Quarantine - Day 18

Ella's Springtime Cake

We are improvising our way through our situation. We are improvising a means of homeschooling, shopping, saying hello to friends and family, working, not working, and we are somehow getting by. Ella, who somehow finds the time to watch hours of baking videos, baked a Springtime cake. She improvised. It had candy in it, and a huge butterfly perched on top made out of chocolate. She printed out a diagram of a butterfly, placed parchment paper over the design, piped chocolate on the thing, bent it slightly by placing it in a book, and placed it on the back porch until the chocolate cooled. Improv art. Neighbors down the street improvised a T-Rex eating a Coronavirus, so we improvised an event to visit the T-Rex. Abigail improvised an outdoor classroom and gave a drama lesson for the neighborhood kids who dutifully gathered six feet apart. Later, while editing video, she realized she needed an original score, so she whipped one up in MuseScore in a jiffy. She has done our theme flourish that starts our videos as well as incidental music where needed. Ella did incidental music for our warm-up video. She did it in less than 10 minutes. It is easy if you don’t really think about it. If you simply improvise. This evening, I watched my buddy Zeus improvise a live stream from his Houston humid backyard for fans and friends. We’re just making it up as we go along here, folks. To the extent that I hold hope, I have hope in people’s nearly infinite ability to make a bad situation better by fiddling with things, or as Kurt Vonnegut once put it, “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”