Saturday morning dawned clear and spectacular. Not a cloud in the sky,
mild temperatures that lasted the rest of the weekend, nary a breath
of a breeze. I ran into John from Seattle when I took the blender into
the kitchen, and invited him over for breakfast. Why was I taking the
blender into the kitchen? Because Maria Sanchez was already starting
on the authentic made-from-scratch Mexican dinner for that night
(she'd been up at  2 a.m. to start the beans!) and she needed the
blender to make salsa. Yes, all that salsa was homemade on the
premises. She started to run down all the plan she had for the dinner
(pinatas for the kids! Mexican garb for the helpers! a sombrero for
Andrew! music!) but I hadn't had my coffee yet and made an exit as
soon as I could gracefully withdraw.

While Barista Bill whipped up mochas for all (yes, I really did bring
the espresso machine), John and I made eggs with mushrooms and green
onions. The kids gobbled Costco danishes and were already menacing
jugglers by scootering through patterns. Someone had set up a
slackrope and I idly wondered if we'd have any broken wrists this
fest.

After food and caffeine, I felt much more human. I went to the front
desk to help Andrew sell t-shirts but ran into Karl Schuh first and
had to  do the first of many RV tours. We juggled for a while (the
only juggling I did that day, it turned out) and then finally I took
pity on poor Andrew, who was being swamped with show ticket and shirt
sales. The  100 maroon shirts vanished by early afternoon, and we
started taking orders for a second run. When that slowed down, I
started braiding hair, which is a nice way to make someone sit down
and talk to you for a long time. Eric Uhrhane's glossy mane tragically
eluded me all weekend, but we managed to get a bit of chatting in
anyway.

One of the very best parts of putting on a fest is looking out into
the mass of props and people, and just basking in the knowledge that
you had a part in bringing them all together. I try to treat myself to
this view often during a fest, and at one point I noticed how many
people out there were wearing shirts from fests that Bill and I had
worked on: two Damentos and four Lodis (the first Damento didn't have
a shirt, and one shirt was designed by Rick Rubenstein -- Lodi  2000,
the Olympic shirt -- but we'd done other stuff on that fest). Five of
those shirts were produced by Bill, and I'd been a part of creating
most of them. It was a pretty cool way to see how many folks had been
able to enjoy the fruits of our labors, and it was even cooler when
several folks requested reprints of sold-out shirts (the Lego and the
Jason shirts are most popular).

Speaking of shirts, it was really wonderful to see this design
disappearing so fast. The problem was that I'd forgotten to take out
all the comp shirts, so we didn't have a shirt to give Haggis or the
Rootberrys. We found one for Haggis Sunday night, but Jon and Bill are
gonna have to wait until the reprint order is done (in about three
weeks; email me if you want to see the design and perhaps order one of
your own).

Robert Nelson finally talked me into letting him massage my shoulders
for a while (I was reluctant because I'm a very difficult person to
massage... not only am I very sensitive, but I'd been having a series
of migraines recently and didn't want to trigger any more). I needn't
have worried. He is as talented with his hands as he is with a crowd,
and exhibited a tremendous amount of empathy while he was working on
me. He is now my hero.

Show tickets, Construction Zone, workshops, dinner preparations, stage
set-up... everything seemed to be rolling along smoothly. Either that
or I was just having a really nice afternoon while everyone else dealt
with the glitches. I hooked up with Ken Schwartz (you might remember
him from Lodi  1999... he was the physicist with the flamethrower) and
toured Beethoven, his new VW camper van. There were  12-inch woofers
under the back seats of that thing... a built-in vibrator!

I noticed that the Serious Juggling folks had finally rolled in.
Yvette gave me a Reader's Digest version of their trip, with something
about eight onion trucks and a cop, and that was pretty much the last
I saw of her. I distracted Ben briefly during a sale to say I was glad
he was here, and the next thing I knew they'd left for the return
trip. I can't believe they do this drive every year -- it must be the
economical thing to do when you're dealing with huge bags of product,
but man it must be a hard job. We're glad they came but we wish they
could have stayed longer...

Back at the kitchen, it was dinner time. Quite a few folks had been
served before I noticed that the drinks were still safely hidden in
one of the kitchen closets. I hauled out the eight cases of soda and
stirred up five gallons of lemonade lickety-split, and then handed out
plates in my pretty Mexican blouse from Maria. Paula Conway looked
like a lovely senorita in her lacy skirt and braids, and Andrew really
relished his headgear and scarf (their boys, Ian and Dan, are
good-looking kids in their own right... Ian was also terrorizing
jugglers via scooter, and Dan stands taller than Paula).

After dinner, I headed over to the theater to see if there was
anything they needed. Scotty Meltzer was doing the sound, producer
Barry Bakalor had a show list, his wife Sue had the front of the house
under control, and the performers were warming up in the green room.
Well, the performer. Matt Hall was the only one in there when I
arrived, and there was some confusion as to where the rest of the gang
had ridden off to. Turned out that there were some music problems and
other assorted glitches, but of course everything turned out great.

When it became clear that the performers were suffering because there
was no potable water in the building (Lodi has a wee bit of a
groundwater problem), Matt's girlfriend Lisa, his coworker Todd, and I
dashed back to remedy the situation. Some small comedy ensued when I
realized I'd left my van keys back at the theatre, but Todd piled us
into his truck and we brought water, fruit and other goodies back for
the performers.

It's always fun to hang out in the green room during a performance,
but you miss the show that way. We got the best of both worlds this
Lodi, because we'd had to do the show in two seatings. The last few
years, we'd stretched the limits of the building to fire-code-hazard
limits. It turned out to be the right decision... both seatings of the
show were very well attended. There was some concern about whether
both shows would be similar, but other than Marcus Raymond (doing
spoons to the theme of "Deliverance" in the first show) and the
Stanford Juggling Research Institute (Martin Frost, Neilfred Piccioto
and Rick Rubenstein in the second show), the acts were pretty much the
same.

In between the shows, Matt Hall and Jonathan Root exchanged bounce
tricks and kept things light. Root was emceeing with partner... er,
strike that -- ‘teammate'... Bill Berry, and they looked incredible.
Bill was in a black suit with black shirt & tie, and Jon had come
across a pimp supply outlet called "Flava" where he found an
alarmingly snazzy suit with a silver satiny shirt and tie.

(They had emceed in Portland two weeks before; normally Lodi wouldn't
have had the same emcees but they said they used entirely different
material for us so it was cool. It sounds like they had quite the
exciting visit to Portland, what with that stolen car and all.)

In between the shows, Matt and Bill Berry worked out some gag
involving a skateboard, an object of which there was a notable lack in
the room. I offered to find one, and jogged back to the fest site. One
of Greg Edwards' triplet boys had one and handed it over with little
trouble, but I had forgotten how bad my skateboard fu was at this fest
(my first fest, I had found one in the parking lot. No one had claimed
it from rec dot or other announcements, and I finally gave it to my
extreme sports-minded brother-in-law, who immediately tried to skate
down Mount Tamalpias with it. A couple years later, the subject of a
lost skateboard came up with origami artist and magician Ken Martin,
who happened to misplace a particularly nice board at Lodi the same
year... ulp). Well, nothing had changed and when a search party was
dispatched to the theater the next day, the board was nowhere to be
found. It is unclear whether the Lodi festival will cover my lack of
luck here, or whether I'll be taking up a collection later on... but
the upshot is, if you're at Lodi, do NOT let me near your skateboard.

On the way back to the theater, doomed board in hand, I met up with
the Chocolate Mountain of Love himself -- aka Ngaio Bealum -- on the
dark path over the creek. We did that little bounce-back-and-forth
thing you do when you have to pass someone in a tight spot and
suddenly this dude just rushed me and grabbed me and hugged me and
picked me up. Now I'm not a mere slip of a girl, and it's not often
that I get this treatment. This guy has become my new hero.

Back at the theater, the second show is about under way. It was a
pretty typical Lodi show, with the hecklers being about as funny as
the performers (and the performers shooting it right back with a
grin), but there was a remarkable absence of the notorious Lodi
glitches like misbehaving curtains and funky sound problems. I didn't
take notes at the show (I didn't know I was going to be doing this!)
but the Rootberrys seemed to have a good time with the crowd and the
acts moved along at a good clip. Maybe someone else will step in with
their favorite show moments ‘cuz I want to finish this up tonight...

There was a seriously good display of showmanship when Haggis had to
follow Ngaio, who had completely devastated the crowd and run
significantly over time. He was a hell of an act to follow, and poor
Haggis had a rough start to his routine. But then he got to the hats,
and it was pure poetry. This fellow just breathed and the hats moved
for him. It was really a beautiful thing to watch and once we'd
relaxed our aching cheeks (from laughing at Ngaio for so long), we
recognized that we were watching someone share a deep and true
passion... which is why, after all, we're at this fest in the first
place. It was really a lovely way to finish the evening.

(Ngaio wasn't forgotten, though. I heard that the Humboldt crowd got
hold of him after the show and hotboxed a tent with him.)

We had to be out of there by midnight, so tear-down was quick. We
rassled the water jugs back to the fest and stood around trying to
figure out what to do next. It looked like there was a fairly large
contingent being sent to the nearest all-night restaurant, but I
noticed Qarin and baby Amelia standing aside. I remembered the days
when I couldn't join my friends out late because I had a nursing baby,
and I offered to skip the Carrow's run to hang out with her instead.
She gratefully took me up on the offer, and several other folks joined
us on the way over to the RV.

Well, it wound up being sort of a diner experience. We ultimately had
what we figured was thirteen souls in the rig at one point, and it
really felt like a kind of housewarming. I set up Q with a sandwich on
one of the fold-out beds (turned out my youngest was already asleep up
there), and Wiley dog joined them. This was the bed closest to the
sink and stove, so I had about a one-foot aisle to scoot up and down
to fix up stuff for the other visitors. It worked OK, though we were
pretty cozy there for a while. Robert Harris brought cocoa mix and we
fixed up hot chocolate for everyone. He also brought us a housewarming
present: two jars of homemade jam!

We also had crackers and cheese, the banana cake, lots of water, and
salami. It actually doesn't sound so good right now, but then it was a
feast. Robert's friend Wendy joined us, along with Ken and his wife
Chris, Michael (whose last name I don't know but if you have heard a
guy named Mike who uses the word "heinous" a lot, you know who I'm
talking about), and my oldest son. My daughter wandered in with a sad
face... she'd had a tumble from a pogo stick and she was bummed
because she wasn't sure if she'd be able to do poi in the kids show
the next morning (she couldn't, unfortunately). The kids curled up in
the corner and got to listen to some pretty wild stories about pot and
penises, but I don't think it damaged them. Or at least, not any more
than usual.

Exhaustion finally took its toll after the Carrow's crowd had
returned. Several of them poked their heads into the very-full RV but
we'd long ago run out of places to sit. I played with Amelia (who had
by now gotten her second wind... she's  11 months old and figuring out
a lot about the world around her). She and Julia hung out while I did
up the dishes and fixed up the table back into a bed position for
Cordell (who had fallen asleep in my bed). I returned the baby to Q
and found Bill listening in on a pretty interesting conversation
(being led by Scotty) about marketing and honesty. It was fascinating
but it was something like  3 a.m. and I was cold. Time for bed.

One bummer thing that became clear upon getting ready for bed was that
the RV's "grey" water tank had filled (sewage is the "black" water
tank, which was still pretty empty). So no more dishes, handwashing,
tooth brushing, etc. Sort of a pain but we were able to work around
it... still getting used to it, after all.

(continued...)