April 04, 2006

10:34 p.m.

Earning It

I got as far as the Connecticut Welcome Center this afternoon and had to pull in and close my eyes for a few minutes, and then get a cup of terrible vending-machine coffee to make it home. But home I am, and after a big dinner, an episode and a half of Six Feet Under, and two glasses of wine, I'm certifiably pooped.

(Ha ha, I accidentally typed "poopeed.")

It was the sort of long weekend that's so packed I can't remember at the end of it what I did at the beginning.

I drove Thursday for a few hours and stayed at an unremarkable Motel 6. Well, it was remarkable in one respect -- it was almost impossible to actually drive into the place from the highway. The sign was visible, but from that particular road, one could never turn left, and turning right sometimes led to a U-turn and sometimes not, but one didn't always know that until one had already turned. I spent 25 minutes driving up and down highway 100 in East Brunswick before calling the motel and begging for directions. The nice East Indian gentleman, who turned out to have pinkeye, gave me very specific directions which I NEVER would have intuited on my own, and got me into the parking lot. The rest of the stay was predictably bland.

We were at a nice theatre in Virginia on Friday, which was well enough attended to be worthwhile, though not full. We split with another songwriter friend of ours who was there with her "lounge" band (my label). She's an awesome folk/Celtic singer, but she has this other sort of jazzy identity, and her voice lends itself well to any of those genres. We stayed at her girlfriend's apartment north of D.C., a funky little garret with mice in the roof and metal kitchen cabinets. I slept badly on a very wavy futon. Saturday we played a concert for a woman who has throat cancer, and is between rounds of chemo. Her prognosis at present is not terribly positive. I was proud of us for getting through the gig without crying -- though there were boxes of tissues placed strategically around the room, and were used liberally. I sold a bit of product, unexpectedly. That made me happy during a very stressful weekend in which I dealt with a major bad headache one day and nagging depression most of the rest of the time. Sunday we got up early to do two church services, then drove 230 miles for an evening concert in New Jersey. By then I was so busy I forgot to be unhappy. Our hostess, Annie, is a passionate and visionary first grade teacher, and she organized our whole school thing (more about that later). Anyway we were an hour late arriving to her house owing to traffic on 95. It turned out that, totally independent of anything we had done, the New York Times had sent a reporter and photographer to this particular gig to do a story on house concerts. So there we were, bedraggled, late, and hungry, walking into a house where people were already arriving for the pot luck and an NYT reporter was already asking questions about the band. Ai, yi yi! Somehow we managed to get set up and dressed, and we ate some takeout Chinese food that Annie had fetched for us. After a few quick minutes in a side room with the very nice reporter, we started the show.

In a nutshell, it was fine, we have no idea what the reporter thought because she left at halftime, and we finally got to bed in time to get a scant few hours of sleep before our first big day with the Hartshorne Kindergarten class.

ARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!

Ahem. Excuse me.

Now you know this was our FIRST shot at doing a songwriting workshop with school kids. We got the kindergarten class because the other five artists Annie had hired for this project didn't want to work with them. They can't really read lyrics, of course, so it's a challenge getting them to write AND memorize a song in 40 minutes. I came up with the idea of visual aids, so in addition to writing the lyrics big on a large pad, I drew pictures to coincide with hand motions we made up for each line, that the kids could do while singing. We assigned "line leaders" for each line, a few kids who would be responsible for knowing that line and singing it nice and loud so everyone else could follow. The theme was "community." The first class came up with a verse; the second came up with a verse and chorus. Thereafter we taught the remaining classes the chorus and created two more verses. Voila, song. When we got home we took naps -- I slept for 2-1/2 hours. We went out with Annie to a diner. She talks almost every moment, so it's a little exhausting to be with her for long, though she is very interesting. Later we tweaked the song, Chris put in a lot of time on the guitar part. Finally we went to bed. Annie has a huge faux waterfall/fountain thing in her living room that sounds, rather than like a soothing river or waterfall, like a huge St. Bernard perpetually lapping from a water dish. Carol said she'd wake up in the night and have to pee from the sound. They had a trundle bed which was apparently hard as rock, and the first night there was no heat upstairs and we were all cold. C'est la vie... that was rectified by the second night. Anyway, this morning (good goddess, was it only this morning?) we went in early to lay down a guitar track and a click. One by one the classes came back in, and we rehearsed and recorded each one's verse and all the choruses. By lunchtime we had a song. Chris took a few more minutes to figure out a bass part and record it, and then we went to lunch.

Truthfully, we did a bit of leading as we went along. We'd come up with an idea to further the song, and ask gentle leading questions of the kids so "they" could come up with the next bit. But all the lines, or at least the ideas for the lines, were really theirs. Some of them were cute and adorable, and a few really didn't want to be there. But the teachers were great and, for having not been into the project at the beginning (Annie really had to sell the idea), they all seemed thrilled that THEIR classes were so bright and the song was so wonderful.

Carol was magnificent with them. She mostly did the instructing and coaxing and asking; I took care of the writing and visual aids and acted as her assistant; Chris handled all the instrumentation. We all participated in arguing over minor points back at the house. The only downside was that Carol's voice is, once again, very tired and her throat is sore. (She's been to an ENT, incidentally, who put a camera down her throat and looked at her vocal cords. There's nothing major wrong with them, but they're a little inflamed and she's going to a speech pathologist this month to learn how to stop misusing her voice in laryngitic situations. Meanwhile Chris has a worsening, spasmodic little cough that Rose says might be reflux related, so he's going to start treating that this week and also go to the ENT in a few weeks.) Where was I? Aside from the day of terrible headache I've been fine.

Are we naturals? No, but I think we're trainable. I don't want to do kindergarten again though. It's easier when they can read and are a little more articulate. And I'd rather come into a school with a ready made program about something in their curriculum -- a musical, theatrical, educational program like Kim and Reggie Harris (look 'em up, they're amazing performers and have a great program about Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad) that we can do over and over again. Songwriting workshops are stressful, especially a product-oriented one like this where you have 80 - 100 kids and an extremely short time to come up with something. You can't expect miracles. We all did learn a lot, though.

And then, after all that today, we drove home several hours and THAT's why I had to stop just inside the Connecticut line and sleep for eleven minutes. On the way home I got my printed book covers from Staples that I had done last week, checked the store where I just bought a kitchen table and talked to them about delivery, and got some groceries. And tomorrow I ain't goin' out for nuthin'. Except to pick up my taxes from the post office. I made over $1200 dollars this weekend and I deserve a day off.