Partners come to La Pastorela

It was another week of empty days that filled up immediately. Filled with meeting people. My new goal is to meet the five Yakima residents I have somehow overlooked up to now. Good people here with great stories.

We have now found three excellent community partners for La Pastorela San Jose. In addition to the Catholic parish community of St. Joseph/San Jose and the preK-8 school St. Joseph/Marquette we now have with us La Casa Hogar. Check them out by clicking on their names. All doing good work in Yakima and we are delighted and honored to have them on board. The women, men, children of these organizations will be the pool from which will come the stories for La Pastorela as well as its actors, technical folks, and audience members. The months ahead will be all of us getting to know each other better as the play gets written, rehearsed and performed.

We also have a space for the work to happen. We will be presenting La Pastorela inside the impressive grey stone building you see above. This is the new St. Joseph/San Jose as the other one burnt to the ground a few years ago. Lots of room inside with plenty of pew space for all you this Christmas.

This weekend is yet another rodeo, this one a bit further upstream. The Ellensburg Rodeo fills the weekend with broncs and elephant ears. Will be speaking to you once I return and get the dust out of my eyes.

Back in the Yak

And I am back! Yes, after almost a month of working the Pacific coast from San Diego to the San Juan Islands I am now officially back in the Yakima saddle.

There is a reason the magnificent Paula Donnelly appears to my left. I spent the most exciting part of the past month visiting Cornerstone Theater's Institute production/rural residency in hot as Hades Southern California. Southern, like "Hey is that other blazing rockpile Mexico?"

Not far from Calexico, the Cornerstone folks were doing an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the community of Holtville California, better known as the former Carrot Capitol of the World. You have not lived until you have seen the rude mechanicals of Dream played by a bunch of raw vegetables. Actor in a watermelon suit. Look out!

But to explain the photo- Paula is the director of the Cornerstone Institute as is the best person you can find to do this amazing work in the middle of nowhere. Each year she is in charge of making sure a community gets picked, students are found, a play is written and produced, everyone gets fed for the month while they live in the class rooms of a middle school and holding everyone's hand when the fits take them. She and the work of Cornerstone Theater company continue to be my inspiration. To Paula!

I returned home to loads of meetings and community engagement as we go forward here in Yakima. It turns out after much conversation I will be the playwright on the upcoming Pastorela San Jose due for production in December. So now come the story circles, the speaking to everyone in the our collaborator communities and coming up with a script.

Arturo Araujo, who is a Colombian Jesuit finishing his fine arts degree at Cornish College is on board to do the design work for the pastorela. This is great news as he brings lots of experience in theater design as well as wide experience with the Mexican American community.

And so out of the office and into the streets of Yakima.