Il Narratore

I had a very interesting week visiting with the program director for the Saugerties Public Access Television Studio. Through Ellen, I had met her friend, Bart Friedman, one of the early founders of the Woodstock station who introduced me to Anastasia Redmond. She offered me the opportunity to submit my DVD's of the shows I have performed on Alan's Italy  to be broadcast on their station for three week periods, twice a week. I delivered the first ten shows I had already performed, and she has already sent me the schedule which will begin on September 18. I told her several stories of my experiences both in Italy and at the station, and she told me that I was quite a storyteller (Il Narratore in Italian). She gave me a tour of their facility and it was quite impressive, much more elaborate than the one in Woodstock. Nonetheless, probably because I have gotten so used to the one I use weekly, I was pleased to get back "home" to WPAT last evening for my first show in two weeks, having been away for the previous Friday. Filled with enthusiasm for the show that I have wanted to perform for a long time on Western Tuscany, I eagerly prepared that program the past week. My main theme would center around the drive Laura and I took across the region known as the Alpi Apuane through the mountains of North Western Tuscany, the Garfagnana. Although that trip was quite harrowing, I love to talk about how difficult the driving was with the ice and snow we encountered. Also I love the fact that I had insisted to Laura that the white capped hills we faced were really the marble tops of the Carrara region, long used as a quarry for sculptors going back hundreds of years. She insisted that they looked like snow, and, of course, was quite correct ! We eventually turned back after traveling along winding, steep roads for over an hour getting nowhere fast. Since I didn't have enough photos for a whole show on that experience we had back in 2009, I also threw some very wonderful photos of Lucca and Chiesina (Lidia's house), plus some internet photos of where we would have wound up had we not turned back on our route, the town of Bagni di Lucca and the famous Devil's Bridge, amid some splendid scenery. I called the show, Western Tuscany, leaving out a part 2 which would focus on the City of Pisa reserved for next week. On the air we had our usual broadcasting issues. First the DVD failed to kick in for the first few minutes, which necessitated our starting for a minute, then stopping, and starting a second time with the introduction. Then my voice was inaudible during the first few seconds, as Ellen had been slow revving up the sound of my microphone after the initial music segment of the introductory video. That cannot be corrected so people all over the world will see a few second muting of il Narratore. Laura at home thought that we accidentally played the ending credits instead the beginning segment, because when she turned on the show live on our television set at exactly 5 PM, the previous show (also one of mine which was actually a repeat of a previous show) had still contained a few seconds of broadcast time left. I told her today that I had the 4 PM slot AND the 5 PM slot, so one just swept into the other without much of a pause. She didn't quite know what was happening, thinking we had started, stopped, started again, stopped  again, and then started a third time !!!! An even greater horror than even I would have been aware. Always an adventure !!! Part of the charm, huh ? So one of my books is nearing completion, but I may take my time, because the second one is really the one I have greater confidence is the better of the two. That one still has some time to go as it is in some kind of editing stage. Thanks for reading and buona sera e grazie per aver letto questo.