so much to tell. so let me back up and try to tell the stories in order.
New Hampshire:
It is beyond cold in New Hampshire. We are in a town whose name I don't know but is the textbook definition of quaint. I keep expecting a horse-drawn buggy to pull up just to complete the picture.
We are rehearsing madly to get the DJ integrated and have the show ready for our first college appearance, at Keene State. So to avoid room service charges, the Subway across the street from the hotel becomes a frequent stop.
UNTIL the tour's first great story begins. So Gina and I go into Subway, get sandwiches, pay for them, and leave. Service is fine, not quite small-town cheerful but fine. Steve and our DJ, J Period, enter the store shortly after we leave. Steve orders a six-inch sandwich. The man behind the counter begins to assemble said sandwich, including approximately three olive slices. (Trust me, this is significant later.) Steve asks for more olives. The man is clearly annoyed and says “That's twenty-five cents extra” and Steve jokingly responds, “oh, the first three olives and free, and then there's a charge?” and the man is not amused. Fine, so the extra olives go on.
J. orders a foot-long sandwich. When the requisite three small olive slices are placed on his sandwich, he too asks for more. The man, highly annoyed now, says “it's fifty cents for extra on the foot-long” so J. decides against the olives.
As they approach the cash register, the man behind the counter asks which campaign they're with (remember that the primaries are in town, so most out-of-towners are with some campaign.) Steve explains that they are with a voter empowerment campaign called “Declare Yourself.” To which the man responds, “Declare yourself? You should try declaring Jesus, you'd have better luck.”
Yes indeed, Declare Jesus. I should mention at this point that J is Jewish. He responds, “Why would that be better than declaring yourself?” and the man says “Because declaring yourself is arrogant and presumptuous.”
At this point, they're ready to go. J asks if they could just pay for their sandwiches and leave. The man says “No, and I'm sick of your attitude. You've had an attitude since you came in here, with the olives and all, and I don't have to take it” -- and he takes the sandwiches off the counter and tells them to leave.
J asks for his name, the man says why, J asks to speak to his manager, the man says he is the manager and if they don't leave immediately he'll call the cops, picks up the phone and calls the cops. J and Steve are stunned into immobility – note that neither of them has raised their voice above a conversational level yet. The Subway man calls the cops. As they're leaving, Steve says something along the lines of “You know, you're not being very Christ-like right now.” And the man says “Yes I am. I'm standing up to tyrants.”
Did you catch that? "I'm standing up to tyrants." Tyrants! Olive tyrants! Declaring ourselves tyrants!
So the cops pull up outside where J and Steve are standing within minutes, give them a hard time about the “situation” and tell them it's that man's “house” and they're no longer welcome there. Tyrants! Blasphemy!
So we had to eat elsewhere for the rest of the stay.
New York City!
We stopped in NYC, performed the poem for MTV which was nerve-wracking because Norman was there looking mildly displeased and it was all kind of crazy.
Then the blizzard hit, which wasn't fun.
Then we had to perform at Joe's Pub.
Let it be known that I love Joe's Pub. I think it's a great space. Let it also be known that very early on when the possibility of our performing there came up, I questioned several times the advisability of our performing at a function that was basically a party and therefore drawing a crowd that was not going to want to listen to us.
I was ignored. So we get there. Find out that the organizers thought we were performing for 15 minutes with music. We were planning on a half hour with no music.
We go on, because Norman is there and we sort of have no choice. Steve takes the stage to introduce us. In an effort to make a joke out of/about the very loud clump of rather large drunk men in a booth, he says something about applauding for the group of Shakesperean-trained actors he's hired to pretend to be drunk guys in the crowd.
The large drunk men are not amused.
Gina freestyles and then sings and then does a poem. She is fairly well received, though it's generally noisy. Sekou does a loud poem, is fairly well received, though it's definitely noisy in the bar.
I get onstage, make some cute jokes to try to get the crowd on my side, and do Harder Than Flesh (figuring what the hell). The crowd is good for half of it, then get noisy again.
Steve takes the stage. The drunk men are not amused. He does a much longer poem than I would have chosen given the circumstances.
Roger, unbeknownst to me, is waiting for the men to say something offensive enough specifically to me so that he can throw a candle at them. I'm glad in hindsight that this did not happen.
We eventually clear out down the street to Bull McCabe's, pissing off the organizer who clearly thinks we should stick around for $15 drinks. Drinking and talking politics with Norman Lear and Beau Sia at 3 a.m. during a mild blizzard is highly surreal. I love New York.
Earlier in the night, I introduced Norman to Roger and he said "Thanks for the lady." As if Roger made me out of popsicle sticks and lent me to the project. Hilarious.
From New York we went to
South Carolina, stopping for one uneventful night in DC.
One would think it'd be warm in South Carolina. One would be wrong. And yet we performed outdoors. In the cold. On a stage on a semi-muddy field that no student wanted to cross.
The plan is for us to perform the show several times on each campus, during class change times, so that crowd can build and word can spread. I was on the tour bus staying warm between shows when our stage manager ran on and told me that there was a fire alarm in the student union building directly across from our stage, so we needed to do the show RIGHT NOW. Which was a good idea except that the DJ was a solid hundred feet behind us and the speakers created this strange echo delay that meant we would hear ourselves speak and then hear ourselves again through the speaker about 30 seconds later.
We have to figure out how to make this work. It's way too much effort to put into something that isn't pulling and holding crowds.
The hotel is lovely – free breakfast buffet and open bar every night from 5:30-7:30 – but isolated, so I barely left the building. The morning we left, the restaurant manager saw me and said “you're still here?”
Gainesville Florida is warm. The school won't let us have music at all, and the sound is not allowed to exceed 85 decibels (apparently regular speech is about 50 decibels.) The school also has us set up the stage near the student union, a high traffic area.
The issue with this high traffic area is that students are, well, trafficking. Getting food and getting to class. Not hanging out, not having time to stop and listen to a bunch of poets.
So we find out that there's another, more appropriate area we should check out. Sure enough, here students are sitting around talking, studying, etc. Unfortunately, here we can't use amplified sound at all, and we have to compete with a super-Christian woman who is bellowing at the students such commentary as:
“Jes-us dis-crim-in-ated. Girls, you must dis-crim-inate. You must be prej-u-diced. I hear there are a few virgins left in the fresh-man class – hold tight to that! Be guarded! you young people, I know what you are doing! using mar-i-juana! getting drunk at fraternity parties! Je-sus knows what you are doing!”
but the best was her tirade at a guy whose phone rang during her rant: “young man! I know what you people use your cellular telephones for! I know you are into that tele-phone sex! repent!”
So yeah, we performed against that backdrop. And later when we came back, she was off sitting with her daughters (pray for them) and her husband came with his small folding chair and Bible to sit directly in front of where we were performing and TAKE NOTES. I was sure he was going to start yelling, but he waited until we were done to begin haranguing the crowd that had gathered.
New Port Ritchie Florida is very warm. Unfortunately, here we are in the jankiest Ramada known to humankind. I'm sure that on paper it seemed fine, but the rooms smell like someone was killed and they covered it up with cheap air freshener. My room is mint green, and has no clock. None.
There is, however, karaoke in the hotel bar every night. So Steve and Robin and I ventured there. I went largely because the room was creeping me out.
To avoid any pressure to actually perform “well,” we selected songs for each other. Robin made me sing George Michael's Father Figure. I gave Steve Creed's “Higher,” and Robin was granted the pleasure of performing M.C. Hammer's classic “Can't Touch This.”
Understand that the man running the karaoke sings between every third song, and is VERY SERIOUS about it. He can actually sing, which somehow made it all sadder. The other bar patrons could not sing. Which stopped them not a bit from being VERY SERIOUS about it. We of course were very obviously not serious, which displeased the karaoke man into singing parts of our songs to help us get back on key. It also motivated a couple into telling us on their way to the stage after we'd each performed, “we're going to do a silly one, like y'all.” And then they sang George Michael's “I Want Your Sex” and never cracked a smile. Not once. VERY SERIOUS. So then finished our incredibly weak drinks and left. I tried to get Twizzlers from a vending machine (no room service, of course, and I was hungry), and got a Nutrageous candy bar instead. Sigh.
The next day, we performed at a voter day thing at the local middle/high school. There were lots of very small children there, which was odd. But it went well, and apparently one of the organizers is David Letterman's sister. I'm hoping she's the one who said we made her cry. :)
Tallahasse, Florida: 50 degrees and sunny.
What's funny too is that I'm normally not all that picky about hotels. In my normal life (outside this tour,) it's just a place to sleep for a night that's not home. So clean and basic is plenty. Now that home IS the hotel, and the next hotel, and the next one, everything's way more important. It's a strange shift in perspective. The hotel we're in now is nice, but I find that with the prices they're charging, a free breakfast is in order. But reportedly there's a fitness center, which is helpful.
We have today and tomorrow (Saturday and Sunday) off, except for some writing. So we don't have to see each other, which is grand. Everyone's lovely, but this is mighty close quarters for people I barely knew, if at all, a few months ago. It'd be nice to have had time off where it was 80 degrees, but staying in the serial killer/karaoke Ramada is a bad bargain.
Next Friday we get a real break and I'm meeting up with Roger in San Francisco for two nights. Then it's off to Tucson.
I'm sure there are more interesting things I could include, but they'll come to me later. Oh, the tour bus has a big rendition of my face on the side, in blue. I posted pictures of it and some other stuff on the web site: www.martymcconnell.com. Strange days indeed. I need to try to do some poetry writing now.
