Celebrity death of the week is astronaut Wally Schirra.
I spent most of the week working on a conference paper. In between work, I repeatedly emailed and telephoned Jo, the contact person for the Fairfax arts event and pretty much had to beg to get a parking map and directions from her so I could send it to the other storytellers. I should have seen the difficulty with this as an omen.
So Saturday comes and the weather, which had been lovely all week, is iffy. It's chilly and overcast - not exactly ideal for an outdoor event But, I figured, we were supposed to be in a tent, so it should be okay. I got to the park a half hour before the event and saw canopies, not tents. Okay, so my idea of a tent was obviously not Jo's, but there were no chairs. And no sign. I went inside the building and tracked down Jo, who couldn't seem to understand why I was concerned that nothing had been set up.
She managed to bring over three chairs, which turned out to be an adequate supplement to the bench already there, because it was way too cold out for anybody to want to sit somewhere completely unprotected from the elements. Penelope did her set anyway, telling stories to her daughter and to me. She did one little girl who listened to half of one story and two children came a bit later and listened to another while having their lunch. When she was done, we suggested to Jo that we really needed to move inside, particularly as it was starting to rain. She said she'd find us somewhere inside. And, oh, yeah, she'd go and pick up the sign she'd had made. (One might have thought of doing that before 1 p.m. for an event that started at noon.) She also questioned why I didn't have the sign Gary had from last year - which she had not even hinted at during our several phone calls.
The problem was the Art League was having a (closed) meeting upstairs and there was a film crew (associated with the 48 hour film project) downstairs. So, realistically, there wasn't anywhere. Since nobody was going to be there to do anything, I went to grab a quick lunch. I got back and Tim was waiting and we moaned to each other about the situation. It was worse in his case because he had a long drive to get there.
Jo waffled long enough that I couldn't even reach the other two performers to tell them not to bother coming. The whole thing was a fiasco wrapped in a disaster and left me with a bad feeling towards the city of Fairfax. There is good reason why artists should not be arts administrators. The failure to have any sort of plan for the possibility of rain was just another aspect of the overall poor planning. I suppose it was actually a good thing that Jo did pretty much nothing about publicity either.
To make things worse, a necklace I love broke in the car on the way over. I think I've collected all the beads from the car and I can get them restrung, but it was still irritating.
Today was not a fiasco, but still a bit disappointing. I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which is more or less a cross between a county fair and the world's largest yarn shop. I was supposed to meet a friend, who didn't make it. To be fair, she warned me that she didn't know how long her other commitment of the day would take, so it wasn't a surprise. The bigger surprise is that I didn't buy any yarn. Not that I wasn't tempted, but I do have a huge stash and there just wasn't anything that I felt was so unusual I couldn't live without it. I did buy a book of textilely-correct fairy tales, though. I also got a purple silk scarf, which is something I've been looking for to go with a particular dress.
I napped when I came home and got up just in time to watch the season finale of The Amazing Race. Damn, damn, damn. The team I absolutely loathed won. Damn. It's been that kind of weekend, I guess.
Copyright 2007 Miriam H. Nadel