Archiving WBI

Many months ago, in the Before Times, we were having some work done under our house to deal with groundwater, and as part of that we had the moisture barrier in the crawlspace replaced. (For those who are not homeowners, that’s a big plastic sheet over the dirt. If nothing else, it keeps the Assistive Felines™ from using it as their litter box as they scamper about.)

That necessitated dragging absolutely everything out of there: all the burn theme camp tubs and camping equipment, all the Christmas Decoratoring™ stuff, and finally, the five huge tubs of materials from William Blake’s Inn.

Short version of the story: In 2007, in an attempt to convince the social leaders of Newnan, GA, to fund a full staging of my setting of Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, a scrappy gang of us worked for a couple of months putting together a “cardboard-and-hot-glue” workshop performance. (The point was to reciprocate for our sister city of Ayr, Scotland’s invitation to bring a squadron of kids over to sing with their Scottish Opera production of Tale o’ Tam.)

We had a great time meeting, studying the poetry and the music, generating tons of ideas and connections and visualizations. We eventually settled on two of the pieces, “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives” and “Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room,” for full staging. (The rest were just sung by our excellent small chorus.)

You can read all about our process in the chapter on SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy. The point is that all our work was in those tubs, and despite what I wrote only a month or two before we re-did the basement, I decided to get rid of everything, either tossing it or giving to Newnan Theatre Company.

Except for our documentation. I kept everything, our sketches, our ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS, our posters, our timelines, our photos. Why? I don’t really know, except that if the piece is ever performed, audiences might like to see an exhibit of the brainthoughts that went into creating the stagework.

Since I made that decision while standing over a tub at the theatre, all those papers ended up in my car, where they have been for a couple of months now. (Yes, it took me a couple of months to get the tubs the three blocks from my house to the theatre, why do you ask? CRAS MELIOR EST.)

And yesterday — TASK AVOIDANCE — I finally dug them out and archived them.

Readers of the book will recognize these two posters:

Fully explained on p. 95

First occurrence of the phrase.

It didn’t take long to sort them into some broad categories, of course, and there were a lot of cool memories involved. And now they’re “archived” and ready to go to our storage unit. (I suppose I ought to label everything first…)

Cecil the Assistant Assistive Feline™ was of no actual assistance in this project.

As always, anyone who’d like to give this piece an actual world premiere — my email is open.