Marissa and jacqui just got flashed by the guy driving this truck. It was a day-maker for sure.

Dont know quite where we are, but we’re somewhere, and that’s good! Marissa is driving, and momentarily Jacqui will be napping, but wanted to take a moment to say, hell yes! We’re in transit! We did it! Yay, us! And you guys are awesome! Thanks so much for coming to our fundraisers and making donations, and for taking extraordinary care of us. We’ll do you proud, and there will be many photos and blogs along the way! Now on to the napping!

Peace!

No time to Blog! Time to hit the road! Hope the crew is getting rested, cuz in about 8 hours, I’m gonna show up like nasty Santa Claus and rip them out of their beds and put them in minivans and steal them away to the Dakotas, where I will make them dance and otherwise perform for food and shelter.

Can’t wait! We’re really really excited, folks. Thanks for all of your help! We’ve hit a glitch or two, so please keep the donations coming! Now it’s time to scrape together a few hours of sleep.

G’nite, everybody, and we’ll see you on the other side of the Mississippi!

Jacqui and Marissa.

Greetings, fellow fire-breathers.  Rehearsals are going well, see photo.  We’re down to the wire now, with our fundraiser tomorrow night and our grand exit first thing Friday morning! Marissa and Audra are practicing in my basement even as we speak. The words “Oh, Shit!” just wafted up the stairs, so I’m guessing great progress is being made. In the meantime, there is laundry and packing and equipment testing galore. Phones are ringing off the hook, and donations are still trickling in. We really need your help. Please make a donation of $5, $10, $20… whatever you can afford. We appreciate it more than you know - all of us do.  Once again… here’s the link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=6KUUU8R6EH63G

Marissa Has Landed.  The chaos of balancing family and rehearsals is getting to us both. There is much work left to do. There is money yet to raise. But it feels good to be in the belly of the beast. We’re days away from liftoff, and we can’t wait.

We’re gonna dedicate this blog to saying the following:

We would take Grahams by the pound on this trip! Graham Martin Byers has proven to be rather a Jack of all Creative Trades! Guitarist, Singer, Storyteller, and overall Mood Enhancer.  We love that boy. Jacqui thinks Marissa’s pretty lucky to be related to him.  Marissa feels the same way.

Graham, Jacqui and Marissa practiced storytelling techniques poolside this week. All work and All play made for productive and festive afternoons.  Marissa and Graham have been practicing their number at Reynolda Gardens and on lovely porches all week. Graham has a knack for making any surrounding feel serene.

Now for the wrap-up:

The End.

Graham Byers, Nic Rowland & Maggie Bessel have restored Jacqui’s faith in the future of the next generation. They are the hardest working members of our little troupe. This shot is of Graham and Nic performing at our last fundraising attempt. (You know, the one where the rain kept everyone away?)  Graham and Nic have brought not only cheerful tirelessness (oh, so valuable as Jacqui and Marissa get more and more curmudgeonly) but also wicked, bad ass musical and story-telling styling to our performances. Maggie, our favorite intern who is also working 2 jobs on top of Jacqui’s incessant neediness, has kept the fearless leaders calm and the young boys watching.  She hasn’t yet met a challenge she couldn’t slaughter, and she is uniquely well-equipped to keep Jacqui off the ceiling.

SO! Here’s the news:

There is going to be another fundraiser on the 28th! Why? Because we missed you at the last one.  This will be our final dress rehearsal before we all pile into sardine cans and hit the dusty trail.  Please come out and wish us well on our journey, and bring money. And if you can’t be there, just send the money. :)

Marissa is done with her opera marathon and is SUPER-excited to be joining the rest of us in the Old North State in less than a week! (The rest of us are excited to have her here as well, but don’t tell her that, lest she get the big-head.)

This is the full-tilt boogie, ladies and gentleman! We’re amped and stoked and pumped and stuff, but we’re still broke. HELP!

Much with the loviness,

Jacqui and Marissa

“PLAYING WITH FIRE” was a blazing success! We might not have made the money we were hoping for as the result of rain, but we had a fantastic time, and the performances were brilliant! We were incredibly moved by the support shown to the project, and it gave us faith moving forward that we will somehow raise the money that we need.

There will be photos very soon, and we’ll let you know where to find them once they’re posted.

We have some important thank you’s to send out today, and we want everyone to know not only how grateful we are, but also how good it feels to express that gratitude to people who are so generous and enthusiastic about what we’re doing.

THANKS TO:

Jill Erin Martin Byers
Liz Alesi
Maggie Bessel
Audra Byers
Graham Byers
Francois Byers
Nic Rowland
Mike Shepherd
Britt Uzzell
Trey Martin
Kara Chambers
Beverly Whit
Jacob Felder
Adam Marshall
The Hunz family
Alisa Simonel-Keegan
(thanks to Cheryl in advance)

And Lee Runyon of Black Horse Studio for the amazing space

We can’t wait to do this again with our final dress rehearsal, which we plan to make available to our Winston Salem friends, fans, and family on July 28th! Come out, come out and play with us!

*Photo of Audra Byer’s performance (by Jacqui Causey)

Chief Sitting Bull. Consummate warrior, martyr and face of the Lakota nation, and inspiration for the quiet calm and pure determination with which we faced today’s to-do list. We were both moved as we watched the seeds we’ve been planting suddenly become sprouts.  Today was proof that not all hard work is hard.  After long phone calls and fax exchanges with PayPal, we seem to have a handle on the issue and hope to be using the account in the next day or two. 

We are planning a last minute fundraiser for this Friday night which will be held in the parking lot behind Black Horse Studio(the old Nissen carriage factory across the street from the Wherehouse… you know, the one that looks like a castle).  From 8:30 to 10:30, we’ll be playing with fire.  Come out and bring your $5 bill.  We will also accept your $20 bill, your $50 bill, or your $100 bill.  We’re not picky.

Other fundraising efforts continue in full force.  It has to be full force, because we don’t know how to do things any other way.  We have a couple of exciting meetings coming up this week.

Our hope is that the news in the blog gets progressively bigger and bigger as the week goes by.  Stay tuned for more of the adventures of the Jacqui and Marissa show!

Happy Independence Day, everybody! Paypal is HARD! But we’ve about got it figured out! Watch for Facebook notifications and emails, wherein we will be devoting our efforts to making it as EASY as possible for you to share your hard-earned moneys with us!  Donations so far are mostly in the form of pledges rather than actual donations, so we’re mildly, but not irrevocably tweaked as time diminishes. (Seriously, we need your help.)

Next week we’ll hold a fundraiser! Watch for your invitation. It’s gonna be big fun.

Press release and flyer distribution time! Remember, the sooner you share, the sooner we can stop hounding you!

Kisses and fireworks from Jacqui and Marissa.

Today we officially got our FIRST DONATION to the project. Props to Marissa, and thanks to Bill.  The flyer and the poster are coming along slowly, but they’re almost done.  Here’s a sneak peak. (Especially for Liz, who was kind enough to stop by and let me take her mug shot today.) The t-shirt design has been submitted, and the fundraising continues!  Back to work, Boys and Girls!!!  More tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Dames en Feu finally has an official logo! The insistence of our southern audience of pronouncing ‘Feu’ as ‘Foo’ has Jacqui threatening to change the tagline to: “It’s like ‘foot’ without the ‘t’.”  Marissa is excited that the logo is versatile enough to work on t-shirts, posters, business cards, and everything in between.  Jacqui is just relieved to have it done.

We finally got the gang (sans Marissa) all over to Jacqui’s for the first rehearsal.  Really, it was more of a cast meeting.  But everybody got to ask their questions, listen to all the music, and play a little.  Things were ignited, photos were taken, plans were hatched, and ideas were born.  The boys were extremely impressed with Jacqui’s collection of electric trains and yo-yos.

Still working on the fundraising, watching our time shrink and budget grow.  Fortunately, Marissa and Jacqui are pretty good at pulling each other off the ceiling. 

The greatest challenge at the moment, as the continued consequence of sleep deprivation, is Jacqui’s apparent inability to string together a functional sentence, as evidenced last night when she said with confidence, though quite by accident, ” I strive on thress!”

More to come tomorrow! We’d love to hear your feedback on the logo! (Though it’s too late to change it, so we really only want to hear that it rocks.)

The magic is starting to happen!

We have secured a phenomenal deal on our housing, and Enterprise rent-a-car has been incredibly generous in helping us get there. On an artistic front, things have really taken shape. We can see now the performance in our mind’s eye.

Marissa completed the set list this afternoon. The theme is set. We were trying to figure out how to merge the narration of the stories with the choreography.  When we found the Lakota Way recording, it became clear to us that there are concepts throughout that are dear and essential components to the Lakota history and life path.  Compassion, humility, generosity, honor, love, and perseverance are the ideas that now shape the structure of each dance.

Delancey now has its first interns! We are pleased as punch to welcome Maggie Bessel and Melissa Cox to our growing ensemble.  They have no idea how hard Jacqui can make a peon work, but they’re about to find out! Seriously, they are brilliant and wonderfully talented young women. We can’t wait to work with them.

The word is spreading at the Standing Rock Reservation, and they’re excited to have us.  We are ecstatic to learn that Miss Indian World will be crowned during the pow wow sometime during our visit!  We still haven’t gotten any sleep.

Too pooped to mess around with monkey business.  We’re tired.  We have reached a whole new level of punchy.  Jacqui has delivered every idea she’s had in the last 5 minutes in some strange cartoon voice.  Meanwhile, Marissa thinks that’s a lot funnier than it probably actually is… and then there’s all the yawning.

Jacqui, Graham and Liz tackled the Sam Walsh mega conglomerate yesterday.  They went to Wal-mart, Sam’s Club, Costco and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Potential for success is great, but now it’s phone tag time.  We don’t have yeses or no’s, but we know the names of the go-to guys and gals, and that’s a really good start.  Oh yeah, we wrote a letter.  Always obsessed with the visual aesthetic, Jacqui gave a spit shine to the Delancey logo and created fancy new letterhead that we will be able to use well beyond the link of this project.

Here’s all we’ve been able figure out about our PayPal account so far: it goes better with money.  As soon as we figure out how to use it, we will let you know.  Jacqui and Liz have begun the process of planning a money raising and hair raising fire party to raise money for the trip.  We talked to Jim(we really like Jim), who rents cabins on the lake near Standing Rock reservation.  We have no reservations about making reservations on the reservation(funny cartoon voice). 

Now we need to go to sleep.