A Week at Home, Yet Still Traveling

It's been a week since I arrived in San Antonio. It is nice to be back home, although I haven't had much of a homecoming yet with many of my friends being gone this week. My sister Sue has been visiting our mother, my friend Merryl is off to Egypt and Jordan with her Adventure Women tour group, my friend Jean has been down in Corpus Christi at her condo, my friends Bob and Judy Maroney are off for 18 days in Argentina, etc. But I have needed the time to unpack, put things away, do laundry, go through the mail, update my account files related to my spending while gone, etc. Even though a whole week has passed, things still are not back to normal. And even though I am now at home, I am still traveling in a way. During the past week, I have:

1. Attended a concert by Heinavanker, an Estonian vocal group that is just fantastic with their polyphonic a capela singing of folk songs and their performances of renaissance music. Here is a second link to a You Tube recording of them.

2. Seen foreign films on DVD from the Czech Republic (Autumn Spring), Iran (Baran), and Israel (Late Marriage which is about Georgian Jews living there).

3. Attended the International Accordian Festival downtown hearing performances of groups from Panama, Romania, the Basque region of France/Spain, etc., as well as local groups playing conjunto music. Click on the Artists tab on that page to find links to the various groups that performed. Some of the better ones were Rupa and the April Fishes, Daddy Squeeze Trio, Amuma Says No, and Paris of the Heart.

In addition to those international-flavored activities, I went to the play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead which transports the characters from the Peanuts comic script into their high school years with accompanying frustrations, hangups, and insecurities that have developed. Snoopy has died of rabies after having first killed the bird that sits on his dog house. Beethoven is gay and avoids the toilets and the lunchroom as a way of hiding from harrassment by his old friends. Pigpen has turned into a super neat freak. Lucy is exploring life with different personas almost weekly. The little curly headed girl (The Doctor is In) has been committed to a mental institution for being a pyromaniac, and Charlie Brown is discovering that he is also gay and wants to become Beethovan's lover. It was hilarious. But it was a bit too mature a subject for the local audiance whose members were shocked by the gay kisses and simulated sex.