The month of June is supposed to be rainy season, but this year it didn’t hit until about two weeks ago. Climate change appears to be shifting things about. Here and there have been sunny days, but mostly it’s been overcast when it’s not raining.
Storm run-off
On one of my recent junior high school days, the taxi ride was rather interesting during a rather strong rainstorm as water streamed down the mountains and cars at various points on the narrow, steep, and windy roads came close to colliding. Near the school, debris clouded the water, which took the appearance of the River Amazon, murky with eroded sediments.
The same day as the big rainstorm they made the first performance of a ten minute version of Snow White written by my partner teacher, edited by Rose and I. Unfortunately the storm’s clattering on the roof of the gymnasium and a lack of stage microphones made some portions of the play inaudible, though their effort was sound (no pun intended). At least the storm let up briefly before the play, so the small audience actually made it there.
Snow White is almost killed by the Hunter.
There were some oddities. Unexpectedly the play was preceded by a video of these students reciting their favourite little poems and a little explanation, probably to add some time. Part of the Seven Dwarves’ introduction involved a springboard flip onto a mat. The song “Memory” or “Memories” was inserted in the story, sung quite well by the girl playing Snow White. The prince, inexplicably, was played by a female cast member. The school’s Christian assistant teacher taught all the narrators Japanese Sign Language for their parts, which done in tandem with English lines was probably the most impressive.
The “Director” asked a TV crew from the local cable channel to come and film the performance. Later they interviewed all of us involved and I was surprised to find that one of them spoke fluent English, the best I’ve heard from a local on the island so far, and had lived in Orange County for a time. We bonded on No Doubt’s album Tragic Kingdom, and I was interviewed on camera for a third time in Japan.
Before this performance, my partner teacher asked me to edit the script, though he insisted on using “Oh my god!” in lieu of “Oh my!” He also had the other town ALT and I record the lines with him, to help the students practice. The recorder was so fancy that it had two microphones built in for a “4 channel” mode that splits the audio into separate sound files, and thus we had to record it again another day to fix the problem.
