October 20, 2009
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Of Heidi Chronz, Sleeping through the Night, and other random haunts...
The Daily News
1 Indeed, the verdict is out.
2 Presently living with the wheezes and the sneezes, but unsure as to whether I'm actually sick, or just exhausted from intense versions of insomnia in the past week.
3 Finishing up doing the grades took a huge toll on me, changing all hope of trying to work an intelligently arranged schedule. I was up late, up early, sleepy, and knocked around.
4 Occupational hazard.
5 The night before last, I awoke at some ungodly hour and couldn't get back to sleep. I worried about lots of things about which I had utterly no control, and then when I tried to get back to sleep, found my chest filled with the wheezes and the sneezes.
6 I jokingly posted on Facebook that I wondered if my students would notice if I took a snooze in the afternoon.
7 I was only partially joking. Well, actually I was totally joking, but in the back of my mind, a nice snooze would have worked beautifully.
8 I naturally chose NOT to do that, and somehow made it, and then conked out when I got home. Sound familiar?
9 October.
10 I took around an hour afternoon nap, and then proceeded to bubble up an amazing chicken soup in the tradition of Original Joe's. Lots of carrots, celery, and onions, and a lot of other dandy ingredients made for an amazingly close cure to the common cold.
11 I then fought to stay awake for the rest of the evening in order to prevent the insomnia that usually hits me at two or three a.m.
12 Well, it SORT of worked. At around 8:30 I conked out, but awoke an hour later, and decided to have a bit more soup to see if it was a fluke.
13 It was spot on like Joe's! Yeah, cold 'cuz I didn't bother to heat it. Ever just take a scoop of something from a Tupperware? Okay, I confess! I'm one of those guys!
14 Anyway, it held its own, so I then walked around, trying NOT to put on a small pot of coffee.
15 I have some Starbuck's Sumatran that is pretty much dynamite.
16 I'm not certain how that would work. My experience with coffee is that it gets you really awakened, but within two hours, one is fast asleep in Sluggoland, a place where we not only sleep, but sleep sluggishly.
17 I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but it seemed like a great plan.
18 Still thinking of doing an offshoot; that is, of drinking a cup of YESTERDAY'S coffee. It seems more tame. Making a pot of coffee at 10:30 at night seems a scary thing, even though I've had coffee this late many times before.
19 Welp, it hasn't been easy this week.
20 My voice is completely annhilated from the wheezes and the sneezes, and I don't know that I should be going in to teach.
21 But I don't trust anyone to do the job. I've worked the students into a discussion mode, so I may be able to do it. Plus, I'm not sure if the wheezes and sneezes are the result of lack of sleep, or of whatever. I'm not feverish, so it's really difficult to tell.
22 Ah, vell...
23 Moving on: nothing like writing twenty some-odd items about one's struggle with personal stuff. Makes for great journalism, right?
24 Let's move on to coincidences and October.
25 Moving on, Part the Second: The only thing that has happened in the past few days is that I found a flyer in a delicatessen. The flyer advertised Heidi's Hens, which amused me. It's some sort of organic turkey farm so people could go green this Thanksgiving.
26 I looked at the turkeys on the cover and they were running around a meadow looking stupid.
27 The thought of eating those poor fellows struck me as wrong, well, at first. Reminded me of those wild turkeys that run loose through Grant Park. So peaceful and harmless.
28 My sympathy never transferred over to the chicken soup for some reason...
29 Ah, cheap hypocrisy!
30 Anyway, the most interesting thing about this Halloween season is the absolute lack of coincidences, especially with all the nines and ones that travel through this particular Halloween.
31 With the Heidi stories, the numbers nine and one have always been an integral part of the coincidences and oddities that have chased me through time. I always LOVE when a good coincidence hits, but this year, they've stayed remarkably tame.
32 They won't, mind you, especially now that a Heidi thing has entered the realm. Yes it's just a brochure, but once it happens the coincidences and oddities start moving in at a locomotive pace. If you hit the xanga site at the bottom of this page, you should be able to browse older DN's, where many of these coincidences have been recorded for posterity.
33 If you want to read the Heidi Chronz, they still lie rusting in the weeds on the ybdrama.com website, which is practically extinct. Each year I try to get them onto this xanga series, but each year I try, something stops that from occurring. So the major part of the story remains on that once rich website:
34 I throw this out there because ever since I hit Facebook, I have re-associated myself with many of the people who were there early on. I'd love to have those guys read the Heidi Chronicles on the ybdrama.com website and hit me with an e-mail about their own recollections. I'm sure very many will corroborate the stories that I share with my students. My e-mail address is gfharrington@aol.com. I'd love to hear things from the perspective of people who were there.Here is a fast track to the only full version of those stories ever compiled:
http://www.ybdrama.com/The_Heidi_Chronicles.html
35 Read those first, then see if you could answer a few questions for me. The questions I always get are these: How did you reach Heidi? How old was she? WHO was she? How did she die? Why does she follow me around? She was a good spirit, to be sure, but were there any bad ones? I rarely have answers to those questions.
36 And most of the people from the Ship of Fools era haven't yet reached me on Facebook, although Paul Long has been in careful touch. John Williams is also out there, but I don't know if he would remember the night he came into the Theatre and asked if anything having to do with Heidi had come up.
37 We were ready to do a rehearsal for Ship of Fools, the Titanic scene, and I told him just to watch. It got freezing cold, and all the seats clicked during the entire scene.
38 I also have Paul Castor and Jason Cuascut who were at those sessions. If memory serves, I kept asking for the lights to raise and lower in order to get the stars bright for Kristi Parker's singing of the song Winter. The lights adjusted up and down, and when I thought it looked perfect, asked Jason to come out into the house to take a look at the stage, so he could see how awesome it looked, like a night sky.
39 Jason popped out from stage left, even though the lightboard was located at stage right.
40 We closed the Theatre that night, immediately, for the first time ever, in absolute fear. That was probably the only time "Heidi" ever scared the shit outta me!
41 Anyway, if you have some detailed tales, send them my way. I'd love to see how close the stories come to my own accounts, which I noted and marked down when they happened so they would be accurate down the road.
42 Well, it's down the road right now, so send me your recollections of Heidi on my e-mail, again which is gfharrington@aol.com. I'll gather them together and see what I could do with them. An update with accurate accounts by other witnesses might do much to enrich the students' enjoyment of the Heidi Chronz this year.
43 Aight then. I think this DN is done for now, and it's still before 11 p.m. I may be able to sleep through the night tonight.
44 But first, I think I'll bubble up a little coffee and slide over to Facebook...
45 Haha. For the record, I wound up going to bed early and slept peacefully all through the night. Between items 43 and this one were well over six hours of peaceful sleep. Finally. = )
46 Peace.
~H~
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