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Cast of Characters

Mid-January, Rain - January 13, 2012
Almost Midwinter - December 14, 2011
Saturday, Noonish, Sunny - November 05, 2011
October, White - October 31, 2011
October, 2011 - October 04, 2011


October 05, 2004

7:55 p.m.

Texas Eve

I sit in my little walk-in closet-turned-office. It's quiet in here. I think it's gotten dark outside while I've sat here and read diaries, and fiddled with pictures. Here are a few moments from our recent stay at Kripalu. I went for a walk in the woods, and found shrines everywhere.








Here is my little room...





And the darkening sky, through my screened window, looking out over the Berkshires.

********

We almost pulled an all-nighter last night working on the DVD. This has been a wild ride; we wanted to get it out for a certain gig next month, so Chris has been spending day and night either at home doing graphics or out at an office working on the video portion, and our deadline for getting the materials to the duplicator was Thursday -- the day we leave for Texas. There are a couple of numbers for which we need a license, and this afternoon we discovered that licensing for DVDs is completely different from that for CDs -- this, after we spent almost $200 on what we thought were the correct permissions from Harry Fox Agency -- and it can take a very long time to get them, if you get them at all. See, if you cover a song on a CD, you go to the Harry Fox Agency website, look up the song, put in some information, and pay $95 for your first 1,000 copies. Apparently it's just different for a DVD -- the owners don't have to give you permission to put it out at all. Harry Fox doesn't deal with DVDs any more anyway, and we didn't know who to ask about it. Our contact at the duplication company is looking into it.

Meanwhile, there's this riotously funny song I wrote (ahem, hem) based on Frank Loesser's Inchworm, for which we've been denied permission already because they're considering it a parody (even though they've never heard it). We've gotten an entertainment lawyer involved in trying to get them to change their minds, but for several weeks she's been swamped with juvenile court cases and hasn't been able to address our issue at all. So we left her a couple of messages over the weekend and Monday, letting her know that this deadline has come up and we need to know something or else leave the number off the DVD altogether. Since we hadn't heard anything, we took it off -- a big bite in the ass, since it's a show stopper and one of our most requested songs, etc. So now we hear all this stuff about licensing for our other covers -- a Beatles tune and another one that contains parts of a Stephen Stills song -- and we're faced with removing THOSE as well. The DVD is getting shorter by the day and we're feeling all lame and disappointed and pissed off after all this work.

Then, later this afternoon, the lawyer calls back.

She's made some headway with Frank Loesser's company, and they want to see a copy of the performance to assess it. We've gone from a flat "NO" to about a 50/50 chance. Chris scrambles to get a copy to her asap. Not only that, but he talks with her about the Stephen Stills song, and she says, "Oh! I just saw him the other day! I can't imagine he'd give you any problem with the permission; I'll contact him. Send me that one as well and I'll hand it to him in person."

Gee.

We probably won't make our exact deadline still, but things are definitely looking up. Chris is chomping at the bit to get it out in time for Christmas sales -- we expect this to be a big cash cow -- but I said, let's make each other be patient and do it as right as we can, because it'll last us a long time and in the end it won't matter whether it came out a few weeks later than we hoped.

Meanwhile, the artwork Chris came up with is fab and I'm really excited about having a new THING on the CD table!!!!!

********

And Rose and I are having a weekend in Vermont later this month, and we've decided it's a poetry retreat so we can get our BOOK together finally. She needs the weekend off every bit as much as I do; she's way overcommitted. I hope that settles down; I know it's up to her, but I hope she just starts giving herself a little more space.

********

And I'm loving my new apartment. I don't want to take pics yet because it's still so disorganized and unfinished. But I will eventually. I just love it here. And I love it here... did I say that? My neighbor said she'd water my plants while we're in Texas, yipee. I'm giving her a bottle of wine.


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