pretzel seating, please

once upon a time, up in a hill, there once was a land of no service.
i know, i know - it sounds crazy!
but in a world of real livin', artificial life hardly found a way to creep in.
so stories were born, visiting was done, and good times were had.


this whole week, in SW VA, not a minute passed that was unfilled. appalachian kindness was everywhere - every night was a visit with a different character, every night a dinner with a friend or relative, or a drive through hills accompanied by stories of a different timeline. it was beautiful there- rolling hills and starry skies as far as the eye could see.

my company was amazing - heather and joey were so fun, and it made me realize that not everyone is that easy to spend slow time with. seven days with anyone that intensely is unusual. they were the perfect hosts, though, always giving me lots of backstories and context to keep up.
heather's parents were super nice, and were super kind to put me up that long.

camp was amazing, too - the reason we went, yep. MAD camp - music, arts, and drama - was the first of it's kind down there. because of that, not all the details were sussed out quite the right way - we realized while there that every group had 80 minutes with us each day. that's not hard when your kids are 12, but it's extremely hard when they are 6. joey and i were a great tag-team, and finally started falling into a great pattern of sensing each others' limits; so when one of us would hit the wall, the other would take over on the littlest's glorified babysittings.

our oldest group had some great talents in it, though - and teaching them improv was about the most fun out there. they truly got tons of joy from it, and several of them seemed shock by the things that were pouring out of their mouth. considering that some of these kids had never heard the word "improv" before monday, it was a huge success. that success culminated in a show we had to give for the parents and community on friday night - and parents were laughing a ton and beaming at their kids.

also, on this trip, besides a million things, i was given the gift of the Joey Bland Parade of Stars - before, i'd been lightly encouraging Joey to become the new Rich Little, seeing that he'd pick up imitaitions pretty easily. after this week, i'll be pushing for it way harder. he could imitate the most eccentric of our classes as if it was down to a science, emphasizing only one thing a tad more to make it even funnier than real life (seemingly the key to a good impersonation). he had at least 8 people's numbers. it is amazing. this will be less gratifying to you to see, but know that it is dead-on in accuracy should he pull one of these out.

so, we achieved a bunch this week - our dream of being the cool counselors in camp was achieved, and kids seemed to really use us as a resource for info and continuing ed. neat. i also learned that when your cell phone cuts out, sometimes, that's okay.