Texas Storytelling (morning): Sacred Tales. First up: Warren talking about taking his new baby to see a friend dying of AIDS. I can't even repeat it all. "You'll see miracles and wonders" if you get into storytelling, he says.

"I have placed these letters in books because I have nowhere else to send them." Jane McDaniel goes into a used bookstore in Ireland and finds a bunch of books with love letters in them to a "Johnny" who moved to America and never wrote her (Cait? Not sure on spelling, just guessing on how she said it. Pronounced like "Coit," but is she a tower?) back in Ireland. Oh man! She rides to the bridge they last met at and...finds a FRESH letter from Johnny, saying he never forgot her! He might still be here! Jane rushes to the nearest hotel and finds him and asks what happened. Johnny cries, says he went to jail for burglary for getting in with the wrong crowd in America and how could he write back to her after that? His brother sent him the death notice when Cait died and that's when he returned to Ireland. Jane brought him the letters. "You only get one chance," she says, thinking of all the people who separated. "You have to take it. No matter how much it costs to love, you have to take it." "I was glad he had the letters, at least."

This one made me cry.

Sam Payne's dad brought home a goat. The goat "was a lousy dog." Bobby the Wonder Dog traveled a few thousand miles to get home, including swimming a river and crossing the continental divide in winter in 1925. Silverton, Oregon.

The middle of the day was collage club again. A notable moment during this was Jade went to go get some book of crystals for Sarah and then had a book fall out at her-- Napoleon's Book of Fate. So she did a spontaneous reading out of it for me. She knew which question from the book to ask, of course: #9, "Does the person love and regard me?" Without telling me what she was doing, she said to draw 4 lines and then put some random amount of stars on each line, then count whether or not the # of stars were even or odd on each line. She used the results from that to get the answer in the book: https://www.astroccult.net/NapoleonFate_book_h.html "This love is from the heart and will continue until death." Exactly what I wanted to hear :)

Jade also got around to watching the video I sent her of Scott and I asked how much of that lived up to what she dreamed about, and she said the way he cocked his head was the same in the dream. Hmmm. I asked if she has psychic dreams and it sounds like the answer was "not especially" on that one.

Stuff besides that:

Jade, Doreen, and even Meg are getting second shots within the next month. (Apparently she has gotten the first one now!) Huzzah. Sarah's still trying to get one. We talked about Sarah Brown's wedding and how her in-laws like her (thank gawd) and how her husband's mother wrote him a letter about four years before they got engaged about how she was what they wanted in a daughter-in-law and he should marry her! (Love this.) Sarah said she used to be totally buzzed and crazy after seeing her husband back when they were dating and I was all ME TOO (see summer 2019). She is also having similar friend issues with some getting closer and some disappearing.

Doreen's still researching places to live via Google. Meg got an idea for a situation after Doreen got off the call, but that would depend on whether or not some other friend is willing to sell their trailer. Doreen did a workshop with a nun who mentioned a "knot prayer" that she read aloud and we all said we wanted sent to us--about asking God to untie your knots. I also got to hear about how Peter and Doreen met. Apparently the two of them would tell this very differently. Sarah performed it the way Peter would have, saying that she walked into the bar and a blinding light was behind her and she walked over to him and he had no idea what to say. Doreen was all "I was in the area and traffic was bad and I thought I'd just go into this bar and make a pay phone call to see if I could see a friend in the area for a few hours." "I blasted him off his barstool." Anyway, they sat next to each other in the bar and hit it off instantly and there you go!

Meg glazed her bowls and is trying to be non-judgmental. Her daughter-in-law is visiting the area, so she was out seeing her for a bit (she's in the vaccination clear). We talked about my work issues and if there's anything that can be done to improve them. Meg is going to light a candle with "Someone else will answer the phones."

I ended up being on the Zoom till nearly 5 today, wowza. I finished the entire unicorn section on the sweater I'm working on, so...six hours of that!

Texas Storytelling Festival: last show. Sam Payne was doing songs when I logged on, and he was talking about his grandparents. His grandmother was diagnosed with a heart condition and one year to live, and his grandfather said if that was all they got, he'd make it the best year of her life. "He gave her 40 years of the best year of her life." AWWWWWWWWW.

I haven't really taken notes during any of the Eth-Noh-Tec stories--I find them a bit hard to recap since they're very active and ain't no way I can describe Robert doing things with his eyebrows and the like--but their last story of the night was about a real life guy (Dashrath Manjhi) who spent sixteen years building a road between mountains after his wife died. "How love can move mountains," they called it. They helpfully had a slide show afterwards.

Donna Washington, "Three Princes Riding." For once, nothing was happening because all the witches were out having a party instead of building gingerbread houses, the wizards are off at college, all the princesses got married or are 2 years old... There was nothing to do! But every king still had 3 sons. I LOL'd at "do you know what happens when you can't get away from each other all the time?" YES, I THINK THEY ALL DO THESE DAYS! So mostly this prince is like, wandering around trying to find himself, which somehow turns into... "I have a goat and a baby. I need a job!" LOL. And I guess the job was woodsman, because then this somehow wands into Little Red Riding Hood territory...."We normally would have killed the wolf, but now he's an endangered species, so we let him go."

(From the chat: "Donna Washington needs to give a workshop at the next festival: How To Make Your Eyeballs as Big as Baseballs." Later, someone asked her if she was selling some kind of knickknack, what would it be, and she said, "A giant eyeball." "By tomorrow, each of you will be refrigerator magnets," someone said.)

At the end: "Everybody have a safe journey home!" someone yelled. "I'm just going to walk right over to my bed!" was the reply.

I hung around to hear the conversation afterwards, about trying to act but not being ethnic enough, being too ethnic, or the right kind of ethnic, or not dressing it enough....Heather said that at her first Jonesboro festival, her husband said, "Heather, you have to get a shawl!" or a vest because everyone had those. Sam refuses to get a shawl! Donna said that some Shakespeare troupe had scandalized a middle school SO MUCH that they rode her ass to make sure she didn't do anything inappropriate. Robert said he got asked if he was going to tell any stories about the devil and he was all, "I wasn't GOING to..." Heather is all, "The most subversive thing we can do is to stimulate a child's imagination." She said she got called into a principal's office at a Christian school for talking about "different virgins," where as far as they were concerned there was only one. "And that's when I made a promise to myself to practice my enunciation. Only storytellers would find that funny." Donna said she was doing something loud and vocal when a fire alarm went off, and nobody moved because they thought it was her making the noise.

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