The Gold Fish– follow it to the source

Spit on your fingers. Feel it… Taste it… This water sucked from your soft palate has a history.

Follow it to the tap, up the pipes, circumvent the morning fog and late spring showers, and find the melting snow pack in the Sierras.

Voice 2 Rain Follows the Plow

Can you taste the tang of Manifest Destiny?

Voice 2 The savage must ever recede before the man of civilization. The square mile which furnishes game to the single family of hunters, will support a thousand families by agriculture and the mechanic arts! —George Lepner, 1845

Voice 1 . . .the empty propaganda of the 1840s that eventually turned into guidelines for growth and expansion.

Voice 2 All of the waters of all the rivers of the West will eventually be diverted from their natural channels. John Wesley Powell

Excerpt from “live action tour of the water grid”, a slideshow for two voices, written by July Cole and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and performed in June 2007 by the authors and Annie Danger at bookstores throughout the Northeast U.S. Find it and more at http://www.watercalifornia.org/projects/cole.html

The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes from the Manifestly Destined comes from many sources– written by July Oskar Cole and shaped by a year of ensemble performances at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Occupy Cal, Wet and Wild Film Fest in Nevada City, and Alley Cat Books, and the transformation to film this spring by director Sarolta Cump.  And now at CounterPULSE as part of the Summer Special Series, we’re taking “the whole! Dirty! House of! Cards by! Storm! Yeah!” as the Water Nymphs declare.

— Dispatch by Qilo Matzen of The Water Underground