The last train to Clarksville

Clarksville, Arkansas is not especially exciting. It's a tiny town with one Wal-Mart, 2 pizza places, a couple of greasy spoon diners, and a used tire store. It's located smack in the middle of a dry county. The 700 students at the University of the Ozarks in town make up about 1/3 of the town's population. The 10 members of Aerial Dance Theater who visited there last week caused quite a stir.
We drove 13 hours to get there, stopping only 3 times. We all crammed into one 15-passenger van, fitting not only the 10 of us, but also all of our luggage, an entire dance floor, 3 chairs, 2 big metal benches, a huge birdcage, and a full set of stage lights. We ate at the same restaraunt 3 times while we were in town, twice keeping them open about an hour and a half later than their usual closing time. We met all kinds of amusing people from Texas (the tuition is cheaper in AR than TX), a guy who called himself John the Jew (who had a good number of company members drooling over him), a bunch of middle schoolers with no dance experience who made us all look like novices, and a couple of high school waiters and waitresses who thought we were the coolest thing to ever roll into town.
The show went well, the stage was huge and the lighting looked very nice considering it was all thrown together out of the back of the van. After a couple weeks of break from doing the pieces in full costume, we got to enjoy again the completely un-flattering many layers of 80's clothing for one piece, and the pants that fit no one in the company that I happened to be saddled with for another piece. The huge screws sticking out of the stage only gave us a little trouble. The biggest injury came when I ran into the pulley system for the back scrim and ended up with a huge bruise on my shin. And no, it wasn't that dark backstage at the time, I'm just no good with unfamiliar theaters.
Overall, it was an enjoyable adventure. I'm still a little stiff from the 16 hour drive back (why did it take so much longer on the way home?), and I'm a little lost in my classes, but it was still fun. I feel accomplished in bringing something new to an area that gets little artistic exposure. John the Jew got a couple more friends on Facebook, and we all have funny stories to tell about the director yelling at us to "move the skank pillows out of [his] way, shut up, and go to sleep" in the van.