The Byrne Diaspora

Monica in the Monologues

Great news! After having seen The Vagina Monologues four times in the last five years, I finally auditioned for this year's production at UNC. I was cast! If you've seen it before, I'm giving the monologue entitled "The Flood." That means I need to start channeling an old Jewish woman from Queens. Awesome.

Melleray projects

Donny writes:

We're going to pick up bees on Saturday, two hives from a senior at UNC whose family lives in Siler City. So we're building some stands for them in the woods next to cabin 3 ("Athos"). And I'm keeping working on the mini-coops for hens. Looks like we'll have chickens and bees this spring after all. And the siding going up on the cabins makes them so done you want to eat them.

I asked whether the other cabins are named Porthos and Aramis, but no, "Athos" is named for a holy mountain in Greece where the monks live.

Soul sisters

Busted Halo, "an online magazine for spiritual seekers" headed by a subversive Catholic, published a great interview with Mary and Clare about "Rounds." You can read it here.

No Pants 2K7

While in New York, I got to participate in the sixth annual No Pants Subway Ride. It's a large-scale performance prank (or hack - MIT what!) of the subway system, where we all get on the 6 train and calmly board subway cars with no pants on. Three hundred people showed up and were split into groups, one for each car along the entire train. I was designated the first de-pants-er for my group, which thrilled me to the core. We weren't allowed to bring a camera; we had to trust others to document it for us. So after the big event, I combed through all the Flickr albums to find some hard evidence that, yes, I'd bared my fanny (or pretty near) so that my labmates would believe me. Here is that evidence. Also, you can read more about it at the official website, which contains a lot of hilarious pictures and stories.

Weekend at Melleray

Clare and Stefan came to visit for the weekend! We met at Melleray on Saturday. Clare helped put finishing touches on the grape arbor Donny had built, while Stefan and Donny put together the wood skeleton of a chicken coop, and then demonstrated how it would work - where the chickens would come and go, where the eggs will be laid.

Night brought a fingernail moon and a crystal-clear sky of stars.

"Rounds" in the Village Voice

Deborah Jowitt wrote a very thoughtful review of "Rounds" for The Village Voice; you can read the article here. Mary and Clare really stirred up her juices! 

Abby's day

We used to have a very sweet dog named Abby. She was a smallish black mutt, with white patches on her chest and feet. When we were all home during holidays, during the night, she would come and go into each of our bedrooms, making sure we were all accounted for. She died of kidney complications eleven years ago today. When I was ten, I swaddled her up on my bed and took a photo of her.

(Forgive me Abby, I knew not what I did.)

Grapes on cedar

Donny writes:

At the moment I'm working on a grape arbor for a corner of the garden. So far I've harvested cedar logs from the woods, from dead trees, and have sawed them up. Now I'm trying to figure how to join them. Without power tools, the sawing and screwing is tough, as cedar is a strong wood.

What wonderful news - the grape arbor was such a lovely addition to our old house!

Songs for the land

Over the past year, Dad has written many beautiful poems about Melleray.

The first cycle was written when Dad had just bought the land - then known only as "The Butters Tract" - and was getting ready to move there. You can read them here. They go together beautifully with these early pictures.

The second cycle was written after Dad and Donny had named the land "Our Lady of Melleray," an echo of earlier Mellerays scattered in their combined familial memory. You can read them here. Print them out and read them in honey sunlight!

The name of the land may still be changed.  I like that: the name of a thing constantly evolving through its relationship to the namer. However, hopes are dim that we might change it to my initial suggestion, "Dingleberry Farms." Oh well.

"Rounds" premieres tonight!

Clare and Mary's dance-and-rock-n-roll collaboration, "Rounds," is premiering tonight! It's being staged at Dance New Amsterdam in Tribeca. There is a preview in the New Yorker (scroll down). Sisters Julie and Monica will be in attendance; pictures to follow, surely.