Weekend

I had a great weekend. Sarah and I went to see David Sedaris on Saturday. This was the first time I had seen him in person. We have all his books and I catch him on NPR from time to time. All of the material on Saturday was new as far as I could tell. He had the whole place laughing out loud only minutes after taking the stage. He talked about living in Normandy, and about a 3 month stay in Japan. The language barrier and cultural differences both present good material for him. He also told stories about his family, mainly his brother, and read a few passages from his diary. At the end he fielded some questions from the audience and then went to lobby to sign books. There's no new book out at this time but I hope for one soon. We'll definitely go see him again if the opportunity arises.

Sunday was a full blown pottery day. Julie and Adrienne from Clayworks were heading up to the Penland area to pick up some donated pots for Clayworks' upcoming fundraising event. We all knew that Will and Douglass at Rock Creek had recently fired their kiln so we worked it into the schedule that we would go there first and get some pots and hopefully have a visit. I was disappointed that we didn't get an earlier start and we didn't arrive until lunchtime. Will and Douglass had some guests visiting from Virgina, Warren Fredrick and Catherine White. I was really excited about meeting them. What was even better was that they had brought some of their pots down so we got to see them too. The highlight for me though was getting to see some of Catherine's journals, drawings, and collages. I could have stayed for several more hours and asked her questions but we needed to move on to our next stop. We did all get some great pots from Will and Douglass' showroom in the barn. I choose a nice tall footed jar.

Our next stop was at Suze Lindsey's and Kent Mclaughlin's pottery and home. Suze had us lunch ready but I was jacked up from having two cups of strong green tea at Rock Creek. This combined with all the pots in Suze and Kent's house had me very over stimulated. I get really distracted visually anyhow, especially with pots. So Suze told me to go look around. There were pots everywhere, many of theirs, but mostly of other potters from all over the country, many of my favorites. After I settled down a bit we all had lunch and a good visit. It was getting on in the day and starting to snow. Adrienne needed to get back home as she had lined up the babysitter for a certain time and we were already behind schedule. We made two more quick stops to get pots and by that time the snow was coming down in big flakes and accumulating on the ground.

We made it off the mountain and they dropped me off at my truck where we had met earlier in the day. Adrienne and Julie still had over an hour to get home, where as I only had about 40 minutes. It was an awesome day. Seeing everyone was great, the thing that is sticking with me right now are Catherine's journals. I told Sarah just the other night that I need to be spending my free time more creatively. I get my pottery time in every day just fine. What I'd like to do is take more time to draw and play in some medium other than clay. Seeing Catherine's work has made that desire more strong and I feel like I'll act on it, as a matter of fact I did a drawing this morning.