One day last weekend I did something I haven’t done in ages – absolutely nothing!
I can’t recommend it enough. If I had more time to kill, this is what I’d fill it with. All around that nothing, in every direction, I did things.
Those things came in the shape of murals, art tutoring, window graphics, album sleeve design and bizarrely a headstone design! Now this is all well and good but what I SHOULD have been concentrating on this last month is the impending shadow puppet play myself and a group of artists are performing in a clearing in a woods in two weeks time. It’s a massive project based on a story set in the Appalachian mountains involving several schools, choirs, a jugband and community groups.

We all have our part to play. One of the artists is in charge of music and she is teaching everyone the songs. One Hell of an undertaking considering the amount of people involved. One is in charge of building the stage, preparing the woods etc and one is making ugly jugs, again with groups of people. My role saw me writing the first draft of the story and then going to the schools to get the children involved. They helped make some of the shadow puppets and the backgrounds but I’ve still a fair amount of work to do on that front yet. Not to mention choreographing the whole thing! Gulp.

This is why I should not have done all those things I mentioned earlier and just stuck to doing this one BIG thing instead.

Something really nice has arisen from all this though, out of the blue. Someone I was friends with when I was very young got in touch again through facebook. While talking about art, he asked if there was anything he could help with. I said,”Well, there’s this shadow puppet thing…” God help him, he doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, trying to tie all this together in a fortnight. I have seen Shane maybe once in the last 28 years and I’m looking forward to properly catching up and doing something as odd as this with him. It seems fitting as the last real time we spent together we were running round with home-made Ghostbusters backpacks on, kicking ass. This is us in the little hut in the roof of their garage planning our next attack.

Anyway, I better get at these puppets. Meanwhile, here’s a picture of myself and my much better half, Jo doing that nothing I talked about. It seems so long ago now…