It has been a rich ten days or so. And these kinds of riches are not an embarrassment at all.  Our designers Molly Ross, Staub, Matt Mahaney, and Kathleen Geldard, along with our Production Manager Amelia Cox and Stage Manager Kate have all brought an amazing wealth of talents - great thinking, great designing amidst the perseverance it takes to try to "get it right". The company of dancers - only two of whom are from our core group, with the rest being adjunct artists joining us for this production - benefited, too, from having the designers present a full week as we rehearse, replicate, rejuvenate, rest, repeat. The dialogue helps the work get better.

A new/old, or old/new?, colleague, Michael Bobbitt, artistic director of the Adventure Theatre at Glen Echo has been generous to offer his response to what we have put together. I would run into Michael more recently on the street or at a theatre. Early on during my DC days, Michael and I met at American University. It has been to have him, along with my Dance Exchange colleagues Martha Wittman and Elizabeth Johnson helping me to rehearse and direct.

AND SO:

We have a rich show to share with you this weekend. And the next, in LA, and the next after that in B'more. More soon.

But: I digress.  The highlight of this particular trip was stopping at the Grand Canyon. I was in a foul mood, and in response to my saying that I wanted to stay in the car, my mother tilted her head forward and looked out of the top part of her eyes, a sign she was about to say something she really meant.

"You will get out of this car immediately, young man, and you will go over to the edge of that canyon, and you will look at it, and you are going to enjoy every moment. Do you hear me?"

My father had been Police Chief here for about 30 years spanning the fifties through the eighties. The population in  the early days was as low as 150. The old Milwaukee Railroad stopped there then. The newly named Metra Transit offers daily commuting between Chicago and Round Lake - unheard of as a concept when I was growing up. Chicago might as well have been Mars!

The Iron Horse Diner, I have mentioned here before, where my mother sat at "her" seat at the end of a communal table, the pleather/plastic chair playing host to a revolving group as my mother had coffee usually from 6 am through about 10:30 am - and then she'd be back for lunch, mock fighting with John the owner and helping Patti, friend/waitress/confidante, make coffee filter setups and to count her tips.

Tomorrow I will return to my hometown to pick up the last of things that were in my mother's house when she died two years ago. The house was sold almost immediately, so these items have been in my Aunt Marie's garage all this while.

For the life of me, I can't remember what it is specifically in those boxes. The big stuff includes two Appalachian stick furniture chairs that my grandmother had bought off the back of the truck of some man as he sold his home-made chairs in the "affluent" Midwest. They are beautiful. I can see my grandmother sitting in one of them on our front porch watching the traffic turn onto the main street of our downtown. At the time the population was most likely under 400 people - the first traffic light was still twenty years into the future. We had rotary phones. TV's were still black and white. Nuns who still wore black and white robes with starched peaked headgear (habits, I think they were called) can be seen with big gardening gloves on, snipping at the roses in their garden, which butts up against our yard. This is the view off the backporch.

... a broken home?

...a fixed home?

...a man-made (or woman-made?) home?

Were you ...

...a test-tube baby?

...a darling baby?

...Gerber baby?

...a big baby?

...fond of Santa Baby?

...mature beyond your baby years?

Tell  me about...

But I am lucky to be among some beautiful flowers. Michael Rohd, of Sojourner Theatre and who is also a visiting professor at Northwestern has arranged for three other artistic directors of companies who engage communities in the making of their work to convene here for a few days, share some conversation. Exemplar funded our time together.

Today, Micheal Garces of Cornerstone Theatre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women, Michael Rohd and I co-taught a class to a mix of theatre and dance students. Vincent Thomas, who has danced with us at Dance Exchange and has taught for Bush Women's Institutes, also taught. How inspiring to be among others who share similar values but also offer new perspectives. Today I got to play in the garden.

So in the thick of our physical rehearsals in the studio and the efforts of a lot of good hardworking people to get this blog up and running and enticing enough for the general public to drop their individual stories onto the site I have not been myself - or all myself.

This flight today:  I went to a place that is probably the polar opposite of my funny uncle self. The role I play in life as a not-quite-dad-or-older-brother to the Dance Exchange, to my niece who's not quite adopted in Mexico, who can't cross the border into the states, the roles I usually play on stage usually leans more toward where the humorous, the facilitator, the narrator, the translator. I am usually good with this.

But today I realised I have been running on empty, a bit depleted  - and, just like the thin chocolate covering on on of those Cadbury Eggs, from a distance I am that sweet, chocolate-y outside, cheery, functioning. But on closer inspection, the chocolate skin is cracked and oozing sweet goo all over, and not able to contain it.

I have had the pills and am on my way to getting healthy, so this is not a pity party. But it is an apology for not being more upfront with this public forum. Really, if I had been more up front with myself, I could have been more up front for this writing.... and probably more true to what I think Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle is trying to say.It may just be part of what makes me a funny uncle that I am in a bit of a denial.

WANT TO GIVE the gift of dance? Try tickets to see the progressive Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s production of “Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle” playing at Baltimore’s Patterson Theatre...Staged and conceived by gay choreographer Peter DiMuro, “Gumdrops” explores the definition of family through the eyes of Siena, a little adopted girl; a pair of figure skaters who adopt a hockey team; and a Baltimore grandfather who creates a home under many roofs. A work in progress, “Gumdrops” is partly inspired by DiMuro’s own real-life experience as an uncle to his young niece and his early career stint playing funny uncle roles, including Uncle Drosselmeyer in the Boston Ballet’s production of the “The Nutcracker.” “After I came out as a gay actor and dancer in the late 1970s midwest, I immediately went from playing male ingénues to odd uncles like Uncle Oliver in ‘School for Scandal,’” says DiMuro. “Knowing I was gay, directors could no longer see me as a romantic lead.”