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Poughkeepsie, NY -- Dec. 8, 2007


ldyjocelyn

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Venue is the Mid-Hudson Civic Center. Venue website is here. (They are redesigning their website).

It looks as if they use Ticketmaster for selling tickets. Ticketmaster for this venue here.

No seating chart as of yet.

I'll post more in this thread as information becomes available.

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BWAH couchie.

Yes, that last story reader was very animated and had them laughing!

GAH Jazzy medley now. Did anyone else notice, in the last few concerts, Clay has stopped singing the "sleigh ride together with you" part at the end and left it to the girls?

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Apparently Jemock's leech story was read again. I missed it the first time around. Can anyone direct me to where it might be posted, or give the the general gist of the story? I looked at her blog, and it's not posted there. Thanks!

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Here's Jemock's story, Gibby.

Listening to Clay sing all those wonderful Christmas songs has quite naturally led to reminiscences and nostalgic memories of Christmases past. While I have no interesting or humorous stories of shuttle regiftings or packages of batteries under the tree, I did have some wonderful, memorable Christmases as a child. I’d like to recount one of those for you now. It’s so poignant you’re going to cry. Cry or throw up, I tend to alternate between those reactions, myself.

Starting back when I was about 8 or so, I began to covet, with a passion that I had previously reserved only for Bobby Sherman, the 72-piece Deluxe Biology and Dissection Set from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Oh my word, that biology kit was to die for. My sisters and I would peruse the Christmas catalogue, drooling and cooing over Barbies and baby strollers and Mousetrap games, but my secret desire was the biology set. I shared this desire with no one, however. I couldn’t explain it even to myself, but I felt quite naughty for wanting it. It was so un-Christmas-sy, with all the foreceps and tweezers and scalpels and bottle after bottle of formaldehyde-encased organisms begging to be dissected. No one in my family had ever wanted a pickled tadpole for Christmas before–I had no precedent on which to base my conflicted and troubled thoughts. I decided then and there that when I grew up and became self-sufficient and independent, the first thing I was going to buy was the 72-piece Deluxe Biology and Dissection Set from Sears Roebuck. Why O Why was it taking so long to grow up?!? But, it was good to have goals and dreams, and thoughts of dissection and scientific knowledge and research and personal fulfillment mollified my days, at least for the two weeks of Christmas vacation, which can equal a lifetime for some people, particularly if they use the Clay Aiken concept of time.

The wondrous full-color product representation took up a half-page in the Sears Christmas catalogue, and the content description was so lengthy and detailed that the editors had to use bullet points and multiple paragraphs in order to properly convey how incredibly fantastic this biology set was. I had carefully removed that page from the catalogue and inserted in into one of those plastic page protectors and then slipped it between the mattresses of my twin bed. Throughout the year, I would clandestinely sneak peeks at the Preciousss even after every single word and illustration associated with the biology kit had been hard-wired to my little brain.

As my ninth Christmas approached, my mom asked my sisters and me to make our Christmas lists for Santa. I made up my usual list of dolls, model horses, Mystery Date, etc., and as a reckless and thrilling act of heresy, I added “72-piece Deluxe Biology and Dissection Set” to the bottom of my list. I had goose pimples all over my body, and I felt an adrenalin rush as I folded my list and handed it to my mother. I then ran to my room, slammed the door shut, pulled the secret page out from between my mattresses, and took a moment. Could it be? Could it possibly happen? Only time would tell....

My sisters and I had a tradition of sorts. On Christmas Eve night, all three of us would pile into my twin bed so that we could talk and giggle with excitement over the anticipation of Santa’s visit. We had a old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, the kind with the big bells on the top, that we set for 2 a.m. and put under the pillows to awaken us. As in Christmases past, the muffled alarm woke us up, and we groggily sat up in bed to coordinate our plans for the trip downstairs. We had to be very very quiet–if our parents heard us, they would make us go back to bed. The plan was to go downstairs as steathily as possible, turn on the Christmas tree, look at all the booty that Santa had brought, and then select one small item to take back to bed with us until morning. That’s the way it always was, and that was the plan for this Christmas.

We waited until the furnace kicked in, because the heat blowing through the vents would cover our footsteps on the creaky stairs. Like little ninjas in our footie pajamas, we crept out of bed, out of the room, and down the stairs. My older sister found the end of the extension cord for the tree light, and plugged it in. The three-color light wheel made the aluminum tree glow like a vision from heaven. I rubbed my eyes and yawned, and immediately recognized the intoxicating scent of new vinyl baby dolls wafting through the night air.

I walked around bicycles, board games, doll houses and roller skates. My sisters were excitedly opening Barbie suitcases and Ez-Bake oven accessory kits. But I walked toward the back corner, where a large box could be seen in the dim light. Oh! Be still my heart! Could it be? Could it be? YES YES YES YES YES!!!!! I HAD BEEN A GOOD GIRL!!! Santa read my list! Oh joy! O wonderment!

I stifled a scream of excitement by stuffing my fist in my mouth and biting down on my knuckles, and fell to my knees in utter amazement. There before me, wrapped in cellophane with a red Sears Roebuck catalogue pick-up sticker adhered to the front was the one and only, inimitable, reason-for-living, be-all-to-end-all, Christmas gift extraordinaire, the Deluxe 72-Piece Biology and Dissection Kit! I’m not sure how my little heart kept from bursting! Gosh, my heart is racing even now! Oh, I could have died a happy child right then and there. Well, there would have been the small bit of resentment for never getting a pony, but that thought had been pushed far back into the recesses of my brain for the time being.

My sisters were completely unimpressed with my beloved biology set. I believe one of them actually scoffed it at. But I didn’t care! Unfortunately, we only had a few minutes until we had to get back to bed, and they were already deciding on what small items to take back with them. I needed no time to decide. I grabbed the entire box containing stainless steel tools, vials, liquids, grasshoppers, tadpoles, frogs, and numerous other accessories and headed back upstairs.

My older sister grabbed the back of my pajamas and yanked me back into the living room. “You can only take ONE SMALL ITEM,” she hissed. “You know the rules!” Gosh darn it! I stood there while they made their way back upstairs with their baby dolls, while I contemplated the quandry that faced me. I could take something else, like a doll or a stuffed animal. OR. OR I could open the biology set and take something from it. Yes! That’s the ticket!

I scratched and clawed at the cellophane wrapping, and lifted off the top of the box. The lights had already been turned out, and I was groping in the dark, feeling the 72 pieces nestled neatly into their own individual molded compartments in the styrofoam packaging. My hand fell upon a bottle, and I gently pried it out, replaced the box top, and ran back upstairs as quickly and quietly as I could. I piled back into bed with my sisters, who were already quietly snoring. I didn’t know what I had in my bottle, but I held it to my chest and fell back to sleep, dreaming dreams of the magical dissections to come when morning arrived.

The sunlight streaming through the window woke me up, but the feel of wet sheets was quite a bit more sobering. Gross! Someone had wet the bed, and even worse, they had peed on my pajama top! Good grief!! I shook my sisters awake and told them to get out of the bed, that someone had peed in their sleep. They both denied any knowledge of such an egregious and shameful activity, but agreed that the odor was indeed heinous. But somehow they had both escaped getting wet at all, and they happily raced downstairs, after throwing an accusatory glance my way.

How the heck did MY pajamas get wet? And what was that smell? I wasn’t feeling so good, either. I had a headache, and my hands and feet were cold. I headed downstairs, carefully holding onto the handrail, and started to feel quite woozy and lightheaded. All I remember is walking into the kitchen, my mother looking at me with a puzzled look on her face and asking me a question, and then I passed out in the kitchen floor.

I was only out for a second or two, and when I regained consciousness, I remember feeling so comfortable down there on the linoleum that I could have lain there all day long. But suddenly my whole family was hovering around me, and my sisters were pointing, and then gagging, and then screaming. My mother went totally pale, and my dad was squinting at me and saying “what the heck IS that thing?”

I tried to sit up, and my mother put her hands on my shoulders and told me to lie still, that there was something wrong with me. I actually started to feel ok but I felt something wet stuck to my neck, so I reached up and pulled it off. It felt like piece of cold rubber. I brought it up to my face to get a better look, and found myself staring into the sucker of a preserved leech. Holy crap!?!? Where did a freaking LEECH come from? I screamed and threw it across the room, where it bounced off one of my shrieking sisters. I was still lying in the floor, but everyone else was running around that kitchen like a bunch of freaks, except for my mother, who had disappeared.

She returned a moment later, and knelt down and asked me if I was feeling ok. I said that I was, but that my clothes smelled bad and I wanted to take a bath. She held up an empty, lidless glass bottle and told me she had found it in my bed, along with the wet sheets.

Oh.

In my haste to take some Christmas joy back to bed with me, I had apparently taken a pickled leech from the biology set. The top had come unscrewed while I slept. The formaldehyde had leaked onto my clothes, which made me woozy and ultimately led to the dramatic bout of unconsciousness, and then the poor dead leech had found itself embedded in the skin of my neck after I wallowed around on it all night long.

Someone brought it to CV and said it was in Jemock's blog last year. I couldn't hear the reading on the stream, so I can't tell if he edited it.

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