Saturday, December 09, 2000
Today went much better! We worked with high school students in Chandler, OK all day who were very creative and enthusiastic. There are only about 65 students per class in the school so it was quite a change in atmosphere from La Joya High which had about 1,200 students per class. The whole day felt very relaxed and fun (even though it was one of our longer ones with a show and four workshops). Our drive to Longview, TX even went smoothly, no flats or anything. We were even lucky enough to stumble across Dudley's Cajun Restaurant (where we had once eaten over a year ago) on our way to the hotel. It's strange when you can find your way around all kinds of towns in American when you've been on the road as long as we have. I must admit i'm ready for the winter break. We still have a week in Lafayette, LA to go, but i'm starting to pine for some quiet time with my cat. It will help being in one place for a week. The packing everything each morning is what tires me out the most. I wrote a song last summer with the refrain: Friday, December 08, 2000 Well, it's been a long day. We started at 8am Rocky Mountain Time with a flat tire that took 4 1/2 hours to take care of properly. UGGGHHH! Then we had a long drive into Oklahoma that put us here finally at 10:45pm Central Time. Ellen Cherry Charles kept us company along the way, but i'm ready for sleeeeep. We start early tomorrow. To top it off we're in no local access zone for Earthlink so that's why this is brief. We start bright and early tomorrow at 8:20am. Tomorrow has to be a smoother day.~w Thursday, December 07, 2000 I've had a hankering for good middle eastern food lately since we keep reading about the tasty fair at Isaac & Ishmael's in Skinny Legs & All. I thought we'd be out of luck in Albuquerque, but ciro's friend Dave came to the rescue. He led us to a little hole in the wall called the Middle East Bakery Cafe here that was simply marvelous! It's made the alibi's list more that once as best in it's class. I highly recommend the baba ghanooj! So, cravings satisfied we made a visit to the Double Rainbow for some coffee and talk. But i was feeling like moving not sitting, so i suggested a trip to the Pueblo Cultural Center (i finally convinced ciro that it was a good idea cuz he could get cigarettes cheap there). As i wandered through the gift shop (mostly looking for holiday cards like the ones i got there last year) i couldn't help but notice that the jewelry and pottery seemed a little bit more expensive and less artistic there than at the pueblos we'd visited this tour. We have visited both the Acoma Sky City pueblo and actually performed at Dowa Yallane Elementary in the Zuni pueblo. After seeing those the Center was kind of a watered down "fast food" version of the experience. It seemed a lot more interesting last year when i hadn't been to the pueblos. I did find some cards i like though and enjoyed the walk. Finally, and most importantly probably, we drove up to Gary Glazner's place just south of Santa Fe where we were wined and dined to our hearts' content. Gary is the poet it residence now for the Inn on the Alameda in Sante Fe (one of the coolest poet jobs i've ever heard of). Gary also organized the Slam America bus tour this past summer and was kind enough to include me in the Poetry Slam Anthology that he edited for Manic D Press. (There's even more about Gary at About.com.) The only problem with the evening was that i tried to say hello to Fred (the aussie blue heeler) while he was gnawing on a bone. Bad idea. But Fred warmed up to me later when i fed him Mr. Barky biscuit and also a few salmon droppings while appetizing in the living room (shhh, don't tell Gary about the salmon). The stew Gary made was delicious and even included an artichoke (which is the subject of my poem in the anthology). After dinner we got to see the beginnings of the Slam America video and browse through Gary and Margaret's photos from their world poetry tour. Between the cold brillance of the desert night sky and the warmth of the fire and friendship and poetry inside it was a lovely and refreshing evening all around. Gary and his lovely wife Margaret are wonderful hosts. I left with a full heart and belly.~w
After numerous tried I finally successfully downloaded the new netscape 6. I looks really swanky, but was a pain in the you-know-what to get up and running (ciro who has a mac found that it caused so many problems on his machine that he finally trashed it and reloaded an older version). It also seems to load pages much slower that MSIE5. But, i did notice that suddenly Pony's page looks much better. Unfortunately, the Lioness Den page never stops reloading. This typifies the frustration that i've been having putting together and updating both pages on my site and the Poetry Alive! site lately. It seems like the fancier i try to get, the harder it is to make the page work in both browsers. My goal is to make a page that loads quickly and looks cool, but i keep running into snags (the biggest being those little hover buttons). So for now, the buttons on parts of my site still don't load with netscape until i rewrite them all and i can't load a new dhtml page to the Poetry Alive! site until i iron out the quirks. Urgh. I need to find a good cross-browser tutorial for web building. Or at least a language that works for them both...(which to choose, dhtml, css, xml, javascript???) What started out as a fun little puzzle has become rather frustrating. any suggestions out there?~w Wednesday, December 06, 2000 The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks, passed away on Sunday. I am very sad that i never was blessed with the opportunity to hear her read her work. I have heard that she was still an amazing presence even last year at 82 when performing for 600 students. Rumor has it that she was a sweet and gentle soul whose spirit will be sorely missed. For myself i can only say that i am truly amazed by her work. As I performed her poem Keziah today for elementary students i silently sent out well wishes for her passing to that "secret place" where the wind is never rough. We also perform her poem The Bean Eaters in the high school show, which one of very few poems i know to have brought tears the eyes of audience members. Gwendolyn herself scrawled out by hand the permission for Poetry Alive! to perform her work in our shows, and when a performer once introduced himself to her as being a member of Poetry Alive! she responded, "that's with an exclamation point!" I only wish i could have met her. With that, go read one of her poems or listen to one. ~w Tuesday, December 05, 2000 I am totally geek happy! I just managed to load my outlook contact list to my new cell phone with just a few clicks of buttons. Whoo hoo! Much better than days of punching little buttons on the phone. Actually, i think i have to connect to their web service to access them, but i got that for free for 6 months when i signed up. Yeah! Other than that...i got to read some more Tom Robbins today as we drove to Albuquerque. I wonder what it would be like to have Tom Robbins face Sherman Alexie in a poetry bout. Okay, sure Robbins supposedly writes prose (though it often sounds poetic), but i think it would be amazing to listen to these two northwest wordsmiths go at it. I put myself to sleep reading in the warm sunshine though. The drive through green chile country is beautiful in a very harsh sort of way. Now, laundry's done, i'm full of good mexican food from Elroy's and i'm ready to face a new day. It felt like Sunday today. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of days with all the driving and time zone changing. I'm glad we didn't have shows today, i wouldn't have had my head on straight. Monday, December 04, 2000 I just finished watching Pretty in Pink just because it was on the TV. Strange, i remember feeling much more strongly about the movie when it first came out. Perhaps partly cuz "Ducky" kinda looked like my friend Kamal that i had a bit of a crush on then. There's a John Hughes marathon on TNT for some reason. Oh...it's the "awsome 80's weekend." Scary. It's been a long time since i've seen that much pastel. We're in Las Cruces, NM for the night. Why Las Cruces? So, we could have dinner at the best new mexican food restaurant Nopalito. I had a yummy pile of avocado salad and beef, egg, sour cream, and green chile enchiladas served flat stacked one on top of the other. I swear that the green chiles everywhere else are tasteless in comparison to theirs. Both sweet and spicy, they are absolutely delicious! We're staying at another Sleep Inn (along with the high school drama club from Carlsbad). This one doesn't have a coffee pot to worry about. Instead, it had a pool full of teenagers, but i didn't need to go swimming anyway. Instead, i messed around with DHTML scripts in my room. Why? Cuz it was a fun puzzle to mess with for an evening. Totally geeky, but i tend that way some days. I guess i'm avoiding the whole christmas card thing. I know it won't take that long once i start, but i'm still in denial that christmas is not that far off. Is time speeding up on me? This year seems to have flown by me. I guess that's a symptom of spending so much time on the road that i can barely remember what happened last week, let alone last month. I guess that's why this whole blogger thing seemed like a good idea. I have 2 years of road travel that i would be hard pressed to write about anymore if asked. There are just strange little blurbs of stuff that pop up every now and then. Like visiting the tree that ciro planted here in Las Cruces 18 years ago. But that, and eating at Nopalito, is all i can remember from our last visit here. Was it a year ago or two? I can't remember exactly. I suppose even if i was in one place that events would start to blend together, but it seems like i should remember more about the travels. Hmmm. I'll have to work on that.~w Sunday, December 03, 2000 Okay, so it's gotten late again. But hey, all i did today was sit in a car and then go to dinner with ciro and phil here in san antonio. Well, i guess i did walk around a bookstore for a while too... But, regardless i've actually been working on updating the Poetry Alive! research page (as well as adding a few links to other pages). It's one thing to have a list of links, but it's quite another to find a short blurb to describe where they lead. Anyway, it should be a little more useful now. I got the go-ahead to add some pictures to the site as well, but that's more than i was ready to do today. (i do intend to sleep after all, but i really shouldn't drink any coffee in the evening...)
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words, poems, & other scribblings made while traveling the United States performing poetry for students with Poetry Alive!
other things to read
help?
 
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