Saturday, January 20, 2001
I had a thought today, if i could just remember what it was.
One thing that was bothering me as we flipped the radio past talk shows today...since there seems to be a big toodoo about how tax payers are paying for the Clinton's mortgage by charging the secret service rent, i'm wondering what us taxpayers are paying for secret service to protect Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush senior. Did any of them pay off their mortgages by charging folks rent? Before i get all up in arms about the Clintons, i'd like to know whether they're just following in their predecessors footsteps or if this is really something outrageous. I also found it very interesting that 2 days before he's scheduled to lead a protest march in Florida during the inauguration that the media found some dirty laudry to air about Jesse Jackson to keep him home. Speaking of dirty laundry, want the dish on past president's affairs? Ciro found this page at a school we visited recently linked from a site the students were using to research presidents that listed all their mistresses and children. But that's not what i wanted to write about.
But it reminds me of what i did want to throw out to the universe for an answer. Why is it that on the same station you're hearing about how awful and immoral today's male leaders are with all their affairs, you also hear ads for little pills to make men more potent sexually? If adult men are making bad sexual choices, why should they take pills to increase their hormones and drive for sex? That's what i don't understand.
Let's see, i also want to write about giddiness and the art of joy. But i haven't quite figured that out yet. I do know that joy is a lot more fun than crisis, but the chaos that surrounds them is similar. It seems that crisis is often created, but joy is more often discovered. I'm not sure that you can manufacture joy, i think it only appears naturally.
We're in Foley, Alabama for the weekend after doing our shows at Oneonta elementary. The 7-8 show was particularly wild today thanks to a marvelous young man who totally got into playing Casey in the poem Casey at the Bat. For dinner tonight we enjoyed the famous "throwed rolls" at Lambert's Cafe just around the corner from our hotel. Unfortunately the weather doesn't look like it's going to cooperate for a pleasant visit to the beach tomorrow. Maybe i can catch up with myself a bit, especially since there is no local access number for wasting time on the internet. Ah, well. I need to do some reading and writing of my own anyway.~w
wendi's 3:29 AM ravings
Friday, January 19, 2001
Ahh, Brewton. The students gave us a standing ovation at the end of the last show. The fed, loved and coddled us all day long. Sometimes it's nice to see people that are even just remotely familiar. After all we only visited them one day back in 1998. The kids are a lot taller now than when we last saw them. The little dynamo hero that we remember dearly is now taller than either of us and quite a distinguished young man. Time sure has flown. I don't feel a day older myself, but they remind me that i am.
I wrote 8 emails tonight to catch up with some of the backlog that i uncovered today. I still have work emails to deal with, but they'll have to wait till i'm more coherent. Besides, though performance-wise this week has gone beautifully i'm feeling like my "personal" time is rather lacking in substance. There hasn't been much time for me to pamper myself. Writing to friends is certainly a bit of relaxation that i felt owed to myself. It's hard to remember how do just carry a conversation with a friend or develop friendships when you only see them in sporadic bursts. It almost becomes hard to shed the peformance/professional persona that i use so often for work and just relate to people as myself. Friendships allow you to have faults and failings that must be stuffed in the closet for professional appearances. But, it's hard to let myself open up and be that vulnerable (not that it was ever easy before).
We find ourselves now in Oneonta, Alabama. I know nothing about this town except that its dark (it being night) and it has a school complex where we will perform for 3-10th graders tomorrow (not all at the same time though). It also has a very nice Super 8 with a cozy room in which i will be sleeping shortly.~w
wendi's 1:08 AM ravings
Thursday, January 18, 2001
Boyoboy what a goofy day. We performed for high school students in Citronelle, AL today. They were a riot! Very outgoing and kind to us despite the fact that many were very vocal while we were setting up about how stupid they thought it was to attend a poetry assembly. Despite that, they were a super enthusiastic audience and some of our dancing Tumtum trees were really breaking it down. However, by the time we saw the 9th grade at the end of the day they were totally psyched about the show. Funny how gossip travels around a campus. The male teachers we picked on to be Jabberwock monsters were forming an exclusive club to revel in their fame. Students were calling out that they wanted to be trees or other things they'd heard were in the show. I would say that these high school students were overall wackier than the 5th graders from yesterday. The assistant principal (who was also a monster for the last show) dug through his office and was apologetic for only being able to give us faculty parking passes and CHS dayplanners as gifts to remember them. Since we weren't expecting anything like that we were totally thrilled. How silly it will be for us to drive around the country with a faculty pass on our rearview mirror for a high school and town that few people have probably ever heard of before. So, we're displaying it proudly! The students even gave us pizza from their pizza sale as a thank you. It was amazing to be showered with so much gratitude.
The drive today wasn't bad. We actually got into town before dark for the first time this week and i napped nearly all the way. Ciro wanted a nap, but he was driving, so he just went to bed extra early for a change. I managed to get caught up with some paperwork and had time to read through my emails. Ah, i feel much better now. Caught up with myself for a moment.
Now we are in Brewton, AL where we performed back in 1998. Another team has been here since, so it will be interesting to see what they think of us now and how they react to the shows. I particularly remember a young man at the middle school being one of the all time best hero's we've ever had onstage. I hope we can have that much fun with them again.~w
wendi's 1:24 AM ravings
Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Aarrrgh! I couldn't get online at all last night or this morning from our hotel. Today's hotel only has 5 phone lines, but i did finally get a connection. Lovely. Anyway, here's last night's post that was never posted.
Tuesday, January 16, 2001 11ish in the pm.
I swear kids are maturing faster today than we did. The fifth graders we saw looked about like high school students. Well, at least the girls did. They seemed very reluctant to be silly with us as well. The sixth graders were actually more willing to play along. It was sort of strange. Overall we had good responses from the kids afterwards, but the fifth grade show seemed a bit rough. The teachers were hysterically silly though in our afterschool workshop with them. We had a lot of fun showing them how to introduce their kids to poetry performance.
Our drive to Saraland, Alabama was fortunately uneventful. Mostly i napped, after finishing my paperwork and reading a bit to ciro before it got dark. We drove along 90 in Gulf Shores (a pretty drive along the coast even in the dark) to find a place to get some tasty seafood for dinner. We ended up at Landry's which is a chain down in the gulf area, but it has pretty good seafood.
Now it's late and we have a 45min drive to Citronelle in the morning to our first show at their high school at 8am. It will be a very early day. I'm not particularly fond of days that start this early. Part of the problem is that high school students are rarely awake at that hour even though they've made it to school (I remember napping through first period myself on many occasions). Perhaps the idea is to prepare them for the job world, but i don't know how you can learn anything when your asleep except by osmosis. But, i've found that sleeping on your book rarely will allow the contents to seep into your brain. Believe me, i've tried that on many occasions, it only causes neck pain and bent book covers.~w
wendi's 7:21 PM ravings
Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Yikes! What a day!
I started by nearly destroying my laptop. I was preparing to sit down with my morning coffee and check email, but before i got that far i had coffee all over my bed, pillow, quilt, floor and nightstand where unfortunately my computer was sitting and booting up. I had a panic attack when i found that the computer had shut down. It wouldn't reboot. I called ciro to tell him i'd be late, i called tech support who said to wait for it to dry out, and finally after i was all packed and ready to go i tried it again. It booted just fine. Whew! Disaster averted. But wait, the day's only begun.
We got out of asheville just fine a little foggy, but it was lifting by the time we hit the highway. We were moving down the freeway just fine headed for Mississippi in our second car of the year, (7th since september) that ciro had picked up in asheville to replace our taurus with a bad airbag system. It was a lovely Nissan Maxima, drove nice, i was napped while ciro drove. Suddenly BOOM! I wake up and say what was that, and ciro informs me that something just came flying off the car in front of us, perhaps the muffler. He pulls off to the side of the highway (and so does the person who was right behind us. We both have flat front tires. After calling Hertz and AAA (boy, a cellphone sure is handy in a case like this) ciro is changing the tire so we can drive back to Birmingham airport, 11 miles behind us, to replace the car. But wait, just as ciro goes to pick up the spare he notices that we have 2 flat tires. The back one has been slashed as well. So, we call Hertz again and in 20min i'm taking my first ride in a flat bed tow truck to the airport. Well Hertz didn't have tires for the car so we had to say goodbye to the lovely maxima that we'd only had for 48 hours. The lady was very nice to us though and got us a decent camry with a cd player and after hearing about all the trouble we've had with Hertz cars this year (mostly the Tauruses) she gave us a $25 coupon for our next rental as well. Granted, the coupon is in our bosses name, but it was a lovely gesture. So, 2 hours and 15min later we're on the road again. Whew! The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, we stopped to eat in Jacksonville and finally rolled into our hotel around 10pm. Ugh.
So, we're here safe and sound. I'm glad ciro had a cool head and steady hand getting us safely off the road when the unexpected happened. But, to top things off i don't have local access here in McComb, MS. I'll just have to post this and leave it without spending time finding clever links to spice it up. Tomorrow has to be an easier day, even though it's middle school.~w
wendi's 12:38 AM ravings
Monday, January 15, 2001
As i was wandering around the web today i found a very useful resource for writers called Inkspot! It has tons of information including self-publishing advice, craft of writing information, networking for writers advice, market information, and even some fun stuff like a joy of writing area and young writers section. There is so much out there to help if you want to take the time to market yourself. I think that's one of the hardest parts of trying to be an artist for a living, the marketing. I mean if artists were truly good at marketing, it would be a lot easier to just work for some corporation to bring in the bucks wouldn't it? Marketing one's art is like putting your children up for auction in some ways. It seems almost cruel to leave you poems sitting in a book in some huge bookstore, or your art hanging on some sterile white wall in a gallery for a stranger to gawk at, and then decide whether it is the appropriate thing to add to their collection. It much easier to focus on the doing and the creating which is the true joy of the work rather than spend the time figuring out how to bring in the dollars.
I have a whole set of files for submitting poems that i haven't used in probably 4 years. I just don't even want to think about it, and the idea of keeping track of guidelines and submissions while traveling is daunting. The only things i've submitted to were for a couple of publications i was asked through email to send a poem to a person i knew (those being the summer issue of Lid at Lioness Den and the Poetry Slam anthology). Harumph! I guess i'll just have to get my head in gear and start sending out submissions this summer when i get home. Until then, i'll enjoy creating poems in my leisure time while on the road.~w
wendi's 12:42 AM ravings
Sunday, January 14, 2001
It's late, but i'm still wide awake. I didn't really sleep in that late today, but for some reason i'm still wired. Could be the rousing conversation i had tonight with a couple of friends. It was fun to just talk and talk and talk all evening with real live adults that weren't ciro. (Not that i dislike talking to ciro. it's just that we talk all the time and it was nice to have a quiet evening with other folks.) It's funny how a good evening can leave you feeling all warm and tingly inside. It's not like we solved all the world's problems or anything, but we were silly and i don't know just people for an evening. I guess a lot of times it's hard to get away from being a "performer" or "poet" while on the road. There's this drive to be constantly moving forward and getting better and coming up with new ideas and doing...something. But art doesn't happen in a vacuum. It needs other influences and the more the merrier.
My roommate's cat just came it to distract me by complaining about the fact that her human isn't here. She's gone now, but i forgot where my train of thought was going. Well, since i've derailed, maybe i should think about sleep.~w
wendi's 3:51 AM ravings
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help?
