A story about... A Storm © 2000 Marg Frey, Bryce Graves-Hurst, Nahoya, Christine Schwab	NAHOYA	MARG	BRYCE & CHRISTINE
				CHRISTINE & BRYCE
			BRYCE	MARG & CHRISTINE
				CHRISTINE & MARG
			CHRISTINE	MARG & BRYCE
				BRYCE & MARG

The art of psychoanalyzing storms is really very ancient. In the good old days they used to play bait 'n' switch with chickens' innards and what have you to get the storms to cooperate. (What the storms were meant to do with the chicken innards was always shrouded in mystery, of course.) In the less distant past, people wrote poetry to the skies in hopes of placating the storms. Just the right sort of rhyme would send it billowing in the other direction. This technique eventually developed into the Farmer's Almanac, which proved to be a grave error because the storms found it way too easy to outwit such mass-produced items. And today, we shoot our electronic beams at the clouds, hoping to harness them with our superior technology. Really I think we should go back to doing rain dances--they seem the most likely thing to coax the rain into coming down to play, and then when it does you're all hot & sweaty anyway and so you're properly grateful.

But this "perfect" storm was in no need of further supplication. It produced record rainfall over every square foot it passed. If anything, this storm needed a "dry dance." But what would that entail? No one knew. The remaining Native American nations were most concentrated around desert areas, and even those that saw regular rain did not have a dance that would stop it. They would have to invent one.

This resulted in weeks of choreographic research at secret laboratories in the lowlands of Guatemala. Dancers from around the world gathered there to try stopping, or at least pausing, the daily jungle rains. The Bedouins had marginal success early on, but the rain they held off while dancing began falling as soon as they stopped.

A ballerina suggested playing a videotaped rain dance backwards, studying the backward dance and trying to duplicate it. She spent many frustrating hours at the video monitor, trying to mimic reactions in advance, to bounce before stepping, to fall upwards and leap downwards. After most everyone else had given up and started learning how to make galoshes, she finally arrived at a dance that would stop a normal rainfall in its tracks. She was flown immediately to the edge of the storm, where the plane could go no further.