Oh well. My forced vocal rest has given me a chance to catch up on correspondence which, contrary to the work I really want to get done, is actually pretty important. I was Gwyneth Walker's airport chauffeur a few years ago and, during the trip, we had a great 3-hour conversation about various things composer. If I remember correctly, she gets up every morning and does something like 2 hours of correspondence (no more, no less) and composes after lunch. Come to think of it I may have that backwards, but whatever. Either way, she hits the proverbial nail on the head about one of the inherent struggles of being a creative professional: you have to be very regimented about anything organizational.
In any case, my vocal problems are made a whole lot easier to deal with by the fact that I'm here in Decorah. I spent 4 years here as a student and 2 summers as a resident and I absolutely love this place. It's a smaller town (only about 8,000 people live here) and the residents are maybe the nicest people ever. You could probably walk straight into oncoming traffic with no right of way and the drivers might actually apologize for the inconvenience. Minnesota Nice has nothing on Decorah. Someone once told me that this place is "like all of America used to be 50 years ago."
Another great thing about Decorah is the fact that there are almost no corporate-owned places to eat. I had lunch and researched some poetry today at Hart's Tea & Tarts (which was way less hoity-toity than it sounds). I've never actually been to an English tea house before and it looked interesting. I had the jasmine green tea.
Their chicken salad sandwich was on some sort of herb bread that I swear had an addictive chemical in it that makes you crave it fortnightly.
Brick Pattern: Diderikke Brandt Hall
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