I'm headed home!

Well, I got the bad/good news just last week-- my ticket is bought and I'm going home to the Rockies in a couple of weeks.  My elderly grandfather in Montana announced to the family about a month ago that he wants to move into one of those senior citizen's communities and sell his house.  He's arranged for a two-bedroom apartment in town where he'll be surrounded by other swinging seniors and have a social life. (Heaven help 'em all.  He's such a grouchy old fussbudget.) 

So, I'm going to be the dutiful granddaughter and help my mother and aunt get him packed up and moved in.  This is going to involve a lot of packing of boxes-- and of Grandpa unpacking and repacking them again because he's O.C.D. and has to make sure all the labels on his canned goods are facing the same direction.

I expect this should go smoothly for the most part, until we get to the old brass bed my grandmother inherited many years ago from her parents and Grandpa no longer wants.  I might have to step in and referee the arm-wrestling contest between my mother and aunt to see who gets it.  ;-)

This means that me, my camera, and my audio recorder are headed back to Wyoming-- and I've decided to go back to Laramie for part of that time to do some research.  At first this seemed like the natural thing to do, given my academic inclinations and fascination with TLP, but I'm having a little bit of panic about actually talking to real live people about The Laramie Project.  I'll have to outline that in a little more detail later.

But in the meantime:  Woo-hoo!  I'm headed home, y'all!

April Showers bring.... Columbine, apparently.

Summer is here, and it has brought me lots of boredom (which is unusual for a graduate student). I've been heading out with my camera taking pictures a lot more than hitting the books recently-- and I don't feel a bit guilty.

So, I thought I'd share another picture for you, from my university's trial gardens at the College of Agriculture.

This is a variety of columbine I'd never seen before. The flowers are only about as big as a quarter or so, and a lovely maroon color. Enjoy!

A Picture of Savage Beauty For You

The Kalamazoo Swan, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

I was up in Kalamazoo, Michigan about ten days ago for a long conference on medieval studies. While I was there, I took some pictures of the Western Michigan University campus and some of its more interesting inhabitants, and I wanted to share a few pics with you.

It's nesting season up in WMU, and this is their infamous campus swan, patrolling the banks of the little pond next to the dorms where I stayed. He's a thing of beauty-- and, just as he should be, a little intimidating.  Swans are anything but the serene, peaceable creatures that Disney movies make them out to be. 

He spent most of the conference beating up on the Canada geese who also share this same pond, keeping them away from the end of the pond where his mate was still nesting. He was a sight to behold.

Enjoy!

Pro-Wrestling Meets Appalachia

Every once in a while I have these little moments of epiphany where I suddenly look around and realize that I'm not in the Rockies anymore.  Usually it's something subtle, like when I smell lilacs (which are rare down here) and I get desperately homesick, or when I see a Cadillac drive by with a "Git-r-done" bumper sticker, and I get confused.  But recently, the culture of public space has been making my status as resident alien to the South to me much more clearly than anything else.

For instance, take the street-side vendor.  Seeing people hock things on the side of the road isn't all that unusual; you see fruit stands and whatnot occasionally out west.  But I'm still not used to seeing a guy in overalls and a lump of Copenhagen in his lip set up shop on the highway selling "Boled P-Nuts" [sic] or "Shrump" [also sic] off the tailgate of his truck.   The strangest thing, up until last week, were the traveling garage sales that sprout up, like mushrooms, in vacant lots and grassy fields next to the road.  I can understand selling your stuff in a yard sale... but why pack it all in your van and roll it all out on the pavement next to the Kroger on my street? 

But what I saw two weeks ago in my neighborhood absolutely took the cake.  What I ran into was this: 

That's right: a bush-league semi-professional wrestling troupe set up a portable ring a block from my house and held a full-out wrestling entertainment extravaganza.  There were five different matches, complete with a tag team event featuring three male wrestlers and one female personality who styled herself as "Miss Las Vegas."  And I, I'm a little surprised to admit, enjoyed it in a weird sort of way, and for a weird reason.  So without further ado, here are some of the highlights:

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Tectonic Uncertainty Principle

In my attempt to think through the relationship of Tectonic Theater to the Laramie community, I've tended to focus on their relationship to the Laramie community as a whole:  are they reporting it like they are from the "inside" of the community in reflection or from the "outside" in judgment?  There's another way to think of the organization, however: as either passive observer, or active participant in, the events they're observing.  When Tectonic came into Laramie this second time, how much had they already changed the situation in Laramie with their first play?  For me, the answer is simple because I don't think that passive observation of a community is possible; you're always changing the environment you're observing.  Therefore, for me the question is not whether Tectonic Theater has had an influence in Laramie; the  question is how much, and whether or not Tectonic recognizes that fact in the second play. 

So, to start, all of you Trekkies out there understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right?  Here it is in a nutshell:  you can't observe an aspect of a particle in space without changing something else about it.  For instance, if you can pin down a particle's momentum, you know nothing about its position because your observation of its momentum precludes knowing its position.  And, since you have to "poke" a particle to know where it's at, you have to sacrifice knowing its momentum just to know its position.  It's the damnable, frustrating fact of life for quantum physicists:  you simply can never be a passive observer; to some extent, just by observing you are always a participant, you always interfere and you can therefore never know everything.    

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Other Side of the Fence

I don't hate this play, I really don't! I swear!  *ahem.*

Okay, so I figured that after the last post I put up on this subject, it wouldn't hurt to make that point a little more clear.  My relationship with Tectonic is admittedly conflicted, but I'm not a "hater."  Actually, you wouldn't find a bigger supporter of reading, teaching or performing this play than me.  M'kay?  Alllright, so let's move on to the good stuff now. 

So, last time I spent an inordinate amount of time picking apart The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later from the perspective of outsiders judging the Laramie community and how that changes the feel of the new play.  That's not the only way to look at this situation, however.  The play gives us a lot of reasons to think that the question "Has anything changed?" isn't so much their question as Laramie's.  In the Epilogue to The Laramie Project, Kaufman and his acting team instead reveal the internal criticism of the community and their drive for change. In these instances, Tectonic acts more as a sort of midwife, bringing Laramie's own questions and ambivalence into the spotlight. Knowing Laramie's reticence to address this topic, this actually makes Tectonic Theater's presence in the community at this moment all the more important because they can bring those voices of frustration, resistance and hope out into the open.

"Has Anything Changed?" Thoughts on TT's interaction with Laramie

Has anything changed?   

That's the question that Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater ask repeatedly in the run-up to the Epilogue-- has Laramie, WY changed since Matt Shepard's murder?  Have we as a nation changed?  It's the question they pose in their Newsweek article preceding the play, and it's the impetus that drives the new play forward.  Is that kind of change even measurable, they ask?   If it is measurable, then what does it look like?  It's only natural that a theater company that prides itself on holding its fingers on the pulse of the nation's important social issues would ask a question like that.  But the thing is, what happens when you pose that question?  Does it change the relationship between yourself and your interviewees?  This really comes down to a more basic, more obvious question: does judgment against Laramie in the new play come from within the community, or without?

Tectonic Theater seems, on one level, to recognize that change in their relationship to the Laramie community between the two plays.  I'm wondering right now if that change in relationship also changes the overall structure of the second play.