Monday, November 5, 2012

Back Home

Post Emily. Stayed in town for a lovely dinner with the cast and Terry (the only board member to see the show), then saw Glenn and Linda off this morning and brought home all the leftovers. Enough food and snacks to last a week, plus beer and a bottle of wine. Seven (her real name) and Alan were at the show Saturday night and they want another Museum After Hours tour for several friends next Saturday. I'll need to clear it with Pegi, but I readily agreed. The matinee yesterday was wonderful, a good audience, several people back to see the show for a second time. Much conversation, at dinner, about doing the show at other venues. Glenn filmed all the performances and hopes to edit a version we can copy for all the schools in the county and sell to interested parties. B said there was six inches of snow last Tuesday on the ridge, and as there were still some leaves on bushes and small trees (protected in the under-story) I had to leave everything in the Jeep and clip a path to the house. Most leaves are gone now and the view across the hollow is stunning. Cold inside, but I burn another kinder garden desk and change into sweats, the winter mufti, settle back with an early drink to consider the past week and the week ahead. A school show to install, that isn't really designed for installation, by Thursday, then the big annual fund-raiser on Friday, and the after hours tour on Saturday. Then, maybe a week off to tease a book out of the files Glenn copied for me. Reading through some pages today, I realized it would be an outrageous book; and yet, a new reader asked me yesterday, where was this Janitor College, because she'd never heard of it before. As Emily is my mentor, a snake in the grass. Not to put too fine a point, the relationship is merely proximity. She rubs off on you. This past week was a kind of complete immersion therapy, what I now think of as The Emily Cure. When you become mentally obese, you hole-up in a tiny, sharply raked theater (seating 98 people) and listen to Emily, with this strange haunting music. I had never considered lentils as a musical instrument, silly me, but when Zach throws them on the cymbal and the table and the floor, they somehow manage to frighten you. Snare drum riffs and a gong. The Cincy Conservatory would be amiss if they didn't just grant TR an advanced degree. His teacher said to me, after watching and hearing the show, that that was what he was trying to do, and the cool thing, about being a teacher, was that occasionally a student would leap-frog right over your back. I don't understand why I'm in the position of getting this kind of thing together. There'll be stories, apocryphal, but we were actually there, and it was way beyond merely good. Zach and TR are in love with Linda, they worship her interpretation. And the music reflects that. Easy enough to force TR into a corner, where he had to compose his way out, but I actually hate the combined arts, where I have to compromise. I'd rather be alone. Yet the chance to work with someone on a similar lie is attractive. It's all theater.

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