Summer Arts Festival Day 6 7/25/11

Frank Soos gave us a problem in voice and character development. We were given two scenarios:1. Annette (mom) and Stevie (son, 13 yrs old): build the dialogue and interaction between these two, beginning with Annette’s opening line: “Stevie, want to tell me about this baggie I found in your room?”

We wound up with several scenarios, with one or the other coming out somewhat on top. (Mine is in the comments as far as I got.)
Second saw a mom with a 4-year-old daughter, whose first line(at a laundromat or grocery store) was “Mommy, can I have some candy?” We didn’t have time to work this one out, but several people had seen similar scenarios. I pointed out that the situation could be heightened by letting the daughter be diabetic.

Jonny Gray did not take us outdoors (it was threatening rain) but discussed readings. Some of the things we discussed were scene of telling vs scene of event, the line from certainties through probabilities to possibilities and finally to distortions. Another continuum runs from evocative reading aloud, through interpretation to full embided presentation to critical performance. His advice on baseline technique was to frame the peace with an introduction (prompting) and closure.

Jeanne Clark had us read a poem: “The Artist Speaks of Gray,” by Anne Coray. She defined a caesura or pause, which in this poem was indicated not only by puctuation and line breaks, but also by variation in the amount of space between words. We were then invited to choose a color and write about it, incorporating a list and using the wild word, “bucket.” I had to leave early as I was reading at Lunch Bites, but for some reason my poem and the two others read all chose brown!

Margo had studio in the afternoon, and we got down to work on the Porchoir. Margo had all of our poems copied, and we each got 36 copes of two facing pages to embellish. This is going to take time—I got my first color applied to all 36 pages, but I still have 4 colors and a number of stencils to go. We only have 2 more days for painting.

Sorry no pictures today; I should have taken some of the class painting.

Fairbanks Weather 7/25/11

Available-light photo, 11 pm 7/24. Yellow cast to windows is due to my rusty water.

Sunrise 4:26 am, sunset 11:26 pm for just under 19 hours with the sun above the horizon. We’re losing almost 7 minutes a day now. The sun is now dipping almost 5 ½ degrees below the horizon at solar midnight, and in  about 4 more days nautical twilight will be back and civil twilight will no longer be as dark as it ever gets.

Not much rain last week, and a fair amount of sunshine. Great for our outdoor exercises at festival, but the garden is starting to look a little parched. Next week’s forecast? More clouds, possible afternoon showers, daytime temperatures high 60’s to low 70’s.

The garden has been neglected the past week because of Festival, and the zucchini and broccoli are threatening to get ahead of me. The beans and peas, which normally peak around Festival, are slow this year. Lots of green tomatoes but nothing ripe yet, and I’d better plan on beet greens – and a few small beets – for supper in the next few days.