Catching Up With Ann and Alan

We were thrilled. They started speaking about a wedding in May. We were aghast, asking them to consider all a wedding entails. In truth, we didn’t tell them all the details--since we had yet to discover them ourselves. Mercifully, without prompting, and deeply tempered as joy was by the sadness of Patrick’s father, Robert, dying weeks before, they considered their own busy schedules and concluded September would be better.

By now Ann was into the 2005 University of Kentucky alumni award (for John Henry, sculptor)--this time she made it of fabric shapes in a box she constructed:
The certificate, in UK blue

The certificate reversed
The certificate reversed into brightly colored geometric shapes which echo Henry's work; see www.johnhenrysculptor.com/ for examples of his work
Ann was still churning out text and models for the second calligraphy book, which, based on her research in Siena, she had convinced Zaner-Bloser, should be on Formal Chancery. Meanwhile, Alan was fully engaged in rehearsals for the fiftieth anniversary of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind at Ohio State. Since it was to be an all undergraduate show, he cast 45 students, without regard to gender or ethnicity.

Thus it was that Matthew Harrison Brady was played by an African-American woman, the preacher was Chinese-American, and the townspeople were extremely diverse. And the crowd scenes worked so well that he was asked to give a workshop on crowd improvisational techniques at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Midwest Regional Festival in early 2006.
Alan gives notes
He also brought in local celebrities and dignitaries as the jury, putting them in the first row of the auditorium, so that the trial scenes could be played directly to the audience. And to top it all off, Jerome Lawrence’s niece, Deborah Robison, attended a performance in mid May to announce an endowment fund of over a million dollars to the Institute as a bequest from Jerry, and that the Institute will receive a portion of the royalties from Lawrence and Lee plays in perpetuity. A grand end to the academic year!

We had already arranged a June trip to Boston, Ann to study a formal chancery manuscript in the Houghton and Alan to resume earlier research in Harvard’s Theatre Collection. Alan had the playwriting contest in full swing and had just completed a workshop training new audio describers for VSAO (formerly Very Special Arts Ohio), Ann’s second book wasn’t finished, and she had agreed to make Kate’s wedding gown.
Help!
Boston was great fun, and research was fruitful--even though we hadn’t noticed that the Thursday of the week we’d planned to spend at Harvard was their spring Commencement. No getting near Cambridge that day! So we rented a car and drove to the North Shore, revisiting Alan’s boyhood hometown where we hadn’t been for some 38 years. The current owner of the house Alan’s parents were the first to own was home and invited us in--

Robin Davis and Alan in South Hamilton
and spent a wonderful four hours showing us changes and learning herself about the history of the neighborhood. We then returned to Columbus, to plan for The Wedding. It was clearly time to really get to work. Ann's books were finally finished by late June,

for more information, see www.zaner-bloser.com/html/hwgen.html

In the end, it all turned out perfectly--a perfect day, a perfect setting, everyone had a place to stay despite the influx of Texas Longhorns for the OSU game and Honda‘s 4000 strong sales force--even the butterflies (almost smothered when USPS left them out in the heat at the wrong address, never bothering to get the required signature) actually revived and flew, and the horse-drawn carriage arrived.

We commend you to www.columbusnavywedding.blogspot.com for ALL the details and links.

It had been a true marathon. We’d been on overdrive over-long. Now we really needed time out. So, after first canning the gallons of sauce made from the tomato plants that sprang up unbidden in the garden we’d vowed not to have this summer but hadn’t had the heart to plow under,

some of the many quarts of tomato sauce, both yellow and red, in the pantry; imagine how many we'd have if we'd actually planted tomatoes?
and after conducting two marbling workshops that were already on the books, Ann has begun taking it easier, getting more sleep and reducing stress, and catching up as catch can. But intriguing projects continue: leather journals and art for a Children’s Hospital exchange program, lettering commitments, planning a brush class for the new year. Other projects and deadlines loom for both of us, but all in time. Alan, of course, had no time out, plunging back into classes shortly after the wedding, doing an appraisal of materials donated to a university in Indiana, and working on an exciting new project for developing new plays that should come about in the next year or so--but which required lengthy planning meetings now. There was the matter of the new roof--after some eight years, the bitumen roof we had put on began to leak--raccoons biting through. So we returned to the original gravel and tar. Very expensive, but it'll last longer than we will!
Ann on roof
For now, we look back at a busy year--an astonishing year, really--thankful for each other, for our “little” Kate grown now into an accomplished woman, for our dear friends and family, especially our whole new family that has come with our remarkable, creative son, and knowing deeply how much we have to be grateful for. ...besides, we’re dancing again. No longer quite as spry, but hopefully a bit wiser, we charge on and wish you and yours what this picture suggests --a “cushy” new year.

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