Day Three: Carlisle to London - Macking on the Dead

Last night Z. & O. treated us to their own rendition of To My Brother Russell, Whom I Slept With. Blame jet-lag if you like, it was irritating.

The performance at St. Cuthbert's couldn't have gone smoother. Technical considerations can be such a headache, we do not have a large operation and to make this work, every venue agreed to provide everything except me and Kelly and a disk full of cues. The set has to be cobbled together at every site, and they have to be sure to have PowerPoint capabilities.

Since the beginning, every site has needed to provide their own rocking chair, even if I bring everything else. As a result, it's always exciting to see what the chair is going to look like. Carlisle set the record for "Shortest Rocking Chair Ever," but it sure was cute.

Friday my biggest concern was the screen - the projector was no problem but there was no blank wall to cast them on. Libby tried very hard to find one and came up short. I was also concerned that the light fixtures, electric candelabras, were too dim. Lots of bulbs at the "stage" end of the room were burned out.

Well. Night of, Libby arrives with her husband Ian and sister Sue and co-group member Angela. Toni was also on hand and between them and Kelly and I, figured out every concern in short order (including dinner, which I always forget to eat on performance nights.) The room was set up with about thirty chairs, they did succeed in finding the only screen in Cubria so we had that to work with, and Ian "pinched" the lights from the fixtures in the back of the room to fill out those in the front.

There were something short of thirty people in attendance. I was feeling surprisingly relaxed in my delivery (Kelly said she could tell - whenever I am comfortable I "mess up" a lot of lines, but f*ck her, she's just the f*cking stage manager, what does she know. F*ck.) and I felt confident delivering some of my alterations to the "British" text.

I still feel stupid saying, "ice lollies" however.

Toni joined me for the discussion after, and we met some lovely people over tea and cake following that. I had neglected to ask our contact about her own experience - I sometimes need to remember, when dealing with bereavement groups (as opposed to, say, medical institutions) that many of the people I am working with have also lost children. And even when I do, well, I guess I wait for them to bring it up, shame on me.

Libby and Ian lost a boy named Kiran just shy of one year ago. I had a long talk with Ian about the boy, and about the way he has dealt with it. Saying our good-byes I wished Libby a good day on the 28th and that's when the tears started. I felt bad, the way people do, for "bringing it up," which is ridiculous when you think about what I have been doing for the past six years. It also goes to show how ingrained these reactions are.

St. Cuthbert's is a great little church. The sides are lined with old tombstones that, for all appearances, were uprooted from the field next to the building. It's a nice, open space, walled-in. The entire time we were there, all evening, there were young people lying about, eating, drinking, making out, on that space.

I thought it was odd, that they had moved the stones, to make that field. "Why?" Toni asked.

So many of the stones included references to babies that died in infancy. I heard Philip Roth on Terri Gross last week, talking about his book "Everyman." The subject was cemeteries, and he noted there how many stones were for children in the old days, and that you don't see that much anymore, because it isn't as much of a problem. I like Philip Roth, but he's been around too long to be that dumb.

Day Two: Carlisle - Street Walking

Sitting in our hotel room by the window, overlooking Greenmarket Square, praying two children take their naps sometime soon. There is a community band playing in the gazebo.

These kids are craking each other up, each in their own beds. There is also a carousel knocked up in the square, which several family members have indulgently taken them on four times each - and at £2 a pop, too. No wonder they can't get to sleep.

We are staying at the Crown and Mitre, surely the best hotel in Cumbria. The service is just excellent. I forgot, you don't tip room service here - I left a pound on each of the three beds ... and found a pound sitting neatly next to each pillow upon my return this afternoon.

We had an extremely indulgent birthday dinner here atthe hotel for Adrienne last night, each of us at different intervals struggling to keep our sanity and our lunch as we struggled to fight off jet lag. The wine didn't help in this regard, but it was an excellent meal. I thought Zelda did particularly well, she had convinced herself that she had had a full night's sleep the night before because she slept until the sun came up. But her behavior at dinner, at bit fractious at the beginning, was merely as loopy as the rest of ours by dessert.

Orson did what he usually does, which is eat everything in sight. Especially soup. He really, really loves soup.

My family was in bed by ten. We woke twelve hours later when Kelly came knocking at the door. So much for the complmentary breakfast. It was switfly decided that Toni would join the rest of the women to catch a bus to see Hadrian's Wall, and that the kids and I would skulk about Carlisle.

I am sure Toni felt guilty about my missing the wall, but there was no time to get the little ones fed and bathed and clothed and on the bus. For those who are unfamiliar, Hadrian's Wall was the outer edge of the Roman Empire, a great barrier to keep those maurauding Scots out. The greatest empire history had ever known, under attack, nearing its end, running out of ideas, decided to put up a big old wall.

Insert ironic statement here. What I said was, "Nah, I don't need to see it, I'm living in it."

I had no idea what to expect from central Carlisle, but we couldn't have picked a better day to spend time out in it. It's warm and sunny, and the place is just crowded, there's lots of shops, and as I mentioned, plenty of outdoor entertainments.

There are several arcades (I mean walk-throughs that have shops in them, not he game kind) and one featured this lovely not-fountain with bronze otters playing in it. I say not-fountain because the center circle is glass made to look like water with light beneath it.

We had lunch at the Prior's Restaurant, in the former Friary of Carlsile Cathedral. Orson wanted the "pizza" which was actually a red pepper and ricotta quiche, and lentil soup. He ate his and Zelda's. She had cheese on toast and part of my salad. Some women who were seated next to us assured me it wasn't a long walk to Carlisle Castle, but suggested it might not be too interesting for the small ones. I wasn't too sure about that, and I hope I didn't err by not going, because the cathedral was right there and we opted to look at that, and that was brief and interesting. All trips to churches are interesting when your children aren't being taught to worship anything. That and all the dead people under the floor.

Last night we met Libby, our contact for the performance at St. Cuthbert's Church, where we will be perfomring tonight. The crowd is expected to be small, so we will be in a room roughly the size of the fellowship hall I was in last year in Wandsworth. As always, I am concerned about tech. There's no screen for the projector, so we will be setting up something like an easel to cast the slides onto. Also, we haven't had to work with an integrated computer system since Nick incorporate the sound into the PowerPoint presentation, so it will be a mystery as to how acceptable the sound will be coming from the projector. But it is, as I said, a small room.