The Last Week and Staging

Philadelphia, PA

I should have posted about what I've been doing in this past week to get ready for staging, but I procrastinated and now... I'm writing standing up in the poorly designed computer lab at the Holiday Inn here in Philly.

There was the Fourth of July and a lot of packing.  There was a train ride and a trip to the Folklife Festival in Washington.  There was Korean beef and a gourmet burger and Chipotle.  There was dancing at a club and laughing with new friends in a quiet bar.  It was a great week.

Spent ten hours packing, had a really hurried goodbye with my family and my girlfriend, spent the train ride up here talking with Mariana, my stagemate.

Staging was almost exactly what I expected, almost word-for-word what I heard back in October.

Went to a great bar with eight of the other stagaires and had one last American burger.

We leave for JFK Airport in three hours.  That's right... two thirty in the morning.

I'm so excited.

Unistock: Last Hurrah of the Campbell Brothers

Boyce, Virginia

    My brother Warren’s goal this weekend was for us to have the quintessential Virginian experience before I left, and I’d say we succeeded.  We went to the first annual Unistock, a small bluegrass festival in Unison, Virginia, with a tent, a change of clothes, and a cooler of food and beer.  The food consisted of bread, peanut butter, grape and blackberry jelly, carrot sticks, and smore components.
    We left with an empty cooler, a soaked tent, a stultifying lack of sleep, and weird camo-pattern-like sunburns from unevenly applied lotion.  It was a good time.
    Unistock is the brainchild of Erik Burnham, harmonica player for the Loudon County bluegrass band The Acoustic Burgoo.  The four-day festival was held on the Burnham family farm.  The event brought many local musicians and bluegrass fans together.

    Warren and I arrived at the festival about 6 on Friday night and set up our tent.  The evening went off went off without a hitch as we listened to the Polka Dots, Jake and the Burtones, and finally the Burgoo.  I went to bed after the music stopped; my far more social brother stumbled into the tent at 3 in the morning.
    We woke to a tent saturated with dew, because we’d neglected to put up the tent’s fly.  After a breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches and carrots (what else?), I started doing some Tai Chi.  The girl in the next tent, Katherine, introduced herself.  By 8 the sun was already beating down on us.
    I spent most of the day trying to alternatively nap off and power through the headache that came through a lack of caffeine.  Melissa, the Burgoo vocalist, oversaw construction of a great slip-n-slide from tarps and plastic sheeting, and people were finally able to cool down.  We met up with Warren’s friend’s Kat and Noah, and Kat graciously offered me some Excedrin.

    After the slip-n-slide’s novelty wore off, most everyone lazed around under a pair of pavilions.  Warren and I tried to emulate some Nigerien wrestling I saw in Birni, but we got bored after no one else joined in. 

    I reflected that this is exactly what Virginia summers were meant to be.  Barefoot and shirtless, sippin’ beer and lying in the shade with your friends.  Screw yer too-cold air conditioning, streaming movies, and Civilization IV to wile away the days.
    But on the other hand, Niger taught me that a fundamental part of my tastes is stuck in the nineteenth century. ‘Swhy I shave with a straight razor and keep a handwritten journal in addition to this blog.

    As sunset approached, a new band took the stage.  Their name was Gallows Bound, and despite their attempts to introduce edgier themes to the music, they came off as kind of bland.  Jake and the Burtones were late coming back from another gig, so in a flash Melissa asked Warren to fill their slot.  He started out a bit nervous, alone with his guitar on the flatbed truck that served as a stage, but once he started playing, he ruled.  The best part was when the Burgoo’s guitarist Rudy joined him on the trumpet for “One Love.”
    Once the Burtones showed up, Warren and I got the smore ingredients from the cooler, only to find that most of the chocolate had melted and the marshmallows had congealed into one shoggoth-like wad of goo.  Tried to squeeze the chocolate out like toothpaste, only to have the packet’s other end rupture and gush onto my wrist; the marshmallows resisted my assault on their new super-form by sticking to every inch of my hands.
    So I threw them away.  CheckMATE, you amorphous monstrosity!
    The Burgoo killed with their next music set, then invited the fiddler Cincinnati Joe and Dwayne Brooke of the Woodshedders to do vocals with them.  Just after midnight the band tried to go off, only to have the audience thunderously demand several encores.  The performance finally did end with Erik rapping.  It was unforgettable.
    We hung out for some fireworks and cake to celebrate Erik’s dad Chris’ birthday.  Went to bed, woke up again when Warren came in at 3:30 and roused me because of the lightning and spitting rain.
    Oh, yes, there was lightning.  Lightning right above us, going off like artillery.  And I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep!  Later, I found out that at that very moment our mother, in a moment of insomnia, was watching the late-night news and seeing a wall of lightning move across our position, like a scene from a Roland Emmerich movie.
    What finally snapped me awake was the sound of... something moving closer to the tent.  I listened harder, and deduced at the same time as Warren that the rain was picking up, that there was an actual curtain of torrential rain headed right for our tent.  When it hit, the staccato of drops hitting the fly was so loud we had to shout to each other to be heard.  Warren had the presence of mind to yell to Katherine to come get in our car away from the lightning.  I ran out of the tent in just my boxers and jumped in the back seat, followed by Katherine.  Warren finished zipping the tent closed and got in the driver’s seat.  I moved to the passenger seat and curled into the fetal position to warm myself. 
    The three of us drifted in and out of consciousness until the rain stopped and the lightning moved off.  It was still dark, so it must have been around 4:30 when Warren and I crawled back into the tent, not paying attention to the water pooled on the floor, soaking into our pillows.
    At light, we dismantled the tent and threw it into the back of the car.  We said goodbye to Katherine and drove the winding backwoods route home.  Had a breakfast of omelet, ham, and coffee, and took a shower.  It was good to be home, but you know what?  The sunburn, the malnourished feeling from eating the same thing four meals in a row, the apocalyptic brush with Nature’s fury...
    All worth it for the music.