Day Five: Vinyl Justice

Today's blog will be told anti-chronologically, as it has been a whirling dervish day. Currently, Matt Damon is before me and my teammates, in the movie "The Rainmaker," nobly fighting for justice against a sea of opposition. This idea will be a mini-motif of our day's adventures.

What seems like just moments ago, we left the Big Sandy Science Center where the curator had given us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He let us in after-hours to see a private viewing of a laser-light show set to 80's rock and roll, called Vinyl Laser. Colored lasers, 1,200 watt speakers and copious amounts of fog created a hair band rock hall effect, with intricate dancing shapes demonstrating the abstractions of rock and roll across the planetarium dome. The experience was mind-melting. When various hits by Queen, Kansas, and Boston had finished their splay on the giant screen, the curator told us that the whole show was performed by a single laser beam revolving at 30,000 times per second. This was described by Susan II in this succinct and accurate way: "It was cool."

Preceding a foodfest supper at Billy Ray's, a restaurant located across the street from our shelter, two members of AppalReD took us on a tour of the local community. They once again generously took several hours out of their day to help us understand both the scope of their practice and the challenges faced by their clients. We saw areas affected by strip mining and mountain top removal (and some of the areas that had been painstakingly reclaimed by local effort) and the abject poverty butting up against homes of the wealthy. It was an eye-opening experience, like most of our trips into the community have been.

Continuing our day-in-reverse, we had left for the Kentucky tour from the aforementioned Science Museum and Planetarium, which the founder of AppalRed, John Rosenburg, had helped to found. The featured exhibit was a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery that involved several intricate scenes, and all of us aspiring lawyers felt like we had to be the first to put the puzzle pieces together and solve the heinous crime. It out-witted many of us. Luckily, we're not in forensics or police investigation. I offered to represent the killer at court, but he couldn't afford my retainer.

The last legal work that we performed for the folks of AppalReD was assembling an instruction sheet for pro se divorce petitioners, and we spent the mid-morning correcting the verbiage of our form, knowing that this document was acting in our stead as interpreters of the law, instructing the client on what had to be done in what format. While there may have been too many cooks in the legal kitchen, I think we eventually produced an effective guide for future clients to escape abusive marriages when AppalReD cannot represent them directly.

Finally, kicking off our day was a talk given to us by the director of Volunteer Lawyers for Appalachian Kentucky (an AppalReD program), Will Synder, who passionately defended the practice of pro bono lawyering, asking us to be advocates for those clients who cannot afford to pay. Just like Matt Damon, that's why I came to law school in the first place- to fight for justice against a sea of opposition. And maybe take in a crazy laser light show set to Bohemian Rhapsody in the process.