Week In Review: February 15-28

Since Ezra has been born, we have spent most of our evenings at home enjoying our new life with baby. Ezra is now a little older and spring is just around the corner causing us to experience a bit of cabin fever. The last half of February helped slow our symptoms with event after event after event …

Saturday, February 20, we attended Malcolm Dalglish’s The Welcome Table at the Buskirk Chumley Theater.  The Welcome Table was billed as a “spectacular indoor – outdoor production and pie party” combining song, dance, percussion, light verse, puppets, dancing reindeer, and a dozen bassoonists to help the audience shed their winter blues and welcome the eventual arrival of spring. The event ends with a parade of audience and performers singing as they march from the theatre to a bonfire beneath Dale Enoch’s sculpture The Bloomington Banquet where pie was provided by Bloomingfoods, the local food co-op.  The show was altogether fun, raucous, poignant, hilarious, and at some points absurd (did we mention the dancing reindeer?).

 Illustration for poster image by Sam Bartlett

Accompanied by his Grandma Sandy, Grandpa Harold, Effie and Squash, Ezra attended his first live, musical performance with The Welcome Table. Ezra loved the show and everyone loved sharing it with him.  He would bury his head in our chest during the enthusiastic audience’s generous applause between acts.  After the clapping ceased, he immediately turned his head back to the stage to see what was next. We were excited to take Ezra, but concerned he was too young for a live performance. We worried he would be disruptive. Would he cry? Yell? Be generally unhappy? He was none of those things. He found the show fascinating, entertaining, engaging, and by the show’s end exhausting, but he made it through.

photo by Stefanie Boucher

Ezra’s eyes closed pretty much after the last note (of the indoor performance) was sung.  He missed us marching through the streets of Bloomington singing about pie.  If you also missed this, the parade was recorded by Duane Busick and captures some of the spirit of the evening – and we think the spirit of the city of Bloomington. Amanda sampled the apple, pecan (thanks for sharing, Garry!), and rhubarb (thanks too, Steve!) and all were delicious (thanks for baking, Bloomingfoods!). In fact, they were most likely the best pies she’s ever eaten. It was inspiration to experiment with pie this coming summer and fall. If you have plans to visit us this summer, come with the expectation to eat pie!

photo posted by Kayte Young

Tuesday, February 23, still thinking about Saturday’s apple pie we helped support Bloomington Community Orchard by participating in a photo shoot.  The photographs will be submitted with grant applications as this new project tries to secure more money. We hope we captured Bloomington’s sense of community in the photograph!

The following week we attended back-to-back lectures Thursday and Friday. Live, variety-type show performances are good in Ezra’s opinion. Lectures? Not so much.

Sarah Sudhoff, Exam 2, 2006

Thursday, February 25, we attended a lecture by photographer Sarah Sudhoff. Sudhoff exhibited in The Kinsey Institute’s 2007 Juried Show and came to Bloomington for a short visit as an artist-in-residence at the institute. Sudhoff’s work, inspired by her own experience with cervical cancer, explores issues of medical waste (what happens to the body parts doctors remove?), the vulnerability felt by medical patients, and mortality.  She has a self-published catalog of Repository, which you can purchase via her blog.  Ezra and Amanda spent the lecture outside of the lecture hall playing on the dirty floor of the fine arts building with an abandoned scarf.

Friday, February 26, we attended a FREE lecture by Michael Pollan. Pollan, a best selling author and food activist, encourages people to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."  Amanda, Stef, and Josh had a great time listening to Pollan speak.  Ezra and Garry spent the lecture on the floor of the auditorium’s lobby where an impromptu playgroup formed with other parents and fussy infants (they also had fun).