Polaroid Photo

Mon
15
Jan '07

Sale! “Rampion” to Prime Codex

I’ve just learned that my short story “Rampion” is going to appear in the anthology Prime Codex by Paper Golem Press, Lawrence Schoen and Michael Livingston, editors.

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Mon
15
Jan '07

Christina has arrived

Fellow Codexian, Christina Crooks has arrived to stay with us for the next three months. While she’s here, she’ll be shopping for a house while we pack up ours. Yay! Moving boxes, galore!

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Mon
15
Jan '07

Life with a touring puppeteer: 1998, Day 10


Thursday, October 15, 1998
Day Ten

Today began at 7:00am for me. Joe got up at 6:30 to handle his e-mail. You will all be happy to know that we found both of our schools without incident. The first school had a really lovely loadin. Notice the covered area next to the door.

Unfortunately the students were really rowdy. Sungura the Hare is an audience participation show. We like a live audience for this, live meaning “with us” or “enthusiastic”, however, there is such a thing as too live. If you ask them a question and they never quiet down after answering you’ve got trouble on your hands.

I wound up having to use my “I’ll wait until you are quiet” speech, during our transition to Brer Rabbit. I used to be afraid to be disciplinary during shows, but I have found that in schools the teachers appreciate it if you can control the students. And on the whole, as long as you’re not mean, the behaving students seem to appreciate it too.

 Load in

See how we can back the van up to the door? This is great.
Here’s a shot of what our van looks like loaded. We finally have a good load-out pack. It looks a little messy, because the last couple of pieces in are the bags of the large puppets. In an ideal world your pack looks neat, and is the same everytime. There are two reasons for that. 1) Loadout goes faster if you don’t have to think about where things can go. 2)You can look at the van and tell if you’ve gotten everything. If there’s a hole in your pack, something is still inside. The only time I’ve ever forgotten a puppet is when it was out for repairs, and not in it’s usual place. I thought it was in a box and didn’t know it was gone till after the show had started. Oooo boy, where there some interesting adlibs flying then.

Load in
Now for those of you who wondered about my little accident yesterday, we passed by and this time I had my camera. Notice the parking ticket. The telephone pole is where the corner is. Oops

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Mon
15
Jan '07

Storage locker

We began moving things down to the storage locker today. It feels strange to be dismantling the house like this. It’s also fairly disorienting. I’m certain that we’ll get to New York and I’ll open a box and wonder, “Why did I bring this?” Our next wave of stuff goes out tomorrow.

I’ve also become quite taken with Freecycle, which is like Craig’s list, except it’s all free stuff. If you have something that no one would buy, but you can’t bring yourself to landfill it, then you can post a message on Freecycle and someone will want it. It’s wonderful. You can also post a message if you’re looking for an item too. They seem to have local chapters all over the world. I highly recommend it. Beats the heck out of consigning more perfectly good stuff to the dump.

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