Memories with Morning Glory!

Hey Jewel Fans! As we run up to the celebration of Jewel Riders 30th Anniversary, we wanted to share this amazing essay on Jewel Riders from Natalie, aka Morning Glory back in the days of Stormy’s Avalon website. She was a prolific artist and writer of the original online Jewel Riders community, and I have many good memories of enjoy her creative talents. This was an absolute pleasure to read, and brought back so many good memories. I hope you enjoy as much as I did!
Jewel Power!

– Chris

This is Morning Glory-chan reporting for duty after somewhat of a decade (or two!!) hiatus. I might need to re-introduce myself as the elementary and middle school student who loved to draw and design characters, compose and play music, and write fanfic that forever was unfinished ^^;;. We’ll get back to that part of the journey.

Here lately, my mother decided she was going to start cleaning the basement of my childhood home and recruited her older sister (heh, you know, my Aunt – who is a minimalist!) to help her organize. Somehow my younger brother and I didn’t want to part with some of our childhood toys and memories, and our parents’ basement was large enough to store them, and our musical equipment, and sound system, and… you get the idea. Auntie and Mom lovingly made piles for the both of us. As both of us now have houses of our own, we need to corral all loving possessions into our own abodes as one would see!

Anyway, after moving my creations/possessions/hoardings (!!) from point A to their final spots, I started to go through each box. I KNEW there were paper pieces in binders that I would NOT want to just store in the garage or even the barn up on the hill (for the tractor and such – we have some acreage ^^;;). After going through my storage binders from 3rd grade (even before PGJR) until a little after college, I realized the impact Jewel Riders had on my whole creative life. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to some of the best parts later.)

I’ve always been amazing at making a short story long. So… I guess making a long story short is probably out of the question. (!) Let’s just try with this:

One random Sunday morning before Church I woke up earlier than normal. Everyone else was upstairs, still asleep. While you’re thinking of me turning on the TV, this was in the mid-90’s and we still had a large TV in a wooden casing… Thankfully we had a VCR (OH my saving GRACE – we’ll get to that in a second too 😉

Somehow on a random Sunday, 5th grade me got some cereal and tried to find something on TV before I had to get ready for Sunday School. I caught the last couple episodes of the first season of PGJR. Actually, Badlands was the first episode I caught. Wow. Instantly hooked. Talking unicorns and animals… magic jewels, magical girls, again… TALKING UNICORNS? Um… yes!! I got wise and set my VCR to tape the remaining episodes. I got a little frantic at the end… I’d only seen the last half of the series, would it air again? Oh thankfully it did. The friendship, the partnership, the magical talking animals; heck, that was probably my favorite part. Magic stones/jewels and talking animals that love music. Wow. My world had been made. The ladies were secondary to me, but… in most cases, the stories revolved more around them than the animals. So, okay, we’ll go with it.

Don’t ever tell, but I even got my little brother into watching it with me before we had to get ready on Sundays. He’ll probably deny it up and down now, but before I got any of the dolls, we used to make our own ‘Riders’ figures out of legos in the house, and we were blessed to have and show horses in 4-H, so we’d play ‘Riders’ around the yard. I had graduated to a sweet appaloosa gelding ‘Pepper’ and my brother had my quarter pony ‘Dusty’ (Ahem – Stardust: she had a perfect white star in the middle of her forehead where a unicorn horn would have been. My cousins also showed horses and we all came up with a whole theory how the white markings on horses’ faces were just how their unicorn horn finally came off. Just saying ^_^:). After we got done practicing riding drills in the round pen, we’d cool down the horses in the woods, we had a path. We’d play ‘Riders’ through the path – sometimes we’d both go, sometimes it was just me, but the idea of being a magical rider was appealing, and leads to what happens next!

I took a weird test in early 3rd grade. I never found out the results of the test (and ha! Still to this day, I don’t know what they were…) but I went one full day a week to a TAG program, first couple years across the parking lot… then it was moved to a room across the district, we got on a bus once a week to go to this class at a completely different elementary school. Compiling what I learned from all that was I liked to draw and I liked to write, and I LOVED learning how to manipulate a computer. 3rd grade me loved drawing and writing stories.

Bloom into 4th grade me, loving to draw and writing stories. 5th grade, 6th grade… you can imagine. I had already started to write short stories once we hooked up the old Lazer computer (wow… OLD), but for some reason, script writing was my main focus. Fast forward into when I discovered Jewel Riders and started writing scripts for it (haha and this was before I had the internet and knew any better!!). Parents bought an upgraded Gateway computer for me/(hah: not just me…US) and it finally connected to the internet. Side note: also bought an upgraded version of Cakewalk – music programming software – and we’ll come back to this ♪♫

World change. Late Elementary school and (I PROMISE!!) responsible use of the internet. NO ONE ELSE even knew about Jewel Riders (other than myself and my brother…or so I thought). I found a page that Stormy started and messaged her right away. We became internet pals. I hate this now, I can’t think of her name at the moment: but I also had another friend in Canada around my age that also liked Jewel Riders… (I really remember her name being Lisa) I remember she loved Fallon. She sent me traced sketches she would adorn Fallon in all kinds of amazing fashions, like modern (hah, well… 90s fashions ^_^;;). How I WISH I still had those. ♥♥

After I met Stormy online, my Jewel Riders life changed forever for the good! ♥ I sent pictures to her (on my own, and also by happy request) and she would scan them and put them on her Jewel Riders page (and send then back… with gifts! – ♥ mention for later ♥) After digging through my own archives, I found some of the ‘baby’ forms of the unicorns.

Stormy’s gifts are still treasured to this day. She sent me subtitled anime’ and it also changed my world, my love of languages and (hey I am learning Japanese through Rosetta! ^^;) cultures around the world also expanded. An initial connection through Jewel Riders helped expand my life exponentially.

Note from the Archive: you can read more about Stormy’s Avalon site and see more of Morning Glory’s artwork over at our retrospective by Stormy herself on the early days of fandom!

Cycling back to music, believe it or not, I turned out to be a K-12 music teacher and professional musician… or well.. I’ve recorded on a few albums in Nashville, TN and multiple albums in NC and OH-IO! I’ve performed throughout the East coast, Midwest, and even internationally with my college singing group and in more recent years, in regional areas (OH, WV, VA, NC, even one in TX!) with family and friends in bands. So hey, I play and write music and get paid, that’s professional, right? I won’t quit my teaching day job. ^_^;; I am blessed to currently play in a family band, ‘The Davissons’ with my parents, brother, and uncle; we’re currently working on an original album! I also play country music in the Ashley Huffer trio, in a 50+ year old Dixieland Jazz band; ‘The Goosetown Astonishers,’ and my brother and I still hang together, now in a musical duo: Nick ‘n’ Nat.

Let’s get back to the story of music and Cakewalk. I believe my dad (also a music major and musician) had some kind of vision for me from the start. I started piano lessons at 4 and learned to read music before I (formally) learned how to read in Kindergarten. I was writing songs early and wrote my first (full length!) musical in 3rd grade. (But let’s please also note that I completely – unknowingly – stole the title song from Glass Tiger’s ‘Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone.’ – my heart was broken when I heard it play – ‘THAT’S MY SONG DAD!’ I argued… Dad laughed. ‘Nope. This one has been out since the 80’s… try again.’ LOL. Tough love.)

Like I said, I love to make a short story long. I have to give you all the details. Get back to Jewel Riders, Nat.. err.. Glory haha. Well, after being trained in piano and family trained in singing, I would play the songs from Jewel Riders on the TV super loud and then run into the adjoining room (hah, the music room!) and figure out the key and the chords. (Why would they record the Jewel Riders theme song in F-sharp???? 6 sharps?? – studio magic I later learned in recording school, but alas. – For those interested, they most likely recorded it in the one sharp key of G. Depending on the singer’s range, in the last bit of the recording stage, sound engineers can speed up or slow down the recording, therefore putting it in a different key to fit the singer’s voice – hence, slowing everything down slightly to make the music go down a half step to F-sharp. Bam. Mystery now solved. The opposite would be the Chipmunks where you speed it up and the voices sing super high!)

Mom and Dad had me performing on stage at age 4, so I had been in a few talent shows at school with them playing guitars and singing harmony. My first talent show playing on my own was a piano version of “I’ve Found A Friend in You’ from the last episode of Jewel Riders. Dad still played the bass with me, so that kind of disqualified me (hah, I don’t care… especially not now)… I still got honorable mention though.

I had an updated version of Cakewalk at that point for my (LOL) Gateway and learned how to set up my own primitive version of a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I think I recorded more than half a dozen Jewel Riders songs for Stormy’s Avalon page. Dad helped me figure out the chords quite a bit, he is a champ… sitting through Jewel Riders episodes until the song came up and I’d play it OVER and OVER until I learned it. (Now, please note, this is elementary school me, so I didn’t have quite the musical training that I do now… so you can imagine how many TIMES we went through one song ^_^;;). He’d sit patiently with his guitar in the living room with the TV and I’d turn on the tape and run to the piano in the music room. He’d yell out the chords if I was struggling. After finally getting those down, I’d transfer that new knowledge to the keyboard and workstation I had hooked up to the computer in my room. YAY! Poof. Digital recording acquired! The Jewel Riders soundtrack was the first recording I ever made. It took me writing this to realize that. Whoa.

Friend~2 jrtheme Jrm-box

Lastly…(from above!) I am sorry for discontinuing my stories. Being untrained as a writer, or well, just being a young writer…. I loved creating the characters and some sense of purpose… but… I could never write their end. At this point, maybe character creation/construction is what I actually love to do. I would draw them everyday in different ways. I had all kinds of ideas of where I wanted them to go, but turning that into a story with an ending was the struggle… LOL I avoided it. So again, I apologize. You deserve to know the endings. From what I can remember: Anastasia is the Unicorn Maiden – forever caught between a human and unicorn world (the true power of the intact Star Stone), Knight Star and SunStar have twins (Helios and Selene), Helios makes the decision to become human forever (through the Star Stone from his father, which then shatters/disintegrates completely) and returns his half of the Sun Stone because he has fallen in love with Princess Allura and he decides they can no longer be just ‘friends.’

Note from the Archive: You can read Morning Glory’s fiction right here on the Archive over in our Fan Fiction section!

Click here to see a listing of all the chapters of her stories.

So, enough about me and all the backstory. You now know me enough to share a friendship bracelet or an enchanted jewel half! ☼ ♥♪♫

Please let me show you some of the lost art and visions I have had past two decades!

We want to thank Natalie again for taking the time to share her memories with us and the fans. If you’d like to hear more from her, Natalie is a guest on the first episode of our podcast!