Friday, April 20, 2007

Because Stevens Point wasn't north enough...

I'm moving to Alaska in September. I mananged to land this season long internship with a theatre up there as Props Inten. So I'm going to be living in Juneau working for Perseverence Theatre. Not only am I excited about the location ( any city with more hiking trails than roads is a great place) but the fact that this theatre is doing vital interesting theatre in a small city (Juneau is 30,000 people with no road acess). Some of the shows that they have done in the last year include Tommy, an orginal work about the Raven in native mythogly and Equs. They've in last 7 years they have also done HEdwig and Angels in America Millennium Approachs. So I'm looking forward to doing a good mix of stuff as well as getting to know this place.

Now I know I'm gonna get questions like "Chris you realize its gonna be colder and darker than WI, right?" Well sort of, it will be darker but not 3o days of Artic darkeness, I'm well south of the Artic circle so the earlist the sun sets there is around 3:00 pm which is earlier enough, but it won't be weeks of total night. And for the cold issue, since Juneau is located between the ocean and the moutians, I get to live in cooler wetter version of Oregon. There winters are in the 30s and 40s with rain and occsional snow. When it was 20 below in Wisconsin it was round 38 above in Juneau, which really made me want to relocate then and there. Rain will be interesting to deal with as Juneau is in a temperate rain forest so it gets a lot, somewhere in 100 inches are year mark so I'll have to get used to being a little damp. But yeah I'm moving to Alaska. :)
Nothing like having the family spread from Deva Romania, to Juneau Alaska. :)

Saturday, April 14, 2007

1984

I dragged my Mom out to our local Irish Pub where we were both plesantly surprised to find live music. We laughed as we both realized that Celtic music was about the only music that we could actually clap to.

Thinking on it, at least for me, it was some of the first music that I had listened to. Thistle and Shamrock was one of the few radio programs that I remembered. And there was a tape my mother made of one program, a tape my brother was born to, and I tape that I lost in 6th grade. We sat and talked and remembered a song called The Ferrybank Piper, to which we only knew the chorus. "So here's to the Ferrybank Piper, May his sad song never die, May his gay tune rasie your weary heart until in your grave you lie." We lamented the loss and the fact that we didn't know the actual name of the song or the artist.

We then got to talking about a song that was about growing up on the Clyde during World War II. My Mom had the lyrics somewhere, but they were on a unlocatable scrap of paper, if it had survied the move from Chicago, was buried in her closet or the basement. And memories of the lost music began to dance through my head, half remembered melodies, snippets of lyrics telling someone's story. Its increadble how music can stay with you.

So once we got home we started our hunt, horribly misspelling lyrics and song titles and trying to remember if this 30 second sample was the one that we had heard on that tape, or if it was another version of a much beloved song and we managed to find 6 of them, including The Ferrybank Piper,(which we misspelled as The Fairy Bank Piper) and Yonder Banks/Shipyard Appreintice.

We found them mainly by dumb luck, persuing the craziest possible route to them. And listening to these songs I began to cry, not tears of sadness, but maybe tears of something, the kind you get when you find something you once thought forever lost, in a snowy parking lot in Glenview, IL. Maybe nothing is truly ever lost, maybe its just hiding in a different place, the place where you almost give up hope of ever finding it again, like a lost tape from 1984.