2008 Spring/Summer Tour - Day 27

I had three shows this morning at a preschool in Henderson, and it was pretty rough going. Nothing to do with the venue or the kids... they were great and enjoyed the shows a lot... but I didn't realize how sick I still was until I got underway. My voice was still far from recovered and I was still pretty weak and didn't have too much energy. Luckily, they were three 20 minute sets, so it wasn't too demanding, time-wise. My voice got a little bit smoother after the first show, but even when I'm healthy, some of the notes on things like "The Elephant Song" test the high range of my voice, and today I felt like I failed that test. Roseann says that I'm being too hard on myself, that the shows went great and my voice sounded fine. I guess my perception of how things went as the performer doesn't really matter so much compared to how well the audience enjoyed the performance, so I was glad to at least be able to perform at all and know that the kids had fun with it, regardless of whether my voice was scratchy and "pitchy" or whatever. One thing I remember from a book on acting by the playwright/director David Mamet is that no matter how bad you think you might have been as a performer, if someone comes up afterwards and says what a great show they thought it was, you should just smile and say "thank you", because to say otherwise is to deny them their experience or to imply that they're not being sincere. Anyway, I try to remember that for cases like this.

We ran some errands on the way back and then the girls played together in their room while we watched Juno, which we really liked, and which happens to feature one of the great pioneers of kids' music, Barry Louis Polisar, performing the opening song.

Otherwise, we mostly hung out at the KOA and did computer stuff, had dinner, watched House, and changed out the water in our RV. We had filled it up at the last campground, but it had a really funny chlorinated taste. It was fine for washing dishes or brushing teeth, but was no good for making juice mixes. Even Tiggy wouldn't drink it, insisting on bottled water from the fridge. I don't blame him.