifers. That’s just one small picture of the grand view of how things have changed.”

Kelsey says that the input cost has changed how he runs his own cows. “You used to be able to wean and hold onto calves because feed resources were [affordable and plentiful] but it’s more expensive now, so fewer ranchers are holding onto cattle,” says Kelsey.

Changes in the market, in how technology is utilized and how ranchers operate their businesses have all impacted the industry to the point that the past’s early generations might be completely unfamiliar with how things work today, at least on the surface.

“My great-great-grandfather would be amazed at how far we’ve come,” says rancher Gentner Drummond, whose 25,000-acre ranch is located near Pawhuska. “He’d feel we lost it all, that we had lost the things he’d valued.”

Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott?

In many ways, however, Drummond’s tale is a powerful reminder of the legacy honored by countless ranchers in the Sooner State.

Drummond’s great-grandfather was eldest son of a Scotsman who traveled to Oklahoma in the 1880s to trade with the Osage. The family stayed, and there are now some 182 family members in the sixth generation. The family’s original 160 acres was leased in a trade with the Osage, and today, oil wells on the property creating wealth for the Osage Nation – not the Drummonds – are a powerful reminder of the origin of their now-significant ranch holdings.

Still, Drummond says there are things that have stayed the same and some that have changed enough that they would confuse his predecessors.

“Ranching has evolved so much from the time of my great-grandfather,” Drummond says. “He’d probably shake his head in dismay at the automation, at networks of ponds – things he would have never imagined.”

Still, Drummond says, “I know this land.”

Tulsa attorney Wendy Drummond, Gentner Drummond’s wife, recognized the drive in her husband from the beginning.

“From the moment I met him, I knew that the most important thing to him was building and making the ranch sustainable for our children,” Wendy Drummond says.

Despite changes, the work remains largely the same. Cows must be cared for, kept healthy, fed and eventually utilized for their ultimate purpose – the production of beef cattle that, when sold, supports the ranch and provides investment capital for continuity.

But details have certainly changed.

“When I was a boy, we had 12 men working the ranch,” Drummond says. “Now, with technology, it takes only five men. When I was a boy, the typical pasture was 1,200 acres, so you needed that many men. Today, we’re more strategic and have smaller pastures. With each pasture, you need a pond, and you have to build those. Every year we dig at least 10 ponds.”

Feeding, too, is easier today with automated machinery and large vehicles.

“When I was a boy, we’d load a truck and my brother and I would load square bales of hay to distribute,” he says. “Today, with automation, we require decreased manpower and increased productivity.”

The laws of supply and demand are also influential on the ranching industry today.

“Thirty years ago, zero percent of our cattle were fed on grain,” Drummond continues.

Ranchers today have to know biology and soil, Drummond says.

“Who is an environmentalist and who is not is the first lesson I learned as a young boy,” Drummond says. “I was taught that we don’t own the land, we are the land’s stewards, with the idea to pass it on. As I figure it, I’m in the business of growing grass. The picture of today’s ranchers is of people with college degrees in ecology or agriculture.”

Newley Hutchison followed the college path himself for three and a half years before returning home. “Home” is a series of seven ranch sites in northwest Oklahoma that date back to the late 19th century.

“My great-great-grandfather came into the Oklahoma Territory in 1893, but he was 17 and too young to stake a claim on land,” Hutchison says. “So he traded a shotgun and $60 for the original acreage. Six generations of our family have lived here.”

Hutchison calls the cattle operation “a family affair,” consisting of numerous members of the expanded family.

However, Hutchison himself once considered leaving the ranching life and its remote nature, which led to his nearly four years in college.

“I went to college and kind of realized that home wasn’t so bad,” he says. “I think we all went through something like that. We got out of the county and learned to come back.”

It is that attachment to the land that ranchers have in common, and it is the source of much of the romanticism “city slickers” associate with the working rural lifestyle. Reality is different, but perhaps not as different as some might think.

“Ranching is a great, great way of life,” Hutchison says. “You just don’t quit. You have to love it and have a passion for it. You don’t get time off. I think people might misjudge the actual work that goes into livestock. I don’t really have any hobbies, except ranches and farms. But I feel we are blessed to live the way we do it. It’s just non-stop.”

Wendy Drummond has a particular perspective when it comes to contemporary highs and lows in ranching. She grew up in southern California, so ranch life – and work – was not terribly familiar when she married Gentner Drummond.

“On a typical winter weekend, as soon as there is light, we load up the feed truck and spend five or six hours feeding one-third of the ranch each day,” Wendy Drummond says. “Counting cattle is also not an easy thing. It has to be done, and it isn’t as if they stand still. We have to feed, count and examine for health each cow.”

While it is work – and hard work – it is also labor a million figurative miles away from being a high-powered Tulsa attorney.

“Actually, in a certain way, there is a lot of solitude, a lot of quiet,” she says. “It’s kind of relaxing after being a lawyer all week. It might be cold, but there is very little stress. When it freezes, we have to cut holes in the ponds so the cattle can drink. In really bad weather, calves can freeze. You become very familiar with the cycle of life and death.”

Wendy Drummond says that when she returns from the city to the scenic ranch, she could easily see herself giving up her career away from the ranch.

“It’s a simple life, but so, so rich,” she says. “There’s the animals, and the people are so warm – they are part of the family. When there is a fire out here, you see it. Everyone turns out to fight the fire. There is a really warm quilt of people associated with ranching.”

Gentner Drummond mentions some ranch workers who might not be anachronistic but who would probably make his forefathers proud.

“We have two men who work for us, our foremen, who have been with us for three generations now,” he says. “They don’t want four-wheelers. Every morning, they saddle up their horses, and they treat the acreage and the cattle as if they were their own. They don’t want technology. To them, what they do is the highest and best calling. These men would kill for the land. There is a relationship between the men, the land and the cattle. You just can’t be more traditional, and more committed, than that.”

Neither Gentner nor Wendy Drummond has any problem identifying the moments of the rural side of their dual lifestyle that are most impactful.

“There’s nothing more gratifying than to be on the ranch as the sun sets, with rays of light across the meadows, the creeks and the hills – to see the sun go down with someone you love and with the land that you love,” says Drummond.

Wendy Drummond says there is only one recurring moment she likes even more.

“For me, it’s the early morning. It’s silent. Dew is on the ground. The light is so beautiful,” she says.

Her husband points out something that may come across as unusual to Oklahomans more accustomed to pavement and cement.

“We have a symbiotic relationship with the ranch – we know when it’s healthy,” he says. “And there are discoveries every sub-season. In April there are the early flowers. Everything blooms in its own season, and it’s a beautiful connection to the land. In the country, everything is regulated by nature. It’s a very spiritual thing.”

The Cowboy Way

It’s changed. Ranching. There’s little doubt of this, when ranchers are better educated, better acquainted with the use of technology and capable of employing it to meet the ever-increasing global demand for protein.

With change has come challenges. Draught has certainly been among those chief challenges. In the past few years, some ranchers have driven out of state to acquire hay necessary to supplement herds. Prices have risen astronomically for the cattle-raising necessities. In 2013, in parts of the state, draught impact has retreated.

“Statewide, yes, there are areas with lots of hay – it might even turn out to be the largest haul of hay in a long time,” says Reese. “But other parts of the state, particularly the southwest part of Oklahoma, might not be as bad as 2011, but they aren’t much better. Certainly they have not received enough rain to recover. But if you look at the ‘green map’ of 2011 compared to that of 2013, there has certainly been improvement in some areas.”

Reese says that draught and the powerful effect of Midwest weather are the chief challenges to ranching today.

“We’re very dependent on weather,” he says. “When weather is good, things are good. When weather is dry, there are very many challenges.”

In a tough marketplace, Drummond says that the margin of error has shrunk dramatically.

“My grandfather’s operation could afford to be less precise,” he says. “Now, with the prices of vaccinations, machinery, supplements and capital improvements – even the price of land – the capital to have an economy of scale requires great skill and offers smaller margins. We make less money than we did 10 years ago. That’s the biggest challenge: economic viability. The only answer is debt management; you can’t carry debt.”

After ecological factors, Kelsey calls federal regulation the third-largest challenge to ranching today.

“It’s a long-term trend,” he says. “The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has introduced well over 1,000 rules and regulations over the past six years. Not all have been enacted. But we’re seeing a trend toward a federal government push for more, beyond even current regulation. Regulation is pushing up the cost of compliance; plus there is a higher cost of transportation. We’re heavily dependent on the cost of transportation. Plus there’s the particulate matter material regulation – dust – and fuel storage regulations. It’s definitely a trend.”

Hutchison sums up recent federal regulation easily.

“It’s getting tough,” he says. “As one tiny example, I had to go 70 miles to get a CDL license to operate machinery on my own land. It’s so many things, from so many different angles, that there are new regulations daily. Plus, obviously we have to pay attention to inheritance taxes and such.

Passing down the ranch to the next generation has always been the plan, and we have to watch to make sure that will somehow still be possible. We all meet twice a year just to discuss how to keep up with the tax environment to try to keep property in the family.”

The past few years have been challenging, theoretically, to rural people, farmers and ranchers. Even before being elected, President Barack Obama said his plan for energy included necessary increases in the cost of energy; and subsequent proposed policies have included an attempted ban on youngsters under 16 doing work on family farms and ranches, environmental controls over both dust and hay that would have conceivably eliminated the small farmer and a tax on cows for their excretion of gases contributing to “climate change.”

Drummond feels less oppressed by new regulation and proposed regulation.

“A properly run ranch has zero concern for regulation,” he says.

Reese points out that farmers and ranchers are fiercely independent and generally not excited about new regulation. After all, agriculture policy in Washington D.C. is mostly driven by support for the growing of corn for ethanol, which enriches many large corn growers, particularly in Iowa, the location of the first presidential caucus and to whose fidelity candidates for higher office must pledge.

Mommas, Do Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys

With all the environmental, economic and regulatory challenges facing ranchers today, has the American cultural icon of the cattle rancher passed into history like the saloon gunfighter and the flawless politician?

Those challenges are not easy to ignore.

“It’s almost impossible for a young person to get into [cattle ranching] without an ‘in,’ such as family,” says Hutchinson. “I’m 39. There aren’t many 39-year-old ranchers and there are sure not many 29-year-old ranchers. The investment is so high, the risk so much – it is just hard to get into. There are a lot of older farmers and ranchers. You have to have some kind of backing to get into it.”

Despite challenges both man-made and natural, there remain reasons to be upbeat, some feel.

“I think we’re generally optimistic,” says Reese. “Part of that is that the world population continues to grow, and people are more aware of the acreage that is available for food production. Food security is more in people’s minds. We’ve been blessed with plentiful availability of low-cost food since the country was founded. There is so much more technology and information available to this generation.”

Kelsey also says the industry is “optimistic.”

But he also points out that the average age of the rancher is not young. However, “there’s some trends that might lend a clue, and I’m taking some confidence from it. We know that upward of 70 percent of land used for agriculture will change hands. A lot will be transferred generationally, but a lot will be marketed and sold. A lot of widows with children not interested in agriculture will sell. It will be bought.”

Kelsey’s optimism stems from a large number of younger people coming to the organization’s meetings.

“There’s been an influx,” he says. “I think we’re seeing young people with genuine interest in food-animal production. They’re going to figure out how to do it.”

Kelsey indicates he meant from an economic perspective in the current environment. “It might end up like a rental situation or a modern version of something like what used to be called ‘share-cropping,’” he says. “But they will figure out how to make it work. They will think outside the box, figure it out and make it work. We’re seeing renewed interest. It’s hard work, but these young folk show promise in keeping it alive.”

Debra Zinke prepares a rustic buffet with gourmet flair for cowboys and friends at Z7 Bar Ranch. The meal features beef tri-tip and rotisserie chicken prepared in her outdoor kitchen.
Photo by John Amatucci/Amatucci Photography

Z7 Bar Ranch

Z7 Bar Ranch is a 3,000-acre spread in the rolling hills of Osage County on the Osage Nation Reservation. The picturesque setting could easily serve as the backdrop for a Hollywood blockbuster, so it’s understandable that owner Debra Zinke, who resides in Tulsa, has found herself spending increasingly more time on the ranch.

Four years ago, Zinke created a more permanent space for herself when she converted part of an old barn into an elegantly appointed apartment. The small space contains all the modern conveniences, and interior design from Doug Campbell and SR Hughes mixes high-end and modern furnishings with humble artifacts of the West.

Make no mistake, though. This isn’t the sort of playground ranch that a movie star might own. This is a real commercial ranch, producing registered Salers, Angus and Optimizer cattle. The operation is steeped in the traditions of Green Country ranching, and Zinke is a hands-on owner that is involved in every aspect of the business. However, her favorite role may be that of the ranch’s head chef and hostess.

Zinke’s ranch home has a small kitchen, but she says the majority of the cooking happens in one of the best-appointed outdoor kitchens you’ll find anywhere, which was built for her by Don Mo.

“I wanted an outdoor kitchen that had everything you could possibly need and where I could feed a crowd,” says Zinke. “We use it all the time. It’s such a beautiful and peaceful place to relax at the end of the day or entertain guests.”

Zinke jokes that ranch food is all about packing on the calories, and she frequently cooks big meals that are sure to satisfy a cowboy appetite. She also takes the same approach to food that she does to interior design. Her favorite dishes are decidedly gourmet, but, at their heart, they’re honest dishes made from simple ingredients – local beef, chicken and abundant fresh vegetables. And there’s always dessert and, hopefully, great wine.

A Bar Ranch

“There’s nothing better than a campfire and food always tastes better when you’ve cooked it on the ground,” says Martha Armitage.

Along with her husband Mike, Armitage owns A Bar Ranch, a cow-calf ranch and marketing company with operations in Rogers and Mayes counties in northeast Oklahoma. In addition to running a successful ranch, they’ve gained more than a bit of local fame for their chuck wagon cooking.

Armitage says she’s always enjoyed campfires, so when she and her family encountered a chuck wagon at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, it wasn’t long before they bought their own wagon and outfitted it for cooking. Things really got going when they entered a chili cook-off organized by Hammett House Restaurant in Claremore. After winning that event for several years, they started getting requests to cook at special events such as the Christmas Train at Dry Gulch, weddings and family celebrations.

The A Bar Ranch chuck wagon might well be a booming business of its own, but Armitage says it takes too much time away from the nonstop business of a working ranch. However, food is an integral part of this business and lifestyle.

“Sometimes we eat dinner late,” Armitage says. “In the summer, it may be 9 or 9:30. When the work is done, that’s when you get to eat.”

A Bar Ranch employs four full-time ranchers and is a family affair. Their son Merrit manages the family’s Squaw Creek Division in Mayes County, and son Turner, a junior at OSU, pitches in when he’s on break. Even Merrit’s wife Michelle is drafted during cattle sales.

“[Meals are] the way we stay connected, both as a family and for the business,” says Armitage. “We discuss what went on during the day and what are the plans for the next day.”

Like most ranchers, Armitage is a tireless evangelist for the benefits of beef, and she’s quick to point out that despite being hearty, stick-to-your-ribs food, ranch cuisine is healthy.

“Beef is healthy and quick to prepare,” says Armitage. “People think it takes a long time or is hard to cook, but it’s really not, and there are a lot of simple, economical recipes. If you take a little time to prepare, it’s so much healthier than getting something at the drive through.”

Kubik Ranch

When you live on a ranch that’s 17 miles from the nearest grocery store, food is always on your mind. Not only is the production of food your livelihood, feeding your family requires planning.

“We don’t have the luxury of going out to eat any time we want,” says Lisa Kubik. “My daughter-in-law Heather and I do a lot of cooking, and we have to be organized. You can’t just run to the store if you don’t have something.”

Lisa, a self-confessed city girl, married into the Kubik family, which owns a cow-calf ranch in the foothills of Kay County. Ranching is in the Kubik DNA. Lisa’s husband, Jeff, is a fourth-generation rancher, and he’s surrounded by family every day. His brother Mark and sons Ross and Matt work on the ranch, and his 88-year-old father, Lynn, also lends a hand.

Lisa owns her own CPA business but also holds the title of “gopher girl” on the ranch, running errands, making trips to the veterinary clinic and such. Heather is a fourth grade teacher in Ponca City, operates her own photography studio and cares for two small children, but she doesn’t escape ranch work.

“When Ross needs to doctor a cow, I help out. I do whatever I can. We all do,” says Heather.

But for Heather and mother-in-law Lisa, their chief contribution to the ranch is keeping everyone fed. That means cooking nearly every day of the week and making sure there are leftovers or other quick but filling foods to eat for lunch.

“On Sunday, we always have family dinner at my house or Ross’ parents’ house, and we cook together,” Heather says. Those meals include family favorites such as meatloaf and potatoes, Cowboy beans, lasagna and roast beef – anything with beef, an ingredient that is always in abundance.

While many of these dishes require preparation and considerable time in the kitchen, these two busy wives and mothers are always happy to find an easier way to provide healthy foods for their families. Heather scours the internet for recipes that can also make a quick meal or snack for the kids. One family favorite that she found on Pinterest uses low-fat packaged crescent roll dough, a little butter, spice and an apple slice to create a bite-size pie that does double duty as a tasty dessert or quick snack on the go.

Before becoming one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the world, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first love was writing songs.  

“From the age of 15, I was really passionate about composing songs,” says the Japanese-born British novelist, who is the winner of the Tulsa Library Trust’s 2013 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. “Like a lot of teenage boys, I was a pathetic reader; I never contemplated becoming an author.”

In his early 20s, Ishiguro abandoned his boyhood dream to write songs when he was accepted into Malcolm Bradbury’s creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, where he started his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. He says he couldn’t write songs and novels at the same time, so he hung up his songwriter’s hat. (He retrieved it about five years ago when he was asked to write songs for American jazz artist Stacey Kent.)

“As the years have gone by, I think that a lot of the way I write fiction was shaped by my early songwriting,” says Ishiguro. “Like in songwriting, the meaning of my novels and short stories tends to fall between the lines. I like that quiet surface.”

Ishiguro’s novels commonly deal with issues of memory, self-deception and codes of etiquette, which lead his characters to re-evaluate their successes or failures. His novels include the 1989 Man Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into an award-winning feature film in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson; An Artist of the Floating World; The Unconsoled; When We Were Orphans; and Never Let Me Go, which was adapted into a feature film in 2010 for which he served as executive producer. His most recent work is Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.

“Each of my books was written in a very different time in my life,” says Ishiguro, when asked if he has a favorite. “For better or worse, each represents me in that time.”

Currently, he is finishing a novel that he hopes will be published in 2014. He started it about five to six years ago but briefly stepped away when his wife, Lorna, who is his best sounding board, told him that she thought it was terrible and that he should just drop it.

   “In fact, she says it was atrocious,” says Ishiguro. “I was a bit naughty, though, and went back to it but kept it a bit ambiguous from her. I’ve reworked it, but it’s the same project without a doubt. I don’t generally like to give away too much before it gets published. But I will tell you that it is set around the year 500 in Great Britain. There’s a mysterious blank in British history once the Roman Empire left and before the Anglo Saxons came. There probably was another race here before the Anglo Saxons arrived; [the Anglo Saxons] might have killed them off. Nobody knows what happened to them. It gives me an amount of freedom to speculate what happened to them. I don’t have any historical interest in this time period; it’s just pragmatic.”

Through his career, Ishiguro says this question of setting tends to dominate how his books are read.

“If I set a book in Japan or Great Britain, people seem to think it’s about something political or cultural. I am not a historian. There’s a part of me that wants to be liberated from those concerns. There is a certain freedom that comes when you choose a period that people don’t care about. That is why I was drawn to this time period for my new book. I want my story to be read as universal.”

Award presentation at black-tie dinner:

7 p.m., Friday, Dec. 6
Southern Hills Country Club, 2636 E. 61st St.
 

FREE Public Presentation:

10:30 a.m., Saturday, Dec. 7
Hardesty Regional Library, Connor's Cove, 8316 E. 93rd St.

Some girls are natural performers and shine from the get-go. From show choir to drama class, pageants and cheerleading, they are born to be in front of an audience.

Only a handful of them, however, shine bright enough to grow up to become stars. Oklahoma City native Aisha Eustache is a rising star who has taken her gifts all the way from those numerous childhood performances to the Big Apple to show the music world what she can do with her beautiful voice.

With vocals as smooth as velvet, her style captures the simple elegance and sophistication of influences such as Sade and Ella Fitzgerald with Motown and R&B undertones.

Eustache’s debut EP, Love & Addiction, explores the humanity in emotions, touching on romantic, loyal love, as well as the darker side of human nature and addictive tendencies.

Eustache wrote all of the songs on the EP and says that she draws inspiration from everyday moments.

“Moments in the valley reflecting on losing my grandfather or making songs up in my kitchen while I cook. Moments looking at two or three stars in the NYC sky while longing for the simplicity and beauty of Oklahoma. My lead single, ‘Faithful,’ is really close to my heart.  I wrote the song last fall for my guy in our home. It was a really beautiful moment of fulfillment, and I am thankful it could be memorialized in song,” she says.

“Falling in and out and finally staying in love has really shaped me as a woman and shapes my lyrics. Spirituality, life lessons and experiences (have all influenced me)… how Oklahoma is so innocent and peaceful in one moment, yet how fierce she is when tornadoes are unleashed to dance across the plains… NYC, with its enlivening energy and dichotomous socioeconomic and multicultural structure… It’s all in the lyrics, the emotional space and the melody.”

After years of writing music, performing and traveling around the country with different musicians and producers, Eustache moved to NYC with $500 to her name nine years ago and has since stretched herself as an artist.

She says that her ear for music has grown leaps and bounds with Love & Addiction, and that her understanding of production, engineering and layers of recording has expanded.

“It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. There are challenges, but nothing that isn’t for my own growth and pruning. When I stopped telling myself how impossible this was and started putting one foot in front of the other each day, things started happening.  I just had to leap,” Eustache says.
“We all experience adversity in some way or another. Fear of failure, fear of happiness, fear of reaching our full potential, fear of not being good enough… fear has been my biggest adversity and challenge on this journey. I haven’t mastered it yet, but my faith, family and friends love me through the fear and help me navigate the waves.”

Crooner extraordinaire Harry Connick Jr. will take his place at the judges’ table of “American Idol” in January. If you’re a fan, you won’t need to wait that long to catch him. The Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards-winning singer and actor will bring the best of his incredible career to Oklahoma in November. Connick plays the Oklahoma Civic Center Music Hall, 201 N. Walker Ave., at 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11. Tickets are $55-$65. He’ll move to the Hard Rock Tulsa Hotel & Casino, 777 W. Cherokee St., in Catoosa for an engagement at the Joint, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16. Tickets to the performance are $84-$125. As a multiplatinum recording artist of great American standards, Connick is a tall drink of nostalgia. As a Broadway star, he’s a reminder of what debonair used to be. And because he’ll endure a line of “Idol” hopefuls between now and Christmas while seated next to J Lo, Connick is our hero. Get the tickets at www.okcciviccenter.com and at www.hardrockcasinotulsa.com.

Monday, Nov. 11, 11 a.m.

When you see that line of cars, marching bands and floats turn Tulsa’s corner of Second Street and Boulder Avenue on Monday morning, you’ll know what patriotism is all about. The Tulsa Veteran Day Parade begins at 11 a.m. Monday, Nov. 11, and is expected to draw another large crowd to honor America’s veterans. Hosted by the American Legion Post No. 1 of Tulsa and the VFW Post 577 in Tulsa, the annual parade is one of the largest in the region and brings out numerous participants, including ROTC, members from the National Guard and branches of the armed forces as well as their supporters. City offices will be closed in observance of Veterans Day. Will you observe, too? For more, check out www.vfwpost.577.org.

Thursday, Nov. 7, 7:30 p.m.

If you want to hear the Baroque masters, if you want to hear some Dixieland, if you want to hear Broadway’s greatest hits, then Canadian Brass is who to call. The legendary quintet with more than 90 albums and still going strong after 40 years brings its unique musical virtuosity to the Armstrong Auditorium, 14400-B S. Bryant Road, in Edmond. Acclaimed for its sparkling arrangements, charm and wit, Canadian Brass is set to impress in this showcase of musical transcendence. Tickets are $20-$45, available at www.armstrongauditorium.org.