Back in the Saddle

Show # 93: My 25 Favorite Photos was designed several weeks ago when I was running out of ideas. I threw together 25 of my favorite photos and decided to just talk about them in terms of when they were taken and why with a brief summary of my personal feelings about them. The photos Laura and I have taken over the years are very precious to us and have a lot of meaning. I thought that would be a good show. It was intended to be just a filler, but gradually I warmed to the idea of doing shows like this every so often, since the photos are the basis for Alan's Italy and in a wider sense the record of our amazing trips to Italy. This will be the first of many.

I enjoyed the presentation very much, but I have been very jet-lagged, sleepy a lot, waking up at 4 or 5 AM every morning, headachy, lethargic, and until yesterday very constipated, all the signs of jet lag which seem to be getting worse each year. By the mid-way point in the show, I could barely stay awake. Doing a show is hard work, and a person needs to be wide awake. I almost went to the YMCA this morning, and if I had, I would have been too tired to do the show. The very essence of the excitement of talking about my favorite places in Italy kept me going. Ellen did brilliant work on her end.

I have become rejuvenated with a lot of new ideas exclusive of the ones we gathered from our most recent trip. I will be doing a show about my favorite Renaissance artist, Domenico Ghirlandaio with a lot of material I took off the internet. I will focus on his works in the three churches in Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Trinita, and Ognissanti, and touch upon a piece he has in San Marco. I have the images ready to go and now must do the research to get a handle on the history, iconography, and background. Then I will do a show on train travel in Italy focusing on the Train Station in Florence, Santa Maria Novella, SMN. I was at the station this past trip checking something out for our ride the next day when it came to me to use my IPhone to photograph every nook and cranny of the station. The show after Ghirlandaio will focus on that concept. I also have a show developed on Shopping in Florence and the Streets of Rome, and together with Professor Eve d'Ambra's appearance on the show in late July, I am quite set for a while. This is good because Laura's computer just crashed, and she bought a new MacBook Pro with immense memory and storage. Therefore her editing process of the photos just taken will be delayed by several weeks leaving me on my own. But have no fear, because I can continue now for quite a while alone with what I have and some ideas that keep coming to me. Now that my college teaching is over for 3 months, and my book fully written and almost ready to be published, I can devote my energies to my TV show exclusively.