Sands UK Tour, Day Three: Carlisle to London

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Sunday, 10 June 2007

The performance at St. Cuthbert's couldn't have gone smoother. I have been touring I Hate This since 2003. To cut down on expenses, I have always requested that each site 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. Our contact 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, our contact arrives with her husband and her sister and a co-group member. My wife was also on hand and between them, the stage manager 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 succeeded in finding the only screen in Cumbria so we had that to work with, and our contact's husband "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. My stage manager said she could tell, that whenever I am comfortable I "mess up" a lot of lines, but fuck her, she's just the fucking stage manager, what does she know. Fuck.

The wife joined me for the post-show discussion, and we met some lovely people over tea and cake following that. I almost forgot 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.

She and her husband lost a boy just shy of one year ago. I had a long talk with him about the boy, and about the way he has dealt with it. Saying our good-byes I wished her 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?" my wife asked.

So many of the stones included references to babies that died in infancy. I heard Philip Roth on Terry 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.

Original blog post: June 10, 2007

Sands UK Tour, Day Two: Carlisle

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Saturday, 9 June 2007

Otters in The Lanes

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

These kids are cracking 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 had an extremely indulgent birthday dinner here at the hotel for my sister-in-law 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 the girl 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.

The boy 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 our company manager came knocking at the door. So much for the complementary breakfast. It was swiftly decided that the wife 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.

Hadrian's Wall was the outer edge of the Roman Empire, a great barrier to keep those marauding Scots out. The greatest empire history had ever known, nearing its end, running out of ideas, decided to put up a big old wall.*

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 and one featured this lovely not-fountain with bronze otters playing in it.

Last night we met our contact for the performance at St. Cuthbert's Church, where we will be performing 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 the music was incorporated 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.

Original blog post: June 9, 2007

*No, seriously. I made this observation ten years ago. - 6/9/2017