Saturday stuff

This morning we rang bells for an hour at the mall for the Salvation Army. Kris and Karen have done that for a few years now as part of Karen's involvement in the Heart of Illinois Association for the Advancement of Young Children. They asked me to do it too, and I was a bit unenthusiastic about it, but when I heard last night that the homeless shelters in Peoria are seeing record use in these rough times I was more motivated. It was fun.

Tonight we helped Kris study for an exam about Illinois history and geography. It reminds me a little about learning about Wisconsin history at about her age. Y'know we send our Catholic daughter to a Protestant school and have not had too many issues, but I tell you, raising Kris as an Illinoisian weighs heavily on me sometimes. Born and raised in Illinois, now learning about geography of this state more than Wisconsin....I'm motivated to say stuff like "What river forms the western border of the state? The Misssissippi? Good! By the way it also forms the western border of Wisconsin." Trying to maintain that cheesy heritage!

Tonight we attended a play at Bradley (Karen won free tickets for most of the season). The play was a postmodern deconstruction of the Greek trilogy Oresteia (so they said). It was an interesting mix of conventional staging, projection, puppetry, audience plant interaction, and even text messaging. It got a bit preachy/un-subtle and had a bit of rough language, but the most unusual part was when they summoned the audience plants up to the stage near the end to act as the jury for Orestes. One of the names they called was a "Mr. Campbell" - I had a moment of panic there!!!!