Moot. Folks. And Folkmoot

Two weeks ago I attended Y W camp. The YW president, Melissa, was pregnant and could not go to camp because she had been admitted to the hospital the day before camp started. She's been there for two weeks, but today we found out that the pregnancy was lost.

My world has been greatly effected by Melissa's hospitalization. As her counselor, I've been on the phone with her for several hours during the last two weeks. I've taken notes about what she has wanted to do, then been her hands in getting it done. I feel her loss, and as I watch my own daughter, I can hardly believe that I was not the one to lose an infant.

In conjunction with my YW duties, I have discovered, to my surprise, that I have been most Laman-and-Lemuel-ish in my behavior with my husband and my life in general. It is not as easy to stop complaining about everything as Sunday School teachers make it sound! But, thanks to the YW Personal Progress program, I am on my way to becoming a little Mary ray of sunshine, once again. (Adara was looking pretty sun-shine-y in this picture; sorry I haven't posted more pictures, but as usual, there are lots more pictures on my picasaweb page for those of you with desires for such. I usually upload pictures to picasaweb around the same time that I do my blogs, so that's the best time to look for new stuff.)

This resolution to be cheerful was put to the test when, on Saturday, Jon decided he wanted to finish all of the filming for our movie: Starfire Part II (that's the working title; stay tuned for more). We were literally working on the movie for 12 hours - from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., which for us would be all right, maybe slightly stressful. But add a 14-month-old and the occasion approaches what one might call an ordeal.

I am pleased to report that the filming was finished with a minimum of grousing and almost no extended unpleasantness between the director, his star, and his assistant. We even successfully filmed a 60-second scene in a room in the Howard Johnson, thanks to Jon's ability to explain his vision and excitement to an open-minded and fun-loving hotel manager. (We had been denied rights to film at an uppity, to-remain-unnamed hotel nearby, and another hotel had no room for us :) -- so I was ready to throw in the towel. It was a great relief to me when Jon secured a victory with the final hotel we visited.)

Now for a picture break. But stay tuned, there's more blogging to be done after the pictures.

With these random pictures and the journaling above, you get a pretty accurate overview of what it has been like here for the last

two weeks. The coup de grace, well, actually there were two, but anyway, it was the international folk festival that Adara and I attended on Friday afternoon. We drove for 40 minutes to attend Folkmoot, which had one of the most entertaining and diverse array of performers that I have seen in awhile. Of course, I may just be starved for interesting activities that I can do with my daughter. But I don't think so. Here's why:

The French group came out in the traditional French mode, which, if you've seen very many French folk groups, you'll know that's a nice way of saying "boring". However, before long, the male dancers came on stage on stilts. Being 11 feet taller than your partner presents an interesting choreographic challenge, which the French avoided. They just had the men dance as a unit and the women dance as a unit, and the two were on the stage at the same time, but they didn't usually interact very much. However, the Frenchmen doing the polka on stilts, with a brief stint of weaving in and out of the women below, made it all worthwhile.


The young girls from Chinese Taipei presented what I thought was the epitome of dancing. Graceful, fun, employing multiple dance steps and formations, as well as Chinese lanterns and other props, the dances were never boring and never repetitive. The music, on the other hand . . . let's just say that, while the Chinese seem to have perfected the art of dance, they have perhaps gone into another dimension when it comes to music. To illustrate, the sound of one instrument made my little daughter start looking around for a dog. As I thought about it, I realized that it did sound like a little mechanical robot chihuahua trying to sing his short little barks.

Finally, if I have ever seen a Japanese drum performance before, the performance at Folkmoot proved that I never had really seen a Japanese drum performance. It was exquisite, if a bit loud. Like the Chinese performance, it was never boring. Unlike the Chinese performance, the music was musical - the flutes and conch shell were wonderful counterpoints to the different-toned drums, and the visual effect of the drumsticks (which we learned are called baci (read with Italian pronunciation) in Japanese) kept both me and my daughter captivated. Since Adara had only watched a maximum of two minutes of the other performances, I believe this made the Japanese performance the best of show.

That wraps it up for the dance portion of this blog. Again, I'm sorry there aren't more pictures this week. It would have been especially nice to have some pics of Folkmoot, but what with holding a toddler, the fact that my digital camera is rather cheap, and the dim light and fast-moving dancers, it probably wouldn't have been worth the bits and bytes and photosensory whatever.

But wait, there's still more to this blog! (I really should post more often.) The second coup de grace, as it were, was during intermission. Adara and I had gone out to the car for a snack and a man had come up to comment on our bumper sticker, "Mormons for Obama". To make a long story short, and an already long blog a little longer, we talked for probably 30 minutes about Utah, North Carolina, Mormons, etc., and he asked where our church was and whether it would be polite of him to drop by, should he wear a tie, and so forth. I thought he was being polite by asking about our church, so when he waved to me from the back pew in the chapel this morning, I was pleasantly surprised.

I guess the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter how you promote your religion, just as long as you do. I'm still shaking my head over that one. Political conversation aside, I wasn't so sure that it was a good idea to put that bumper sticker on the car, mostly because we were moving to "the South" and I wasn't sure how safe it would be to advertise that we are both Mormons and democrats. (Not to say that I am a democrat - I have no political affiliation, but I do drive the car with the bumper sticker, so I am guilty by association.) But my fears were completely unfounded - not only have we not been lynched or ostracized for either our religion or our political affiliation, we have instead been befriended because of both. Just "be yourself" I guess, and "seize the day" "e plurubus unum" and all that.

Ya'll come back now, y'hear?