Memphis Democrat
June 16, 2005

Day to Day Life
Memphis Democrat Column -- Jacob's Travel Logs

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This is Nicole. Lately I have been enjoying one of my favorite parts of summertime around here, the night sky. It seems that there’s always something to please my eyes—the moon and stars on clear nights, distant or nearby lightning on cloudy nights, and, of course, the fireflies. They put on a nocturnal show that I haven’t seen matched in all my travels. Daytime is occasionally less delightful for me. I find that it’s taking my body a long time to adjust to this humid heat. I have an aversion to sweating, and I fear that all this sun exposure is making my skin prematurely leathery. I had a goal to become one of those critters you only see out and about around dawn and dusk, and spend the rest of the day in the relatively cool shelter of the common house. The dusk part has been easy enough, but old habits die hard, and it seems that nothing can induce me to crawl out of bed before the sun has been up for several hours. What’s a girl to do? Last night we enjoyed our second annual Joanne and Stan Katz mini-Broadway production. Last year Joanne and Stan (Rachel’s parents) visited from New York and helped folks here do a few song and dance numbers from West Side Story. It was such a hit that they came back this year to do several selections from Avenue Q, a musical that could be described as Sesame Street for grown-ups. Several of the characters are puppets, so I had my mom send me her old ones from her puppeteering days. We did five songs from the show, but I guess it wasn’t nearly enough, since once we were finished the audience insisted that we do the whole thing over again! After few impromptu acts in which audience members displayed their talent (or lack thereof), we complied and did our routine again, straight through from the top. After all the festivities, we ended the evening on a bittersweet note as we said goodbye to one of our members, Jacque. Jacque first visited DR back in 2002, when I was an intern here, and I remember her and Cecil serenading passersby from the top of the school bus we have parked here. Since then, she has become a well-loved part of life at Dancing Rabbit and the surrounding communities, where she has working as a teacher. It was hard for me to feel too sad as we said our farewells, though, since Jacque is leaving us to go live with her friend Nathan in Hawaii. I know that calling Hawaii an earthly paradise is soooo cliché, but a visit there this past winter convinced me that the description really isn’t too far off. Come December, I know I’ll be considering paying Jacque and Nathan a visit.

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Memphis DemocratJune 16, 2005

Memphis Democrat
June 16, 2005