The week was pretty routine. I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed by the learning curve at work, but I'll get past that. As for non-work, I'm still behind on errands, which is why the travelogue is barely started. I have, however, hauled everything I schlepped back from New York up to my apartment. Though I haven't found permanent places for some of it yet.
I should probably have spent the weekend getting caught up on household stuff. But there were two storytelling festivals in the general region and I decided I needed to be at one. Gettysburgh is probably a shorter drive, but the line-up at the Colonial Williamsburg Storytelling Festival was too good to resist. My compromise on my should-haves was to go to storytelling just yesterday. The downside of that was that I didn't get to hear as much as I'd have liked, especially as I left a bit later than I'd planned to and missed the first session. I did get there in time to hear Antonio Sacre, who did a marvelously nostalgic piece about going to Nantasket Beach as a child, and Kathryn Windham, who is simply a hoot. I grabbed lunch and decided that the local teller session I'd go to would be the "Stories in Songs" one. I was a bit disappointed. The performer was fine musically and did several ballads (which is what I expected), but the flow of the performance didn't quite work for me.
That was followed by a full hour of Bill Harley, who I just can't get enough of. I was reminded again how much humor is anticipatory. That is, everybody starts laughing when they see something coming, without the teller having quite gotten to what the audience is thinking. I was really torn about which session to go to at 3 o'clock. I decided that, as much as I love Antonio Sacre, I should really make a point of hearing as many tellers as I could, so went to hear Jamal Koram instead. He told one exquisite personal story (about a teenage dance) and a very nice variant of "The Gingerbread Man" (with cornbread instead of gingerbread). But he also threw in a few preachy odds and ends, which I felt detracted from the overall hour.
In the evening, there was an adult storytelling event, with wine and cheese. (You even got to keep your wine glass as a souvenir.) Kathryn Windham stole the show, but all of the performers were quite good. Ed Stivender (who I'd have liked to have seen earlier in the day, but I can't be in two tents at once) also did a very clever song about seducing a girl during the Cuban missile crisis. All in all, a very nice day.
Williamsburg is far enough away that the only sensible thing to do was stay overnight. Today, I drove over to Yorktown and did a year-round Volksmarch there. Most of the walk was very pleasant, especially the parts along the river and on the tour road through the Battlefield area. But there was a rather long stretch on the shoulder of a busy road, which was a bit annoying. The walk took longer than normal since there are so many historic signs to read along the way. To top that off, I drove back by a longer route (taking 17 up to Fredericksburg), during which I whined about all the historic signs by the side of the road that are unreadable at 55 miles per hour. And there is nowhere to pull off to read them either, so I'm really not sure what the point of having them is.
Anyway, all that means I got home later than I'd planned to, so I'm off to try to get a few odds and ends done.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel