Oh, woe is me – I’m a sleepy puppy. A sleepy Bullpup, mayhaps.
Heather and Kristen and I have been running around Coffeyville, KS for the week doing a program on murder ballads and gender roles as part of the Humanities program at Coffeyville Community College. Most have been at senior centres and assisted Living homes, some at the college itself, and today has been at Caney High School where the local sports team, the Bullpups, will be battling the neighboring sports team, the BullDOGS in an ancient form of gladiatorial combat known as foot-the-ball.
It wasn’t till we started doing them that I started feeling the awkwardness of talking about death over and over again to 70 year-olds, or chatting about shootings in a high school. It’s a morbid subject that I think was primarily geared to the idea that were doing mostly COLLEGE presentations, with a couple at a high school and a couple for the older-than-65 set.
Meh – no matter. It’s been going swimmingly, though we’re definitely bad at parceling it up properly. Heather’s doing much of the talking (which is just fine, I’d stumble over the talking points a lot, I’m sure) whereas I’m relegated to talking about “bad boys” rather than “bad girls” and Kristen talks a bit more about sex as power…
I’m not quite sure that videos of today are going to work out that well as a proof of concept for this in any other circumstance, but it’s been interesting and we hope to be able to take this as a course of sorts to other colleges. I’d even shopped it around somewhat with this tour, but got no takers – probably for the best because we’re definitely still working out the bugs.
The week HAS been a bit rough – Sunday was a lot of fun and saw us taking a whole day in the sun and the fun of the Texas State Fair – which true to its state, was gigantic. My cousin and her husband both own businesses that have booths there (she runs something called “Fair Hair” which specializes in air-brushed and hair-sprayed top-of-the-head hair sculptures, what they did with MY tresses was truly magnificent, if a littleoverly patriotic for my tastes) and HE being the head of a food stand that had won best-tasting of 2014 at the Fair this year with its Deep Fried Shrimp Boil (which was indeed delicious). But with all the awesomeness, Monday came all-together too soon, especially with a 2pm teaching engagement in Coffeyville, KS and a 6 hour drive betwixt the southern suburbs of Dallas and the geographical centre of the country.
Monday saw us getting up and dressing in darkness and packing the car by dawnlight, fighting our way through Dallas’ rush-hour traffic, taking one SHORT seven-minute break in Henrietta (?) Oklahoma before diving headfirst into our program of death and mayhem in front of 5 or 6 dour-faced old women who stared at us for the whole 45minutes. We had a Bible to our right, a hymnal right next to it and we performed using the podium and about Stagger Lee going to Hell and dethroning the devil where normally a minister would lead the weekly prayers. It was especially awkward as I’d been chatting
with one of the women as we were setting up who revealed that they’d had “a sickness” in
the past couple of weeks – she said “oh, normally we just fill these tables, but the sickness took a lot of us these past weeks”…
Meep! Tragedy done struck. We tried to remain upbeat despite the weird aura of the place and did get a few smiles and chatted with an elderly woman named Dorothy… and then threw everything in the car and scooted over to another facility where ANOTHER elderly woman named Dorothy resided with a larger group of women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They were a lot more engaged (or maybe we were more comfortable?) and we had a great time before retreating to our home for the week at a local motel. We went grocery shopping, did a little bit of wandering and then went “home” and CRASHED.
Tuesday was a lot more easy-going with a couple more of these senior home kind of gigs.
It’s amazing how many of them are clustered in the area, and even more amazing how different they all are. The first one on Monday seemed very desolate and joyless and the coordinator who “welcomed” us was all-too-eager to get the Hell out of dodge once it was obvious we knew what we were about and wouldn’t be any trouble. They also had a little dog that ran around but who was rushed hither and tither by the woman in charge.
The second place was a LOT more friendly, with lots of smiles and a much more actively interested community – and one big friendly dog and one grumpy small dog. It was legitimately a lot of fun.
Tuesday and Wednesday ranged from audiences that were ambulatory and actively interested in interacting with us, to people who seemed not aware of our existence and were wheeled from place to place. Some were clean, some were not. One was particularly unpleasant, with alarms going off every couple of minutes where we felt barely tolerated – but the people have been generally really Lovely, and we get the impression we’re a very, very welcome change of pace. We’ve been playing for smiles and a couple of foot taps here and there as opposed to raucous applause and whistling (though a THIRD Dorothy kept yelling “WHOOPEEEE!!!!” from the back of one room) and though I
think I was uncomfortable at first (and I’m definitely still awkward) it’s very gratifying work. I feel like we’re doing something good even if the subject matter’s a little dark.
And we’ve had spare time – always a welcome commodity – we’ve gotten to explore the town a bit and talk to people, delve into the town’s old and recent histories and it’s kind of a fascinating place. The Dalton Gang met it’s end here and they’ll be celebrating that with Defender Days this weekend. There was a huge oil spill that wiped a goodly portion of the section of town we’re staying in off the map giving parts of Coffeyville a ghostly, almost Silent Hill kind of feel, and it’s an old industry town, struggling as big oil and big business do their best to cut costs and remain competitive in a global economy…
An interesting place to have a cluster of a dozen + senior homes.
Back to work though and THIS morning was rough. We had to be at this high school by 7.30am, and it was a twenty minute drive, and we had to stop for fancy coffee – so back that out and we had had to set our alarms for 5.45am in order to get here. And it’d be a long night. Though I fell asleep pretty swiftly, I was woken around 3am by weather alerts from my phone and constant rumbling thunder. It seems like I’d only JUST fallen asleep again and it was time to get up, and driving West from Coffeyville to Caney in the still dark before dawn gave us a bleary-eyed chance to catch the still-ferocious lightning as the lightening of the sky slowly woke us up.
Well, while my cousin’s husband Clint was running amok frying amazing things, Rachael was heading up “Fair Hair : Crazy Hair Creations” – and I couldn’t say “NO”…. Not really having ANY idea what to ask for, I said “Well, I’m just the canvas, do what you want!” …My only stipulations were : I”ve got to fit in the car and I’ve got to teach tomorrow. And so I got brushed and combed and airbrushed, braided and glittered… A good deal of it was like getting a wet willy, but like… all over my head!
The school is tiny, and the populace kind of subdued, but everyone’s friendly enough. We’ve got two more classes now and then we’re done with the day – at which point we will be at the precise midpoint of our time on the road – 22.5 days – with 22.5 days to go and 2/3 of the miles yet ahead of us it’s nice to spent this precise middle moment sort of stationary.
From here we go West to Colorado, and I think this is the warmest day we can expect going forward. From here going west and north it’ll get colder and colder till we hit the coast – at which point Fall will be taking over to push KEEP the temperatures down. It should be crisp and autumnal when we get back, just under a week before Halloween and Heather’s birthday. Not a bad way to beat the end of Summer. Not a bad way at all.
Below – a ton of photos from The State Fair of Texas in Dallas, TX. It covers about the same area as the University of Maryland, College Park. i.e. it’s HUGE.
one of th emany bizarre sites to be seen welcoming us to the State Fair of Texas. We always visit aquariums when we’re able, and so we stopped into the one at the Texas State Fair – and I’m TRYING not to take as many pictures I have been because… we’ve SEEN all the fish, right? Wrong. Here is something NEW to us! Walking bat fish! They’re kind of AWESOME – and have little jet things in their butts. May I recommend you find them and make friends with them, though they look grumpy. Petting rays at the aquarium at the Texas State Fair. an amazing version of the fair done in miniature and in plant Life at the arboretum at the Great State Fair of Texas. That awkward moment when part of the foliage says “HeLLLOOO there!!!” and starts walking around and reflexively you yell – “HEATHER!!! ENT!!!!” Yeah, I don’t even know what’s happening here. We were looking for animals to pet and encountered this child sleeping on a pig. Go figure. the photo says everything you need to know. We didn’t buy any pink oil, but I WAS tempted by the Tail Adhesive…. We stopped at the petting zoo at the State Fair of Texas and even spent a couple of bucks on animal feed in the hopes of petting some velvety noses. We hadn’t thought this through. With about 30,000 people there over the course of the day, even if only 1/10 of those people had come through the petting section, and only 1/10 of THEM had spent money on the cups of food for the beesties, it still means 300 people have fed these mammals before we have. And frankly there was probably that number of people packed into the attraction while we were THERE. No wonder that every creature seemed patently disinterested in what we had to offer them. We still really tried to express that we were sharing the Love of Mosno – but the camel wasn’t buying it. probably the high point of the petting zoo – the moment when the joey hugged it’s parent. It was REALLY bad – like there were ALL these people clustered around the pen and they’re all watching the two animals kind of nose each other, and then there’s this HUGE sigh and AWWWWW as this uber-anthropomorphic cuteness ocurred. Yeah – EVEFRYBODY made this face!!! – Big Tex speaks up every couple of minutes with a booming baritone. He’s quite terrifying to behold. Just as we entered one of the showrooms at the Texas State Fair this THING went skittering past us – and with our eyes adjusting to the comparative darkness this kid nearly gave us a heart attack. Still, I’m fast with the shutter. My cousin’s kid, who I guess is also my cousin (?) Evan can do a pretty obscenely fast kind of reverse crab walk that can be quite upsetting. I set him after Kristen at one point to just be unnerving at her. An incredible sunset on the way home after the Texas State Fair.
