The Children's Tour

The Children’s Tour

The last week in September is time for the annual Children’s Tour in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches (APHN) sponsors the program which is offered to all third grade classes throughout the Parish. This past September (‘08) there were about 30 participating classes.

They arrive on their buses from all points: Cloutierville, Fairview-Alpha, Marthaville, Provencal, and many schools in the city of Natchitoches itself. There are private schools as well as public. Each class has a list of places to visit, and the schedule has been overseen by Martha Wynn for many years. It was a labor of love for Martha, but she's finally letting it go and leaving it to other APHN ladies.

The classes may start at the Prudhomme-Rouquier House, a big white mansion built of bousillage in the late 18th century; or they may start at the Court House Museum, where last year the creator of the Blue Dog, George Rodrigue, was having an exhibit. This year it was a Cane River Creole exhibit.

They may start with us, down on the stage by the river: we’ll sing them songs of old Louisiana and end with a rousing version of the state song, “You Are My Sunshine.” The program starts at about 8:30 am, Monday to Friday, and runs til about noon when they climb on their buses and head back to their little towns and schools. All a great deal wiser.

Father Serra

The Father Serra film is about half-finished. When it is complete, the 80-minute travel film will be titled: "The Travels of Father Serra: Majorca to California."
However, we are treating the half we HAVE finished as a complete guide to the California Missions of Father Junipero Serra and aiming to market the DVD to gift shops, bookstores and Serra International.

During our last trip to California, in April, we went to Mission Santa Barbara, "The Queen of Missions," which was the next one begun after the death of Serra. It's almost a Serra Mission. He was there to raise the cross and bless the site, but then there was his controversial relationship with Governor Neve, who probably vetoed the new mission just because he and Father Serra didn't see eye to eye.
Serra said "in my poor judgment this is not a good place for a presidio or a mission," but it is an uncharacteristically negative remark.

Anyway: we have the DVD of "The Missions of Father Serra," (that's the first nine missions) plus two bonus tracks, as we used to say in the music biz: Santa Barbara and Soledad. Well, we will have it next week. It's being mastered and produced at Dale and Sandy Johnson's Trailwood Films in Shelbyville, Kentucky. It's looking good and we just got the covers from the printer in south Shreveport.

May

We are in Louisiana for a few weeks. Last night we played a party for Joe Thibodeau in Natchitoches. There is no name which is more essentially Cajun than Thibodeau, unless it's Boudreau. Joe has a dog named Boudreau. Of course, Fonteneau is pretty strong, too. And a few others which we won't even get into. Joe had a housewarming at his new place on the rivah, the north bank of the Cane. Or is it the east bank?
We stayed the night with our friend Conna who told us all about the new Natchitoches movie, The Garden Club. It is the work of Bobby W, or Bobby Deblieux, Conna's next door neighbor, and it's premiering next weekend. Should be a great hit. Check it out at Garden Club in our "Friends and Family" list at left.
In the morning, Saturday, we had played music at the Cane River Green market down by the river front in Natchitoches. This is always a great pleasure: there are lots of kids on hand and Marsha has them singing, dancing and playing along on tambourines, spoons, rubboards, ti-fers, or whatever else she has in her bag of tricks.
I will be leaving for England on May 28th and soon after heading for Scotland to film some stuff for our next film, "Etched in Stone: Scotland to Provence." Marsha will be joining me a little later. She will not miss the France part of our travels, and I can't blame her for that. France may be our favorite place.
The one kitten has grown and graduated from the computer drawer. The other kitten disappeared while we were out on tour. We understand it may have been too weak to survive. Amber is pregnant again and may come up with two more kittens. Anybody want this kitten? She's litter box trained and quite adorable.

Golden Gate Geographical Society

La Manche comes to the Bay Area, San Francisco....
Moulin Huet Bay, Guernsey, the Channel Islands (see picture). Auguste Renoir was here in the 1880's. He painted several canvases on the beach at Moulin Huet Bay, some with families frolicking in the foreground, most with these rocks in the background. Victor Hugo spent 15 years on Guernsey just before Renoir. He wrote "Les Miserables" at his home, Hauteville House. Hugo is famously quoted as saying that the Channel Islands were "fragments of France, dropped into the sea and picked up by England."

We've just checked in to our motel in South San Francisco. We have done the first two shows with Ken and Bettine and their Golden Gate Geographical Society. This is the last of their series. It seems a shame to end it because it still attracts an audience - albeit a predominately aged audience - but who else makes entertainment for this age group? Most of them will be disappointed to have no place to go for their travel films next season.
Ken and Bettine Armstrong have been presenting their series for 34 years and this will be the end of an era. Our show today was at Belmont; yesterday was up by Santa Rosa; tomorrow's will be at Mountain View. Thursday there will be two shows at Moraga, and the finale will take place at Oakland's amazingly ornate picture palace, The Paramount, next Saturday at 2:00 PM. These venues are among the best in the country, known for quality films, excellent sound, professionalism in production and attention to detail; the audiences are well educated and interested in geography and history. In other words, the audience one dreams of when one makes these films: they understand the references and the humor, and they exit saying things like they actually learned something from the presentation. They are open minded and willing to learn. One can only hope that the younger generations will learn enough to be so humble in 50 years time. Dream on; but hope. I think today's young folk may be literate in technology, but ignorant in everything else.
During each of the Golden Gate programs Marsha makes a presentation of appreciation and good wishes to Ken and Bettine on behalf of their peers at TRACS, the Travel Adventure Cinema Society.
Our show is "La Manche/the English Channel." It's literate, colorful, informational, geographical, historical, theatrical and just plain good stuff. We dedicate it to Veterans of WWII.
Check it out: go to You Tube and "lacahoots" ("Monet in Normandie" is from "La Manche") or go to  montyandmarsha.com our website for an overview of our work.

Fruits de Mer, St. Peter Port, Guernsey.

Kittens

We have figured out what the cat, Amber, was going on about. Mewling and yelling at us for the first day or two after our return.
I was sitting in the back yard a few days ago when I spotted Amber heading for the back door carrying something furry in her mouth. I thought, "Oh-oh, she's caught some rodent to present to Marsha." I told Marsha that the cat was trying to bring her something too small to be a rat, to big for a mouse. Perhaps a baby rat. Amber was turned away from the door and so carried her prey back behind some bushes and disappeared.
The next evening she arrived at the front door with a similar offering. Marsha wasn't pleased, initially, but then noticed that the mouthful was, in fact, a kitten. Amber's kitten. She brought it in and trotted over to Marsha's computer desk where she is able to access a deep drawer by coming through the back way. She had been mysteriously preparing this drawer, by tearing up paper in there, for a few days before Marsha departed for Kalamazoo in late February. Now she was using it as her nest. She is a small cat and Marsha wasn't too surprised at the idea of her producing just the one kitten.
However, a while later, Amber requested to go outside again, and when she returned, she was bearing a second kitten. She took it to the nest and now she seems quite contented. She shows up in the kitchen whenever there's any activity there, so she can keep her babies well fed. She apparently has just the two, because it's been a few days now, and no additional kittens.
We haven't named them yet; we've sort of left it up to Ryan and Emily to handle that.

Good Friday

We arrived back home in Louisiana yesterday, March 20th, and today is Good Friday. It is quite warm and sunny today, the temperature in the high 70's F. Our azaleas are in bloom (LEFT). We don't get to see them every year as our house is a bit like one more stop on our ongoing tour of North America and Western Europe. There is evidence of daffodils and crocuses, the dark green stalks that are left behind after the blooms have fled. I won't mow them for a few days, so when I'm sitting out in the sun I can ponder them. The travelogue tour continues in under three weeks: we'll be off to California around the 8th of April.

The picture of our van is the morning after the snow. We have rinsed the road salt off, though yesterday and the night before it got a good rain-drenching. I went to the car wash this morning where I was accosted by a man speaking some form of Louisiana ebonics, and after I had him repeat it four times I discerned that he said something after the order of: "Too bad I didn't talk to you before you started cuz I woulda did it for yuh." I told him I was OK even though I may have looked like a doddering old fool struggling with a soapy brush and shooting powerful streams of water which kept bouncing back and drenching me in clouds of mist. He obviously wished to make a little coin, but why?, did he think? didn't I take it to the car wash where they do all the work for you? Because I'm also a doddering old miser. And I'm trying to stay alive by getting as much exercise as possible.

Marsha's little grey cat, Amber, has returned, though she is a little nervous about us, since we keep leaving for extended periods of time. Still, we thought that was the deal. She obviously got too attached to a routine during December, and parts of January and February.

We managed to get to Pub Quiz on Tuesday night at Veach's Office Bar in Jackson, Michigan, and our team, the Blarneys, which plays every week whether we are there or not, won with over a ten point margin. It was a major victory, and a distinct team effort.
The distance from Jackson to Bossier City is 1055 miles, so we don't get to Pub Quiz all that often, but when we are in Michigan we try to get there every time we have a free Tuesday. As it happens, last Tuesday was the first one this year.

The night before we had driven down from Oakville, Ontario. the site of our last show of this tour segment. Most of the time we were in Ontario, we stayed at the Courtyard Marriott in Mississauga, where we took advantage of the swimming pool and exercise room. The accompanying photograph is of me in the pool at the Holiday Inn in Huntsville, the night after the Great Storm of '08; we had also been in the pool during the storm, underneath the faux palm tree.

During our stay in Ontario we went to the McMichael Gallery in Kleinsburg (BELOW: Marsha in front of the gallery) which houses the Group of Seven, Totem Poles, Etched stone, and Inuit stuff and we trolled about in the art for a few hours. I had always wanted to learn more about the Group of Seven (turns out there were 8 or 9 of them) as I actually referenced them on the trip between Huntsville and North Bay. Some of the scenery looked like Group of Seven paintings, as well it should, I soon found out. And I rediscovered Emily Carr who had been held up as a bit of a heroine during my schooling in Victoria, BC.

Canada, 2008

It seemed like these places were a long way apart. In January we were on the beach at Palm Harbor, Florida, and last weekend we drove through one of the biggest snowstorms of the winter on our way to North Bay, Ontario. Oddly, North Bay itself didn't have much of the storm, which mostly took place around Toronto. Apparently places as far south as Columbus, Ohio, were blanketed in snow, and the storm gradually moved East and finally hovered over the Maritime provinces on Sunday.
The snow began as we were leaving Jackie and Eric Whitesel's place in Lake Orion, just north of Detroit and continued and worsened as we crossed the border at Sarnia and wended our way past London, Toronto, and north past Barrie. We almost got stuck behind a Canadian Tire semi at a rest stop, but he finally got himself going and we plowed through a pile of snow in his wake.
(Marsha writes:) PS: On Saturday we drove (all day!) through one of the harshest blizzards they've had in Canada in decades. We just held onto the steering wheel and trundled through the wind and snow and ice packed road, thinking this is what the brave Canadians have to deal with normally. We got to Huntsville before giving up, leaned into the wind to reach the motel door, and then from our cozy room we looked out the window and watched the snow blow sideways across the parking lot. (We also viewed the storm from the swimming pool for a while. That was pretty strange. The pool was nice and warm, with big windows looking onto piles of snow and a driving blizzard.) The next day the sun was out and all the news was about the storm and the huge amount of snow. Sometimes ignorance is bliss!! For us, I think it happens often.
We decided to stop at a Motel 6 in Huntsville, 75 miles south of our destination. I had been hearing all along that tomorrow (Sunday) was to be sunny in North Bay, and indeed it was. In Huntsville, too, so we set our clocks forward and headed for the Capital Center in North Bay where we arrived to do our 2 o'clock show around noon.
The show, "La Manche," went well and we headed back to our Motel 6 for Sunday evening dinner at Kelsey's. But, had we known we were driving through such a memorable storm, who knows? Would we have given up.