Not the end of the world (yet)

One of the least tragic consequences of the recent flooding: 

My concert in famously never-inhabited Lewis, which was scheduled for the scenic Lewis Pond Overlook in the Silvio Conte Wildlife Refuge this September—very purposefully for the last weekend before the start of waterfowl season, so we would not frustate hunters by monopolizing the parking—was been postponed until at least next fall, as the road to the overlook was washed out by the recent record rainfall.

The July 10 flood claimed at least two lives in Vermont, and hundreds have lost their homes. Having to reschedule a concert is no tragedy. But it is interesting that this is already the second extreme-weather cancellation for me just this summer.  This project, like any ongoing regular activity, serves as a barometer of climate destabilization in Vermont, as concerts intersect ever more frequently with weather disasters and extremes.

There’s a map for that

...or, How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+2

In my last post I bemoaned the time spent on scheduling now that I no longer delegate it to assistants. 

This is a real issue, but my experience of the last few weeks was (I hope!) atypically heavy on logistics, because I’ve been working my way through a huge backlog old notes and stale email threads going back sometimes to the first summer of the project, i.e. two years ago. 

I’m about ¾ through that task and feeling good about being much better situated for future scheduling, because I finally figured out to go visual.

From the outset, I’ve been working from a master spreadsheet of all 252 towns (actually 251 when I started). I just copy-pasted the one on Wikipedia, which came with populations, and added columns for things like contacts, venue leads or likely possibilities, local performer-collaborators, attendance, donation beneficiary and amount, and of course concert date. I tried to take all incoming email invitations, tips from other pianists, scribbled notes from conversations after concerts or from pianos seen when peering church windows as I passed through villages, etc. and enter all that into the spreadsheet. I did tend to get behind, which is why so much of the past month was spent digging up information. But otherwise I thought it was working just fine.

When thinking about scheduling a concert, though, it was always a bit disruptive to have to switch to a map view to see where the town lies—location being important not just to avoid concerts too close together in both time and space, but also to facilitate scheduling of double-concert weekends, where we desire the two concerts to be relatively distant from our home base, not too far from each other (but not too close), with an overnight in between. (As I said we might here, Annelies* and I have indeed settled on a plan where we devote two weekends a month to this project, to keep roughly half our weekends free for Everything Else, which now includes trips down to Boston to visit our grandbaby. To keep on my 7-year desired pace, that means every other weekend needs to be a double-header.)

Yet somehow, even though a state/town map is prominently featured in both the Concerts page of the website and also, in physical form, at each concert, where the host gets to fill in the town being played…somehow I didn’t connect dots to realize I needed a scheduling map as well. A third map, one that shows not only the towns already played (like our giant physical poster) plus those coming up (like the map on the website) but also the towns where I have a lead or a conversation started.

But I got there eventually! and now I have a top-secret home map that shows everything: towns played (filled in with highlighter), and towns both scheduled (with little sticky notes and a date) and with scheduling conversations (with blank sticky notes). The image here shows the map after going through about 3/4 of my communications backlog. It’s a bit heartening, because while I’m now a bit under 1/4 through the project, the map indicates some sort of activity—past, scheduled, or in discussion—for about half of the 252 towns.

Now, whenever an invitation comes in, or whenever I’m considering a particular town, I can see at a glance where it is relative to us, and how close it is to other towns awaiting a date. So obvious! Not sure why it took me two years to figure it out.

*i.e. my life partner and also project partner. I hate saying “my wife” which to me has a patriarchal legacy connotation I can’t shake off. And “spouse” is just an ugly word.