–Sunday, 1-29-2006:
I found a different coffee shop, it’s called EnVie and was as equally adorable as CC’s was. After another morning in a coffee shop, we headed back to Stuart’s to put the final touches on packing and head off. Stuart saw us off, he was just the greatest. The van that had been shuttling us around all week picked us up, and took us to the hotel where our bus was waiting. We had a three and a half-ish hour drive from New Orleans to Lafayette. I promptly fell fast asleep. I blame this on the fact that I didn’t go to bed before 3am any single night in New Orleans. Half way through the bus ride, I was waking up and I hear “Does she know yet? Did anyone wake up Melinda? Someone should tell Melinda!”
This was kind of disturbing to me, in my half-asleep state, because I assumed that something had gone horribly wrong and I was being assigned either blame or cleanup duty. However! It turns out that, as a bus, we were going to stop at a Taco Bell, and since the reputation of my love for Taco Bell is well-known, everyone was excited to wake me up and watch me squeal. I thought this was cute.
We got to Lafayette, and checked into our La Quinta suite hotel, (which is pretty awesome, by the way,) and were greeted down the street by a freaking BILLBOARD for our show. I’ll have a picture of it later. I took another nap (my 2nd of the day,) and woke up just in time to get ready for the dinner we were to attend that night. The presenters hosted a home-cooked dinner party for us at one their houses (more like mansion.) The woman whose house it was had the most amazing backyard I’ve ever seen… It was huge, and landscaped in a way that it was divided into full outdoor rooms, complete with outdoor furniture and lighting, but not in a way that seemed artificial… it still completely felt like we were outside.
Dinner was gumbo (check another local specialty off my list!! plus, it was homemade and seafoodless… awesome.) It was really, really, good… and it was cool to eat something we’d heard SO much about. (I could probably already make the roux without the recipe in front of me…) We mostly mingled, and I must say, I was regrettably less social than normal (though still more engaged than most,) due to my now-bordering-on-ridiculous level of tiredness. One of the highlights of dinner was when one of the guests produced a newspaper article that featured us in the paper and the full-size image the article used to show us was a picture of just me, under a wheel piece in wheel duet… yay!
Perhaps the coolest part of the evening, however, was when we walked outside to be picked up for dinner, and saw a TROLLEY. A full-on trolley on wheels was there to pick us up. It was kind of surreal… and even more confusing. I later learned, that this trolley was to be our transportation for most events/rides for our entire stay here in Lafayette. The owner is somehow affiliated with PASA (the organization that brought us here,) and he volunteers his time and his trolley to take us all around. His name is Don, and he is a retired counselor who now owns a casino. In addition to this trolley we know and love (The Good Times Trolley, which he got from Portland, OR,) he also owns a trolley from Disneyworld and two airplanes. He a real character, and so fun and nice. He even has music he blasts over the trolley’s speakers as we ride in it… which ranges from everything from calypso and carribean to some kind of quasi children’s country on crack: “I wanna ride you little, donkey, donkey, donkey… I wanna ride you little, don-key…”
After dinner, we came home and fell asleep… yay for sleep.
–Monday, January 30th:
This day, we’ve been warned for a while was to be hell-day. We all had to be up and in the lobby to be picked up to all go around and teach classes. The morning was to be a logistical brainteaser, because we had about seven classes to teach, and three teams of three of us all coming and going to them all throughout the morning. The final class was the kicker: 100 students, all in one gym. Our classes normally range from 10 kids to about 30 on the very high side.
My first class was at a normal middle school. Perhaps, though, I’m throwing around the word normal too easily… they had so many weird strict rules, I thought the lady was joking when she explained it to me. In addition to uniforms and security badges – neither of which I ever had, but I know aren’t too unusual these days – every kid was required to use a mesh, see-through backpack. Supposedly this is going to halt middle-schoolers from carrying drugs and weapons in their packs, but I think that really, someone on the school board must have owed a favor to someone who works at Jansport, the only company who makes those bags.
I think it bothered me a little more than it should have because I remember middle school being so awkward, and having just a little bit of personal space inside my backpack was important. Also- whoever thinks that kids aren’t smart enough to find a way to still hide drugs and or weapons in their packs regardless of the mesh outside has got to be the most naive, or stupid, take your pick, person alive. But I digress…
The one super-impressive thing about the first school I went to was the fact that they had a dance program. They’re a magnet arts school whose mission statement was something like “enriching academics through study of the arts.” So, perhaps a dance programs is necessary and in order for such a school, but to me, I was blown away that these kids got to spend learning hours doing dance. For me, dance came in for the seven hours after school and before homework, and sometimes sleep. The dance room was amazing too, at least to my college-dancer eyes, because all over the walls were pictures and lessons about Graham, Horton, Ailey, Cunningham… basics and hallmarks about the dance world that I, regretfully, didn’t even get to learn about until college.
The class itself was fun, the kids were giggly and somewhat unfocused, but they really tried hard and were very interested in our lessons – the traditional mix of “I care, but no so much as to appear uncool to my friends” that runs rampant among 13 year olds. Regardless, I’d say I lucked out, compared to poor Becca who taught in what was later described as the worst teaching situation we’ve come across in our outreach. The school they went to said there would be 30 kids in the class, so we sent three teachers, who showed up to, instead, 60 students dancing, and another 25 lining the walls and watching. The kids were so uninspired, and so unwilling to listen, care, acknowledge and even remain in the classroom, that eventually the three Diavolo teachers had to resort to boot-camp tactics to even be able to run a functioning classroom.
The problems, I think, were twofold: First, what we do is dangerous, so the need for us to have focus from the kids and be in control is paramount. Secondly, I think this group of kids was at the place and the age to have just given up on life. This school, we knew going in, was 92% on free lunches, and notorious for behavioral problems, which I can only assume are characteristic of bad family situations and a hard life. We knew that going in… the problem really was that the school tripled the class size without telling us. It truly sucked for those involved.
Now, traveling from one end of the social spectrum to the other, our last class, (the 100 kids class) was at a private school about a half an hour – by trolley no less – from Lafayette. The school costs more per year than private college (which after attending Loyola, I find hard to fathom,) and is well known for what great people the kids there are. I took that last bit with a grain of salt, thinking perhaps they might be spoiled and that deemed perfect and good was only a byproduct of the “my little angel can do no wrong” principle. Nope. They were amazing.
Honestly, I haven’t seen so much love and heart in kids that age, ever. We were teaching ninth graders, and generally the freshman crowd is one I find particularly abhorrent, but there was no trace of bitchiness, evil, unfairness or exclusion among them. They rallied around one another, made no allusions to making fun of anyone for any reason, and were generally just a parade of unbelievable and unexpected kindness and focus. My group (me, Garrett and Crystal,) took our 30 kids outside. No one complained about sit-ups and push-ups once, even though we were even asking them to do them in the dirt. No one tried to sabotage their partner on the trust exercises, and no one did the typical trying to get attention by purposely failing. Everyone just tried and was having fun, and were helping each other.
One kid was handicapped, and we were doing cluster flys (where one person runs at the rest and they get lifted up into the air,) and we knew he wasn’t able to run at us, and was going to be much heavier than the rest, due to his size and his body’s lack of stability. I was over talking with him, giving him a flying lesson, and when I came back to my group of catchers, one kid, who had been the main muscle of the group – taking the exercise very seriously and keeping everyone focused, and taking the responsibility of calling our “set” – was giving a little speech… it went something like this: “You guys, you know this is going to be really hard for him, because he is so shy and nervous about his ailment. We need to make sure to get him up in the air no matter what. I really need to everyone to put everything you have into it, we really need to show him, he’s capable of this…”
I was shocked. I’ve never seen a ninth grader who was that intuitive and kind. Well I have, but I’ve never seen one who would put himself out there to take care of this friend like that, and then in addition, would also be surrounded by a whole group of ninth graders who were equally responsive and who would take that seriously, and to heart. So, when he came hobbling up, and jumped as best he could, they all did what they said they would, and even though it really was hard and strenuous, the group lifted him all the way up. Then, upon setting him down, they greeted him with hugs and high-fives and a chant in his honor.
I don’t know what it was about what they teach, or how they teach there they could produce such great results. It seemed normal enough to me (and perhaps a bit abnormal in a different way – exemplified by a yellow sign in the gym that read: “If your pee is THIS color, you need to drink more water!!”) Perhaps I have just been surrounded by the fakeness and social politics of Bellevue and L.A. for too long…
After our classes, Don, our trolley man extraordinaire treated us to lunch at a local Po-Boy restaurant. We had some amazing shoestring fried onions, and I got a turkey po-boy (yum) and I TRIED ALLIGATOR. It was okay, it tasted just like normal sausage. I had trouble swallowing it though, because I still can’t turn off that literal part of my brain that takes over.
After lunch we were dropped off at our hotel, with just enough time to come into our rooms and change, and then head off to the theater for tech. Yep, my day wasn’t even half over yet. We spent the afternoon and evening doing a slower-than-normal tech of act one. Nothing new or exciting, except perhaps the addition of a piece called “Bonjour”, which Jacques choreographed in the baby years of the company, and is being performed just in Lafayette by Nick, a founding member of Diavolo who now lives here. The piece is drastically different from the kinds of things we do now, and even though the piece isn’t my favorite, it’s neat to see the roots of where this all came from.
After tech: sleep.