Tour Day 13 – Wedowee AL to Clarksville TN

Tonight, I laughed so hard I thought I was going to fall out of my chair.  It has been a long time since that happened. You get to know a group of kiddos for a couple of weeks and your main interactions with them are through the work of tour. This means a kind of professionalism gets built up. We definitely have a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but we’re all in tour parent/tour kid mode, and you can miss some nuance that way.

Life on the bus even has a rhythm to it that lends itself to a trance-like routine (I think that is a large part of what has made this tour seem like it jetted by so fast). Singers draw for which bus they are going to be on every morning, and they promptly lug their junk out to the bus and find their seat. The morning is usually a little groggy as the non-morning people are still rousing, but there is a slow waking that blooms as the day goes on. And just like that, it’s lunch time. Depending on the day, we’ll have 45 minutes to an hour and back on the bus we go. Then quiet time. It’s technically an hour or so but depending on how tired we are it can stretch to two hours of just sweet, sweet silence. Inevitably a few people start moving around a little; a sponsor takes a phone call about work; a quiet conversation starts to emerge. It just grows from there. I always know we’re relatively close to our destination when quiet time has dissolved into outright chatter, and most of the kids are now standing in the aisle of the bus.

Today was no exception to this rhythm; the main difference about today was that there no performance. Today was allocated to the talent show. I wasn’t expecting much, actually, since we had never done this on tour since I’ve been a sponsor. It opened with Karli Schreck and Garrison Bradley absolutely roasting the sponsor men in rap battle style. My favorite line was something to the effect that Bemo was so old that his birth certificate needed to be translated. And then Corey Wilmes got up and told these jokes – I don’t know how to describe them. I mean they were just silly, but something about the delivery and how he pointed out individual people in the group just got us all. We were all rolling. I seriously couldn’t control my laughing, and I’m a pretty in-control guy. Everyone was funny and talented, but one other talent of note was Brittany Jackson.  If you haven’t seen the drawings she does, you should ask her about it (and she’ll talk about them for an hour). She is an amazingly talented person. I really hope the talent show becomes a tradition on tour.

And so the rhythms of tour have brough us to the end of the 13^th day. 48 hours from now I am going to be stuffing myself at El Maguey with all my friends, and all of this will just be another tour in the history books. It feels so big right now, but eventually, not too long from now we’ll all be transformed into people that are looking back at what was, happy that it is in the story of our lives.

Good night with a full heart, Joseph