News May 2006

May News

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A Reminder:
The CD RELEASE PARTY is only days away!

10th June at 2pm at the Howe Library.
Please remember to come. It is a free event, where I will be storytelling and celebrating the release of my new CD, "Second-Hand Tales", hopefully with Steve Glazer, Rick Barrows, Maureen Burford and Kristina Stykos there to celebrate with us. It will be fun; do please come!

Second-hand Tales - a CD in the making

I have completed my first ever recording and it is looking and sounding great AND it is on sale! Of course, none of it was done alone; I had a great deal of help. A very good and old friend of mine in the UK worked on the cover and his work is some you will want to keep on your wall, if not on your CD shelf! I have added music between the stories with the help of some very accomplished musician friends: Rick Barrows plays mandolin, Maureen Burford plays fiddle and Steve Glazer plays guitar. Rick is a contra-dance player, Maureen is a player in Revels North, here in the Upper Valley and Steve Glazer is, quite simply, a fantastic guitar player (as well as great friend), so I could not really go wrong!

A really nice environmental piece of this project is I am using very little plastic in the packaging (no jewel case for me) and it was all recorded off the grid at Kristina Stykos' recording studio in Chelsea, Vermont. The playing time is about an hour and the CD has four stories on it. If you are four or five and over, I hope that you will enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it. You might also enjoy it if you are younger, but you might want to have a bigger person check it out first! When will it be out? RIGHT NOW!

I am having a CD release party, to which you are all be invited! The party is going to be on June 10th, at 2pm at the Howe Library in Hanover, NH.

The CD is available in these local stores, here in the Upper Valley, and is also available at CDBaby.com if you prefer to buy on-line. The local stores are:
Booked Solid, Bradford VT, 802-222-5826
Norwich Bookstore, Norwich VT, 802-649-1114
Music Matters, West Lebanon NH, 603-298-6625
Hot Shot Photo, Lebanon NH, 603-5505
When it is carried in more stores, and further afield, I will add those to the list.

My family went down to Jim Thorpe, PA for a family birthday get-together over Memorial Weekend and we went to the jail there. It is one of those castle-like jails built hundreds, it seems, of years ago. Walls feet thick, a damp dungeon and a spooky feeling when you walk around!
There is a story of an inmate there who claimed to be innocent of the murder he was accused of. As he was about to leave his cell for the gallows, he rubbed his hand on the dirt floor and put his hand-print on the wall saying: "This hand-print will stay here as long as my innocence goes ignored." The guard told him to wipe it off, which he did. Later that night, the guard saw the print back on the wall. It was scrubbed down but the print came back. It was painted over, but came back. Over the years the handprint has been plastered over, scraped, painted over and plastered some more to the depth of six inches, but the hand-print refused to be covered up. One warden knocked down the wall and rebuilt it with new materials. But ... the hand-print came back. It is still there on the wall. I saw it in the dark chamber where this man spent the last hours of his life.

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