This is an English arts project

http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/mike_l

And this is how my brother folds his tent

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Well, we had a lovely party, much improved at the last moment, by learning that, in all probability,my mother would become a great grandmother within her life time and that my dear older brother would be a grand papa. I haven't seen him crying since he was a teenager. So here is wikipedia's picture of the day. It rather reminds me of us all eating beef fillet in a tent in the garden. Someone was letting off fireworks within earshot, but out of sight. The night was so clear that, for the second time this year, I could see the milky way. Twice my meagre presents for Kim produced, not in themselves, but in the resulting conversations, big laughs. Gina and Mike and their lovely four year old were there. Several times Gina made slightly acerbic and very funny comments. I sat at the end of the table and chatted quietly with Carol beside me and Cathy across a quite narrow table. My mother sat at the head of the other end surrounded by my nephew and his generation. She seemed fairly oblivious, but not unhappy. She had eaten corn on the cob, one of her favourites, and spent the rest of the meal trying to dislodge the strings from between her teeth with table knives and various dental pieces of equipment. Nice Steve tried to discourage her from putting quite a sharp knife to her teeth, but I said, "No, just let her get on with it". Perhaps I shocked him. A lot of the time she reminds me of Woody Allen in Sleeper when he is in a wheel chair and comatose for some reason I forget.

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I've been reading about these men, but, in any case I really like this period of portraiture as it is quite close to photography. We were in Parham recently and I saw a portrait that was evidently painted so that someone could visualise a future bride. The person I was with said, "But then other people got powerful and, or famous, and that was the reason they were painted". I mumbled something about fashionable portrait painters and we sauntered on. I have been there several times. If you find yourself in Sussex, I urge you to go. A family bought it in the twenties and were rich enough for a while to restore it very well. The descendants of those buyers still live there. In the East I would recommend Leeds and here, Parham.

Giants still roam the earth....In North America

http://healthmap.org/en

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Moutiers

Inspired by this, here is a piece I often used for an audition, confident that my audience had not heard it before.

An Eskimo lady, who could not speak or understand a word of English, was offered a free trip to the United States, plus five hundred dollars, providing she accompany a corpse for burial. After burying the coffin, she arrived in the city and went to the railway station. She lined up at the ticket window and listened very carefully to what the person in front of her was saying, she repeated what they had said and in this way travelled around the country from place to place. After a while, her money was running out and she decided to stay in the next place she came to. However she found herself in a small town, from which no one that day was travelling. By this time, she had picked up a little English. So she went to the ticket window and said to the man there, "Where would you go, if you were going". He named a small town in Ohio, where she lives to this day.

I had a recording of John Cage reciting this quite slowly, with many pauses, which were filled in by his partner, David Tudor on, or often inside, a piano. Sometimes they would both make sounds at the same time. I loved that recording; a reel to reel I still have, but have not spooled up for twenty years or more. If my audience did not seem bored, I would segway into a piece from "The Idiot", and maybe from there to a piece by Alan Bennett. When we see actors, we usually see the parts they are playing, and judge them for how well they performed. What usually remains hidden, is that many actors are preachers, trying to impart what they have learned in the only way they know how.