A Bottle of Cough Medicine Saves the Day !

When I awoke this morning, I still had a lingering cough from that allergy thing I have had for the past few weeks. I was worried I would not be able to do the show, since I did not want to cough my way through one hour, so I went to the doctor. When I arrived there to get the medicine, I was told I had to make an appt, because they did not want to just give me it without having me see a doctor. I made the appt for later in the morning and went walking at the reservoir (2 miles) while I was waiting for the appt. I then came back, saw a new doctor I had never seen, got the cough meds, promised the doctor I would help her plan a trip to Italy, and scampered home to write a plan for the doctor. I took the cough meds at 1 PM just to test it out and found that I needed the full dosage of 2 teaspoons so had another 2 hrs later, went to the studio, and did the show, flawlessly !!! Thank goodness for modern medicine. First Ellen and I were told some people were going to be using the adjoining community center for summer stock rehearsals, but it was not a Flamenco Dancer so that was an improvement. It turned out I didn't even notice them. I was a bit apprehensive about doing this kind of show with all videos and perhaps 15 minutes of my introductions. Laura and I had done several interviews with a lot of very interesting people, and this night inaugurated the concept of Alan's Italy: In Their Own Words. It was pretty good I guess, as I viewed it later. Once it was uploaded to Youtube, I realized it had to edited front and back, so that is going on now, so if you go to it before the editing process is complete, which takes a few hours, you will hear some extraneous noise at the beginning and end. Otherwise, Show # 23 is there now for all to see with some very interesting stuff by four extraordinary people. Susan Chalkley, Resident Artist, at the Villa La Palagina, where we stayed while visiting Luca in Figline Valdarno, is the first. She was a lovely, fun person we got to know, and we took her to dinner in Florence soon after the video was made. Andrea Martellini, a Spokesperson for the Five Star Movement in Italy, a movement to try to root out corruption in the Italian Government was just a charming and wonderful guy with a great plan and plenty to say. Drs Roger Crum and Bill Shuerman, Professors at University of Dayton had brought a group of students from their University to study in Florence for a month. We met them at La Spada where we ate every night of the stay in Florence. They are both extremely nice people, fun, intelligent, with great knowledge of Florence and interesting stories to tell. I hope to do more shows with the same theme in the future. I have a bunch of interviews I have taped in Woodstock of people we know who have an Italian story to tell, so if this goes over well, I will continue with the theme. I would like to interview Andrea again, but on Skype, live on the show this time with him in Italy and me in Woodstock at the studio; I hope we can work that out. I felt a little strange, because I just did a lot of listening to the videos, instead of talking so much, but this is, I believe, a great idea for a show. Next week using a book my friend Luca gave me about the 19th century photography of Florence taken by the Alinari Brothers, I will do a show called Florence Then and Now discussing the old photos and the newer ones 150 years later. I will compare the same venues with the changes that have occured. It looks good with what I have done so far. Stay tuned. Thanks for tuning in to the blog and the show.