We had a very peaceful day.. not much happened. It was a good rest. I’m still  absorbing in all that I saw at the Paul Zaloom Puppetry workshop I went to yesterday… I picked up several ideas from the workshop that I can apply to my own  Jolts and Volts shows.. The main ones were:

– On keeping material fresh:  do each show for the sound guy (or the roadie.. or whatever).. that is the guy who sees your show so many times that he/she would be sick of it.. If you can make him/her laugh, you’re keeping your material fresh. That’s good advice to me.. I sometimes hear myself repeating these same old geeky jokes in my shtick and worry about it getting stale.

– On making mistakes – Paul said never apologize for mistakes.. or even apologize for a lousy show.. Embrace your screw ups and go with them..  Sometimes the funniest parts are recovering from errors.  Never give the audience reason to believe that you think you suck…   I know that sometimes during a show I get myself mentally tangled in something that doesn’t work and it can make me loose my focus.. I’ll try this next time some thing blows up figuratively or literally .

– On building new material – he suggests writing down little sections of ideas whenever they come to you.. .. At some point sit down and explore different orderings of the ideas.. I like this idea of slicing and dicing.. I tent to do all my thinking in one linear  shot.. which makes  changing it hard..

‘m thinking about revamping my show for ’08.. I’m currently scheduling no more than 2 shows per month.. but some of my friends fill in .. so I’m guessing we average about 3 per month overall.   As I have said here many times before, reaching out to kids with this geeky science is the thing I do professionally that really feels most kharmically right.

Anyway.. As I said yesterday,. I was so impressed with Zaloom that I bought a standing room ticket to the show at the Flynn Space..  The show was so amazing.. It was also impossible to describe.. It started with a monologue on Zaloom’ trip to a biker festival then transitioned to a bizzare and amazing shadow puppet show.

The show was basically an hour long shadow puppet show with amazing articulated cutouts casting shadows on a small sheet. The hero of the show was Karagöz, the Turkish equivalent of the English character Punch. The story was incredibly goofy., twisted and fun . In Zaloom’s telling,  Karagöz in trouble with the law in Syria for being gay..He ends up escaping from jail and ends up accidentally blowing up the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.  The whole thing was full of wonderfully gross humor.. uh… anatomical exaggerations.. and .. uh… excreta of all kinds,   and .. oh forget it.. I can’t retell the story here because of the family audience.  Just trust me it was amazing to watch and hear. Zaloom is a magician with puppets and sound.

There were several of the workshop folks in the audience and we hung out for a little while after the show talking..   As we were standing there, my buddy Gina came in and invited me to catch the last part of the Bottine Souriante show that was still going on in the Flynn main stage. Bottine Souriante is  a famous Quebecois folk band with amazing dance and stomping rythyms. They play and dance so hard that you get exhausted just listening to them. It could not have been more different than the show downstairs.. It was a pretty eclectic evening .

Afterward there was a small reception for the Flynn members  and the band.. I hung out for a short bit talking to Gina.. then headed home.

One of the and members was wearing this shirt which I thought was cool. I never did learn what it meant.

Today .. was really peaceful. Max had a Voices movie recording session . Gabe was up at the mountain.. so Diane and I got a chance to hang out and putter around the house, which was just what both of us needed.

Mid morning, Diane, Chai and I headed out for a snowshoe up the long trail north of Bolton Notch road. We wanted to take in some of the powder before the thaw projected for this week sets in.  I always think it’s funny the way that Chai sits in the front seat.

It was beautiful out in the woods.. I loved looking at the bark on some of these trees.. looked like eyes to me.

Especially when you put two of them together in photoshop 🙂

We found lots of bear and woodpecker  markings too.

Here’s some more beautiful scenery  – my girls..

The rest of the day was very quiet..   Around 6 we went up to Tim and Jen’s for a great dinner.

Gabe was playing with Crunk-beast the cat… which inspired Tim to lend us the Alien Trilogy.. Wonder why…