Sunday, August 15th.
Am in the office. Writing to you. Sorry about not getting this out yesterday. As you see, I was busy with the Penland Auction and with a nap and with a visit to hear my favorite storyteller, Garrison Kiellor. And though it’d be a good thing to go for a bike ride, I’m still tired so I’m going to write and then go home for a nap. I might ride later. We’ll see.
When I was in college I was a theatre student. Specifically, I studied lighting design, but all design students had to take acting classes too, to get a feel for the on-stage experience, I guess. It was a good thing, for many reasons.
In one of my acting classes, we did an exercise in which one student would go to the center of the room and make a repetitive movement. Maybe she would bend at the waist, swivel to the left, swivel to the right, and then stand back up. Then she’d repeat it. The next student’s task was to go next to the first student and create a repetitive movement that fit into the first student’s motion. Student three came next, creating another movement.
By the end of the exercise, each student in the class was part of a crazy Rube Goldberg-like machine. Each student was a cog in a hilarious creation. Each person was connected by the intricacy of the movement. A smooth, swish-like sound emerged when we hit our group’s full stride.
When I do big caterings, I frequently think of that acting exercise.
On Friday, for the dinner’s dessert, I started our machine by scooping a portion of cobbler out onto a plate. And at the beginning, Michael took my filled plates and lined them up on waiting tables. No one else, right then, was needed. But then dinner was done and the waiters came to pick up finished plates and Michael became “sour cream sauce man,” portioning out the cream onto each lined-up plate.
Andy moved in, taking the finished plates and placing them on trays for the waiters. Meanwhile I portioned cobbler and Kris, fitting herself in, moved my filled plates to within Michael’s reach for him to sauce. Michael kept an eye on my cobbler and, when it was almost time for re-supply, he sped his actions up so he’d caught up with me, stopped just long enough to slip a new pan of cobbler to me, skipped back to his position, and kept saucing. Kris, meanwhile, kept my plate piles full.
On it went. As more waiters came to collect desserts, Meesh fit herself into our machine, taking empty trays and getting ready to hand them to Andy to put more of the plates that Michael had just sauced that Kris had just put in front of him after taking them from me, right after I had put cobbler on.
Swish.
And now my thoughts move to my TED talk. I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between my life these days and the systems that are in place inside a beehive. I hope to make my ideas clear enough that you’ll be inspired to think of your life when you hear me talk about mine. We’ll see.
Swish.
