Tim and Leanne's Valentine Newsletter

THREE SHOWS THIS WEEKEND

Friday Feb 15
(Valentine Show!)
The Bridges Family Resort
Waitsfield, VT
7:00 ON

Sunday Feb 16
Trapp Family Lodge
St. George's Hall
700 Trapp Hill Road, Stowe VT
7:30

Monday Feb 17
Hawk Mountain Resort
Inn, Library
75 Billings Road, Plymouth, VT
7:30 PM

Greatest hits, including White Bear, Hungry Wolf, Jackal's Pond, and St. Ailbe's Wolf Mother.

WAZZUP

It may be quite awhile before we send out another of these, so I'll try to make this issue a good'n.

Big changes afoot. (Rubs hands together.)

Folktale.net is going to be split up between two, possibly three domains
- a trade journal about folk storytelling,
- our advertisement to potential sponsors
- something for folks like you who already like us and are interested in what we're doing.
The email newsletter needs to be made more mobile friendly. This is but the first lame attempt. The next is apt to look much different. Maybe it'll be a kind of digest, with links to something web-based. (Notice how I'm avoiding the word "blog.")
We're finally putting some of our stuff onto video. Most of the taping should be finished by midsummer.
We hope to undertake a series of public shows-- possibly quarterly--at the Four Corners Schoolhouse in East Montpelier.
We're looking into new ways of tapping into the Vermont tourist trade, starting with the tour busses.
We're booking shows for our tour in September-- New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania fans take note!
I'm taking classes and workshops!
I'm making a business model!
New flyers! New graphic design! New download pages!
I'm ... I'm.... I'm ... I'm gonna clean my office---

BEFORE:

messy office

("after" picture next issue)

OR ELSE

on the other hand I may possibly have entered a period of dangerously unstable mania, in which case I'll crash and burn momentarily. It hasn't happened before, and it doesn't feel like that now, but then it wouldn't, would it?

Either way, I'm likely to be too busy to update this thing for at least a couple of months.

HAVE SOME
VALENTINE
MUSIC

Lar Duggan is a good friend of ours, and one of the most profound musical artists we know. Leanne heard him play "Stardust" once, and when she and I got married she got him to open our ceremony with that music. (We closed by singing about rowing gently downstream, merrily, in this dreamy life.)

It's a haunting tune when it's not oversold (as vocalists tend to do), and Lar's version goes beyond that.

Lar mostly records his original material, but he was nice enough to record Stardust for us - for Leanne especially, who has wanted this for years.

Here it is for you, with our love.

http://soundcloud.com/folktaledotnet/sets/stardust

Here's our own version of the Irish melody Give Me Your Hand. The tune was playing in the background much of time during our courting, decades ago. A college student once requested it by asking for "that make-out song."

http://soundcloud.com/folktaledotnet/sets/make-out-macushla

You can listen to some of Lar's original compositions here
http://soundcloud.com/larduggan

A VALENTINE PRAYER

for you from Leanne,
who wrote it in her poet days, back before we met. A friend turned it into this:

LORD save us from the frightened who

CAT NEWS BULLETIN

In October, as our little dog Ivy came into our house for the first time she woofed once at our cat, Charley, who then disappeared.

For a long time we didn't know where he was. It turned out, he was here

cat in a hole

in a kind of priest's hole

cat in a hole

up under the ceiling

cat coming out

behind the furnace.

cat on a heater

For three months he would only come down as far as the top of the hot water heater,

cat on a heater

eat there, then go back up again.

He never stopped eating, thank goodness, but for a few dark weeks he stopped coming down to the catbox. I think he found a place up there where he felt safer, up amidst the ductworks, and the whole house began to smell like catbox.

But

cat coming out

halleluia!

cat peeking round

Charley has begun coming out

cat sees dinner

into the adjacent unfinished room-- what we call "the pantry", to distinguish it from "the furnace room" -- really, they're both "the basement" only they're on the same level as the rest of our (finished) downstairs.

We feed him on the freezer now.

cat eats dinner He's still two rooms and a baby gate away from the dog, and he's begun to feel a little more secure. So when he's finished eating, he'll often cross the floor and jump up to to the shoulder-high padded windowseat we made for him months ago.