When you come from the east coast, you don’t get the chance to appreciate wide-open expanses of land that seem to stretch out forever. I had no idea that there was this much un-fooled-around-with land out there, all tranquil and serene. To get to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from Aberdeen you have to pass through some pretty interesting cities. Riding along in the tour bus, I would see places like, “Arrowhead, Population 12.” and 30 minutes down the road you’d see another sign: “Custerville, Population 4.” Right afterwards you’d see two or three random houses, side by side. Then you’d come to the realization that in that split second you’d seen the entire town of Arrowhead or Custerville pass by the window, and that would make your head hurt a little, because you'd try to wrap your brain around questions like, “Where does the state get all that money to replace the sign every time someone either moves away from, or is born in Arrowhead, South Dakota?” and, “If you live in Custerville, and your house is on fire, how long does it take for the fire department to show up?” and even more perplexing: “If there are 4 residents in the town, and two of those residents are under the age of 18, and the other two residents are married, how do you choose a mayor?”
The day we reached Sioux Falls was one of the busiest travel days we had on the tour. After Marv and The Other Guy That Particular Week parked the buses, we all piled in to a gym connected to a church, and were instructed to sit in the middle of the floor. After we went through the week’s schedule and found out that we were sponsored by Burger King, they told us that this was the week of the Hometeam Olympics. Every cast is divided up into hometeams who get together periodically and do group activities or discuss things going on that week. So, we split up into hometeams and were informed of the events that we would be competing in: Musical Chairs, Tug of War, Pictionary, an alphabet game whose name escapes me, a statistical quiz about the numbers involved in the tour, and a special outdoor activity that would decide the ultimate winners. They passed us the quiz and told us to fill it out during the course of the game.
First up, it was Tug of War. The organizers of the hometeam olympics thought that just regular rope would withstand the force of teams with a combined total of 24 people pulling on it in opposite directions for a long period of time. Well, the rope stood up for the first round. The second round was off to a good start when all of a sudden we heard a big snap, and both of the teams went down with a thud. Little did we know afterwards that when Kirk hit the floor, he landed wrong and ended up breaking his finger. I think next time they had a better rope.
Then, it was Musical Chairs:
Let’s have a moment of silence for the three folding chairs that perished during the course of the game... It turns out that 107 people shouting at the same time can get pretty loud. I think they could hear us screaming all the way in Arrowhead.
After all of that, the third event was Pictionary, which was interesting, because instead of playing one word at a time, we played it like the end game of Win, Lose, or Draw, where you have a certain amount of time to draw ten words, and the team that ended up with the most words guessed moved on to the next round where the winner would be determined. Naturally, the team who was lucky enough to have Chihiro, the graphic designer from Japan, ended up winning. It was really interesting to see how much talent this cast had when it came to visual arts. And it was also interesting to see how some people just have absolutely no talent whatsoever. But we love them, anyway!
The next game we played was something I’d never seen before. I am not sure what they called the game, but the object was to be the first team to make formations of certain letters and numbers on the gym floor without talking. I’m not sure if I was an advantage or disadvantage to my team. Even though we were pretty darn quick, there always seemed to be a team that was slightly quicker than we were, and it always seemed to be the team closest to the head judge... Anyway, our team lost, and all we had to do was find out what the outdoor challenge would have in store for us.
Because I have only so much space, and this activity is really hard to explain, I’ll just post a video of what we had to do, and showcase the speed with which my hometeam won this particular activity.
After everything was tallied up, and scored, it was a hometeam that I wasn’t a part of that won. Oh well... the games were fun, and a wonderful change of pace from the normal day to day activities on the tour.
Then we were told to clean up and get into our number 2s for a press conference and host family pick up. Up with People has a special dress code that dictates what we wear. Number 5s are the crappiest clothes that we own that we usually wear when we’re out painting walls in exotic locations. As the numbers get smaller, our clothes get nicer. So, therefore, number 1s are our nicest clothes that we wear when we meet really important people like governors and mayors. Whenever we’d get off the bus, we’d have to be dressed in our number 2s so that we would look presentable to our host families and to any kind of media and paparazzi that happened to be there as we got off the bus. I remember one time Angela forgot to put her number 2 in her backpack for our trip to Albuquerque, and had to wait on the bus until the news crew had left, because she was in a number 3. I have no idea why I went on this little tangent. Apparently I have a lot to say about our dress code. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah... the press conference.
The press conference was a time for the cast to get oriented on what significance of the week was and what we were going to be doing, and to meet our host families. First, we found out that we had the potential of having the biggest US audience since Up with People was reformed, since our show facility had a capacity of 2,000 seats. So we needed to do as much as possible to get the word out there and raise money for our sponsors. Then a couple of people spoke about the history of Sioux Falls, including the mayor, and he told us that having so many young people from all around the world in Sioux Falls was a momentous occasion and he welcomed us all.
Then it was time to meet our host families. This city was unique in that instead of host codes, we had differently shaped keys that would only fit in our host families’ locks. This was good because we kind of got to meet everyone else’s host family before we met our own. My roommate that week, Colin Duckett from Texas, searched frantically for our host family, trying everybody’s lock. Finally, we saw a woman on the other side of the room that looked like her lock colors matched our key. Sure enough, it was a match. We were to be staying with the Roberts family, Judie, her husband, and their son and daughter, Sarah and Andrew. This was a unique family in that Sarah used a mobility scooter like mine, and so I had no problems getting around the house. What I particularly liked about this family is that every night after dinner we each would have an ice cream sundae with whatever topping we wanted on it. I would naturally drown mine in butterscotch and hot fudge to the point where that’s all you’d taste. Another cool thing about this family was that there was a old fashioned player piano in the basement that Mr. Roberts played for us. I had never before actually seen a player piano play all by itself. Colin and I spent at least 2 hours down in the basement listening to Mr. Roberts play. When you live an itinerant life, and you go from place to place, and live with a whole bunch of people from a varied array of lifestyles, you have no idea what is going to happen from one week to the next.
And that is no truer than when you are traveling in Up with People. If someone had asked me if I thought the cast would be performing during halftime at a high school football game in 15˚ weather, I would have responded by asking them if they were on psychotropic drugs. But I would have been wrong... So painfully, awkwardly, wrong. You see, it turns out that in order to promote the show that week, we were asked to perform a couple of songs for an O’Gorman High School football game. In sub-freezing temperatures. In our thin show costumes. And we had to act like we were enjoying ourselves, and not at all pre-hypothermic. I hope you know where I’m heading with this, because I could continue if you really want me to. I have never been that cold in all my life, and I’m from Maine. Luckily we were only doing three songs, so it took all of 15 minutes to perform. However, 15 minutes is a long time when the vitreous humor in your eyeballs is freezing solid. Did I mention it was cold? Anyway... all of the South Dakotans in the stands certainly understood our plight, and cheered us on, and waved signs at us. And it was kind of cool, because the scoreboard had a mini-Jumbotron (a Minitron?) on it, and I was told later that during a whole chorus of Up with People, I was on the Minitron, frozen eyeballs and all. It was probably my first and last time on anything with “tron” in its name... After all of that, my host family’s house had never looked better, or warmer.
Our theme in Sioux Falls was poverty in the world. This one we really understood, because we had had a taste of extreme poverty in Cabo. To really drive the point home, we had a couple of things planned. The whole cast was split up into small groups, and had to do various activities. I was in a group of 6 people and we were told that we were a family in Africa and then we were given 5 or 6 cardboard boxes and told to build a structure under which all of us could sleep at night, and this is the finished product:
After that was all said and done, we went back into the gym where there was a makeshift museum set up along the walls where there were pictures of what extreme poverty looked like, one of the pictures showed an african boy that was so starved that his stomach was distended and you could see his ribs, and it was plainly obvious that he hadn’t had water in days, or even months. It really hit home to me that I could have just as easily been that African child, and really all it comes down to is where you are born and who you are born to. There were other pictures of people scraping by on $1 or less a day. Then I thought of some of the very generous people who donated money so that I could go on this trip, the people like you and me who can afford simple luxuries like clean drinking water, or decent-quality fresh food and the oven or stove or microwave to cook it in, or a flushing toilet, or a bed... And I think of all of the frivolous things that the people who have an overabundance of money spend their fortunes on. The $10,000 pieces of jewelry that walk out of my Cabo host brothers’ store, the yachts, the big flat-screen HD TVs, and I think of how much of a better life all of these people in the pictures could have if they could get some of this money.
After the museum, we sat down to dinner. As far as the tour went, this was a very out-of-the-ordinary dinner. Earlier in the day, the poverty committee tossed a bunch of coins in the air, for people to catch. There were people who caught a whole bunch of coins, there were people who caught a couple of coins, and there were people who didn’t catch any coins at all. The people who caught a whole bunch of the coins became the Upper Class; the ones who caught a couple of coins became the Middle Class, and the rest of us were under the poverty line.
Dinner that night had three things on the menu: for the Upper Class diners it was a full 4-course meal, complete with a salad course, a bread course, an entrée, and a desert course, with a selection of carbonated beverages. For the middle class it was rice, beans, and a jug of water. For the poor people it was half-cooked rice and a glass bottle of water, that turned out to be salt water. I was in the group of people living under the poverty line. Here’s the set up of the gym floor:
The middle class were on the far left, and had the circle of folding chairs and the plastic table. The poor people sat in the middle of everything, and only had cardboard; the upper class on the far right had two tables with tablecloths and centerpieces and all of that stuff. They also had a staff of people taking their orders and serving them food. On either side of the low class people, there were blue jump ropes that signified oceans, and whenever one of the poor people’s feet would accidentally touch the rope, a member of the upper class wait staff would curtly bark out, “You are disturbing or guests! Move your foot!” This happened so often that the wait staff decided to stand tables on their sides between them and the poor people so that the upper class wouldn’t be disturbed. That was fine with me, because it somewhat blocked the delicious smell of the food that I wouldn’t be eating that night.
A couple of moments later, I saw the very environment-savvy, non-wasteful Ellen Enebo slide the garbage can in full sight of the middle and lower classes, and very purposefully scrape all of the food that the upper class people didn’t end up eating into the trash. The worst was when the garlic bread all went in the garbage can. I think at that moment, my heart did a reverse Grinch and actually shrank two sizes. I looked down at my bowl of undercooked rice, and finished the last of it, trying to forget the gruesome image that I had just bore witness to. But, one very cool thing happened during the hunger banquet:
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade!
After the whole hunger banquet had ended we all sat down as a cast and processed the events of the day. What began as a discussion turned into an outpouring of emotion as people started sharing their personal stories of the poverty they had witnessed in their own countries. That is when some things started to click for me: I was so lucky that I was born where I was born and that I had two loving, fairly well-off families that could support me if I needed it. I am from one of the richest countries in the world, and would never face living in a cardboard box, and looking around the room I realized how fortunate the whole cast was to be able to have this experience of traveling the world and actually going out there to help the people that most desperately needed it.
When they announced at the end that our host families were given explicit instructions not to feed us that night, my stomach started doing flips, and my mouth got a little dry as it wasn’t going to be enjoying an ice cream sundae that night. But hey, despite the extremely loud protests from my digestive tract, for the first time I had a clear picture economically of where my place was in this world, and I knew that I’d have a good breakfast in the morning.
The show that week was amazing. We reached our goal of 2,000 people, and the gym that we performed in was packed! It’s so great to look out into the audience before the show and not see one empty chair, and know that they all came to see us entertain them. It’s also great to look out in the audience and see some of the friends you had made that week and get their reactions after the show, and know that you added a little something to their lives.
Sioux Falls was definitely one of the most memorable cities of the tour, and this was particularly poignant as it would be our last travel day completely within US borders, and soon we’d be in the tropics.
As Marv and The New Other Guy That Week pulled the buses out of the driveway, we all waved to our host families, and thought of what North Platte, Nebraska might bring us.
The day we reached Sioux Falls was one of the busiest travel days we had on the tour. After Marv and The Other Guy That Particular Week parked the buses, we all piled in to a gym connected to a church, and were instructed to sit in the middle of the floor. After we went through the week’s schedule and found out that we were sponsored by Burger King, they told us that this was the week of the Hometeam Olympics. Every cast is divided up into hometeams who get together periodically and do group activities or discuss things going on that week. So, we split up into hometeams and were informed of the events that we would be competing in: Musical Chairs, Tug of War, Pictionary, an alphabet game whose name escapes me, a statistical quiz about the numbers involved in the tour, and a special outdoor activity that would decide the ultimate winners. They passed us the quiz and told us to fill it out during the course of the game.
First up, it was Tug of War. The organizers of the hometeam olympics thought that just regular rope would withstand the force of teams with a combined total of 24 people pulling on it in opposite directions for a long period of time. Well, the rope stood up for the first round. The second round was off to a good start when all of a sudden we heard a big snap, and both of the teams went down with a thud. Little did we know afterwards that when Kirk hit the floor, he landed wrong and ended up breaking his finger. I think next time they had a better rope.
Then, it was Musical Chairs:
Let’s have a moment of silence for the three folding chairs that perished during the course of the game... It turns out that 107 people shouting at the same time can get pretty loud. I think they could hear us screaming all the way in Arrowhead.
After all of that, the third event was Pictionary, which was interesting, because instead of playing one word at a time, we played it like the end game of Win, Lose, or Draw, where you have a certain amount of time to draw ten words, and the team that ended up with the most words guessed moved on to the next round where the winner would be determined. Naturally, the team who was lucky enough to have Chihiro, the graphic designer from Japan, ended up winning. It was really interesting to see how much talent this cast had when it came to visual arts. And it was also interesting to see how some people just have absolutely no talent whatsoever. But we love them, anyway!
The next game we played was something I’d never seen before. I am not sure what they called the game, but the object was to be the first team to make formations of certain letters and numbers on the gym floor without talking. I’m not sure if I was an advantage or disadvantage to my team. Even though we were pretty darn quick, there always seemed to be a team that was slightly quicker than we were, and it always seemed to be the team closest to the head judge... Anyway, our team lost, and all we had to do was find out what the outdoor challenge would have in store for us.
Because I have only so much space, and this activity is really hard to explain, I’ll just post a video of what we had to do, and showcase the speed with which my hometeam won this particular activity.
After everything was tallied up, and scored, it was a hometeam that I wasn’t a part of that won. Oh well... the games were fun, and a wonderful change of pace from the normal day to day activities on the tour.
Then we were told to clean up and get into our number 2s for a press conference and host family pick up. Up with People has a special dress code that dictates what we wear. Number 5s are the crappiest clothes that we own that we usually wear when we’re out painting walls in exotic locations. As the numbers get smaller, our clothes get nicer. So, therefore, number 1s are our nicest clothes that we wear when we meet really important people like governors and mayors. Whenever we’d get off the bus, we’d have to be dressed in our number 2s so that we would look presentable to our host families and to any kind of media and paparazzi that happened to be there as we got off the bus. I remember one time Angela forgot to put her number 2 in her backpack for our trip to Albuquerque, and had to wait on the bus until the news crew had left, because she was in a number 3. I have no idea why I went on this little tangent. Apparently I have a lot to say about our dress code. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah... the press conference.
The press conference was a time for the cast to get oriented on what significance of the week was and what we were going to be doing, and to meet our host families. First, we found out that we had the potential of having the biggest US audience since Up with People was reformed, since our show facility had a capacity of 2,000 seats. So we needed to do as much as possible to get the word out there and raise money for our sponsors. Then a couple of people spoke about the history of Sioux Falls, including the mayor, and he told us that having so many young people from all around the world in Sioux Falls was a momentous occasion and he welcomed us all.
Then it was time to meet our host families. This city was unique in that instead of host codes, we had differently shaped keys that would only fit in our host families’ locks. This was good because we kind of got to meet everyone else’s host family before we met our own. My roommate that week, Colin Duckett from Texas, searched frantically for our host family, trying everybody’s lock. Finally, we saw a woman on the other side of the room that looked like her lock colors matched our key. Sure enough, it was a match. We were to be staying with the Roberts family, Judie, her husband, and their son and daughter, Sarah and Andrew. This was a unique family in that Sarah used a mobility scooter like mine, and so I had no problems getting around the house. What I particularly liked about this family is that every night after dinner we each would have an ice cream sundae with whatever topping we wanted on it. I would naturally drown mine in butterscotch and hot fudge to the point where that’s all you’d taste. Another cool thing about this family was that there was a old fashioned player piano in the basement that Mr. Roberts played for us. I had never before actually seen a player piano play all by itself. Colin and I spent at least 2 hours down in the basement listening to Mr. Roberts play. When you live an itinerant life, and you go from place to place, and live with a whole bunch of people from a varied array of lifestyles, you have no idea what is going to happen from one week to the next.
And that is no truer than when you are traveling in Up with People. If someone had asked me if I thought the cast would be performing during halftime at a high school football game in 15˚ weather, I would have responded by asking them if they were on psychotropic drugs. But I would have been wrong... So painfully, awkwardly, wrong. You see, it turns out that in order to promote the show that week, we were asked to perform a couple of songs for an O’Gorman High School football game. In sub-freezing temperatures. In our thin show costumes. And we had to act like we were enjoying ourselves, and not at all pre-hypothermic. I hope you know where I’m heading with this, because I could continue if you really want me to. I have never been that cold in all my life, and I’m from Maine. Luckily we were only doing three songs, so it took all of 15 minutes to perform. However, 15 minutes is a long time when the vitreous humor in your eyeballs is freezing solid. Did I mention it was cold? Anyway... all of the South Dakotans in the stands certainly understood our plight, and cheered us on, and waved signs at us. And it was kind of cool, because the scoreboard had a mini-Jumbotron (a Minitron?) on it, and I was told later that during a whole chorus of Up with People, I was on the Minitron, frozen eyeballs and all. It was probably my first and last time on anything with “tron” in its name... After all of that, my host family’s house had never looked better, or warmer.
Our theme in Sioux Falls was poverty in the world. This one we really understood, because we had had a taste of extreme poverty in Cabo. To really drive the point home, we had a couple of things planned. The whole cast was split up into small groups, and had to do various activities. I was in a group of 6 people and we were told that we were a family in Africa and then we were given 5 or 6 cardboard boxes and told to build a structure under which all of us could sleep at night, and this is the finished product:
After that was all said and done, we went back into the gym where there was a makeshift museum set up along the walls where there were pictures of what extreme poverty looked like, one of the pictures showed an african boy that was so starved that his stomach was distended and you could see his ribs, and it was plainly obvious that he hadn’t had water in days, or even months. It really hit home to me that I could have just as easily been that African child, and really all it comes down to is where you are born and who you are born to. There were other pictures of people scraping by on $1 or less a day. Then I thought of some of the very generous people who donated money so that I could go on this trip, the people like you and me who can afford simple luxuries like clean drinking water, or decent-quality fresh food and the oven or stove or microwave to cook it in, or a flushing toilet, or a bed... And I think of all of the frivolous things that the people who have an overabundance of money spend their fortunes on. The $10,000 pieces of jewelry that walk out of my Cabo host brothers’ store, the yachts, the big flat-screen HD TVs, and I think of how much of a better life all of these people in the pictures could have if they could get some of this money.
After the museum, we sat down to dinner. As far as the tour went, this was a very out-of-the-ordinary dinner. Earlier in the day, the poverty committee tossed a bunch of coins in the air, for people to catch. There were people who caught a whole bunch of coins, there were people who caught a couple of coins, and there were people who didn’t catch any coins at all. The people who caught a whole bunch of the coins became the Upper Class; the ones who caught a couple of coins became the Middle Class, and the rest of us were under the poverty line.
Dinner that night had three things on the menu: for the Upper Class diners it was a full 4-course meal, complete with a salad course, a bread course, an entrée, and a desert course, with a selection of carbonated beverages. For the middle class it was rice, beans, and a jug of water. For the poor people it was half-cooked rice and a glass bottle of water, that turned out to be salt water. I was in the group of people living under the poverty line. Here’s the set up of the gym floor:
The middle class were on the far left, and had the circle of folding chairs and the plastic table. The poor people sat in the middle of everything, and only had cardboard; the upper class on the far right had two tables with tablecloths and centerpieces and all of that stuff. They also had a staff of people taking their orders and serving them food. On either side of the low class people, there were blue jump ropes that signified oceans, and whenever one of the poor people’s feet would accidentally touch the rope, a member of the upper class wait staff would curtly bark out, “You are disturbing or guests! Move your foot!” This happened so often that the wait staff decided to stand tables on their sides between them and the poor people so that the upper class wouldn’t be disturbed. That was fine with me, because it somewhat blocked the delicious smell of the food that I wouldn’t be eating that night.
A couple of moments later, I saw the very environment-savvy, non-wasteful Ellen Enebo slide the garbage can in full sight of the middle and lower classes, and very purposefully scrape all of the food that the upper class people didn’t end up eating into the trash. The worst was when the garlic bread all went in the garbage can. I think at that moment, my heart did a reverse Grinch and actually shrank two sizes. I looked down at my bowl of undercooked rice, and finished the last of it, trying to forget the gruesome image that I had just bore witness to. But, one very cool thing happened during the hunger banquet:
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade!
After the whole hunger banquet had ended we all sat down as a cast and processed the events of the day. What began as a discussion turned into an outpouring of emotion as people started sharing their personal stories of the poverty they had witnessed in their own countries. That is when some things started to click for me: I was so lucky that I was born where I was born and that I had two loving, fairly well-off families that could support me if I needed it. I am from one of the richest countries in the world, and would never face living in a cardboard box, and looking around the room I realized how fortunate the whole cast was to be able to have this experience of traveling the world and actually going out there to help the people that most desperately needed it.
When they announced at the end that our host families were given explicit instructions not to feed us that night, my stomach started doing flips, and my mouth got a little dry as it wasn’t going to be enjoying an ice cream sundae that night. But hey, despite the extremely loud protests from my digestive tract, for the first time I had a clear picture economically of where my place was in this world, and I knew that I’d have a good breakfast in the morning.
The show that week was amazing. We reached our goal of 2,000 people, and the gym that we performed in was packed! It’s so great to look out into the audience before the show and not see one empty chair, and know that they all came to see us entertain them. It’s also great to look out in the audience and see some of the friends you had made that week and get their reactions after the show, and know that you added a little something to their lives.
Sioux Falls was definitely one of the most memorable cities of the tour, and this was particularly poignant as it would be our last travel day completely within US borders, and soon we’d be in the tropics.
As Marv and The New Other Guy That Week pulled the buses out of the driveway, we all waved to our host families, and thought of what North Platte, Nebraska might bring us.
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