The Summer of the Skunk
When I was about seven or eight we had a Swan come and stay on our pond one summer - it just showed up one day in June, and walked out the driveway one day in September and we never saw it again. But it was enough to make it the Summer of the Swan. When I was just re-booting Grinder Productions in 2017 we had a pesky raccoon that insisted on disrupting rehearsals - that was the summer of the raccoon. This summer, well... let's just say that much of the food for the barn cats that we've dished out has been inhaled by this thing, having now taken up permanent residency under the deck: This is the summer of the skunk. I have hated this summer. Not for the sake of anything that I've put on stage - my evaluation of that will be much more nuanced, and will come much later, when there's snow on the ground once again. No, I have hated this summer because of the weather. It has rained, interminably. The hay crop is ruined for the second year in a row. In between the rain the