…with the wind wuthering around the house. I’m preparing a program on the history of Christmas carols for a gig on the fourth Sunday of Advent at a retirement home here in Bloomington, and I have been considering the folly of attempting such a program ten blocks or so from the Jacobs School of Music at IU. How many retired music professors will I have among my listeners? Best not to worry. Maybe they will be polite to the storyteller.
The church where I worship is preparing to give a group reading of my Nicholas stories on December 20 and I am immersed in that project – as an organizer, not a teller. Right now I am working on collecting six brooms. (We used to do it with two brooms, but we’ve expanded the janitorial staff. ) The program begins by claiming the performance space – a meeting room at the library – with a Christmas Sweeping Poem. I’ll put that up over on the same page as the script, later today. Not much to do today but stay indoors and hone the perfection of various web sites.
Actually, there might be one or two other things to do, and I’ll go do some. Eat breakfast, for instance.
theshawl.wordpress.com 
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the sweepers somehow remind me of the way Bread & Puppet makes use of a janitor figure in their shows. I think their circuses–and maybe all their shows–always start with a janitor, who frequently reappears between acts to clean up the assorted messes left behind.
I’d forgotten that!
I have borrowed my sweeper from the old Christmas mummings – as I recall, someone comes in and clears the performance area – on a hobbyhorse? With a wooden sword? It’s a long time since I’ve thought about mumming. I guess my life must have gotten very boring for a while…Amazon.com has GIANT WAREHOUSE BROOMS for $6.00 each but I feel dicey about getting them in time for the show.
Perhaps each sweeper could bring a broom from home. Most likely this would result in a motley, mis-matched collection not unlike the storytellers themselves.
I did think of that – but I worried that our audience might not catch the irony, and just think we were too off-the-wall. I have learned that quite a lot of what I think is funny, other people find inexplicable. This is a family trait. My sainted Grandma Hetty was well known for her queasy sense of humor.
Probably some shared ancestry in your sweepeds and the B&P janitors, going back to European folk drama somewhere . . . interesting. I like the mismatched brooms, but then, I did join the family voluntarily . . .