Long delay in entries in this blog, right?
Here’s the scoop, and why I never mentioned here.
February 18th was a big day. My wife and son had just completed two weeks of school assembly shows in Southern CA. It was an absolute hoot to do shows with them and to have audiences of children. I won’t go into it too much here – we kept a blog of the whole experience and you can read it here if you wish.
So, back to Sunday, 2/18/07… After being away for 2 weeks we landed home in time for the annual Mardi Gras parade in Nevada City, CA. A very fun parade and bead collection exercise for my 5-year old son. Perfect weather and saw a ton of friends who had all followed our tour on the blog. One of the those days you pinch yourself to make sure it’s real.
I hadn’t worked out with my exercise partner in 2 weeks and we planned an afternoon mountain bike ride.
About 10 minutes into the ride something went horribly wrong. A branch flipped up into my spokes and took my bike from 17 MPH to zero in nothing flat. I, on the other hand, didn’t stop and flew off my bike and through the air. After a rather ungraceful landing I had the wind knocked out of me and was totally unable to move anything on the right side of my body. My partner came over and in no uncertain terms assured me I had broken my collarbone. I don’t want to go into it here, but you can read it here.
Blogs for everything… it’s a way of life.
Now, onto the subject of this blog.
Indian Wells, CA for Association for Wire Rope Fabricators.
Wire rope… cable. Yep, there is an association for everything in the world. What’s it like to hang out with people from all over the word who make cable? Sure, they try to remain humble. Act like they are just regular Tom and Barbaras, but they make CABLE! 1/8″ all the way up to 6″ diameter cable. I got my picture taken with the president of the association.
The thing that made this show so memorable was that we were not only coming back after a 9-week forced ‘vacation’, but the label had fallen off our prop truck and Fed Ex had no idea of where it was! Ouch.
With 2 hours until showtime and the assurance of a few Fed Ex supervisors that we would not see this trunk tonight, we got resourceful. We went to WalMart and spent a couple hundred bucks buying foam-core bats, balls, rings, plates, ping pong balls, and anything else we could use on stage. We hurried out of there and got our butts back to the hotel to figure out a 60-minute show.
The producer and the client were both very calm and wonderful throughout the ordeal. It didn’t have to be that way and we were very happy that it was.
The show was a blast… I would have liked a bit more variety but we had what we had and I think we rose above the adversity in a big way. The show was 65 minutes.
What a way for me to come back. I still have a fair amount of pain from the broken collarbone and surgery. I did the show on a few pain pills so no one had to see me wince. It was great to be back on stage again. Dan was perfect and gave an extra dose of wacky to his performance to cover for, well, for everything really.
None of the people in the audience really believed our whole WalMart/Fed Ex story.
I guess that’s a good sign.
Happy to be back… Barry