Freelance Chalkboarding

Before:

After:


My knees and neck tingle a bit. My arms are heavy. And my jeans are covered in yellow chalk-dust, but that last one is more of a coincidence.

I worked on my first freelance chalkboarding gig for hours today. Two boards for a small music venue: one drink menu, one informational header. This wasn't at all like the writing or design jobs I've done before, but a very cool opportunity. I was commissioned by a music venue, and to do wall-art! Call me Leah-nardo.

Fonts, colors, layout, vibe. It took an hour to computer-design the menu, and about 20 minutes to lay out the second. Setting up a workspace and supplies took 20 minutes. Applying the design by hand took about 4.5 hours.

The whole process put me in good spirits, but there were challenges: technical details like using carbon paper and working with chalk markers, which I've been used to on smaller projects in my regular work, turned into more complicated maneuvers on the much larger boards. Giving the design some hand-drawn warmth, while making it sharp and polished, took close attention.

Overall, the work was enjoyable, hitch-free, instructive. I charged a lot. I worked diligently. Probably, I could have charged more.

It was empowering.

So I look forward to taking on more artistic freelance work. Any ideas?


{Thank you for reading!}

Week of Sunrises

I've been biking to different spots along the lake every morning this week to watch the sun rise. Tune in until Sunday for new photo each day...

Fitzmaurice Voicework

Body tremors.

Pardon?

In a Fitzmaurice Voicework class on Sunday, I participated in voluntarily-induced body tremors.

What?!

Right, and I'm not sure if I can explain. But I'll try.

My friend Sam and I decided to take a class together at Piven Theatre Workshop, a decades-old, somewhat well-known training program for all ages. Sam had taken a Piven class before and quite enjoyed it; she thought I would, too. Interested in something unique, I suggested Fitzmaurice Voicework, a special voice-developing workshop that's on the program just for this Fall session.

This class is certainly unlike any other I've joined.

But we'll get to that; it didn't start out so unexpected. The class lasts six weeks, and the first meeting was spent in socked feet, sitting in a circle and sharing, then playing trust games and moving dramatically with our eyes closed. All that's part of what I imagine when I hear the words 'acting class.' Predictable, amusing!

Of course, the Voicework class was sure to be a bit different, and appeared more and more dynamic as our compact, gray-haired, eloquent-and-cheeky British instructor, Roger Smart, let on to his background in Eastern philosophy and movement, facets of the brain and movement of energy. Still, Roger gave no discernible indication of what was to come later – at least, not what would come physically.


***

Sam and I both missed the second class, so when we arrived at class 3 on a brilliantly sunny fall morning, mats and pillows under arms, we'd not a clue what to expect.

After a slow start (literally, we warmed up with a mindful space-feeling 10-minute walk across a 22-foot room), Roger directed the class to stretch in a few comfortable positions. Then we broke into work. In the middle of a classic dorsal stretch, on our backs, right knee up and torso twisted to allow the left leg over – we were told to look for our 'tremor.'

Perhaps you expected this, even if I didn't: a tremor is a shake in your body. It names what happens to your muscles when they're not quite stretched out completely in an exercise, at an active point just before flexing on the bend/flex scale. Your muscles can't quite hold their place, and they shake a bit (or sometimes a lot).

All my exercising life, I'd been under the impression that such shakes were signs of weakness in body movement, clues to what muscles should or could be strengthened. In gymnastics practice years ago, we young gymnasts sometimes shook while deeply stretching, but really only at the beginning of the season. By the end, we were strong and very flexible.

So, it was not intuitive for me that finding and holding this tremor in a series of positions was our goal for the last two hours of our three-hour class. We got into a series of fairly difficult positions, each suspended somewhere between relaxation and exercise, looked for the tremor and attempted to draw the shake up from each muscle to our chest and breath. We were to relax, allow for chaotic breathing and 'soft and fuzzy sounds' or loud vowel sounds to escape our mouths, and feel free to...feel free.

Eventually, tremoring this way is supposed to allow deep, strained emotions out of your depths, so you feel free to speak with a full voice and to emote sincerely. We were told that signs of breakthrough include, but aren't limited to, sudden sobs, intense laughter, near-involuntary speaking, simple realizations.

Early on, one woman started to wail, then laugh out loud. She did this multiple times during the class, and after the meeting, exclaimed that she'd been looking for this release for some time. Another student burst out into sobs during one exercise.

The rest of the class shook it out, and will continue working, with open minds, toward our own versions of breakthroughs.

Meanwhile, if you happen to look in on our classroom, we might be a practicing crew of closed-eyed 'spazzes,' most shaking without form, some breathing as if in rapture, a few letting out wailed 'O's.

O, my. Three classes, three weeks left. We'll see what happens.

Visiting Chautauqua

Chautauqua, Illinois could keep you out of trouble. The tiny, members-only village-like resort in a shady crevice along the Mississippi River is a version of Utopia that – it seems – is only quietly celebrated.

Walk the length of the picturesque village and back in half an hour. Pass miniature vacation cottages whose screened, wrap-around porches are bigger than their main caverns. Count three hands’-worth of door-flanking bird-feeders and wind chimes, observe cottage names like Weather or Not and Witt’s End and a rusty bicycle-built-for-two, leaning undisturbed against lattice-work.

Hear the peaceful central waterfall spill a fine 14 feet and catch its pool.

Cars don’t drive the streets of Chautauqua; bicycles and golf-carts provide the quickest transportation, and some long-time residents scoff at the latter. There’s a craft building, and an administrative building where residents get their seasonal mail. There’s a chapel, though the community’s religious tradition has relaxed in recent decades.

This place, one of several Chautauquas around the United States that was perhaps formerly held together by faith tradition, maintains many of its ages-old ways because a number of its tenants are life-long members, whose light-washed cottages have lasted generations.

A ladies’ council (membership mandatory) meets to play cards and plan community-building programs. There’s a men-only Roque field, though I’m told few men or women would attempt to play these days. Chautauqua calls in its children from the pool, the road and the hiking trail for lunch and dinner by sounding a bell.

They use that chilly, quiet waterfall to cool watermelons for barbecues.


***

It’s a beautiful, sun-soaked October day, and the bustling late-summering population of Chautauqua has relocated their home bases back to their houses in St. Louis’s metropolis and better-known suburbs. The road is empty, and cottages are locked. There are leaves on the Roque field; the assembly hall is dark. The pool-side snack shop’s refrigerator door hangs lazily open and there are no balls in the foosball table pockets.

If you’re bold, peak in on a wrap-around porch and peruse titles of summer reads sitting in small piles under wicker tables. Find colorfully-patterned throw blankets, cushioned hammocks, pictures of lighthouses, over-sized ropes, watering cans full of flowers.

Chautauqua gets frustrated cell phone coverage–indeed, you might find reception at the place’s river look-out point on its West edge, or at the end of a hike up to the rocky bluff that overlooks the Mississippi.

But that’s if, upon reaching the wide-open bluff some 200 feet above river-level, with a clear view of the Mighty river, you haven’t forgotten all about your phone, and your call, and everything but the shine on the water stretching miles to your left and right.


***

My good friend Audrey hosted me at her home outside of St. Louis for a couple of nights this week. Audrey and her brothers spent many of their childhood summers at Chautauqua with her aunt and uncle, and she suggested we hike through the forest up to the bluff, high on the hill next to the village.

Audrey’s a well of knowledge who imbibes history, knows the words to great classic rock songs and writes postcards from everywhere she goes; she’s up for anything and jokes around with strangers; I like to tell her she’s a renaissance woman with an adventurous soul.

Audrey and I, who only discovered a common zest for life in the last semester of college and have still had little more than a handful of chances to hang out, tend toward endless, easy discussion.

Even so, after we navigated Chautauqua’s forested hillside path, lowered ourselves down a short slope by knotted rope, emerged onto the sandy boulder’d cliff, and set to gazing out at the wide, dark Mississippi, we found our words swept away by the moving water.

We happily looked out. We felt the sun and watched it catch the current. We saw the flow and smiled about it. We lost minutes and unhurriedly found them again.

Eventually, Audrey and I threw our voices around again like pebbles, and finally we rose and wound our way back down the hill into Chautauqua. I was markedly refreshed. Amidst a great couple of days in the St. Louis area, delightful exploration and a bounty of charming characters and livening discussions, Chautauqua and its bluff were my simple peak. Ther is something about water, and the sky – and the two together! Gosh.


Do you find yourself so moved by water, too?