So much work to be done for Rattlebrained Designs that I haven’t had much time for blogging or much else lately. Sales are down, blame the economy and my incapacity to be mainstream, but visitors are significantly more numerous than in the past so hope is still there to break through somehow.
Fortunately various musical activities have kept me from rotting completely. The Tonatem Time afternoon with Bill Holden for the Fête à Voltaire down in Ferney-Voltaire was a lot of fun. Tonatems are a homemade mono-string instrument Bill invented using an old curtain rod, Styrofoam, a discarded piano tuning peg, various other bits of hardware and a piece of wire. The idea is to have an instrument that makes everyone a musician since it’s so easy to play yet which offers quite a few possibilities for group participation.
I’ve helped Bill make around 40 of them, all different sizes, which if possible are hung up underneath a tree or two but since in this case it wasn’t possible to hang them, we leaned them against three trees in the park of Voltaire’s castle where we were on June 27th. So when people walked by wondering what was going on I had to get them to accept a Tonatem, “a big one for you sir?” and attempt to get a group going where folks when beyond just banging with a chop stick (the official Tonatem playing utensil) to play together. Easier said than done but which happened a few times, especially with groups of kids, was tremendous fun and well worth the two hour effort of getting all the Tonatems ready before the afternoon begun.