This blog originally posted at http://mariancall.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/salt-lake-city-memories/
Tonight I’m in Cheyenne (and soon in Laramie), looking ahead to SALT LAKE CITY on Sunday night! One of the prettiest places there is. If you’ve never flown in over the Wasatch and the colored lake at sunrise with a Supermoon on your starboard side, I can’t explain it.
Then we roll on to Colorado, which has been deserving my attention for far too long. Colorado, I love you. I’m sorry. I hope you haven’t forgotten me. I’ll be back through again next year. Let’s be friends?
Marian Call Utah Trivia: SLC is the first place not-on-the-west-coast that I ever remember going in my young life. And it’s a short, funny story.
In middle school, I was so obsessed with Les Misérables that I wrote a script suitable for middle schoolers to perform, and in seventh grade we performed it (I was Enjolras).* You should have seen my rewrites of “Master of the House” and “Lovely Ladies.” It was spectacularly Waiting for Guffman, I’m sure, but my classmates and I were dead serious about our production. It was heartfelt.
The real Les Misérables wasn’t coming anywhere near Seattle that year, so I convinced my dad we should organize a trip of school classmates over the summer to go see it in the closest city — that was Salt Lake.
We couldn’t afford it alone really, but I told my Dad we should coordinate a trip for a bunch of my classmates and chaperones, and have them pay a little extra for our very much legwork. The extra bit of money would make it possible for me and my dad to lead the trip (he was the director of our school play, I wrote the script).
And that, boys and girls, is how I invented crowdfunding in the seventh grade. And how I visited Salt Lake City for the first time!
Loving the Mountain States, eating a peach and tomatoes from a Montana farmer’s market, attempting not to die from exhaustion because the drives are so long. Love to all.
Marian
*My dialogue for the script, written in sixth grade, was based on the unabridged novel, not the musical. That’s a young nerd in the making.
