Winchester Coop
Yes, I know. Everyone is doing it.
In my new life in the country, we decided to get chickens. Along with my talented and generous neighbor, Chris Cimino, we built a coop. I jokingly refer to it as the Winchester Coop - it has taken 2 months and been given way too much detail and attention. Here is the finished product and below meet our chicks: Tanya (Tucker Chicken, named after the brilliant Tanya Tucker…of course) Janice, Jolene, Junebug, Lana and Mary Jane (formerly Mary Lou, and Carla).
Wednesday grocery distribution
One bit of silver lining through this pandemic is having the time to participate in my community, Beacon. Maggie and I moved here in May 2019 and felt disconnecte; her commuting to the city and myself traveling to work on shows most of the year. Mutual Aid Beacon provides many necessary services for our community, ranging from providing extra groceries for people who are food insecure to emotional support for homebound neighbors. I’ve been lucky enough to participate since early March in their Wednesday grocery distribution. A large number of people from our community show up on Wednesdays to help bag and distribute groceries for over 500 people.
Pictured above is one of my favorite volunteers, a retired corrections officer Stephanie Hirschmann, who dresses up every week to help direct traffic to our pickup stations and entertain the waiting cars.
In addition to the services provided by Mutual Aid Beacon, there are many other organizations which existed prior to the pandemic that I’ve learned about through this experience.. Please check out the amazing work these organizations have done and continue to do.
Green Teen - The Green Teen program empowers urban youth to be effective community change-agents by immersing them in the local food system. Shout out to coordinator Helanna Bratman…I’m totally your fan girl!
Land to Learn - They integrate nutrition education and experiential learning into public school classrooms by bringing dozens of classes each week outside to school gardens to grow and taste new vegetables, read and write, learn math and science, and learn about health and wellness.
Common Ground - Common Ground is rising to the real need for a strong and equitable local food system that recognizes access to fresh food as a human right and that supports small scale farms.
Rizzabeth I
Covid Pivot. As we’ve heard on Twitter; dogs are the real winners of this pandemic.
Rizzo, my fur-baby, muse and best friend of 10 years would agree — until Maggie and I began this exciting calendar project. Against Rizzo’s will, I’ll periodically share some of the calendar photos.
I just returned home from 2 action-packed weeks at the beautiful John F. Kennedy Center working on two productions for Washington National Opera, Don Giovanni and Samson and Delilah. Erhard Rom designed a masterful contemporary festival set, which Robert Wierzel lit and I projected imagery on.
With very limited tech time, my team and I worked to create two vastly different productions which both were staged on the festival set, with various scenic elements added for each production. My team consisted of myself, creating and designing the video content, Sean “Thick Neck” McNally, who programmed and co-created the system design, and April “Google Photos?” King who was our media server tech and the other co-creator of the system.
This post is devoted to bragging on April and Sean. Those of you who are familiar with media servers (the computers we cue projections on, and how imagery is emitted through projectors, etc) know that Watchout is a wonderful server, but if you have a lot of surfaces, you pick D3 (ok, I realize it is called Disguise now). But thanks to Sean “Fitz” McNally - he has masterfully turned WO into a nimble multi-surface media server. Using a mind boggling amount of virtual displays and auxiliary timelines - he and April were able to converge our quad stacked Panasonic projectors onto multiple scenic planes. Using the NDI input, we were also able to create pixel perfect masks through Photoshop - allowing us to even project the thinnest peach line.
I realize most audience members have no idea about the amount of work it takes to create a production. Nor do they realize the number of people it takes to put on a “flawless” show. While I get the credit (and often the criticism!) - I literally could not have done these shows without Sean McNally and April King. Thank you guys! This Bud’s for you!