Goodbye Tatla Lake

There's a lot of goodbye here. Goodbye to Tatla Lake, goodbye to Canada, goodbye to Fall Tour 2010. As I sit in my hotel room and actively procrastinate packing up to leave, I feel the need to reflect a bit.

I want to talk about Tatla. This is the most unique community I've been to yet. Unfortunately, the nature of small town politics means that stories about some of the unique characters and personalities involved would be inappropriate. The nature of this place makes its people unusual. It's quite a diverse set of unusual too. Sometimes in a small town, everyone is odd, but the same kind of odd. But here, everyone is odd in their own unique way.

We started Monday with 25 kids. This was essentially the complete population of 5-16 year old children in a 50-mile radius. The school was a relatively small building, of course, but not much smaller than some other schools I've been to. For 25 students, only 18 of which regularly attend classes (7 home-schoolers came in to participate this week), the building is a palace. You could spread the kids out and have one in each classroom. There's a lot of specialized classrooms and a rather nice gym. Unsurprisingly, the school in many ways seems to be the center of the community.

That is one of the most odd bits about this week. We didn't just cast everyone who auditioned, we cast the whole school. Classes were shut down this week and replaced with our rehearsals. We effectively gave the two teachers there a week off. But not really, they just worked on coordinating the massive undertaking that the play became.

This is definitely the smallest town we've been to, but the play has, perhaps because of that, been the biggest event we've been a part of. The whole town turned out and I'm almost being literal here. There was a massive, medieval style dinner put together to precede the show. They roasted a pig. A charity auction was held after the show to raise money for the show. I saw a real auctioneer at work. That's a sight to see, let me tell you.

The gym was transformed. A local technology buff loaned us extra lights, the bus driver from two towns over came in and played guitar for us. Rather extensive sound equipment came from...somewhere, I don't know where, it just showed up.

It's strange, I've gotten used to being thanked for what we do for the kids. And for kids that aren't used to any group over 20, being put in front of a hundred people and performing is a valuable experience. So we got the normal group of grateful parents and grandparents that are one of the highlights of my job, but in addition, there were people who told us that we were helping bring the town together.

Towns this small are a vulnerable breed, and having such a small population means that people run away, resisting the middle of nowhere. The young, in particular, flee in search of work, in search of experience, in search of other youth. They used our show to pull the community together and give them something to be proud of.

I'm not taking credit for this, by the way. It was the hard-working people who brought us here who deserve the credit. I am happy, however, that we got to be a part of it. It makes how extremely tired I am worthwhile.

Today, by the way, was very busy in final preparations. Being part of a larger event naturally increased our workload and complicated the production. Also, we started early with the kids, and what would normally be a five or six hour day became over ten hours. There were a lot of difficulties to overcome, but we overcame them. The show went off. The audience laughed and applauded. A lot of those kids were beaming as the show finished. This was a hard week, but it did remind me why this is the best job I've ever had.