Time To Weigh Rice

Jetlag still has its grip. For a second successive morning I’m up and awake at four. As a result the lecture I am giving on Saturday will be as well prepared as any I’ve ever done. This is no bad thing as, to my shock, flicking through the TBA festival programmeI discovered there’s only one other lecture, that’s by the Festival Director. He’s free and I’m $10 bottom wack. The pressure is on!

Yesterday we made good progress, we got the space cleared and ready, then laid out seven chunky stats.

The Population of Spain.
Customers of McDonalds world wide each day.
Victims of The Holocaust.
Everyone who is HIV positive in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Everyone in the USA without Health Insurance
and
biggest of them all
Everyone who tuned in to watch the last episode of Cheers.

It’s very instructive being here with this show. There’s the sense abroad that this country is insular and rarely looks beyond its own boundaries. Now we’re here and the place is so vast and exciting and with such a busy recent history that even we are struggling to see beyond its boundaries. This challenge, to open things out, should make doing the show even more fun than usual.

We open to night at five. It’s time to weigh rice.

James



5 thoughts on “Time To Weigh Rice

  1. Blimey, big hitting numbers, very Broadway. Good luck on Saturday. Give my respects to Laurie if she’s there.

  2. By the way, I saw on the PICA blog that they got the rice from a company called Riceland in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Spooky.

  3. We’re all booked in to see Laurie Anderson do her thing.

    Yes, we were so pleased to find our rice came from there. We discovered that company and town whilst researching the performance for Stuttgart. We put statistics relating to them out in the show, much to the bafflement of the locals who’d never heard of the place, they thought it was some elaborate English joke, which I suppose, in a way, it was.

  4. Hello.

    I was the guy checking tickets at the door to your lecture this afternoon.

    And it was great. And inspiring, and gosh so was the rice show, and really, do your shows always inspire like this? if so, thanks even more for coming to portland.

    jwithington at gmail dot com

  5. Thanks James, that’s very kind of you. We are really enjoying it Portland, it’s a great city and everyone is very engaged. We’d love to bring some more Stan’s Cafe stuff to you, then you can judge for yourself how inspiring it is or isn’t.

    Good Luck

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