We’re about to wrap up our residency in Kansas – and by “about to wrap up” I mean we’re through the first three days and getting ready for one last marathon : 6+ hours at a local high school and then one last senior center before driving two and a half hours to Arkansas for a video shoot.
Still – we’re getting there.
The Coffeyville Community College Humanities Program is completely unique in my experience – and I don’t know that even the locals really understand it. Artists are asked to create a program based around… something… that counts as a humanity subject? I’m not really clear on that – but basically it’s a way of getting musicians (and other performers) from around the country to come to this practical ghost town and perform for a varied group of locals – we do a program on American Murder Ballads, but I bet most acts do a lot less talking and just play music – the sign for next week declares “Kansas folk songs” and one of the women we performed for today was just grateful we weren’t clowns.
So – yeah, not entirely sure WHAT else they get in here – but I also know that a lot of the different senior centers – from the posh to the poor, from the food center where seniors and veterans get a meal for a dollar to the completely independent apartment buildings – don’t seem to have TOO much contact with the other centers in town and some of them are under the impression that we’ve come to Coffeyville just for them! We play the card room on the second floor of an old folks home and the under-lock-and-key “dementia ward” in another facility, adjusting the parameters of our program to the varying levels of response…
Now when we applied the first time, three years ago, it was sort of implied we were mostly gearing our material towards college students and high school kids… with one or two of these retirement communities thrown in to fill the time – but it’s entirely reversed and though we’re ready for it this time, it’s still an interesting mind set to get into : playing the same (ish) set 14+ times over the course of a couple of days to audiences generally never younger than the age of 70.
Well, except for the kindergartners. This time we got some kindergartners. They’re brought into one of the nicer facilities (with comfort dogs, a beautiful aviary, and multiple Wii game systems) to mix up the generations and we did ANOTHER quick revamp to our programming. I’m glad all the kids got excited about spiders and didn’t ask further questions about electric chairs.
Hell, maybe they assumed we were talking about the motorized wheelchairs used frequently in these facilities.
In any case – I think we’re all kind of exhausted – we’ve been Living out of a hotel room since Sunday and we’re beginning to get punchy. Don’t ask ME about yelling “Zeus can taste my EYES” in an elevator! You don’t REALLY want to know more. Also – Heather won at burps, we can’t sign into SyFy with our Verizon login for some reason and I’m really, really sick of microwavable soup. However – this place DOES have a pretty kickass automatic pancake making device that reminds me of nothing so much as some sort of Xerox that prints with hot batter.
It’s kind of awesome, but I bet it’s an absolute BITCH to clean.
Tomorrow it’s the high school – which means we’re probably indoors all day which is a shame. The weather which is pounding the east coast is entirely absent here – and it’s supposed to finally hit the 70s with sunshine and light breezes – but yeah. Stuck inside with class after class after class (after class after class – five in total) of high school kids instead.
Sigh.
