Meeting Diana the Cow

Well, here I am.  I'm nearly two weeks into rehearsal for STONES, and this show feels like it's getting the hell away from me.  I'm finding it a lot more exhausting than I ever thought I would.  Apparently all the biking didn't work the right muscles, or build up the right kind of stamina.

The good news is that I've gotten around to ordering my new computer, and that should be arriving sometime in the next week or so.  Keep your fingers crossed.

[So, sadly, I discovered in the process of adding this post that the original photos are lost.  Bummer, 'cuz they were fun.]

So, I think turning 40 has turned my memorization skills to mush.  These lines are refusing to stick, and it's becoming a source of great frustration -- if not to the sainted Jay O'Berski, than to me, at least.  I keep plugging away.

Last week we went on a little outing to do some publicity photographs for the show.  Jay brought along his 35mm camera, and I brought the digital.  Sadly, I don't think that any of the photos really came out well enough to be of any use to a newspaper, but for low-resolution internet viewing, some of them aren't so bad.

 We arrived at the second-oldest family-run dairy farm in the nation, just off the Hanky Farms exit on Rt. 22/30 -- exactly the area in which I grew up!  I remember this farm from my youth.  I used to love driving past it on the highway, during the summer, and smelling that peculiarly particular cow-farm smell.

 So we met Bill, whose family runs the farm, and he introduced us to Diana the cow, with whom we were to work.  While we'd been waiting for Bill to arrive home for work, I made fast friends with Bill's dog, as you can see to the right, and Jay made fast friends with Diana, without knowing that she was the cow we were going to be working with on our photo shoot.  She was a great, lovely beast.  Willful, but fun and very sweet.  She wanted lotsa loving.  All of us agreed that we were very glad this was a dairy farm, and not a farm where cows ended up whacked over the head with a hammer.  Even those of us who aren't vegetarians were a little weirded out by that thought.

 Anyway, an hour and many many photos, later, we came away with a newfound appreciation for the operation of dairy farms (isn't it ridiculous that Bill, who's also a full-time farmer, has to have a second job to make ends meet?!?  What's up with that?), but also the charms of farm life... and farmers.

Coincidentally, if you look at the shirt that Bill is wearing in the picture above, you'll note that it's a West Allegheny Indians t-shirt.  That's my alma mater, yo!  Bill, it turns out, graduated from my high school ten years ago.  Small world, no?