Ghosts and Girls 2.0

Ghosts and Girls is tomorrow. I can't believe it. It kind of snuck up on me. We had a run-through last night and tonight I'm going in to help with lights. It's a challenge staging this in the new venue. Lots will be visible that hadn't been before. We have to be more graceful with better stage presence. We have a minuscule backstage and one teeny tiny wing which means that no matter how interesting and engaging Brenda's story is, the audience's attention is going to be on us when we're lifting drums onto slant stands and clanging around with equipment. The space holds a little under 100, and I heard a rumor we were at about 70 tickets sold, so if you were planning on coming, you ought to get your tickets online now.

[ADDED 5 MINUTES LATER]:
The website says we are sold out! Woo hoo! But if you haven't gotten your ticket, go anyway and I bet you they'd be able to squeeze you in. Or if you can't get in, contact me and I will get you into the next show in August.

Practice Makes Perfect

Worked out a little time to get into the RCW space before my class on Tuesday nights to practice. I think practice is so important, no matter what it is you're working on--diddles, rolls, doro tsu ku's. I practice them at home in my closet (the chasm) on a practice pad, but nothing really compares to actually getting some time on a real drum. Janet gave me the go-ahead to make noise in the performance space, and let me tell you--it was such a luxury and gift to be able to practice on my own. I almost didn't know what to do with myself, but pulled out my snare drum work book and did some diddles, and then worked on some Chikara timing issues and then I played Kai to Ryu five times in a row just to see if I could! I did (!) and after the fifth time I collapsed, but it was good. Last Sunday they made me play it over and over and laughed and said they were torturing me, but eh, I say I'm better and stronger on Kai now. Ha on them! And now I have this little bit of pre-class time that I will savor every minute of.

We have our next show coming up really, really soon. Our shows always seem so far away, but I think I'm just doing a mental psych-out to myself so that the nerves don't flare up. Ghosts and Girls with Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu, yo. It should be a good show. I know it will be a good show. I say it over and over, but it really is wonderful to work with those folks. It's like magic every time they come by. Things always seem to come together and when they do you just get the goosebumps. RCW is way smaller than our venue at the JACC, but that just makes it more intimate. Think of it as your own personal command-performance. Get your tickets soon though.

Taught my class tonight. I am so happy with my students. They've dwindled down to 7 or 8, but they're all really great players and I hope they all continue. New sessions start in less than a month.

I Learned How to Use Bullet Points, So THERE!

I feel like I should have something interesting to say, but all the big events in my life are taiko-related, so here is the bullet-point version of my life.

• STAGE RE-CONFIGURATION: Last Sunday we had to reconfigure the stage at RCW into riser-seating. This was fun. Well, fun in a masochistic way. We had to take apart the stage and move it. Might I add that the stage, modular as it is, is freakin heavy. Janet handed me and Crissy allen-wrench types of tools and let us get at it. Maybe Crissy and I have a similar sensibility about embracing the whole teamwork-sweat-muscle-and-gristle sort of attitude, but she and I were ripping apart that stage like wolves. Everybody was sweating, and thankfully Janet fed us, and we all sat there quietly inhaling delish sandwiches before our real rehearsal could begin. We get to do it all again this Sunday.
  
• MOSQUITO BITES: Ouchie. I have two. I want my mommy.
• NEW TAIKO CLASS: I have agreed to offer an intermediate version of taiko classes. Part of me is like, why the heck did I sign on for this? and the other part is really relieved because I can focus on the good stuff and work on drills and kata and stick control and new songs without fear of boring my wonderful students. Plus I won't have to start over every ten weeks and teach people which side of their bachi is up and how to stand and reassure them that yes, your leg muscles will get used to standing like this. But I find that I really like doing those first lessons. I like the excitement and challenge of it. I like getting my students excited about it. I'm just glad that my faithful returning students won't have to keep sitting through those lessons and can finally move on. Now I need to start thinking about teaching Mokuyobi, which is a song that is ingrained in every muscle of my body. I have to mentally start over and think about how to teach sticking and timing and stage presence and movement. But I'm excited about being able to teach that song.
• ALLERGIES: I've never had allergies growing up. But each year around this time, I get the sneezies, and they're getting worse as time goes on. I spent all afternoon sneezing and blowing my nose. I know this is not a cold. Why me? On a side note, read Parasite Rex for an interesting explanation of allergies, and trillions of reasons why it is unwise to go swimming in rivers or lakes.
• KASA/MIX TOUR 2008 TO SADO ISLAND: Hooray! I'm going to to study taiko with Kodo in Japan! I finally got the OK from the bosses, so sign me up because I'm ready to taiko my butt off with the best of them. And when I say best of them, I mean, best of them. I still haven't realized the fullest extent of my excitement yet. It will keep growing as time goes on. More updates on that later.
• It's time for dinner! Oyasumi nasai, yo. I'm having pizza.
  

New Show

We are mounting Ghosts and Girls at Rhythmix Cultural Works, our home base, and we spent today figuring out the logistics of new transitions of the show in our space. We don't have the luxury of the wings stage left and stage right and a lot of the transitions will be visible to the audience. A new challenge, but we did important work tonight. We also won't have the youthful vibrance of KK or the beautiful shakuhachi work of Christopher, but all that is being worked out.

Part of the challenge of working out taiko transitions is moving the taiko with dignity. It's very easy to bend over and give the audience a great view of your backside, or clamboring and making a great deal of noisy distraction to get a drum on a slant stand. It's the small adjustments making sure that a drum sits snugly on its stand that is so very important, but how do you do that in front of people while making it look smooth and effortless? My goal this week is to spend at least 15 minutes figuring out how to put my drum on a slant stand in one easy move. Ha!

Oh, and if you're intersted, there are some very wonderful photos of the Ghosts and Girls show on the First Voice website.

Visiting Day

Woke up early this morning and drove up to the small town of Crockett, the town my good friend Mary spent a good part of her childhood in. She was up here for a short weekend visit with her family, so we took advantage of what little window of opportunity we had to hang out. I'd visited Crockett with her way back in the college days, so it was nice to go back. It's a wonderful small town in the big city sprawl of the San Francisco Bay Area. I could see myself living out my old age here. I like it because it's small and quaint, with quiet streets and old brick buildings and sleepy art galleries and little parks, surrounded by the Bay and the Delta and nestled in the crook of the sleeping arms of the East Bay Regional park system. Urban life imposes itself conspicuously with such things as the impressive Carquinez Bridge and the massive C&H Sugar factory, which is more picturesque than urban:

Since I only ever get a few hours here and there with Mary, we decided to go for a nice hike through the regional park. Unfortunately it was closed. I'm not sure how you close the great wide open spaces of a regional park, except with those cow fences that swing open and shut and are built like ladders anyway. So we just ignored the "No Trespassing" signs and hopped over a couple fences here and there and made our way down the great swaths of road that serve as fire breaks. We walked through rolling fields of thistle and foxtail, past stands of poison oak and little man-made ponds filled with thick green and brackish water. We saw the ostrich-like flash of a wild turkey as it fled, saw deer stand absolutely still on a distant hillside, tracking our way past with its ears. At one point Mary jumped straight up in the air when she realized she had just stepped on a snake, but they both scared each other off, and I had a nice laugh. The hills rose and fell around us, great green swaths of light and color. The live oaks with their new green and jagged leaves gave us a place to rest under. In the distance was Suisun Bay with its rusting battleships laying in their hazy graves, waiting to be scrapped or consumed by oxidation.

At one point we eyed a hill, large and hulking, the back of a whale that we clamoured up, disturbing crickets and small beetles and butterflies, and we were rewarded by a great view. It sat over a road frequented by Saturday morning motorcyclists, and was covered by prickly grasses that are just beginning to turn golden in anticipation of the long, hot summer months to come: In the distance were radio towers, placed at the intersection of where old military installations fought old wars--real and imagined--and where radio signals from the City begin to lose their reach and are boosted to the further places. Who knows what tales were ever broadcasted or broadcast still:

We rested on that hill for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the mutual good company and we traded stories and talked about life and sat also in that silence that only old friends have, beneath the crackle of the radio waves and above the drone of motorcycles and amidst the calls of crickets and the hard-shelled insects that tick and wind themselves up as if they were expanding and cracking open.

Our time was up too soon and we headed back, more slowly than we had come.

After I dropped Mary off, I was driving back home, only to get a phone call from another friend from my college days. She lives just across the Bay, but such a short distance creates bigger divides to cross. The stars must have been aligned today because we made plans to go see an art show her friend was in. It was good to see her, and after seeing the show we went and sat down with glasses of Merlot and loud music and caught up with our lives and had a nice little talk. It's good to check in on old friends. We made vague plans to make my Mother's tamale recipe, since we both love to eat and we both loved my Mom's tamales--which are notoriously delicious, by the way.

It was a good day. I'm such a home-body but every once in a while it's nice to get out and be in the world and with the people who have joined you along the way. Tomorrow I pursue my future again. We have another installment of Ghosts and Girls coming up at the end of the month. Never too early to start plugging.

My OTHER Obsession

When I'm not playing taiko, or perhaps as a distraction from it, my other OCD hobby is growing and propagating African Violets. Seriously, if you added all the minutes that I spend just staring at my violet projects, they would add up to hours and hours. Watching plants grow isn't the most action-packed hobby one could have, but again, I have OCD.

The vast majority of my stock comes from the few plants I rescued from back home. These were all my mother's violets, and at first my goal was to try to keep them alive and healthy and happy. But then I started doing some research on the good old internet and I realized how easy they are to propagate and make new violets from. African violets (AV) are surprisingly hardy. In fact, I am discovering that they try very hard to cling to life and will thrive if you just give them the essentials: dirt, water and sun. You can grow violets from their leaves, or some will offer "suckers," which are baby plants that sprout out of the trunks of mama plants.


Yes, it's as simple as plucking a leaf and sticking it into some moist soil:
I've given my Mom's plants names to keep them straight. The plant above I call "Mom's Afro," since when I first repotted it, it grew giganto and large and full, and um, like an afro. I nearly killed it out of love, and though the mama plant is still thriving, the leaf I plucked from it and stuck in soil is still growing babies. It grew two sets of babies that I have since transplanted, and after I stuck the original leaf back in the dirt, it's growing more babies! Wow!

Here are the first set of two babies from Mom's Afro (the one in front and the one in back):

The two in the middle are called "suckers" which are plants that grow from the main stem. You just pluck them off and stick them in soil and hope for the best. I gave a plant to my friend but it kind of floundered in the low-light environment she had it in, so I re-adopted it and now it grows suckers like crazy. I repotted the thing and now it's a sucker-maker-mama-maniac! Look at the new suckers:

And here is another example of suckers. This one came off a beautiful variegated plant. Apparently plants with variegated blossoms are hard to propagate back into their variegated state. I'm hoping this sucker grows the variegated flowers, but eh, if it survives then that is victory:

But my saddest violet was the one that struggled the most. It's leaves were always curled, so I nicknamed it "Curly." Extensive research informed me that it probably had mites, which are really bad news for violets. I put it in AV intensive care, only to have the result be this:
Doesn't that just bring tears to your eyes? That is one dead plant if you ask me. But luckily before I transplanted it to the AV ICU I plucked a leaf and stuck it in soil, more as an afterthought than as anything to invest hope into. But now look!:Babies! There's twins or triplets growing there! I really hope they survive! Here is before and after:There are other stories too. If I can remember to bring my camera to work I will have beautiful flowering plants to show you and I could also tell you about the Miracle of Miracles that I rescued from the garbage can (literally). And if you have the stomach for it, I will have to show you the gnat eradication system. But that's for another entry.