Davenport Diary Sunday/Monday
Jul. 21st, 2005 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamagotchaGreetings, friends, jugglers, family, and everyone else!
I was going to bail on my IJA Festival Diary duties this year, but I received a wonderful note from Sean McKinney’s mom requesting their return.
My excuse for not writing this year? Because my 11-month-old baby Lincoln is running me ragged. Well, I can’t really say that to the woman who raised one of the most influential and creative jugglers on the planet (I can only imagine what a handful Sean was at this age!). So I humbly accede to her kind request, and now begin, several days late, to attempt to bring you all to Davenport with me.
First, a quick snapshot of the fest right now: the Bix Biterbum (Bridalbeef? Buckleby? ack... I cannot get my mouth around that word) contest has just finished (Michael Karas as Barnacle Bill the Sailor took first place; the Pez kids tapdanced their way to second... I think Adam Zeisler was third? in any case, Cindy Marvell looked lovely in her slinky black dress and b&w feather boa). The gym is hopping, workshops are humming along, the crush on registration has passed. There’s an air of anticipation for Championships tonight (finalists, in show order: Ole Soto, Kikyo Brothers, Cécile Poncet, Entropy, Manuel Mitasch, Swingsisters, Scott Sorensen, Kevin Axtell, Pick’n’Mix, Ryo Yabe, Jonglissimo, Mark Kolbusz). The numbers qualifying runs are proceeding smoothly under the watch of Merry Spahl (?) and Sandy Brown.
Twenty-three folks are being amazed and worked hard in the Yuriy workshop (the student he brought, Gregoriy, has a nickname that sounds like Greasha and does four pirouettes under three balls. He looks like Barishnikov). Lots of vendors are scattered round the gym... the Carmine St. Irregulars are parked at the Logo 27 booth, a snazzy setup surrounded by yard-wide mylar triangles arranged in a wall.
I’m afraid this is going to be a scattershot bit of writing... not only am I operating on little sleep, but I’m getting interrupted (quite pleasantly, of course) by vendors (I’m the vendor coordinator), workshop leaders (I’m also doing workshops), moms (I’m sitting at the Flamingo table), my kids (my 15 y.o. daughter Julia is here, helping wrangle the aforementioned baby), my husband (Bill “Spin Doctah” Gilliland), and anyone else wandering by.
More to follow...
OK, let’s slide back in time a bit... on Sunday we drove up to Davenport from Kansas City, Missouri, where we are temporarily camped out while Bill works on his postdoctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society (yes, he really is a PhD... look for us to head back to the Left Coast sometime in the fall of 2007). Not much juggling going on in the KC metro area, but we’ve recently hooked up with Greg Owlsey who is teaching high school math after a nice long stint at RIT. He’s been getting us fired up about juggling in groups again, so we’ve been looking forward to getting a club growing close to home.
I haven’t been to a fest since the Reno IJA two years ago. I’m jonesin’ bad! The last few weeks have been devoted to getting this fest ready... not only are Bill and I doing workshops and vendors, but we put together the fest program... meaning, Bill did baby wrangling while I did Microsoft Word rassling. It’s been lots of late nights already, and I couldn’t believe it was already time to start driving.
We loaded up our gear, the baby gates (which were immediately snagged by the ball bouncers), flamingo table stuff (first aid kit, toys, snacks, etc.), workshop signs, all of it into Lilith, our 95 Honda Odyssey, and hit the road. We leapfrogged with Sandy (from Lawrence, KS) all the way up, but never actually saw her and her red van. Julia was devouring the new Harry Potter book, so we didn’t hear much from her.
After many fields of corn and loud CDs and a few well-timed naps from Linc, we arrived in the Quad Cities area. Our hotel was easy to find, your basic Holiday Inn. Sandy called... apparently it’s illegal to sell alcohol in Iowa on Sunday, so could we please dash over the stateline to immoral Illinois and snag some MGD for the festival launch party? Easier said than done... we got horribly lost before we finally surfaced somewhere in Moline. Alcohol and a map were obtained and we returned to Davenport safely if not rapidly. Some of the neighborhoods on Rock Island were a bit sketchy and I was wondering about the fest location, but it turned out that the RiverCenter is in the middle of some city blocks that have apparently been the target of some serious urban redevelopment. Lots of pretty pots of hanging flowers (bet they love the humidity) and street repairs and stuff like that.
Party was nice... reacquainting myself with folks, introducing Linc and Julia, nibbling on veggies and dip. Bill Giduz had brought leftover ribs from his restaurant meal but those were snatched up quick before we got there, oh well. Will Murray and Rhonda were very patient with the baby crawling through their conversations, which is good because they are coming to spend some time in KC with us for a bit after the fest. Julia enjoyed meeting a magician with a flaming wallet.
We were pretty fried, so we bailed fairly early even though Sandy and Linc were fast becoming best buddies. Back to the hotel room, ordered an early breakfast, and snoozed.
I wanted to be there at 8 a.m. on Monday because Fergie was going to be a vendor and he’d emailed me about being there right at 8. Well, I hadn’t met him yet, and we’d had a few discussions on rec dot, so I wanted to make a good impression on him. I was there right at 8... no sign of Fergie for several more hours. But when he did make it, he was charming and professional... didn’t bite my head off even once. Same thing happened when I met Andrew Conway... I was skeered spitless, and the ol’ dragon turns out to be a total pussycat.
We pulled up to the service entrance of the main exhibit hall. The place has the empty, cavernous, echoey sound of the pre-festival. Concrete floors, maybe a 40 foot ceiling, halogen lamps (not great, but at least they’re spaced kind of far apart so you can stand between ‘em). Part of the floor has been carpeted, but there’s no padding underneath. Linc is a tiny speck in the middle of the wide sea of floor, crawling and visiting with folks while I do vendy stuff. The center has tables out but no tablecloths or skirts, and there’s not nearly enough tables. There’s some stress of finding all the shipped goods and whether vinyl table coverings will be better than cloth, but once it’s all sorted out we have a nice ring of vendors around the room (12 in all!).
Jerry Martin grins his way in... turns out he and Dave Davis met up the night before and totally forgot about the welcome party. I hear that Martin Frost had a bad travel day and is still stuck in Chicago (but he arrives by the end of the day). Tables emerge from the freight elevator and the Reg Desk is built from the ground up. Dave Davis sat down to start up his camera/printer system to print out color photo badges for the fest... and didn’t move his butt from that seat for about 18 hours. I’m still unclear on the exact nature of the problem, but at one point folks were hollerin’ for a volunteer who know anything about Linux drivers. Sheer tenacity won the day, and soon folks were sporting spiffy nametags with their own smiling faces, color props down the sides, and a barcode across the bottom (taking the place of show tickets).
Monday was a free day at the fest, so it didn’t matter much that badges weren’t ready right away. Slowly the room filled with jugglers, transforming from a huge empty room with busy edges to a uniform blur of color and music and happy reunions.
(I wish I’d been taking notes... I really wasn’t planning to do this, and now Monday seems so long ago, and it’s gotten fuzzy... I’ll know better next time!)
There was some confusion about the festival programs. I had been told that the copier the fest was renting would be up to the task of xeroxing 500 copies of the seven-piece program, but this turned out not to be possible. After Marilyn Sullivan (one of our amazing volunteers... half of the Sullivan membership team) wrestled with them for quite a while, it was decided that it was time to let the pros take over. I hauled the whole thing over to Kinkos and handed it off happily.
When I noticed the room was emptying out, I looked at my watch... time for the Welcome Dinner and Show! We headed out of the gym and over the skywalk into the Blackhawk Hotel, where the Gold Rooms were. We were pretty late, but Scotty Meltzer found us a table with four empty seats. Madelyn Dinnerstein, one of my workshop leaders and a fellow Flamingo, was already there. Linc got lots of pictures taken (good thing the little anklebiter is so photogenic) and we settled in for the dinner... salad, pasta with meatballs, angelfood cake with strawberries and whipped cream.
According to Dusty Galbraith (Quad Cities booster, and fest press chair), Cary Grant died in this building. This was supposed to be historic and maybe a little morbid, but after eating those meatballs, was completely believable. Dusty opened the show with the never-before-seen act of passing a kidney stone on stage.
Olga Galchenko was supposed to have been anchoring the show, but backed out at the last minute. After some scrambling for replacements, Scott Slesnick, Jason Kollum and Dean Frantzen filled the bill. Some of Scott’s tennis-ball-and-can stuff was cool (especially the bit with a giant can-and-ball routine with his wife, the lovely Erika), and Dean had a few good lines, but the show felt thrown together and hurried... the consensus among festgoers was that the performers had certainly tried to save the show, but it was generally a disappointing start to the week (those meatballs didn’t help, either).
One bit of the show was memorable to me... Peggy Reuss got up and showed off the “Juggling is Rough Work” award, to be presented to a juggler who most embodies the style of Sean McKinney. The sculpted trophy, of Sean leaning back, juggling over his body with his arms crossed behind him, captured his intensity and thrasher spirit perfectly. It was a powerful moment that brought the whole group together in a solemn way, and at the same time promised joy, competition, and of course more crazy juggling... just what this fest needed.
On the way back to the gym, I was distracted by Steve & Michelle Gerdes (who are sharing a hotel room with Jeffrey Daymont and his purty gal-pal, who I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting). The distraction lasted a while, and I returned with a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for my husband who had been ditched with the baby.
Visited a short bit with Matt and Lisa Hall (yep, he finally did the right thing and married that lovely lady... be sure to get the whole romantic surprise-Hawaiian-wedding story from them), and a ton of other folks.
I didn’t last very long.... the baby was tired, I was tired, and as much as I wanted to keep chatting with folks, I had to head off to bed. The fest programs had been finished, so we picked those up for the midnight jugglers to peruse, and headed back to home sweet hotel. It had been a very long day and the fest had just barely started. But all my vendors were happy, and the programs were in the gym, and I felt pretty accomplished.
More to follow soon....
I was going to bail on my IJA Festival Diary duties this year, but I received a wonderful note from Sean McKinney’s mom requesting their return.
My excuse for not writing this year? Because my 11-month-old baby Lincoln is running me ragged. Well, I can’t really say that to the woman who raised one of the most influential and creative jugglers on the planet (I can only imagine what a handful Sean was at this age!). So I humbly accede to her kind request, and now begin, several days late, to attempt to bring you all to Davenport with me.
First, a quick snapshot of the fest right now: the Bix Biterbum (Bridalbeef? Buckleby? ack... I cannot get my mouth around that word) contest has just finished (Michael Karas as Barnacle Bill the Sailor took first place; the Pez kids tapdanced their way to second... I think Adam Zeisler was third? in any case, Cindy Marvell looked lovely in her slinky black dress and b&w feather boa). The gym is hopping, workshops are humming along, the crush on registration has passed. There’s an air of anticipation for Championships tonight (finalists, in show order: Ole Soto, Kikyo Brothers, Cécile Poncet, Entropy, Manuel Mitasch, Swingsisters, Scott Sorensen, Kevin Axtell, Pick’n’Mix, Ryo Yabe, Jonglissimo, Mark Kolbusz). The numbers qualifying runs are proceeding smoothly under the watch of Merry Spahl (?) and Sandy Brown.
Twenty-three folks are being amazed and worked hard in the Yuriy workshop (the student he brought, Gregoriy, has a nickname that sounds like Greasha and does four pirouettes under three balls. He looks like Barishnikov). Lots of vendors are scattered round the gym... the Carmine St. Irregulars are parked at the Logo 27 booth, a snazzy setup surrounded by yard-wide mylar triangles arranged in a wall.
I’m afraid this is going to be a scattershot bit of writing... not only am I operating on little sleep, but I’m getting interrupted (quite pleasantly, of course) by vendors (I’m the vendor coordinator), workshop leaders (I’m also doing workshops), moms (I’m sitting at the Flamingo table), my kids (my 15 y.o. daughter Julia is here, helping wrangle the aforementioned baby), my husband (Bill “Spin Doctah” Gilliland), and anyone else wandering by.
More to follow...
OK, let’s slide back in time a bit... on Sunday we drove up to Davenport from Kansas City, Missouri, where we are temporarily camped out while Bill works on his postdoctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society (yes, he really is a PhD... look for us to head back to the Left Coast sometime in the fall of 2007). Not much juggling going on in the KC metro area, but we’ve recently hooked up with Greg Owlsey who is teaching high school math after a nice long stint at RIT. He’s been getting us fired up about juggling in groups again, so we’ve been looking forward to getting a club growing close to home.
I haven’t been to a fest since the Reno IJA two years ago. I’m jonesin’ bad! The last few weeks have been devoted to getting this fest ready... not only are Bill and I doing workshops and vendors, but we put together the fest program... meaning, Bill did baby wrangling while I did Microsoft Word rassling. It’s been lots of late nights already, and I couldn’t believe it was already time to start driving.
We loaded up our gear, the baby gates (which were immediately snagged by the ball bouncers), flamingo table stuff (first aid kit, toys, snacks, etc.), workshop signs, all of it into Lilith, our 95 Honda Odyssey, and hit the road. We leapfrogged with Sandy (from Lawrence, KS) all the way up, but never actually saw her and her red van. Julia was devouring the new Harry Potter book, so we didn’t hear much from her.
After many fields of corn and loud CDs and a few well-timed naps from Linc, we arrived in the Quad Cities area. Our hotel was easy to find, your basic Holiday Inn. Sandy called... apparently it’s illegal to sell alcohol in Iowa on Sunday, so could we please dash over the stateline to immoral Illinois and snag some MGD for the festival launch party? Easier said than done... we got horribly lost before we finally surfaced somewhere in Moline. Alcohol and a map were obtained and we returned to Davenport safely if not rapidly. Some of the neighborhoods on Rock Island were a bit sketchy and I was wondering about the fest location, but it turned out that the RiverCenter is in the middle of some city blocks that have apparently been the target of some serious urban redevelopment. Lots of pretty pots of hanging flowers (bet they love the humidity) and street repairs and stuff like that.
Party was nice... reacquainting myself with folks, introducing Linc and Julia, nibbling on veggies and dip. Bill Giduz had brought leftover ribs from his restaurant meal but those were snatched up quick before we got there, oh well. Will Murray and Rhonda were very patient with the baby crawling through their conversations, which is good because they are coming to spend some time in KC with us for a bit after the fest. Julia enjoyed meeting a magician with a flaming wallet.
We were pretty fried, so we bailed fairly early even though Sandy and Linc were fast becoming best buddies. Back to the hotel room, ordered an early breakfast, and snoozed.
I wanted to be there at 8 a.m. on Monday because Fergie was going to be a vendor and he’d emailed me about being there right at 8. Well, I hadn’t met him yet, and we’d had a few discussions on rec dot, so I wanted to make a good impression on him. I was there right at 8... no sign of Fergie for several more hours. But when he did make it, he was charming and professional... didn’t bite my head off even once. Same thing happened when I met Andrew Conway... I was skeered spitless, and the ol’ dragon turns out to be a total pussycat.
We pulled up to the service entrance of the main exhibit hall. The place has the empty, cavernous, echoey sound of the pre-festival. Concrete floors, maybe a 40 foot ceiling, halogen lamps (not great, but at least they’re spaced kind of far apart so you can stand between ‘em). Part of the floor has been carpeted, but there’s no padding underneath. Linc is a tiny speck in the middle of the wide sea of floor, crawling and visiting with folks while I do vendy stuff. The center has tables out but no tablecloths or skirts, and there’s not nearly enough tables. There’s some stress of finding all the shipped goods and whether vinyl table coverings will be better than cloth, but once it’s all sorted out we have a nice ring of vendors around the room (12 in all!).
Jerry Martin grins his way in... turns out he and Dave Davis met up the night before and totally forgot about the welcome party. I hear that Martin Frost had a bad travel day and is still stuck in Chicago (but he arrives by the end of the day). Tables emerge from the freight elevator and the Reg Desk is built from the ground up. Dave Davis sat down to start up his camera/printer system to print out color photo badges for the fest... and didn’t move his butt from that seat for about 18 hours. I’m still unclear on the exact nature of the problem, but at one point folks were hollerin’ for a volunteer who know anything about Linux drivers. Sheer tenacity won the day, and soon folks were sporting spiffy nametags with their own smiling faces, color props down the sides, and a barcode across the bottom (taking the place of show tickets).
Monday was a free day at the fest, so it didn’t matter much that badges weren’t ready right away. Slowly the room filled with jugglers, transforming from a huge empty room with busy edges to a uniform blur of color and music and happy reunions.
(I wish I’d been taking notes... I really wasn’t planning to do this, and now Monday seems so long ago, and it’s gotten fuzzy... I’ll know better next time!)
There was some confusion about the festival programs. I had been told that the copier the fest was renting would be up to the task of xeroxing 500 copies of the seven-piece program, but this turned out not to be possible. After Marilyn Sullivan (one of our amazing volunteers... half of the Sullivan membership team) wrestled with them for quite a while, it was decided that it was time to let the pros take over. I hauled the whole thing over to Kinkos and handed it off happily.
When I noticed the room was emptying out, I looked at my watch... time for the Welcome Dinner and Show! We headed out of the gym and over the skywalk into the Blackhawk Hotel, where the Gold Rooms were. We were pretty late, but Scotty Meltzer found us a table with four empty seats. Madelyn Dinnerstein, one of my workshop leaders and a fellow Flamingo, was already there. Linc got lots of pictures taken (good thing the little anklebiter is so photogenic) and we settled in for the dinner... salad, pasta with meatballs, angelfood cake with strawberries and whipped cream.
According to Dusty Galbraith (Quad Cities booster, and fest press chair), Cary Grant died in this building. This was supposed to be historic and maybe a little morbid, but after eating those meatballs, was completely believable. Dusty opened the show with the never-before-seen act of passing a kidney stone on stage.
Olga Galchenko was supposed to have been anchoring the show, but backed out at the last minute. After some scrambling for replacements, Scott Slesnick, Jason Kollum and Dean Frantzen filled the bill. Some of Scott’s tennis-ball-and-can stuff was cool (especially the bit with a giant can-and-ball routine with his wife, the lovely Erika), and Dean had a few good lines, but the show felt thrown together and hurried... the consensus among festgoers was that the performers had certainly tried to save the show, but it was generally a disappointing start to the week (those meatballs didn’t help, either).
One bit of the show was memorable to me... Peggy Reuss got up and showed off the “Juggling is Rough Work” award, to be presented to a juggler who most embodies the style of Sean McKinney. The sculpted trophy, of Sean leaning back, juggling over his body with his arms crossed behind him, captured his intensity and thrasher spirit perfectly. It was a powerful moment that brought the whole group together in a solemn way, and at the same time promised joy, competition, and of course more crazy juggling... just what this fest needed.
On the way back to the gym, I was distracted by Steve & Michelle Gerdes (who are sharing a hotel room with Jeffrey Daymont and his purty gal-pal, who I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting). The distraction lasted a while, and I returned with a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for my husband who had been ditched with the baby.
Visited a short bit with Matt and Lisa Hall (yep, he finally did the right thing and married that lovely lady... be sure to get the whole romantic surprise-Hawaiian-wedding story from them), and a ton of other folks.
I didn’t last very long.... the baby was tired, I was tired, and as much as I wanted to keep chatting with folks, I had to head off to bed. The fest programs had been finished, so we picked those up for the midnight jugglers to peruse, and headed back to home sweet hotel. It had been a very long day and the fest had just barely started. But all my vendors were happy, and the programs were in the gym, and I felt pretty accomplished.
More to follow soon....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2005-07-22 01:04 am (UTC)You mean, my sweet Andrew has a bad reputation??
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Date: 2005-07-26 08:42 am (UTC)