Brigadoon (not!)
Maybe the sun gave me the pow'r,
For I could swim Loch Lomond and be home in half an hour.
Maybe the air gave me the drive,
For I'm all aglow and alive.
What a day this has been! What a rare mood I'm in!
Well, no - it's not been almost like being in love - it's more like . . . oh, death warmed over, mebbe . . . let me jump back to Friday, which was the last full day I was in Cleveland.
Friday morning not long after the sun peeked over the horizon I was southbound with a friend to http://www.scifimarathon.com/films.html [The 29th Annual 24-Hour Ohio Science Fiction Marathon from Noon Saturday May 19th until Noon Sunday May 20th at the Drexel Theatre near Columbus] Then it was listening to NPR on the way home. The bit by an author of a book on Stoic(i)s(m) hit me as that it was not all that different from Epicureanism - if, as a Stoic, you imagined for say, five seconds or so, that someone you really cared about had died,or otherwise their presence had been removed from you, how grateful you would be that it really wasn't - your friend was still there to be appreciated - and so you would - and should appeciate them.
It kinda feeds into my seeing days as 86,400 seconds and collecting birthdays and such which started back when I was a freshman in high school in Larry Morningstar's honors algebra/trig class where we had a quiz or test every single Friday and since it was the last period of the last day of the school week there wasn't a lot of things you could do, schholwise, if you got done early.
But I digress. The marathon - not as grueling as the 26.2 miles some folk I know do - had other elements of endurance - I'll get into the films later when I have more time/energy and don't feel like I'm oozing into my chair . . .
Got home, laid down for a while, then got up to make my appearance as the last scheduled poet at the open-air reading on Hessler Court for the last day of http://www.hesslerstreetfair.org/ [2012 Hessler Street Fair - May 19th-20th]. I'd not actually determined what pieces I'd be performing - with all the ambient noise any of the softer, melodic pieces wouldn't have worked very well, so I did a few declamatory ones that seemed to go over rather well - including one that linked into this year's annual eclipse, in that, when the last annular eclipse visible in Cleveland rolled around in the early 1990's my friend Jeff & I checked his astronomy magazines and discovered that the last total solar eclipse of the second millenium fell on . . . my birthday in 1999.
So I wrote that into my schedule.
Interestingly enough, in retrospect - if you go in for that sort of thing - in 1995 my friend Désirée (whom I'd met my first time in Austria when my friend Regina, who was in Lonsdale College with me at the University of Lancaster in England, and in the Lancaster Filmsoc - invited me to stay with her in Vienna three years after we left Lancaster - I took all three weeks of my holiday from CWRU Medical School) invited me to stay with her while her flatmate was on holiday. Due to a computer banking error I was stranded in Vienna for some days. The silver lining was that my path crossed with that of a pedagogical clown [ http://xgridmac.dyndns.org/~thiebaut/www_etext_org/Politics_4014/AlternativeOrange/4/v4n2_17b.html ] with whom I stayed until the situation was rectified. In the meantime, he invited me along with him to a gig in Linz (we'd met at the lake in the Stadtpark in the third district in Vienna - I was wearing my hofnarr hat and he was in full clown regalia) and by the time I was able to leave, he told me he was writing a grant proposal for a revisionist musical Romeo & Julia and he wanted me to return the following spring to play the role of William Shakespeare. The grant would allow him to pay me 12,000 - 15,000 schillings.
Sounded like a good idea to me.
So I did.
I've often referred to the time i had a long-term sub assignment teching Spanish in South Bend, Indiana before returning to Cleveland as the time I had "the most fun making the least money in my life." If so, the ten performance of Romeo & Julia throughout Austria was definitely "the most fun I had making the most money in my life" if you only factor in the actual performance times. But hey! All my living expenses were being paid and I was making some friendships which continued via post [pre-Zuckerberg & FB and all] to this day - also augmented by the internet. In any case - 1996 was still three years away from my birthday with a present of a total solar eclipse - topped off by the annual celestial birthday event (cloud cover/lack thereof permitting) of the Perseid meteor showers.
Imagine my delighted surprise when making arrangements for that birthday adventure when I discovered that the path of totality fell right between two towns in Burgenland - Pinkafeld & Oberwart - where about 90% of the cast & crew of Romeo & Julia hailed from.
Back to this evening's poetry event - but only to say that one of the pieces I picked linked from the annular eclipse of the early 1990's to my birthday eclipse to the annular eclipse today - because I must be off to bed to bed to rest my head before day is done - for if I break the rule of good health of going to bed the same day you get up today I fear I shall be in a very bad way. More tomorrow I hope . . .
For I could swim Loch Lomond and be home in half an hour.
Maybe the air gave me the drive,
For I'm all aglow and alive.
What a day this has been! What a rare mood I'm in!
Well, no - it's not been almost like being in love - it's more like . . . oh, death warmed over, mebbe . . . let me jump back to Friday, which was the last full day I was in Cleveland.
Friday morning not long after the sun peeked over the horizon I was southbound with a friend to http://www.scifimarathon.com/films.html [The 29th Annual 24-Hour Ohio Science Fiction Marathon from Noon Saturday May 19th until Noon Sunday May 20th at the Drexel Theatre near Columbus] Then it was listening to NPR on the way home. The bit by an author of a book on Stoic(i)s(m) hit me as that it was not all that different from Epicureanism - if, as a Stoic, you imagined for say, five seconds or so, that someone you really cared about had died,or otherwise their presence had been removed from you, how grateful you would be that it really wasn't - your friend was still there to be appreciated - and so you would - and should appeciate them.
It kinda feeds into my seeing days as 86,400 seconds and collecting birthdays and such which started back when I was a freshman in high school in Larry Morningstar's honors algebra/trig class where we had a quiz or test every single Friday and since it was the last period of the last day of the school week there wasn't a lot of things you could do, schholwise, if you got done early.
But I digress. The marathon - not as grueling as the 26.2 miles some folk I know do - had other elements of endurance - I'll get into the films later when I have more time/energy and don't feel like I'm oozing into my chair . . .
Got home, laid down for a while, then got up to make my appearance as the last scheduled poet at the open-air reading on Hessler Court for the last day of http://www.hesslerstreetfair.org/ [2012 Hessler Street Fair - May 19th-20th]. I'd not actually determined what pieces I'd be performing - with all the ambient noise any of the softer, melodic pieces wouldn't have worked very well, so I did a few declamatory ones that seemed to go over rather well - including one that linked into this year's annual eclipse, in that, when the last annular eclipse visible in Cleveland rolled around in the early 1990's my friend Jeff & I checked his astronomy magazines and discovered that the last total solar eclipse of the second millenium fell on . . . my birthday in 1999.
So I wrote that into my schedule.
Interestingly enough, in retrospect - if you go in for that sort of thing - in 1995 my friend Désirée (whom I'd met my first time in Austria when my friend Regina, who was in Lonsdale College with me at the University of Lancaster in England, and in the Lancaster Filmsoc - invited me to stay with her in Vienna three years after we left Lancaster - I took all three weeks of my holiday from CWRU Medical School) invited me to stay with her while her flatmate was on holiday. Due to a computer banking error I was stranded in Vienna for some days. The silver lining was that my path crossed with that of a pedagogical clown [ http://xgridmac.dyndns.org/~thiebaut/www_etext_org/Politics_4014/AlternativeOrange/4/v4n2_17b.html ] with whom I stayed until the situation was rectified. In the meantime, he invited me along with him to a gig in Linz (we'd met at the lake in the Stadtpark in the third district in Vienna - I was wearing my hofnarr hat and he was in full clown regalia) and by the time I was able to leave, he told me he was writing a grant proposal for a revisionist musical Romeo & Julia and he wanted me to return the following spring to play the role of William Shakespeare. The grant would allow him to pay me 12,000 - 15,000 schillings.
Sounded like a good idea to me.
So I did.
I've often referred to the time i had a long-term sub assignment teching Spanish in South Bend, Indiana before returning to Cleveland as the time I had "the most fun making the least money in my life." If so, the ten performance of Romeo & Julia throughout Austria was definitely "the most fun I had making the most money in my life" if you only factor in the actual performance times. But hey! All my living expenses were being paid and I was making some friendships which continued via post [pre-Zuckerberg & FB and all] to this day - also augmented by the internet. In any case - 1996 was still three years away from my birthday with a present of a total solar eclipse - topped off by the annual celestial birthday event (cloud cover/lack thereof permitting) of the Perseid meteor showers.
Imagine my delighted surprise when making arrangements for that birthday adventure when I discovered that the path of totality fell right between two towns in Burgenland - Pinkafeld & Oberwart - where about 90% of the cast & crew of Romeo & Julia hailed from.
Back to this evening's poetry event - but only to say that one of the pieces I picked linked from the annular eclipse of the early 1990's to my birthday eclipse to the annular eclipse today - because I must be off to bed to bed to rest my head before day is done - for if I break the rule of good health of going to bed the same day you get up today I fear I shall be in a very bad way. More tomorrow I hope . . .