Nick Tochelli's Backstage Ballet Blog

Out of my Element Review: This Lion Should have Stayed in its cage

2011-10-03T00:40:00.000-04:00

Recently, I upgraded to Lion. Want to know what I discovered right off the bat? I no longer could use Microsoft office programs.

So a stage manager can't use word, or excel....You'd figure that removing support for the world's most popular office software would be MENTIONED!! ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS, DUDE?????

Now I've had to drop an additional $40 so I can just do my goddamn job. I have to be able to read .doc and .xls files. Now I have to learn another interface....I'd love to hear an explanation. Oh but that's ok....I'll be able to edit scripts in Final Draft.

Wait what? What do you mean that's not supported anymore either??? You're telling me if I want that program to work, I need to spend $200??!! Get bent, Apple!

But not all hope is lost. Megawatch, the world's most convenient stage management clock program I've ever encountered must still be ok. It's just a stop watch with a break clock countdown....

.....Really? Not that either, huh?

Mac OSX Lion sucks ass, I don't care what improvements they've made. They removed compatibility. Who does that???? Evidently Apple does.

Now after 5 years of using laptops and using finger scrolling, apple decided they wanted to make it more like an iphone/ipad. So now when I scroll down, the page goes up. When I scroll up, the page goes down. It's like old school nintendo games with airplanes, with the reverse controls. But I only picked those games up once or twice. I didn't have it engrained in my muscle memory with five years worth of use. It's pointless. I know it "makes sense" because it mimics all of the other touch screen technology. Mouse pads are not touch screens. You fail.

They redesigned spaces, too. Pointless. Now for some reason all 6 of my traditional spaces have arbitrary wallpapers. But it's not like each one has it's own wallpaper. Screen 1 has one thing, screen 2 has another thing, but screens 3, 4, 5 are all the same and 6 is different from all those. Used to be that spaces would show you all your spaces at once. It still does, but it's also combined with expose. But like....a cracked out expose that doesn't actually....show you all your windows. Things are placed on top of each other and you can't get to all the screens. Oh just in case you were wondering, the alignment of the spaces is arbitrary as well. They don't stay in order. So Screen 2 isn't always screen 2. Sometimes, Screen 3 is screen 2. Even 1st graders know that doesn't make any frickin' sense. This whole mess of crap has been redubbed Mission Control.

The dashboard is changed as well, also not for the better. The default setting is to use the dashboard as a space, instead of an overlay on the space you're working in. So if you need to use the calculator, and need to see the numbers, by default, you can't. Thankfully, they left AN OPTION to turn that preference off.

I do believe this is quite possibly the worst $70 I've spent. I'm not saying the $30 retail price because, as I said before, I spent $40 on more bullshit to make my computer not a worthless hunk of plastic and silicon. You know what? If you don't have to....skip Lion. Fuck this OS. And Fuck apple for foisting this on us without the proper information available. Also, fuck them for making me say fuck about apple products. I don't want to be angry at them, but they are making it really hard for me right now.

Theater Stats: Ford's Theatre- Washington, D.C.

2011-10-01T22:00:00.000-04:00

Theater Type: (Historical) Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 655

I hear you saying, "Wait....you're where now?"

Yeah I know it makes no sense. I know I said touring was over and done with and I was settling down into NYC and makin' it work.

Well sometimes there are opportunities too good to pass up.

As some may know (though most will not) I've been searching for jobs outside of theater for the past 5-6 months trying to find a career that will....oh I dunno.....pay the bills, and maybe if I'm lucky leave me enough left over to purchase more than a pack of gum. So it so happens that I stumbled onto a job opening at a big company in the film/tv/theater industry that specializes in lighting. And I interviewed with them....then I interviewed with them again (well honestly it was more like a quiz day to see how much I knew about lighting) and they told me I would be contacted later that week, or early in the next week.

Well the end of the week came and went with no word. So that's fine. There's still early next week! That Monday, I was out on the town with Godlight folk to celebrate the NYIT awards victory by Nick Paglino and Deanna McGovern for their work in Impending Rupture of the Belly....I think we were all slightly shocked because that show was seen by like.......12 people. Apparently all 12 of them loved the hell out of it! So we were at a Dart Bar when I check my phone and see I got an email just before I have my data scheduled to turn off at midnight. And it's from someone I have never heard of or met in my life, but it contained a job opportunity in the industry. And a pretty good one too. So we schedule an interview with the director.

So now it starts to dawn on me: I have two decent opportunity for jobs. One is short term high immediate reward, the other is long term...well, I'd call it "medium" reward. I never asked how much I'd get paid as a base salary with the lighting company. So I wouldn't know exactly how to quantify them in this equation other than long term employment that I've heard is good money.

I interview and get offered the job with the production. But they know that I have this job opportunity and I need to hear from them before I can really make a decision about the production. I ask for as much time as I can get, including going in on Thursday to work "for free" as an AEA Stage Manager so the company could rehearse to buy me as much time as I could get. Then they put me on the spot and said they needed a decision by 10pm that night. I hemmed and hawed over it until just about as late as I could. Because I know my luck. I'm going to accept this production job and then I'm magically going to be called in the morning with the career job...with benefits and everything! Then I'm going to be stuck in the position of letting someone down I just said yes to which I did to Cherry Lane for The Acting Company and I always felt terrible about it. Finally, I called at 9:56pm to accept the production.

So what I signed on for is Anne and Emmett, a theoretical meeting between Emmett Till and Anne Frank (or Helen Keller to my cousin Ryan....). And it's being rehearsed in New York, and being produced in two different theaters in Washington D.C. The Atlas which is a new complex in the same ilk as the Guthrie but not quite as expansive and borg like as Karen once put it. But still a very nice facility with lots of nice people. And the other: Ford's Theatre.

If that tickles a thought in your head but doesn't quite pull a memory...Shame on you! It's a historical landmark for being the site that Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. We have now combined two of my most favorite things in the world: History and Theater!

Ford's is gorgeous. It reminds me of the theater in....uh....South Carolina(??) that looked like an old town hall where people would have decided to declare war against England....though it obviously has more modern touches. Like massive amounts of boom positions in the third balcony, infrared cameras, B/O monitors for the cast etc etc. But the most important thing it has is the booth where Lincoln was shot which still contains original artifacts from that night.

The reason we're at the Ford's now is we're the first reading in a series they are holding over the course of the Fall. So it's the staged reading version of Anne and Emmett and not fully produced. But since we are working out way to a full production, we took a few liberties to how far this staged reading went. We did give the cast costumes to put on and blocked the entire show. But much like a Godlight show, everyone was visible at all times...no exits, no entrances, and there were only two props: Anne's diary, and Emmett's hat both of which are iconic of their owners.

I tend to find I rub elbows with famous people very tangentially in my career. I work with someone who was just working with so and so, or is working on a reading this week with such and such. I've worked with Denise Crosby (played Lt. Tasha Yar on TNG), and because of Godlight have worked with some famous writers. I've now worked with my first famous politician and my first BET personality. William Cohen, the former Secretary of Defense under Clinton is the husband and producer of this piece and is married to the playwright Janet Langhart Cohen.

This play has some history behind it too. Remember back in 2009 when that psychopath/neo-nazi attacked the National Holocaust Museum in D.C.? Well, Anne and Emmett was there that day to premiere. Mr. Cohen had been in the building, and Janet was on the way, and in fact that deranged asshat parked in Janet's designated parking spot out front.

Thankfully, no tried to recreate Lincoln's assassination while we were in residence at the Ford's for 4 hours this afternoon. The show was very well attended considering this was just a reading of the play. We had groups of schools kids bussed in to see it, and a really wide variety of people from all walks of life, and all ages. It was very poetic considering the message of the show of tolerance and respect.

I'm currently sitting on a train back to NYC and trying to wrap my head around where I've been today. I did make the comment (jokingly obviously) that John Wilkes Booth was a pussy because he broke his leg from that short of a fall. I don't know why I always envisioned that jump he took to be so much higher than it actually is. Don't get me wrong, it is a respectable 12 feet from the box seat to the deck and it also looks much closer considering the deck of the show in there now is raised so it's actually about 4 feet closer than it normally is. Pictures to come later. I didn't bring my camera cable to D.C. with me.

And once again in the grand tradition of theater is a small world: Kristen Fox works at the Ford's Theatre. And by golly if she didn't go to Fredonia and know who Steve Rees is!

For those interested: I am apparently still a finalist for that other position, but I still haven't heard from them. I hope I hear from them soon and they say I got it because that way I'd get to have my cake and eat it too!

Audition Monitoring or How to Go Slowly Insane 101

2011-07-09T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've 1. Blogged, or 2. Monitored an audition. I've found tht in general, the companies I work for in NYC tend to hire the stage manager as the very last part of the pre-production process. So by the time I'm involved with the production, there's already a cast, there's already a solid design in mind, and I just come in and play catch up.

Well for the first time since The Acting Company, I find myself in a process around the time I should be: during auditions. And I forgot how boring it can be to sit around and wait for people to show up! Ultimately it makes no difference, but to sit for 6 hours to shuttle people in and out can be a task in tedium. Asking the same 5 questions over and over again.

Am I complaining? Nah, not really. I'm happy to be working again. Since the end of Winkie I haven't been able to work. Something about a marriage or something like that....I dunno... But since I can't very well tell a theater I need 2 weeks off. I'm supposed to be in charge of the room. And generally speaking, 2 weeks equLs the entire rehearsal process for a lot of the shows I end up doing.

But now that the wedding and honeymoon are behind me, it's time to get working again. It's been actually hard to convince my body I have somewhere to be again. I haven't had to be anywhere theatriclly speaking in just under 3 months. Yet here I am, in the warm lobby of the Neighborhood Playhouse shuttling potential cast members into the auditorium (which by the way is tantalizingly cooled by a wicked air conditioner). I haven't had a chance to read the show yet, so I couldnt tell you anymore about it other than the title. Einstein and Mileva, it's about Einstein's first marriage going to pot as he was discovering the theory of relativity. And it's going to happen at Theater Row so that's some nice exposure once again.

It's good to be back!

A Blog About A Story of Survival

2011-02-27T11:17:00.000-05:00

There comes a time in everyone's lives when they are posed an important question, and there is probably none more important than the following:

Ok, so it's not necessarily the most realistic question in the world.......

Sometime around Halloween I was trolling through iTunes while in bed looking for a new podcast to listen to. As many of you know, I am a gigantic podcast whore. I hardly listen to music anymore. I listen to a whole bunch of NPR podcasts, ESPN podcasts, a couple of wrestling podcasts (judge all you want), but around Halloween iTunes was promoting this podcast called "We're Alive: A Story of Survival." I read the description and was like "Wow.....it's a radio drama merged with a zombie apocalypse survival horror story....that's.....so....that's so cool!" So I streamed the first 4 episodes directly to my iPod and was like "whoa....this is really good. The acting is excellent, the writing is awesome, and I'm getting out of bed and downloading the entire series...now!"

Which I did, and I then spent the next 24 hours straight (with a few cat naps here and there) listening through the entire series. I couldn't stop! It was so good! Since that time, I have listened through the series 3 times all the way through, and I joined the online forum....and by join I mean I like....bounded to the head of the class and have become an admin of the forums......

If you're a radio drama fan, you should check it out. You can look it up on iTunes here. If you like it, head on over to zombiepodcast.com, and click on "Discuss" and you can find me at the forums. I won't be too hard to find honestly.

It's always great to get behind artists and actors who are doing something that is such high quality and can create such a buzz. The creators and actors don't make any money on this, but still dedicate their time to creating a really excellent product. So kudos to them, and kudos to you if you listen and support the project!

Ok, geek out time: Over. Have to get ready for rehearsal now. I promise I'll blog about the load in process for Winkie this week. I'll be at 59E59 almost all week putting my first real production on its feet as a production manager. It should be interesting.

An Astounding Amount of Pure Suck

2011-02-17T00:00:00.040-05:00

Used to be when I was growing up January to February was such a great time of life. Holidays had just ended (and so had round 7 bajillion of Christmas between McLean/Tochelli clans), hockey was in full swing (in high school this would mean the lead up to the sectional tournament....not in high school it meant I was still getting my butt handed to me on a silver platter every weekend and traveling to Buffalo from Rochester to do so), but more importantly it was the ramp up to my birthday.

My birthday growing up was always perfect. Falling on the 17th of February almost always (with the exception of my junior or senior year) placed it dead in the middle of the President's Holiday week. My perpetual birthday gift was to get a week off of school. That's pretty sweet as a kid. Though, I did count that one year spent in school as a really great one too. I always felt jealous people got their lockers decorated and had to walk around with balloons. The one year I got to, I did it with pride and was glad to embarrass myself all day long.

Once I got to college, this ramp up was a little more stunted. The spring semester in the theater department in Fredonia was always so crammed full of work. School work was back loaded in the department, and the big musical was always in the spring semester. So after finding myself on vacation for all of high school, I'm now finding myself working really hard on my birthday. But I was with friends, and I was having a good time. So I still got to enjoy the lead up and my birthday.

After graduation, I took a job in retail. I started that job in October, and by November I became a manager. So when my birthday rolled around, I got to request my birthday off. This ended up being one of the worst birthdays ever. I spent the day with my girlfriend at the time and we spent the entire time together running errands for her (including buying a car...seriously) and by the time 9pm rolled around I finally said "Hey can we do something I want to do on my birthday?" and we finally went somewhere to get something to eat. She then passed out with barely so much as a kiss goodnight. I'm pretty certain we broke up less than 2 weeks later.

I won't complain about my birthdays spent at Fairport Hots. Despite having to work 6pm-5am two birthdays in a row, people are very generous with their tips when they are drunk and you are stuck working on your birthday. I made $150 one night because the rest of the crew gifted me the tip jar so we didn't have to split it up. I heart my crew!

Finally, we roll around to my first birthday in New York. My sister Erin is pregnant at the time, and she's due to pop on the 9th of February. I, being the snot that I am, told her she better give birth January 31st, or hold it in until March 1st. With the large family I have I was the only person in the entire extended family (with maybe cousin Katie as the exception) who did not have to share my birthday month with anyone. We're talking 20-25 some odd birthdays. I wasn't ready to give up my month. I swore if she went into labor on or around the 17th, I would drive to Syracuse and just like...hold the babies head in until it became the 18th so I would at least not have to share the day. I then proceeded to tell everyone this joke until someone pointed out I'd be putting my hands into my sister's crotch. I never really mentioned it again. Ella was born on the 22nd. And she's a beautiful miracle.

But more recently, this traditionally exciting and happy ramp up to my birthday has become something else all together. Last year, I had to leave The Acting Company tour to return home to attend to a family emergency. My father was in the hospital, and I needed to get home. And I'm grateful TAC let me abandon 3 venues to be with my family. In the midst of this trip home, my birthday came and passed with very little fanfare. It seemed so muted and unimportant. And in comparison, it was.

I had higher hopes this year. Not only is the ramp up to my birthday my last one as a bachelor, I was actually going to be spending it with Anna which I haven't been able to do since we became a couple. We had a great holiday season, and got so many great gifts for our new life together. Soon after returning home, we had a Wagner family get together to celebrate our engagement. I finally got to meet 3/4's of the southern part of the family I had not yet met (one cousin and his wife had plans they couldn't rearrange). When I say I have found the German version of the McLean clan, I'm not joking. I see shades of my family all over the Wagner clan. The family dynamic is so similar it's almost scary, but very comforting and welcoming all at the same time. Specifically, Anna's cousin Alex reminds me of my cousin Ryan and the energy they bring to each collective family is remarkable.

That was the 20th. Less than 1 month later, everything is different. And ultimately, I will never be the same from a pair of people who are now gone who only tangentially and briefly intersected their lives with mine.

Eight days after the engagement party, I had been cuddling Anna to sleep as I am like to do. I fell asleep and took a quick nap (also as I am like to do). When I woke up to begin my normal night owl routine, I hopped onto facebook and saw on either my mother's or my sister Erin's status that a teacher from my high school had died in a car crash in Kenya. Beyond the fact that Jim Nowak was a social studies, and Eastern religions teacher at Fairport he also deeply influenced Erin and shaped her personality. He was a warm light walking through the school (occasionally dressed in some traditional Tibetan wraps and garb). Beyond even that, he dated my mother briefly after Erin graduated and had moved to Syracuse. During their short time together, Jim joined my mother in Fredonia for a production I was working on, which we had decided we know what show it was but I can't remember it right now. Before the show, we went out to dinner in town and I remember that despite trying to put off what I was doing as nothing important (I was the ASM for the show and I really didn't do all that much except sit backstage and read), he saw past that and remarked how special it was I was pursuing my dreams. And it was great that I was able to still find the passion despite the major set back of being dropped out of the Acting program a mere 5 months previously.

As I sat on the couch and read the brief news article over and over again, these memories flooded back to me and I cried for an hour. I cried not only for the loss of Jim, but for the way he selflessly lived his life. He was in Kenya doing what he loved to do. He was helping people. Building schools and health clinics in under privileged areas of the world. I cried because of the inspired life he had led and the profound impact he had made in my family. I cried because despite what seemed like such a small encounter in a dimly lit restaurant 8 years ago in Fredonia, it was an encounter I would never forget.

For the next week, I felt myself on edge. Little things that shouldn't make me get choked up were. But I finally got it back under control. Anna and I had a wonderful Super Bowl Sunday. We got our wedding bands, updated our registries and had homemade pizza for dinner.

The next day, Anna got a call from her mother saying Alex was in the hospital. I don't remember when we learned that bacteria had gotten through a hole in his sinus cavity and gone into his brain, or when we learned of the two abscesses one of which burst and had to be drained. I know it wasn't until Friday evening that I learned Alex lived his whole life with cystic fibrosis, and that he had an identical twin brother, Evan, who died when Alex was 9 months old.

I also know that around 3am on Saturday the 12th of February Alex passed away, just two days after turning 31.

Since then, life has been a blur of time standing still, and everything mashing together. It has been 96 hours of pain, heart break, outpouring of grief, tears, and love. I generally don't pray, but I do pray that I never have to hear the absolute heart breaking sobs for a young man too soon gone ever again. I don't want to have to hear a family matriarch begging for her to be taken instead because she's ready and wants to go and leave him be. I never want to hear Anna cry like that ever again. Ever.

We spent Sunday at Anna's parent's house scanning pictures and just trying to cope. Monday, Anna went to work to set herself up for substitutes for Tuesday and Wednesday. We then spent our fifth night in a row crying ourselves to sleep.

Tuesday was the wake and spent with family. Anna and I met Alex's parents, Lynn and Lloyd, in the parking lot along with Celeste, Gary, Anna's parents and her brothers. Lynn apologized so hard that she was sorry this is how I was being introduced to the family, which is the furthest thing from the truth. I think I told her something to the effect of "stop that" or something as seemingly ungraceful...though I don't know that there is a graceful thing to truly say when you are hugging the mother who has had this happen to her twice now. I have very frequently found myself tongue tied these past few days, which is why I'm writing this now. It's helping, and I don't have to worry about choking on the words, or sobbing over them.

I was introduced to the final cousin, Ian, who was unable to make it to our engagement party. The entire Wagner family apologized to me in the same manner Lynn did, each time I was finding the actual words I wanted to say originally to Lynn, and eventually was able to say them to one of the aunt's at some point in the last 48 hours "I'm honored you let me be here."

Alex wasn't someone I knew well. But I've heard so many great stories and pieced a few things together here and there. Alex had the biggest heart. He loved everybody, and he especially loved Anna. He was convinced when they were growing up that he and Anna were going to get married. They did everything together, and Anna was called by Lynn and Lloyd the triplet. He was an accomplished musician playing the clarinet, and sax which should be impossible to do as well as he did with C.F. The Wagner cousins all grew up playing Life and somehow Alex always ended up getting stuck with no job and a double decker car full of children.

Like everyone else in my soon to be family, he loves food. There's a picture some where on facebook with him about to ravage a pizza that is so big, the box swallowed up a 3x3 Ikea coffee table. He was shameless with a karaoke microphone. He was a master photo bomber. And apparently, he looked an awful lot like Beeker from the Muppets.

But those are all specific examples of what I could tell on my own. See, Alex wore his entire personality on his sleeve. He was warm, open and caring from the moment you met him. His smile and laugh were infectious. You could tell he lived his life to the fullest, and that was before we had done more than shake hands. You could tell what type of person he was by the way everyone reacted to him, and I could tell exactly what he was like when I came to the realization he was my cousin Ryan. I knew where he fit into the family, and why people acted exactly the same way they do with Ryan.

I am not usually an overtly emotional person. I will get choked up, but its rare that I cry. Maybe it's being on edge from Jim's passing that had opened this introspective part of me. Monday night after Anna had gone to bed, I sat up as I always do on the computer and looking at the plethora of fond memories from coworkers, college friends, and family posted on his facebook page. While I was looking at all these comments recalling memories from years and years ago, I realized how long I knew Alex in person.

11 hours.

Less than half a day. We met at Oktoberfest last October for dinner, and once again at the Engagement party.

I tried over and over again these past two days to find a way to say this to anyone in the family. And specifically I wanted to say this to Lynn and Lloyd. But every time I even thought the words forming together into a coherent thought I knew if I tried to say it I would not be able to do it. So I'm here writing this long blog because I needed to say this and now I can without fear of being unable to complete the thought:

I knew Alex for 11 hours. But in those 11 hours he's changed me forever. To my new family: I know everyone is hurting now, but I hope once the pain subsides you feel blessed to have 31 years of memories and love from Alex to warm your hearts forever. I had 11 short hours and I am honored to have known him.

So that's been the lead up to my 29th birthday. And as the title implies, it has indeed been an astounding amount of pure suck. It's now past midnight, so it's my birthday. You'll have to excuse me if I don't jump up and down for joy like I used to when I got my birthday off as part of President's Day vacation, or if I'm excited because I'm gonna get $150 in tips tonight while working. It's very similar and subdued, much like last year. It's an after thought compared to the enormity of this past week, and honestly doesn't feel all that important anymore. I've never been so unaware my birthday was coming until I looked at the program for Alex's mass today and realized it was the 16th.

If you haven't bought me a gift, not to worry because I have an idea. If you have bought me a gift, I have a wonderful add on to it. The people in your life that you love, tell them you love them. Give them a hug. Give them a kiss. Tell them you love them.

That's the best birthday gift you can give me.

Alex

Jim

Still on the Road by Sara Wolkowitz

2011-01-04T02:13:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned a few times before on this blog, my original tour with The Acting Company was recorded for a documentary. We were introduced to Sara at our first rehearsal and she popped in and out of the tour while we were rehearsing, performing, and traveling. There have been some small screenings before, but tonight was a big ol' screening (with a facebook event and everything!) at the Lincoln Center. It was so surreal to see this finally completed!

Just to make sure I was as fresh as possible, I went back and reread my blog posts starting from the very beginning and going all the way through the end of the 08/09 tour. I can always seem to remember exactly what was going on in my head when I read my old posts, I remember things I deleted from entries, I remember things I was going to say but changed some wording things like that. So the tour was very fresh in my mind before I hopped the train.

I wasn't sure who was going to be attending, but I was hoping I was going to get to see some old familiar faces. And I certainly did. In attendance tonight (in no particular order): Margot Harley, Kelly Curran, Freddy Arsenault, Matt Amendt (whose father I understand still reads this blog: HI MR. AMENDT!), Will Sturdivant, Andy Grotelueschen, Georgia Cohen, Carie Kawa, Sonny Valicenti, and Chris Thorn.

The movie itself is wonderful. I understand the trials and tribulations Sara went through to put this piece together. The final product she has put together is really wonderful. It has a very natural, and easy flow to it. It's really conversational which makes sense considering one of the trials/tribulations Sara dealt with was a tremendous shortage of footage. She was only on the road with us for a grand total of 4 weeks...one month vs. the 7 months we were together. She ended up missing a whole lot of great stuff happening live, so she had to hear the cast tell stories. Which one would suppose would be the death of any film (too much talking vs. not enough action), but what is truly amazing about the way this was edited together is how riveting the 12 cast members of the company truly are. There wasn't a dull moment for me in this film. Any time when it felt like you were just about to lose interest in a specific subject, it switched to another subject....or it showcased Tough Nuts (the home spun game involving throwing tennis balls at a distance with the intention of hitting the opponent's testicles and you aren't allowed to move). Sonny was sadly the victim captured on camera for all posterity on the losing end of a game of Tough Nuts.

I also have to say I was very happy that the decision was made by all parties to acknowledge what happened regarding John's departure from the company that season. On this blog, and Karen's too it was glanced over because it wasn't our place to put it out there, and we certainly didn't want to make public the reasons John decided to leave. But it was one of the most definitive things that occurred that season. There were so many things that tested us as a company, but the departure of Ron, and John were the two big ones. And it would have been such a disservice to the resiliency, and professionalism of that group if Sara wasn't able to include that aspect of upheaval we all felt all season long. And it was handled very well with an explanation from Ian.

Some of my favorite things that made it into the film: Pants call officially made it in! With Andy actually responding to Karen making a Pants Call over the PA system. The aforementioned Tough Nuts demonstration was also entertaining. Ian quoting the prayer from the preacher before our performance of The Spy in Houghton, NY, and of course Rick Ford's infamous "ICEBERG!" moment on the bus when he broke his toe. We also had the associated footage of Rick going into the Nurse's office in the high school at Ogdensberg, NY to have it looked at.

It really warmed my heart to see the film, and of course all my colleagues, some of which I haven't seen since we parted ways at SUNY-Purchase. All the exhaustion and frustration have long since melted away and it was such a nice feeling to see those smiling faces again. Both Matt and Freddy made comments about how obvious it is to us now looking back how special a thing we had as a group for those 7 months. And how you can never appreciate how special it is until it's already over. And all you can hope to do is remember it fondly and think of the good times you've had with your life long friends.

I know I'll always remember. And to have such a glorious way as this film to remember is a blessing. So to that, thank you so much Sara and congratulations. It was beautiful!

Christmas Haul 2010

2011-01-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

Please pardon the late nature of the Christmas Haul post this year. This year has been a lot like when I was growing up where Christmas was spread out over the course of nearly a full week, so we just finished Christmas the other day with Anna's family since we spent actual Christmas in Rochester. So without further ado.....actually....there's some ado....Can I tell you how weird it is to go from geeking out for video games, music, movies, pieces of silly technology to now geeking out over kitchen appliances, and utensils? Ok, ado over. And now........The Haul!

Our Stuff
1. Gorgeous new set of kitchen knives and the associated Block!

Here we have an awesome set of knives. Here we have a video of us using our awesome set of knives.

Did I mention that we are dorks?

2. Many a Kitchen Utensil/gadget!

In no specific order we got new measuring cups/spoons, toaster tongs, a skimmer, salt and pepper grinders (with stand), kitchen shears, silicone basting brush, salad/berry spinner, stackable colanders....I think that just about covers all those types of things.

3. Les Crueset Braiser (3.5 quart)

I really have nothing to say about this. It's Anna's toy, not mine, but it was addressed to me as well so I add it to my list.

4. Canisters (porcelain)

Anna desired these like whoa. We now have them.

5. Panini Press

Yeah, it may be essentially a souped up George Foreman Grill, but goddamn it's pretty and I can not wait to fire that sucker up and make me a quessadilla!

My Stuff
6. The Book of Useless Knowledge

Unlike last year, Anna got me a book that wasn't mean spirited. This is perfect. It's a book full of stupid and worthless facts like White Chocolate isn't actually Chocolate. Cocoa Butter, milk and sugar. Who knew?

7. Cafe Press T-shirt

It says "You can't see me, I'm wearing black" but I'm not a fan of it. It looks like a 5 year old made his first t-shirt ever! It's the poorest quality thing I've seen from Cafe Press and we are going to return it and complain. No where on the site does the image look anywhere near as terrible as the final product. Cafe Press=Fail Christmas 2010.

8. Isotoner Touch Gloves

This may be by far the best geeky present I've gotten in a while. They are a pair of isotoner gloves. What's so special about that? Well, they have been designed with the modern smart phone user in mind and they have harnessed the technology to allow you to wear gloves to avoid frostbite, and still use your touch screen devices. Sadly, it doesn't work with Android's Swype all that well, but for tapping messages and unlocking the screen, they are excellent. Full review to come later on those! And obviously, the ones on the right are not mine, they are Anna's.

9. Clothing
Anna's parents got me some great clothes for Christmas. I got a zip up sweater (I suppose to replace my not quite so attractive hoodie) and a very nice and comfy sweater. Both came in black of course.

By Me, for Me

10. Mac Book Battery Replacement

I went up to Buffalo to see my friend Renee whom I haven't seen in nearly 4 years (possibly longer). So we hung out at the mall and she stopped in to a Mac Specialist store and I happened upon a delightful little happy accident. They actually carried a replacement battery for my black mac book. I was stunned. So stunned that I had no choice but to buy it and save myself the cost on shipping! (Only to leave it in Rochester and force someone else to pay the shipping for me....oops)

11. Epic Mickey for the Wii

I haven't been blown away by the game selection available to me recently. Sure, I could buy the latest Professor Layton game for my DS, but it didn't have to happen. I'm torn between buying Black Ops for the wii, and until I can afford the PS3 nothing really comes to mind that I HAVE TO HAVE NOW! But Epic Mickey looked like a lot of fun, and Disney video games are pretty solid. I've really enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts Franchise, and hope Epic Mickey can follow in it's footsteps in some manner.

The one true sentimental gift this year was a Christmas memory book. Many years ago my mother compiled a bunch of people's Christmas memories and created a little book with a typewriter, construction paper cover and bound by yarn. This year was far more modern. Everyone emailed their memory, and it was printed by Office Max. I haven't read through all the stories yet, but I'm looking forward to it!

So I guess it's official. I am now far more an adult than I have been in recent years. I got excited over kitchen stuff, and a book of memories and I got no real nerdy pieces of technology. And I was actually fine with it.

What the heck am I doing in New Jersey?

2010-12-17T05:19:00.000-05:00

While working on my design of Clemenza and Tessio Are Dead, I suddenly became concerned that the rotary phone I purchased from an online antique store in Florida was not going to arrive in time for opening. Long story short, there was a death in the family of the store owner and she didn't mail the prop until Monday afternoon and we opened on Thursday. I called and asked if we could work on a deal to have it over nighted to New York so I could avoid the hell of looking for another rotary phone. In a desperate plea I posted to a stage manager forum for help, but there was only one helpful post. I also posted to facebook and got a couple responses.

One response was from a woman I worked with back before my Acting Company days Kathryn (aka China). She tried to get me in touch with Columbia's prop department but it ended up being for naught. The phone arrived just in time, and Columbia's prop department just wasn't going to work out anyway. But this reopened active communication lines between myself and China. She mentioned that she'd love it if I could come talk to her students about touring, what it's like, what would be expected of them etc etc. I said of course. I heart me talking to some students! It's fun!

We made the arrangements for me to take the train out to Dover, NJ and China came to pick me up. After a 90 minute train ride, we drove an additional 20 minutes out to Centenary College in Hackettstown. We had a couple minutes to grab something to eat and she walked me around the theater building. They have a really nice blackbox. It reminded me of the black box in Baton Rouge where we toured to twice with TAC and they set our green room in the black box. Though unlike the college at Baton Rouge, the blackbox in Centenary never got sound proofed. So when it rains, it apparently sounds like they are sitting in a giant drum. Oppsie!

The mainstage there is gorgeous. It's basically a brand new building and everything in there just has that nice new look to it. So it all looks very clean and very pretty. Even the ropes on the fly system are white. The booth is so awesome. It's wide and spacious, located on the lower seating level so the stage manager is eye level with the deck. The light board is on the left, sound on the right and a nice expanse between them for the SM to sit. The now becoming standard camera and infared camera are there too. It would be a great place for tours like the Acting Company to go to. We'd fit in there well.

The class I spoke to was relatively small. Only 7 students, and only 1 student who was definitely choosing stage management as a career. The others were a mix of actors, costumer/make up artist, dancer etc etc. We started off the class with the kids getting their final exams back and they went over it. Every once and a while there would be a question that they would have an issue with. "Well, I got points off for this and I don't get it!" and China would ask me "Hey, Nick, what's the answer" and I'd answer, and she'd say "And that's the sort of answer I was looking for." What happens if you come in as a professional stage manager experty person and you get an answer on an Intro to Stage Management final wrong? Thankfully, I never found out cause I aced the final! :-P

The conversation then turned to me, and my career and how I got to where I was. We went over some paperwork of mine including my resume, sign in sheets (where I explained that I prefer using sheet protectors and dry erase markers vs. wasting paper daily or weekly), my rehearsal and performance reports (which sadly for me, I accidentally printed out a performance report in the rehearsal report window in Filemaker, so the header was all wrong), and a few other things. I also showed them the Washington and Tiger signage from the tours and explained why we chose what we did. One major reason I was asked to come talk to them is the kids just started a touring company themselves so I was trying to let them know some things that will make their lives easier as they go out on their first tour, so we then moved onto what a daily tour schedule will be and since they are non union, they should expect everyone to pull their own weight.

We also went into a few specific examples the kids have gone through and how to handle those situations. One that came up was how to deal with unprofessionalism backstage. I told him that the best policy when working with friends in college as a Stage Manager is to treat it like you would if you were dealing with anyone else in a professional setting. Draw the line backstage as to what is acceptable and what is not. As long as you are in the right, whoever is being unprofessional backstage won't have a leg to stand on. For example, if you have a cell phone backstage and the ASM tells you to turn it off or take it outside the theater, and you don't: You are wrong. And if the situation continues, the ASM can then move up the chain of command to rectify the situation. In a professional setting, the ASM goes to the SM, who then would go to the director (if they are around still), then upwards and onwards to Production Managers/Company Managers, and if that won't do it, then up to the producer. If the producer doesn't deal with it, it becomes the new reality. And the ASM has to deal with it. College setting goes in the same way except you skip the PM/CM step and go to the "Producer" also known as Professor.

Once class was over, the kids bolted (cause I think it was generally their last class of the day and vacation is coming) and China and I tooled around helping one of her SM students turn in their prompt book from Oliver. Those few minutes actually caused me to miss my train, so China decided to drive me back into the city. It was pretty rough ride in and was horribly stop and go around the Lincoln Tunnel and I started to feel queasy about 500 feet from the entrance of the tunnel. She dropped me off right by Theatre Row and I walked to the Shell to set up for C&T.

Overall, it was fun times out there. Like I said, the space was gorgeous and would be a fun place to work in. But man oh man is it far away!

Theater Stats: The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row, NYC

2010-12-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

Name: The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row, New York, NY
Seating Capacity: 88
Style: Proscenium

This is the second time I've run a show in Theatre Row in NYC. The first was Noon Day Sun in the Beckett I believe....there are 6 or 7 theaters in Theatre Row, so I always get them confused. I will, however, always remember going in for a 4 hour work call only to be there for 9 hours replacing the deck/subdeck because the set was improperly sealed and when they made it rain during the performance, all they really accomplished was rotting out the floor.

Anyway, The Lion was home to Godlight Theatre Company's An Impending Rupture of the Belly by Matt Pelfrey. It was the first time since I think 2004 Godlight has produced a production not based on a book. Rupture is all about a man who is about to become a father for the first time and the absolute fear he feels about this change in his life. It isn't enough becoming a father for the first time, but now he has to deal with this schmuck of a neighbor who lets his dog crap on his lawn every day.

Traditionally, I would blog about the shows before they open, as they open, or you know..even while they are running..... But this was far too difficult this time. Not only was I around for the performances of the show, I was working on the front end every day as Godlight's new Production Manager. When I wasn't at the show, or arranging comp tickets for VIP/Press, I was dealing with the upcoming strike, audience development, or any other many Godlight tasks. When those tasks were done, I was on to the other production I'm working on which will get its own post soon.

I generally like to keep things nice and neat and organized on my laptop when I'm working. It makes my life much easier, I can find things quickly, and there's no confusion about what's old and what's new. For instance, here's a picture of the production folder for Cloaked which happened right after The Acting Company Tour this past year:

See? That's pretty. There are a few stragglers, but nothing major. The original script, the database, AEA rules blah blah. But everything has a folder, everything has a home. And it's easy to find it all.

This was what my desktop looked like not quite in the midst of total hell between both shows, but this was on average how my desktop looked the past month. Things didn't even get a chance to get into my production folders. I would work on Andrew's sound, make a quick cut or snip, pump up the volume, save a new file, it would end up on my desktop and it would just sit there....for ever. I literally ran out of space for icons and they started to just sit on top of the icon for my hard drive.

So tech week was crazy for this show, and what made it harder to deal with was the poor attendance of the show. Just to be clear, Theatre Row is not the usual home for Godlight. We usually work out of 59E59 where we've been for the past 5 years, where they have a subscriber base who know who we are and will come see out shows. Theatre Row was sort of a swoop in and save the day situation. Joe had been talking to Theatre Row about a time slot later on next year in October, when suddenly a time slot opened up in November and Theatre Row needed to fill it. We gladly obliged. However, this meant all the advanced publicity in the prime time of 3-4 months prior has already passed and we were kinda on our own. Sadly, it did put a damper on the entire run. In our 88 seat house, I don't think we broke an audience of 30. We did nearly cancel a matinee because we had 2 patrons and they were late...That kinda sucked hard.

But the true badness didn't last past the first week. We got some good press, and we got the word out on facebook and the new Godlight Twitter which Deanna McGovern, Joe and myself all control and tweet from. Audiences became more consistently in high teens and low 20s. We have no problem filling theater C. If we have a house of 50 (out of 70) it's like "Dude, this stinks!!!" so it's certainly humbling to play to a house of 2.

We have learned our lessons from this and are looking forward to the month of December off, and then we retool and hit our next production full force. There are a pair of options for our 59E59 time slot this spring, and I'm waiting to hear officially what show we're doing and I'll be sure to share it here. We already know another piece we will be doing in the late spring back in the Lion, but I'll wait until we officially announce that. There's also another piece of exciting news that hasn't been announced yet, so I won't say it here, but I will wait until next Monday.

Apologies for being absent for the last month. But as I've basically pointed out, I've been a busy little bee this last month in ways I haven't been since I moved to New York. This almost felt like college again in terms of workload. And P.S.- The Backstage Ballet turns 200 with this post! Congratulations to me for not being sick of this blog yet! Thank you for reading, and hope you continue to do so!

Theater Stats: The Emelin Theater- Mamaroneck, NY

2010-11-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

Name: The Emelin Theater- Mamaroneck, NY
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 275

The Emelin is not a traditional road house one would think of. It's not designed for load in and load out of massive shows like The Acting Company's tour. It's pretty much used for music performances (they have what looks to be a beautiful grand piano that I didn't see until we left for the night). But this wasn't going to be a typical day at the Emelin as Godlight invaded Mamaroneck with Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter!

We arrived early that morning at Grand Central Station (how apropos) to take the train to Mamaroneck. Strangely enough, everyone save one cast member arrived on time (must be a Godlight record), and we hopped the train out of town.

We arrived just short of 10am and walked to the theater which was a half a mile away. It was a nice day so the walk was pleasant enough. When we arrived, I met Brian who was the TD on scene for the day. We let the cast take a break right off the bat, and we got ourselves set up (12 music stands and lights, mics for each actor, and the lights. Sound came later in the day and I'll explain why.....now!) Sean Phillips who was slated to play our "Young Lee" was in an accident and unable to join us on our trek, so we asked Lee Stringer if he wouldn't mind taking over the role of himself. He was overjoyed and thrilled to do so. But this meant that my first task upon arrival was to print out a script for Lee in 24 point font so he could read it onstage. Our script was 89 pages long, but Lee's was 315 because on average 4 lines fit per page.

The day went well. We finished our rehearsal around 4:15pm and went to dinner in a pub close to the theater. The food wasn't so great, though. I had Buffalo Wings that weren't done right, but being a Western New York Snob about my wings, I can't really blame any place about that. But I can blame them for cutting their wing sauce with BBQ sauce. That's a crime that should never happen ever! I also had a not so great pulled pork sandwich that was just pretty blah.

We all started walking around the main drag of the town popping in and out of shops. Some people had some ice cream, nearly everyone went into the toy shop, I had to buy a few things for Clemenza and Tessio are Dead so I went into a Radio Shack and almost got myself kicked out. Simple misunderstanding created by the same product marked with two different prices and I tried to get the lower price on both of them. Granted, it was only fifty cents, but it's the principle. I said something like "I'm sorry to be pain at the end of your day...." and a lady behind the counter, not even the one I was dealing with, said "Well, my day isn't gonna end if people keep asking stupid questions" and I knew that from here on out, she and I were gonna be friends for life. I said nothing because I knew there was no way to salvage this conversation, so I didn't. Until the rest of the company found me and walked in. Then I said "Well, looks like your day just got longer" and I walked out.

The show itself went really well. Lee brought a quality to the performance that can't be matched by any actor unless they have lived as a homeless crack addict. Not to mention, Lee, having lived the story, knew exactly what the subtext was. He brought everything to the performance it would take weeks of rehearsal to get. Shocking, right? Who would ever think that?

We hung out in town until just before midnight when we caught the train back to NYC. I didn't get home until two and I nearly passed out upon entering the door. It was a long day, followed by another long Godlight day.....which will be followed by a couple of long Godlight days this week as well....Hurray tech...

Three Shows, One Me.

2010-11-04T00:18:00.000-04:00

I am now certainly in the thick of it. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I first signed on to be the Production Stage Manager and Production Designer of Clemenza and Tessio Are Dead I was mortified I wouldn't have enough time to commit to fulfilling both roles. That is still a small concern, but not nearly as much as I originally thought. Things are coming together with C&T and its not nearly as complex as I was expecting it to be. It's very straight forward. Simple costumes, (relatively) simple props, simple set. The lights and sound will have to pick up the slack, but I've already selected some gobos that I like, and I'm working on recreating the sound effects from The Godfather on my own so we can use them for the key moments. I have to record one of the actors performing nearly every single line he has because most of them are offstage. Rehearsal props are due next week, so I'll be shopping for them most likely this weekend or early next week to pull together all we need. Other than that, C&T load in is still decently far away that I'm not too concerned.

The land of Godlight is much much different. After attending rehearsals for a week, we have settled on me fulfilling the Production Manager role. So I am the Production Manager of the Drama Desk award winning Godlight Theatre Company! Yahoo! Nothing honestly changes, I'm still doing lots of the stuff I was helping Joe with, I just have a different title this time.

Things are moving forward quickly though. We have had to split the company up into two different productions. I'm now getting a chance to work with the people I didn't get to on some of the older Godlight productions (those who came before I moved to NYC in 2007), and some of those who came after I turned Equity (casts of 1984, In the Heat of the Night). And then there's Lawrence who was in theory around for Slaughterhouse-Five but I never worked with him because he had to drop out. It didn't occur to me until recently that as often as my path with Lawrence has crossed, we actually haven't worked together.

An Impending Rupture of the Belly is different from what we normally do with Godlight in that Rupture isn't actually a novel. It's an actual, real life, normal, no related novel play. Matt Pelfrey, who wrote our adaptation of The Basketball Diaries, also wrote this play about a man who is determined to defend his family against any threat: Thermo-nuclear war, dirty bombs, or his neighbor and his dog. The show opens really quickly. Rehearsals have only been going on for a week or week and a half tops and we open on November 17th (Previews before that I believe).

I've been getting in touch with our Production Designer Maruti Evans (which is no simple task because he is constantly busy) and we've been ironing out some of the details about rentals and things like that with Theatre Row (we requested a bunch of stuff they don't have right now because other shows have claimed the equipment) and on our other production as well...

...which is Grand Central Winter by Sean Tyler (adapted by the memoir by Lee Stringer) moves into the Emelin Theater (OOOO! New Theater Stats to be had next week! YAY!). Lee is a pretty amazing guy. I met him this summer when Sean was in from the UK to work on the show with the company. He has some unbelievable stories to tell about his time living as a homeless crack addict, and apparently he even showed Sean where his old home used to be under the platform on track 109 of Grand Central station (it has since been boarded over). Sean has done a great job taking the story fragments from the memoir and creating one hell of a streamlined story which was so much fun to listen to the other day.

The cast will move go to the Emelin next Thursday (the 11th) and we'll spend the day teching the show, having a dress rehearsal and just hanging out in Mamaroneck. We perform at 8pm and then have a Q&A session with Lee and the company afterwards, and Lee will also do a book signing. I've seen the plans for the Emelin and it looks nice. I haven't done much more research yet, but that is one of my projects in the next couple of days is figure out what's near by the theater so the cast can know what's going to be around there (at least according to google).

A Message to the Voting Populace of this Country

2010-10-29T16:46:00.000-04:00

I try to stay off politics because it's one of those things you don't mention in polite discourse. Especially since this blog was initially intended to travel with me around the country, there's no point in writing a post praising one party and tearing another one down considering I would eventually travel to an opposite colored state. And because my blog was unofficially tied to a company, I didn't want to necessarily connect my opinions to them.

However, I have found something in the past week that is non-partisan that is really starting to get on my nerves. In the past week, I've noticed an increasing amount of people bombing Facebook and other social media outlets requesting me to vote on Tuesday in the mid-term elections. I appreciate the late push to get voters to the polls (regardless of party).

I'm glad so many of my friends are committing to vote through Barack Obama's website (or website with his namesake that isn't officially tied to him...don't know, don't care). But what I don't get, is the need. I don't understand why people need hot button reasons to go vote. "They want to legalize gay marriage, I must go vote!", "They're going to repeal Health Care Reform, and I must go stop this!" Yes, those are great reasons to go out and make your voice heard. But what about just....voting....you know...because the people in elected office influence the way the world around you works. That seems like a good enough reason to me.

I will openly admit (in full midterm electoral disclosure) that during my college years, I did fall off in midterm election of 2002 because I wanted to stay registered to vote in Monroe County to vote for politicians in my home town and I didn't register for an absentee ballot in time. And in 2006 when I went to vote, I forgot I had re-registered in Chautauqua county for the 2004 election and wasn't registered in Monroe anymore. So while technically part of the problem, it isn't because of apathy. It wasn't because my party leaders didn't "energize" me. It's because of voter negligence.

It's not like you don't know an election is coming. It's an even numbered year and November is arriving. If you don't know by that formula, maybe the multitude of political signs in lawns would be a good indicator....the people handing out fliers on the streets....you know...something is bound to have caught your attention....

....maybe its the political campaign ads from Connecticut being run on New York City TV. That one catches my attention each and every time.

I know it's work. I know it's hard to learn about all these people and what the believe in and what they stand for. Put the effort in. This is an important decision even if it's a midterm. And if nothing else, if you want to catch the broad strokes, watch cable news programming. They'll give you a basic idea of what people stand for (by attacking them for one thing or another) and you don't even have to put down the Mallowmars. (For your homework assignment: Watch two hours of CNN/MSNBC and then two hours of Fox News. Write down two stories they cross covered, and then go find the truth yourself between all the rhetoric and spin)

Used to be that 60% of the registered voting population voted in midterm years. Now it's apparently a miracle if 45% makes it out to the polls. How can less than half of the registered voting population care about what happens in our government on any level? That's ridiculous. These people decide your tax rates, governmental benefits (medicaid, unemployment), projects for infrastructure, the military, what supplies your kids will be provided with in school, what side of the street you can park on and when your trash will be picked up. If you think that's not a big deal, wait until you have to go with bi-weekly trash pick up because an elected official is trying to reign in some spending.

This is a non-partisan issue. You need to go out and vote. You shouldn't need to be energized. You should want to participate. You are not too busy to go vote on Tuesday. You are not too cool to be seen voting. You are directly affected by what happens in any election.

Just to put a nugget of knowledge in your head, for the Presidential election in 2008, 62% of eligible voters turned out. In 2009, 85% of Iran voted in their Presidential election. Iran does the democratic process better than we do....unless you include the whole controversy and what not...

So think of it this way, if you go out and vote you are working towards being better than Iran! (just in terms of voting turnout)

My Last Two Musicals

2010-10-15T03:14:00.000-04:00

Theater is always pushing boundaries before other mediums will attempt to do so. Musicals like Rent and Hair were shining bright lights on things society was avoiding and made people stand up and take notice.

For some reason, it’s easier to do these things in theater first vs. television or film. This is not scientific fact...as a matter of fact, it may not even been fact. But for my purposes, I will say it is. (I love how blogging works)

That being said, we might be heading towards a new trend in our entertainment. The show I did right after the TAC tour in April was a musical based around pedophilia... without anyone ever actually committing the act. Every time someone went to do something with a teenager, they were entrapped by a consenting adult. Either way, it takes balls to turn that subject matter into a musical and to do it as well as Danny and Michelle did. I still get the music stuck in my head. I wish the AEA showcase code allowed for recording songs. I would have loved to have that show in my back pocket. Les Sigh. Les weep.

Fast forward to now and Once Removed. This time we aren’t dealing with Mr. Pedo-Bear. Now we’re delving into the wonderful world of incest! It’s not like some of the other pieces dealing with the subject where its brother/sister, father/daughter, and of course mother/son (looking to you Oedipus). This is about cousins but Mini is actually cousins to Jay’s father (Mini and Jay are the relationship) so that makes it less taboo or something? Honestly, I don’t care. The music is really awesome and I really enjoy listening to the cast rehearse. It's amazing the amount of sound they are able to produce.

I now fully expect the next musical I work on will be based on polygamy. I have to go write the next big Broadway smash: Gettin’ Plygy With It!

Ultimately, I'm just happy to be back in a rehearsal room. It's been a long time, and I've missed it. While Anna is sad I'm not waiting for her when she gets home from work, she has noticed I've become much happier since Tuesday when I started rehearsals. My mind was beginning to atrophy theatrically, and this is a nice warm up to the rest of this year where I've crammed myself into 3 productions in two months.

Re-Learn To Fly

2010-10-15T03:02:00.000-04:00

I’ve had a very uneventful few months in the theater. I have really only worked for The Acting Company on their truck as I have mentioned. I had a few things lined up and then all of them flamed out and nothing came of them. Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel. And for me, when it rains it pours.

I am currently sitting in rehearsal for Once Removed (Note: I did actually write this during rehearsal, I'm just getting around to posting it now) a new musical with book by Melissa Bell and music and lyrics by Graham Russell. For those who don’t know, Graham is someone you’ve heard of even if you haven’t registered it. He’s one of the founding members of Air Supply, the Australian soft rock band. I have yet to meet him, but he’s supposed to be in rehearsal tomorrow to hear a read through of the piece. I’m really excited! I love those random celebrity run ins!

I have also reconnected with Joe Tantalo and Godlight to work with them on a few things. I can’t return as my traditional position. Since I’ve turned Equity, I am not allowed to stage manage his productions until he turns the company into an AEA company. Then I can retake my throne. Until then, I’m this sort of strange nebulous undefined role player in the company. Joe and I are trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to do.

Regardless of what my title is, Joe picked up a time slot at Theater Row to produce Rupture which I know literally nothing about. I picked up a bunch of books this summer for Joe’s in the works projects, and Rupture may have been mentioned but it didn’t register. It’s a tight process though. First preview is November 12 and we haven’t begun rehearsing.

In the middle of that, we are also doing the staged reading of Grand Central Winter by Lee Stringer. We are traveling to his hometown to perform at a theater and celebrate the re-release of the book. By the middle, I mean the 11th of November. Which means, odds are Joe, Maruti (Godlight Production Designer) and myself will have to leave the production of Rupture to go work on Winter.

During all of this, I landed a PSM/Production Designer role on Clemenza and Tessio Are Dead, an unauthorized parody of The Godfather. Frank Senger, whom I worked with back in the day (all of two years ago) on Epitaph for George Dillon, posted a job on playbill.com and I responded and away we go.

I am actually quite terrified because I have never been a production designer in my life...well sort of. I was basically production designer for Coffee Shop in college. But that was because I wrote it, and directed it (which I recommend against for EVERYONE AND THEIR MOTHER!) and didn’t want to give up any creative control. I had people do some of the leg work, but I did a whole bunch more than I should have. I should have let some people just do their jobs instead of me doing it for them and saying “Wow, you did a great job.” Cause I bet you they would have done some things better than me.

So that’s what’s going on in the world of theater right now. well....at least my world of theater.

Wedding Database, or How I Became a Dork of Epic Proportions

2010-10-10T01:37:00.001-04:00

As I have mentioned many a time on this blog, Karen turned me onto Filemaker for the Acting Company Tour last season. I have used it for all my shows since then and will be using it for all my shows in the future as well.

As much as I don't want to think of my upcoming wedding as a show...if you think about it...it really is. I just won't be running the show, I'll be onstage performing. I have found myself with a lot of time on my hands recently, and Anna and I keep coming up with things that we should really have a record of. So one night, I decided that I should just make a database for our wedding.

This is the homepage, awash in our wedding colors and one of the photos from our engagement photoshoot. I know....how sweet and sappy. But click on the picture and it opens our wedding website (Which you can see if you click here). I took the basic format loaded in the program for contact information and modified it to our purposes.

Normally there's spots for pictures, email, company, phone numbers and what not. But for our purposes, we don't need to know that stuff. So I've created my own tables to keep track of important wedding information: RSVP, Hotel Needed/Nights needed, Children, etc etc. So that's all well and good, but what if you want to look at all the info together? Well, you're in luck!

Well I've got that figured out too. So when we get to the point of needing all this information at once, we can sort by RSVP and print out the table as needed. We'll be able to count the amount of hotel rooms we need, if they are attending the rehearsal dinner, blah blah blah.

Anna's contribution to the database was requesting that we have a gift registry so we can tell who has given us what. And that basic form I stole from another basic database from Filemaker.

If you look back up at the second picture (the one with all the detailed contact information) there was a check box row similar to the one in this picture, and a "Register Gift" Button. The plan is to be able to go to the details page, click in the box of the type of gift, and then click "Register Gift" to have the information transfer to this page and fill out the Date received, name of the gift giver, and the type of gift. Then the only thing we have to do is enter the actual gift, and where it's from (in case we want to return it....though I can't imagine doing that). Then there's a handy check box to tell us if we've sent out a thank you for the gift yet.

Problem with all that above is getting that goddamn button to work. I've spent more than a few hours trying to get the relationship to work right, and the script to work, but I can't get anything to work. I've tried to research it, and I've sent Karen a "HELP ME...when you get a moment" email but she's in the midst of remounting R+J and I didn't expect a response until she gets a day off.....or until she's on the road and might have time to answer my stupid questions about the database.

On the wedsite, I have a poll asking if making a Wedding Database makes me a dork. The options are "Yes", "No", "That's freaking EPIC", and "Anna, you're marrying him...why exactly?" I uh...I personally chose "That's freaking EPIC!" because it is.

UPDATE: Karen did indeed have to wait until a day off to assist me, though I did technically write a script that technically worked. I wrote a copy paste script to enter the information from the contact detail into the gift registry but the problem was the two forms weren't connected at all like I wanted. It ended up being as simple as deleting one relationship on the relationships table and poof. Everything worked.

I also added an additional bit of dorkiness: On the bottom of the where there's the check boxes for the thank you's....Karen assisted me in writing a conditional format for this box. So now, when I click the entire sequence of boxes ending with "Mailed" it fulfills the conditions and a big red DONE! appears to the right of all the fields. Dorkiness continues to rise and I have just over 200 days to make it dorkier.

Playing Pranks on One's Cat

2010-10-07T05:50:00.001-04:00

It's very simple to play pranks on domestic animals, and most if not all cat owners will do this with their pet. From fake throwing the ball to a dog, or hiding cat nip just out of reach of your cats it's just kinda fun to do and good for you.

Lance (our big cat) has become pretty tweaky lately and startles at just about anything. When we make kissy noises, he starts. When we stand up from the couch he runs away. If I twitch my toes when he's near my feet, he'll do a vertical leap and then run away. I try not to do these things to him on purpose because I'm afraid he'll start pooping or peeing every time he gets scared and I don't think I could deal with the constant clean up.

But today presented itself with too good of an opportunity. Anna's back at some point in the last 48 hours seized up on her and she's been trying to fight it off with a combination of pain killers, heating pads, massages from me (because I'm so nice like that) and I even fished out my Shiatsu Chair Massager I got from my days at the Discovery Channel. I had it all set up in the comfy chair, but Anna decided to stick with the heating pad and the couch.

So as we were watching TV after dinner, we noticed that Lance had gone over to the chair and sat directly on the pad. I started to giggle, and Anna (who sadly has come to realize that this type of giggle means I have just thought of something terrible, awful, or just plain old mean) asked "What the hell just popped into your head?"

"That massager has a vibrating seat pad."

"Oh really?"

"Oh yes indeed."

"You aren't really going to...?"

"Yes, of course I am."

"Ok, if you let me finish, I was going to ask if you were really going to do it without getting it on film"

".....I love you."

So I got my camera out of my backpack and....

He has since forgiven me, and we've had some good cuddling tonight. Besides, he knows I feed him 50% of his meals, so he better get over it.

Road Box Revenge v 2.0

2010-09-29T04:16:00.000-04:00

I do so enjoy my pranks/jokes of Karen. They make me giggle. Minor things like victory in the Blogging Wars. But my coup de grace was Road Box Revenge.

For those too lazy to click the above link, I found an alligator head in a rest stop in Louisiana and I decided to hang it in the road box for Karen to discover because she was mean and claimed the road box as her own property. Here is the aforementioned head hanging in the road box waiting for Karen:

Well over the summer, I went to the zoo in Rochester while I was home visiting family. It was the second zoo I visited as I mentioned going to the Bronx Zoo on vacation during tour last year. But for some reason, I didn't see an alligator at the Bronx Zoo. But there definitely was one in Rochester!

And for my purposes here's what this picture became.

I hung it right on her shelf so it would be the first thing she would see when she opened the box. This is what I have been sitting on for two months. Not nearly as good as the alligator head itself, but I can't help but chuckle.

A Truckin' Adventure (in the Rain)

2010-09-29T04:05:00.000-04:00

In the grand tradition of my last post about the Acting Company, I found myself on the back of the truck again Monday morning to help load in road boxes to the New 42nd Street Studios. Tragically, a relentless downpouring soaking rain found the truck as well.

When last I left the truck, it was packed exactly how I had found it: Set in the back, road boxes in the nose. This was done because I was told the set was going to be delivered to the shop before the road boxes would be delivered to the studio. Well, at some point that plan got changed, but the truck pack didn't.

So when I arrived at the truck around 11am, I discovered Daniel (lighting supervisor from the first tour, and now the do all end all of the company) wanting to bash his head through the side of the truck. I hopped up and we formulated a plan. We started to move the walls and make a hole in which to drive the road boxes through and then down the ramp. We were waiting for the rest of our help to arrive but we made a strategic error. We forgot we were in New York. By the time we realized what was going on, a van had parked behind the truck and we couldn't put our ramp in place. We ended up being able to squeeze it just barely on the driver side of the trailer, but it required a lot more steering than should have been necessary.

With a considerable amount of effort, pushing, pulling, sweating and swearing we managed to fish each box out we needed except for Bunny. Bunny was far too buried and already has a hard time fitting down the ramp in ideal situations. We also left Fred alone not wanting to deal with moving the second balcony piece and honestly, there was no good way to get it off the truck even if we could have freed it from it's prison. We repacked everything much better than it had been and finally sent the truck on it's way to Brooklyn to drop the set off for touch ups, cuts and etc.

I went upstairs to get my bag and saw a couple of the returning cast members. I wanted to hug them, but refrained since I was sopping wet. I also finally got to see my little surprise for Karen in the road box for the first time in two months. I will post a quicky blog about that later.

Ian had asked me to come back to the office, and Daniel and I trudged through the rain back to 9th ave. We were then offered lunch for our services and Daniel and I sat around waxing about the set and what worked, what didn't work, safety concerns, how it was assembled and taken apart last year, ideas on how to save room in the truck, etc etc.

I had a train to catch because I was heading out to Long Island proper to drive Anna home from a long day of work, so I caught the last off peak train before rush hour and took a nice relatively empty train car ride to Westbury. Upon my arrival, I got in the car and the first thing Anna said to me might have been "Dude, you frickin' stink." It had occurred to me to bring a change of clothes and I had done so already. I didn't bring another under shirt. It was soaked through with rain and sweat. And I had warmed it up with body heat. I took it off and put it in my backpack.

We immediately detoured to Target to buy a spray deodorant (Thank you Old Spice) to try to combat the smell. Like I said, I couldn't smell it until I returned to the car and realized I had really stunk the place up. Maybe the train ride wasn't so empty, maybe I just stunk so much that people just avoided my area....But at least I sat near the bathroom on the train. Maybe they all thought it was the crapper, and not me.

The Forest Hills Macroburst

2010-09-22T04:00:00.000-04:00

There was something markedly different about the warning I got on my weatherbug app last Thursday. Call it a feeling or whatever, but I had this sense of "uh oh..." was coming. I ignored it thinking there's no way something that terrible could be on its way.

But I decided to ignore my gut....until the electricity started to flicker. The combination of the weather warning, the power and my gut finally got me off my butt to close the windows. As soon as I stood up from the chair to start locking down my apartment, the rain started to pound down in sheets. It was the most intense storm I had ever seen in my entire life. I couldn't see anything out my window, literally. Visibility was zero. The wind was howling against the building, my cats were freaking out. Bad bad deal man.

Once the storm had passed I checked the radar on my phone and saw this whole thing was moving in a straight line across Long Island. I sent Anna a text asking where she was and what she was doing. She was staying late after school for set crew. When I got a hold of her she was just leaving school. I told her that there was a gigantic storm coming her way. She then clicked over to Rachel (coworker) who lives in Bayside and Rachel told her there was a big storm coming her way. Anna had just turned onto the road when the rain started and she turned right back around into the parking lot.

I stayed on the phone with her for the length of the storm and she hung up to drive home. I went outside to see what I could see. First thing I saw were my garbage cans littered throughout the front yard, driveway and street. I collected them and put them back along the side of the house. That's when I noticed a very healthy looking Christmas Tree across the street. But it isn't Christmas time. Not even retail stores can get away with Christmas right now. Thanksgiving, sure. Christmas? Me no think so.

I actually had a really hard time trying to figure out where the hell this came from. Because one wouldn't necessarily conceive that the top of a tree had been ripped off the tree itself and thrown across the street. But that's indeed what had happened. I didn't figure it out until the owner of the Saab that almost had the tree embedded into his trunk pointed up at the top of the tree. Not only that but the tree had actually done a flip or two in the air because the end that was broken off was facing the other way from the tree. When I looked further down the street, I noticed that a tree was uprooted and laying on an apartment building. That's when it started to really sink in that something other than just some crazy rain storm had passed through here.

I was waiting for almost two hours for Anna to get home. 35 minutes of which were spent in the final mile on Queens Blvd. She finally got home and told me the amount of damage that was done. She said driving home was like driving on bed of leaves, and branches. We decided to walk around and see what else had happened.

We first hopped over the rail road tracks because we had heard that the otherside got nailed pretty hard and was powerless. The first thing we saw when we crossed were the two trees that were blocking off the road making it basically inaccessible. That and the fire leaking out of a downed powerline.

We started to walk down towards the park on Queens Blvd because that's where the most noticeable damage had been done. When we got to 67th Drive...

So just in case we aren't following, this would be a truck cleaved in half by a tree that spans one side of the road to the other. It's at this point you know something huge has happened. Not because you see the destruction. Nope, not that. The real reason you can tell something huge happened is life long New Yorkers are out on the street standing around, talking to everyone that walks past, and taking pictures.

We finally made it to the park after walking down the middle of Yellowstone Blvd (which should not be possible by the way because that is one busy street). We saw some crazy things like the top of an air conditioning system planted into a fence, a couch that broke another fence, a cinder block wall toppled....

The park is utterly destroyed. That panoramic shot at the top of this post that looks like a war zone? That's the park. That's not what that park normally looks like. It had a very lush canopy, but now it's a series of twigs.

Uh....trees aren't supposed to look like that.

It was getting late and Anna and I hadn't eaten yet, so we walked back towards our apartment and we saw probably the craziest thing we saw during this entire thing

That would be a steel garage door torn off the tracks with a gigantic hole punched in it. Yup, that's some crazy force that could do that.

It had occurred to me that we were really really lucky. Had the wind been blowing in a different direction, that 12 foot Christmas tree would have planted itself into my kitchen. We also didn't have any power loss, and the worse that happened was our apartment got a little wet, and the lawn furniture tried to fly over the fence and onto the railroad tracks, but it didn't make it. Since it was such an emotional night, it was really hard to see the entire storm as a whole, so the next day before I took a train out to Farmingdale, I walked around to see exactly what happened.

You could start to piece together exactly the path of the heart of the macroburst took. It basically followed the path of Yellowstone down to the park, and destroyed the Northern side of Queens Blvd. Nearly every side street on the north side had a tree blocking the road. Anna discovered that when she tried to get to work the next morning and couldn't find a way to the Grand Central and had to backtrack to the L.I.E. instead. But just like an actual tornado, the macroburst was really selective in it's path of destruction. Yes, lots of trees got uprooted or snapped off at the base, but as you can see:

That garage door I showed you earlier is in a direct line to that empty swath of trees. There was also a line of four trees on Yellowstone uprooted and all laying facing the same direction in direct line with this spot in the park. Simply a ridiculous amount of power.

Most of the clean up focus has been put to the northern side of Queens Blvd because that's where all the entrances and exits to the parkways and highways are. Until today (Tuesday September 21), that tree that was blocking the entire street and crushed that truck in half was still in the road. Yellowstone still had trees down on the side of the road and some sidewalks are still inaccessible. Every morning I wake up to the sound of distant and close chainsaws lopping trees apart to try to clear the mess, but there's a lot to clean up and who knows how long it will last.

It really was a miracle that only one person was killed in this storm. With the amount of pedestrians and drivers in New York it's really a shock. The woman that died when a tree fell on her car died 10 blocks from me. She died on the off ramp Anna and I take every time we come home from her parents house.

But this city is awesome and resilient. Less than 24 hours after the storm swept through and caused all this damage, and destroyed my park...

There they were, back in the park, playing chess on a table that had been choked by branches the night before.

P.S.- Here's a different panoramic I hacked together from my actual camera the morning after the storm just so you can get a better idea.

Unemployment....or How I Lose the Desire to Blog When I Have Nothing Cool Happening in my Life....Like Work

2010-09-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

The horrible thing about keeping a blog regarding your life in the theater is if you are not currently employed in the theater....you find it harder to write about it.

C'est la vie. I won't say things are necessarily looking up on the job front, because while there are jobs available out there, there aren't jobs that are good enough to work on right now. There are jobs that expect an Equity Stage Manager to accept for stipends less than $100 for 2 months worth of work...and rehearse for 5-6 days a week. They also expect you to run both lights and sound, and wrangle a cast of 12 by yourself. There were days I would do that when I first moved. I can't do those anymore. So while it seems in my own head like this is the longest two months EVER I know it's just because I'm becoming far more finicky about what I chose to do.

I am developing some things with Joe and Godlight again. He's working on a whole bunch of stuff and I'm more than happy to continue my relationship with Joe. There's also some discussion of a production of another script that was rejected by 59E59 Theaters in another venue, but I haven't heard anything more about that in a while.

I'm also getting my feet wet in directing, and in talks to work as a PSM/AD for a production for a friend of mine from the Epitaph For George Dillon days when I first moved to NYC. But I don't know a whole lot more than that right now. He just got a cast together and we'll be meeting sometime soon.

Regarding other topics usually covered on my blog: I hate the Buffalo Bills. I love them, but I hate them too. I would love them more if they fired Captain Checkdown and got a real quarterback. After watching Michael Vick for the Eagles last night, I wish oh wish Dick Jauron hadn't been a total failure and secured him upon his release from jail. He out rushed both running backs for Buffalo in just one half, and nearly threw for more yards than the Bills gained on offense. *sigh* 16 more weeks of futility.

Anna and I had our first pre-Cana meeting today and I didn't necessarily burst into flames while being lectured about the sanctity of marriage. I did have to switch to autopilot once or twice to make sure I didn't get too riled up about anything, but I was a good little boy and behaved myself...I was also in front of the room right near the priest so I feel as though lashing out would have been frowned upon.

We were grouped with the other "problem" children as I am calling ourselves because our schedules were supposed to be the hardest to work around. Two ladies are engaged to police officers, another woman's fiance wasn't there for some reason, and the other couple is getting married in like...3 weeks. It would have been awful amounts of fun if I was actually working to say to all of them, "So, Monday is the only day I'm available. How does Monday work for you?" I actually felt very good about not being the schedule trip up like I usually am. I also found it rather amusing that we were grouped with a training pre-Cana couple (already married and going to be running their own pre-Cana group) and they were nearly throwing wrenches in the works for our pre-Cana scheduling. Ours. Not yours. You've already done it. Bad married couple, BAD! You had your turn!

The next thing, I hesitate to bring up because I don't want to anger the Droid Gods by blogging bad things on their creator's blogging service but f*** it, and f*** them. My Droid X has been giving me nothing but goddamn problems since the beginning of August. It started off working great! And then it started to lag when I clicked on things, it would take a while to load messages and things of that nature. So I went to Verizon and they said they would have to give my phone a hard reset. I, having just spent $7 on an application, asked if I would be able to recover my app. They said no. I said, Go to hell, and they said we'll work something out...meaning they'd find a way to save my app. After the tech downloaded something to my phone (without permission or telling me what it was or how it worked) they backed up all my data, and reset my phone.

And it worked great!

For another 3 days.

Then it started to power cycle, over heat and drain the battery in a few hours on top of not working properly in the exact same manner as before. I went back to Verizon, got the same tech who worked on my phone before and said the same thing was happening but this time, it's over heating. She said she would have Verizon mail me a new phone because they didn't have any in stock.

Well by new, she meant refurb. Because when I got the box it said "LIKE NEW" on the front. Well this one worked for a grand total of a day. Because after that day, the same thing started to happen again. Over heating, power cycling, draining the battery, lagging, took forever to load my messages. I called Verizon this time because I'm over dealing with instore customer service at this point. They say to hard reset the phone.....seriously? Ok fine, I hard reset the phone. It worked fine......

....For another day.

This time, I finally realized what the issue was. I loaded the motorola facebook app onto the phone so I could have pictures with my contacts. That apparently makes the phone go poof. I even did that before I loaded the 3rd party facebook app. So there wasn't any conflict what so ever. So the facebook app that comes preinstalled on the phone causes the phone to blow up....ummmm.....

I am currently waiting for the 3rd phone in a month. Well, it might now reach over a month because Verizon in all their infinite wisdom doesn't ask where they mail phones to. At least not on the phone. If you're in a store, they ask you where to ship it..especially if you are in a store in Queens and the address on file is some town they never heard of. So the Verizon Call Center mailed the phone to my Dad. Cool. Dad had to forward it to me and Verizon won't pay him back because they think it's our fault that it was sent there in the first place.

Part of me almost hopes this new phone will die too. So I can return it and raise holy goddamn hell at the Verizon Store and make them bend over backwards to appease me, their pissed off customer with a legit gripe. If you get mad enough about a legit enough problem, Verizon does a lot to make sure you are happy so you don't go elsewhere and you don't go onto a blog and tell everyone about it.....

....oops.

Oh I just Can't Quit You!

2010-07-30T01:46:00.000-04:00

As you may have noticed, I worked for The Acting Company for a couple of years....If you look at the "tags" menu on the right hand side of this, TAC is one of my most oft used tags because I started this thing while working on the road for the company.

But as I mentioned after Philadelphia this year, I have bid farewell to the road life of the Acting Company. It's too stressful planning a wedding to even think about being gone until a week before the event....even just typing that gave me hives.....

I was surprised while I was rehearsing for Summer Stock NYC to be contacted by Scott, TAC's Production Manager. Evidently, there were plans to go up to Wappinger Falls to organize and trash some stuff on the truck and it required someone who knew the truck pack. Well....I certainly qualify. And everyone who would know the pack (and still somewhat employed by the company) is out of town I was the next logical choice.

There was some back and forth about when and what not, but it was decided that this past Wednesday was the day to head up on the Metro North and go to our storage unit and do some "spring" cleaning.

Unfortunately, the train ride up to Wappinger Falls was early mcearly. Like get up at 6am to shower and leave the apartment to catch a train no later than 6:45am to get to Grand Central in time for a 7:38am train early. I hate 6am. The only time I like seeing 6am, is if I'm up before it and have been up for many hours leading up to it. And since I had ended my show on Friday, I haven't been going to bed at normal human being like hours. I've been averaging bed time at 3am. Which was the time I fell asleep before getting up at 6am because that's when my body was tired enough to crash.

The train ride up was beautiful. I forgot how awesome it was to take the Metro North up the Hudson. Last time I did that was when I was apartment hunting for the first time in NYC and was commuting in from SUNY-Purchase. And usually I was far too tired and worried to pay attention. I found Scott on the train and sat next to him. We spoke about the company and some of the pitfalls and traps of last year. We discussed the line up of cast and crew and what changes were under way. I might have found them a costume supervisor for the road (who knows!), but overall it was a great trip.

It wasn't until I was on the train that I realized I hadn't actually sat down and had a conversation with Scott like....ever. We had quick snippets of things regarding the show during the tour last year, and we had the post mortem in Nancy's office but that was mainly me talking about my experiences and wasn't so much a dialogue. It's weird because of his position and hearing things via emails, or directives (ie- No we can't do that because Scott wants us to try this, or Yes, Scott likes it so lets make it happen that way) so I felt like I was talking to him all the time but never actually had a conversation with him.

We arrived at the storage place around 9:30am. And the truck wasn't there....if it were a show day this would be a huge issue. But it wasn't such a big deal on the unload the truck to remove some things and repack it day. The truck eventually showed up and Scott, myself, Nancy's son, and his friend all got to work unloading the truck to get to the road boxes. Immediately, we cut the Moby box from the truck. It was poorly built (it doesn't even have hinged doors. It's flat panels held on by coffin locks), and very oddly shaped. It's long and thin and really doesn't fit in well with the matching sized boxes we have. So long Moby!

We also decided that despite our wanting to destroy the two road boxes we gained from Spoon Group last season (that don't actually belong to the company....), we were going to keep them as spare storage of Comedy of Error props. They ultimately don't take up much room, and it's nice to know there are two totally empty boxes that can be used for anything that pops up should they be needed. If not, they'll just stay on the truck like they did last year and Karen will curse loudly every load out.

We were also going to get rid of the cornice pieces (hate those things) but sadly a well timed call by Ian prevented this and we had to load the damn things back onto the road boxes in the back.

By losing Moby, it actually greatly impacted the ways I could repack the truck. Moby fulfilled a wonderful purpose, it ended up filling in all the holes created by the random one or two oddly shaped boxes perfectly. By cutting it, I started to run into some annoying "air" issues. Air is good for breathing, not in a truck. For the purposes of what we were trying to do, it didn't have to be perfect. it just had to travel without being destroyed. So despite how damned ugly the pack is, it's all done and ready to go to Brooklyn for touch ups.

Following a lunch break, we bid the truck a fond farewell and we went to the storage bays the Acting Company has. It was one hell of a nostalgic trip. As soon as I walked into the room where our storage was, I was immediately met with the Henry V set. I saw the sliding doors, the ladder, and the goddamn track...... and I also found the elusive missing numbers in our road box set. The boxes are numbered but for some reason the ones we take on the road aren't numbered in any sort of discernible pattern. So you might have 6, and 7, but there is no 8, 9, 10, or 11 box. I think 12 is sound, I know 16 is SM, the TD box I believe is 15, sound might be 13, but I don't think I've ever seen a 14. Well, now I know where 2 and 3 are! In the basement at Wappinger Falls!

The basement that is dusty! Everything you moved kicked up another decade worth of dust. Some of it was saw dust, some of it was just plain old dust. Dirty stuff! I was really glad I had my truck gloves with me. I can only imagine what my hands would have looked like without it.

We spent the next hour or so cleaning up and throwing away things that weren't needed anymore or were far too specific of a prop.... props like.....

Richard Rawlings!!!! As soon as I saw him, and I heard he was being tossed, part of me did a happy dance! Don't get me wrong, he's a fantastic prop. And he's beautifully made too. But Jesus H. Christ was he a pain in the ass! He was attached to a stretcher, so every time we loaded and unloaded him from Bunny it was an ordeal. Every space required a Rawlings test conducted by Daphne and myself trying to figure out how exactly we could maneuver him throughout the stage. I will admit, I did feel a sad twinge in my heart when I saw him face down on the loading dock covered by old mattresses and sheets, and some old costumes with only his boots sticking out....Cause we did endow him with so much life even though he was a dead man. God rest ye, Richard!

I have also discovered where all the furniture/carpet dolly's the company owns were last year. In the basement at Wappinger Falls! Of course, I didn't notice that they were down there until after the truck was gone. I hadn't gone downstairs until that time. I saw them and said "Well damn, those would be good to have on the truck." And Scott was like "What?" "The dolly's" "Well, you should have mentioned that 30 minutes ago!" "I didn't know they were down here!!!" But it's not a huge deal. Honestly, the company's dolly's get in the way. They aren't big enough to hold a lot of scenery, and they usually cause anything you are transporting on it to bottom out on the ramp. We did just find without them this year, I'm sure they'll survive without them next year......and if they can't they at least know where they are now.

So we finished purging some stuff (leaving all the Henry V stuff just in case) and were all done...except we were supposed to save all the Henry V stuff, and I looked at Moby really quick before we called it a day and realized that the box of tennis balls and the Eastcheapers luggage crate were still in there. I mentioned it to Scott and he was like "Well this is another thing we probably should have figured out a while ago, huh?" "Yeah, but I forgot they were up there. Don't worry, I'll just run them back downstairs"

So I threw the two boxes onto a cart and was wheeling it back downstairs. This wasn't a real cart mind you, this was something that looked like a rolling stair case but had only two stairs on it. So the top of the unit was at my knee caps. It has really loose casters and I thought I had cleared a gigantic steel framed platform with the corner of the cart...the searing pain in my knee as I type this as it remembers the story should tell you that I did not clear the corner of the platform....nor did the corner of the "stair" part of the cart clear my knee. Nope, it plowed right into both of them. The other gentlemen were kind enough to wheel the cart back upstairs while I gimped my way back to the loading dock.

It was much quicker than I thought the day was going to go. I was expecting to be there until like 5 or 6pm. We were done working by 2, and were on a train back to New York by 3pm. It was, again, a nice train ride back. Though it was much harder to stay awake for this one. Having only slept 3 hours, working like crazy on the truck and in a basement for 5 hours, and then finally being in a comfortably air conditioned car meant it was nap time....sorta. I don't actually sleep on public transportation, I just sit there and fight it off and make myself miserable.

I was back in Queens by 5:30pm. Not bad for a days work. I hopped in the shower and I figured out exactly how dirty Wappinger Falls really was. I had showered less than 12 hours ago. I had washed my face with a deep cleansing face wash less than 12 hours ago. When I put the stuff back on my face: Instant burn. I sat there feeling my pores get assaulted by the face wash and it was simultaneously awesome, and disgusting....and very refreshing!

It was a fun day. It was nice to see the truck again, and the R+J set. It was really cool to see Henry stacked neatly in a pile, and to bid farewell to Richard....

...But really it was nice because I got to spent some quality time with my road box one last time. And I got to leave Karen a surprise. And I get to torture Karen with it for two months (at least). That is if she stoops to my level of maturity and takes my bait....

.....here kitty, kitty, kitty....

Out of my element Review: Droid X

2010-07-27T03:55:00.000-04:00

I said it when I reviewed iOS4, reviews really aren't my thing. However, I feel as though I should take another crack at it and see if my twisted sense of reality can bring some fun and excitement to the technology reviewing blogs of the world.

So as I mentioned in my previous post: I am now the proud owner of a Droid X. So here is the second in what I'm sure will be a continuing series of Out of My Element Reviews. And just as a note: Because I own the iPod Touch, and have just jumped from Blackberry and have never owned a Droid before, there will be lots of comparisons to those vs. previous incarnations of the Android OS. Fair or not, I have a pretty damn good cross section of technology going on I can draw from.

On first glance, the Droid X is huge. By Huge, I mean the first time I held the thing, I immediately thought "Umm...crap. I don't know if I can even use this thing." But that feeling passes. Granted, one of my hobbies is palming people's faces and I usually am able to cover at least 3/4 of their face, so I really had no true worry. I knew I was going to be able to hold and operate the phone with general ease. But still....I mean look at this:

The only reason my touch looks like it can compare in size is because I have the old school plug attached to it. I did take a funny sort of picture that makes it look like I actually have an iPhone 4:

Just that little bit of extra depth makes it look a little bit like the outside of the new iPhone. But only just a little, and I'm tired and I'm sure that my mind is playing tricks on me.

Anyway.....

One thing that is noticeable right away are the physical buttons along the bottom edge of the phone. They are the quick links to open the menu function, home page (and a double click of the home button can performed a specific user desired task (like open your universal inbox), a back button and a search button. The first three work like a charm, the search button leaves me with something to be desired. It's very encompassing and by this, I mean it doesn't just locally search your phone. If I type in "Home" it shows me all my contacts labeled with Home, but also brings up home depot, and home goods for a google search. Nice idea in theory, but not what I want. There are widgets that allow me to google search. I would like it to just be localized to my device. Or if you're going to perform the find in this manner, how about a feature like the Mac OS spotlight function: Give me the top hits in each category "Contacts" "Web" "Pictures" etc. That would make this more user friendly to me, and not require me to scan through a whole bunch of stuff I don't really care about.

On top of the phone is the lock button. It is in the perfect location for a phone of this size. I feel like if it was off center like on the iPod Touch or iPhone it would actually make it harder to use. Having it in the middle allows those with big hands and long fingers to execute the lock easily with one hand, and if you have to use two hands, your index finger should be able to easily find the lock.

Along the right hand side are the volume control buttons. Simple enough. Press up when you're on the home page and the volume goes up. Down, and the volume goes down. The reason I mention on the home page is because the Droid allows you to change the Media Volume if you are in the middle of playing a game or listening to music or watching a movie independent of the ringer volume. Nice touch, Droid!

The screen quality is really fantastic. It's really crisp and clear so long as you have the backlight set appropriately for your surroundings. The auto bright function doesn't seem to work as well as it did on my Blackberry, but I can still notice the difference when it kicks into high gear. I think it has something to do with the battery profile I have selected in general which is designed to save the battery. Going really bright, and saving the battery are contradictions and therefore, the Droid creates a little black hole every time this conflict comes up. Me and my Droid are destroying distant galaxies! Muwhawhahahahahaha!

Along the top of the screen is a menu bar which holds all the usual fanfare of a phone (message indicators, network, battery life, time...). Tap, hold and flick it to the bottom and all of your notifications are laid out in front of you. You can easily clear them all as read by tapping the Clear button, or you can go through and tap each section to go to your facebook, twitter, texts, or emails.

Droid comes equipped with 7 fully customizable home screens. You can add widgets, or shortcuts to programs on any of the 7 pages. Some of the widgets are truly helpful, some are practical and others are just damned pointless....you know....widgets! So far, I have discovered the most useful widgets are things that control settings. for instance on one of the predesigned homepages has widgets to turn on wi-fi, bluetooth, gps, and airplane mode. If you were to go through the settings menu, it would take so much longer than "flick-flick, tap." Also, there is a similar widget bar that controls wi-fi, bluetooth, and gps, but it also controls the push refresh (for things like twitter) and also a brightness control which is very helpful when you have your phone set to be on battery saver and the screen is too dark to read in the New York City blazing sunshine. Couple of taps, and you are bright enough to read in direct sunlight.

Speaking of the battery, I will say that without the proper knowledge battery life on the Droid X will be crappy upon crappy upon sh**ty upon crappy. The Droid OS works like a mac. Just because you click on the X in the corner doesn't mean the program is turned off. Just that window is closed but the program is still going. Same thing on the Droid. Apps run. And they run. And they Ruuuuun. First thing you need to do as a new Droid owner, go to the market and download an app killer. There are plenty of free ones. I personally downloaded the Advanced Task Killer Free and it has saved me from having to recharge my phone in the middle of the day. One of the things that really leads to depleted battery life, when you open an app....lets say text messages. Not only does your texts inbox come up, but any app associated with text messages comes up too, like voice command. You don't necessarily need that open, so you click on the app killer widget on your homepage and it will kill the apps you've selected it to kill each time you press it.

Also regarding the battery, recharge time is sorta night and day. On the wall adapter, recharge takes about an hour and a half tops from a dead phone to fully ready to go. You can take that time and double it if you're charging off a laptop (which I tend to have to do often in my line of work). I would love to see that time on a laptop charge get better, but if I'm charging it at a rehearsal odds are I'm going to be sitting down for at least 3 hours anyway.

I was very pleased to discover that the GPS on this phone actually works unlike on the blackberry where I was always given my general location within 600 meters if I was lucky. This is fine in New York City in general, because it's really hard to not know where you are. There are street signs all over the place and hints to which direction you're pointing all the time. On tour, this sucks ass. Now if I'm somewhere I don't know, I will actually know which direction I'm pointing and where exactly I am instead of inside the blue circle!

Ok, what's the primary function of a phone? Make phone calls (we can ignore all you who screamed "Texting! Tweeting! Sexting!" because you are wrong....well sorta wrong). As I mentioned in my previous post, I hated making calls on my blackberry because the sound quality was so terrible. Night and freaking day! The sound quality on the Droid is fantastic. I'd wager a bet this is the best sound quality I have had on a cell phone ever. One major perk is the placement of the microphone on the face of the phone itself and not underneath like on my Blackberry Curve. On the Curve, anytime there was a slight breeze, it would sound like a tornado was ripping through the area I was making my call. My first call on the Droid was to my Dad and it was gusting about 10-15miles an hour as I was walking back. Not once did I hear the wind whip into the phone. It was a miracle!

So now, as high and mighty as I am on my new phone, there are some things that I am not such a fan of. I've already mentioned the search and I'm going to expand on that a little bit. I really really like the way the Blackberry separates it's inbox. Each message is boxed in (if you have it set that way), and they are separated by date. So I can quickly press a button and skip to the next days or previous days messages. Also, its a local search so if I perform a search for "Skylar" it will look in the expressed parameters of my search for "Skylar" and return any relevant results. The Droid's inbox is far more similar to the iOS than the Blackberry. Messages are separated by lines, with the name of the sender in big bold letters and a time stamp. However, the iOS has a "Search inbox" bar right in the message window. So sadly, Droid ranks #3 out of 3 for inbox functionality for me.

Google Market is ever expanding, but it's got one hell of an uphill climb to compete with Apples App store. There are certainly free apps that are cool and useful for Droid but iOS has basically everything by everyone already. If you want the Chase bank app, iOS has it. If you want the app from Allrecipes.com, App Store has that, not the Market place. However, I have found a couple little nuggets of awesome that makes me really ok with the more limited selection of things. I love the dice game zilch and I found a free version that is excellent on the Marketplace, and I would have to pay a dollar at the App store. There are also lots of excellent Google Labs items like Goggles (yes I meant goggles, I didn't misspell google) which allow you to take a picture of barcodes, landmarks, items, etc etc and it will perform a google image search and return you some pretty accurate results.

Best app I've found so far is "Where's My Droid" which is great for those working in theater. As theater folk, we often have to have our phones on silent, and much like normal folk, we are likely to leave it somewhere and not be able to find it. Well it's hard to call a phone that's on silent because that does you no good. This app will recognize a text message phrase you send your phone from any friends phone, and will immediately turn your ringer on, and start ringing until you find it. So damn cool!

Ultimately, I'd like to call the apps a push between Droid and Apple but if you made me chose, Apple wins because everyone has developed an iPhone app already and are just getting around to the Droid.

Another drawback I've discovered to the Droid is the push notifications. Despite my Blackberry eating my messages every once and a while, the push notifications were near instantaneous. My yahoo account registered a new email, a few seconds later my Blackberry did too. The droid has a lag of about 2 minutes at best and a nearly 10 minutes at worst. Then again, sometimes it works just as well as the blackberry, so it's hard to know what exactly is the cause of that. Also, if I have my laptop up and running and it gets the email before the Droid does, my droid won't even give me the message received sound. It doesn't even let me know I got a message. No big deal right? Well if I'm away from my computer, this is a problem because I won't know I got a message. I can't compare it to the iOS because my iPod touch connects via wi-fi....so it's cheating.

I'm sure out there somewhere is a program dedicated to the Droid and the Mac OS, but I haven't really had time to look for it yet. Basically, there is no back up for all the gadgets and crap I've downloaded right now. If something happens, I have to start over with everything. Like I said, I'm sure the answer is actually staring me in the face and I just haven't noticed it yet.

The last "big" complaint I have is actually rather petty but it's still annoying the living hell out of me. Because of a snafu at Verizon when I was purchasing the phone, I had to steal my Dad's early upgrade (as my step-mother stole mine....we're a lovely pack of vultures that way!). Because it was off his line, I had to take his phone number for about 2 minutes before they could transfer it over to my line. I had to register my google account and when they did, my "This is Me" name card was created, but it took my Dad's information because I had my Dad's info in my google account and it found the phone number and finished the rest of it by itself. Now my phone thinks I'm my Dad sorta. That first phone call I made? When I called him it said "Dialing Myself." Droid does not allow you to remove information from your profile card. You can only add to it. I'm thinking about going back to verizon and having them blow my phone away and start over just so I don't have to deal with it anymore.

So I know it sounds like I'm complaining a lot, but that's really not the case. I really do adore this phone. It's nearly perfect in every way for me. Even the size of it seems to fit me well. Though I will say it makes me feel like I'm playing with a kids toy every time I pick up my iPod Touch now. I have too much music and I spent too much money on the Touch to retire that from my life, so I will continue to be "that guy" and have an iPod and a phone capable of performing all of the iPod's functions.

Overall, very pleased. I am happy to have switched off my blackberry. I won't say I'm not going to go back to Blackberry ever, but they aren't really focusing on regular consumers and are focusing more on corporate clients. And I don't fit into that mold very well....or...at...all...... The only question left for me: Will I make the jump eventually, or has Steve Jobs lost my iPhone purchase forever? That remains to be seen, but Android is making a really good case to continue to see what Droid Does in the future.

Verizon Droid X vs. The Mythical Verizon iPhone

2010-07-27T02:31:00.005-04:00

I have wanted an iPhone for a very very long time. I have dedicated many a facebook update, tweets, and a blog post to how badly I wanted an iPhone. One very major reason I wanted an iPhone was because my blackberry has been dying a slow and painful death for at least the last 6 months, probably longer. I have had nothing but issues with the trackball since day one (lord help the person who has the slightest bit of grime on their fingers and touches that trackball....it will lock up and render your device worthless), the internet is slow (I blame the RIM people on that one), the apps they have are extraordinarily terrible, but above all else: The phone itself couldn't make phone calls inside anymore. I was hearing distortions and drop outs every time I made a call from inside, and it really got bad when I started to hear them outside too.
It was obvious that I needed to put a fork in the blackberry. I was over due for an upgrade with Verizon but I was waiting for June to hear what Steve Jobs would be saying at his mid year conference (the one usually dedicated to updates or upgrades to the iPhone). I could wait that long certainly. I had already waited for an additional 4 months after I was eligible for my upgrade, what's another 2 weeks?

What really set the wheels turning was during Cloaked I received a voice mail at 11:47pm after a show one night. And I saw it was from one of my actors. I thought to myself "Well crap, she obviously forgot something at the theater....Thankfully I am still out and about with some of the staff of the show, and I can go back and let her in. No big deal." So I listened to the voice mail and it turns out it was her telling me she was running late and would be there as soon as possible....

...Wow....what a thoughtful person. She knew nearly 21 hours in advance she was running late......or my phone decided to give me the message now and not in a timely manner. I looked back through my history and saw no missed phone call from her. My blackberry ate the phone call and the message.

Little factoid about stage managers: We kinda need to know what's going on all of the time. It's very helpful to know where a cast member is 30 minutes before show time. It's just a thing with us. And if my phone isn't fulfilling that function anymore.....we have a problem.

So I was still holding out hope against hope that the announcement was coming....an iPhone for Verizon. When the "big surprise" release of the iPhone 4 (wow....who saw that one coming...) happened, and no mention of Verizon (barring a heckler at the event making fun of the lack of connectivity on AT&T to the interwebs) it became a game of pining. I pine for the iPhone on Verizon, but it's just not happening.

Of course immediately following the June thingy with Apple, the rumors started to fly about a Verizon iPhone in September being announced for sale at Christmas time. Or in January of 2011. Or next spring. Little note on that: The dude that predicted this for Bloomberg news has made these claims before. And he's been wrong. Stop thinking it's going to happen. My philosophy on predicting the iPhone on Verizon goes like this: Until Steve Jobs says "We are bringing the iPhone to Verizon" it's an unfounded rumor and I won't believe it.

That being said, I still had every intention on waiting for the iPhone announcement in September, and if it didn't happen then I was going to upgrade my phone and be happy with it. Besides, its not like Apple would enter a 6 month agreement with Verizon and I would be screwed because I was in a 2 year contract.

The straw that broke my iPhone on Verizon pining back was the "death grip" rumors and confirmation from Apple. They built a phone that is faulty in enough cases that if you hold it wrong, you lose reception. Um, fail. Epic Fail. And Epic Horrible Response too.

Between the "death grip", the response, and Parlato's blog post confirming everything I had been thinking, I walked my ass to a verizon store and began looking into the Android phones. The one I was planning on upgrading to in January/February originally before the iPhone rumors began to be screamed from the highest mountain by everyone...except the one person who counts.

I am very content with my purchase of the Droid X, and I will be posting a full review of my experiences with it shortly as well. And while part of me knows now that I'm tied into my contract with the droid for 2 years, the iPhone will be announced and released sometime in the next calendar year because that's just how this works with me. However, with the design flaw they have right now I think I'm really ok letting a generation or two go by before I jump to the iPhone on Verizon. Figure out all the kinks and issues before I spend my money on something I can barely use.

Droid X review is on it's way!

Theater Stats: CUNY-Hunter: The Danny Kaye Playhouse

2010-07-27T02:08:00.000-04:00

Name: The Danny Kaye Playhouse at CUNY-Hunter
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: ~750

Following our run at Pace University, we moved uptown to CUNY-Hunter and into the Danny Kaye. The Kaye Playhouse is not nearly as wide as the stage at Pace, but we gained an additional 4 feet in depth. So we had to have a full spacing rehearsal on Tuesday to fix the big numbers and walk through all the solos and duets to make sure there were no issues.

Once that was over, we reopened that night. This time the band fit Stage Right, and Stage left had little wing space. So much less that we had to keep playing tetris with our rehearsal blocks and ballet bars to keep fire exits clear. But once we figured that out and marked out the floor, it was a piece of cake.

Originally when we were scoping out the Kaye, we had a horrible realization that the cast would have to cross under the stage instead of doing the traditional backstage cross over because our projections were going to be in the way. However, harkening back to old school ECW days (wrestling, don't worry if you don't get the reference) we stacked 3 folding tables on top of each other and our projectors rested on those. This made them high enough to clear the walk way beneath and allowed the cast to cross freely from SL to SR during performances.

The Kaye is an expansive backstage area. The dressing rooms are located...well kinda every where off Stage right. On the stage level are two star dressing rooms (dedicated to wardrobe quick change items/props and the production office for us), downstairs we housed our male ensemble, up one flight were our leading ladies split into two dressing rooms, and the female ensemble next door to them. Up one more flight was the wardrobe room proper (laundry machines, sewing supplies, irons, steamers that sort of thing).

In order to call preshow times at Hunter required one of two things: Two interns to divide and conquer the task, or me escaping from the backstage hub bub and going up to the booth where I had an intercom mic that I could page the dressing rooms with. Each day basically resulted in me doing both. For three of our four days at Hunter I was backstage late into the half hour call putting out fires, and would find my two interns and make them call half hour and 15 minutes, and then would make it up to the booth in time for the 5 minute call and places.

Aside from the space being a touch smaller, Hunter also presented some new issues and some brand new benefits. One major issue was the cast being able to hear the band. Because they were breaking proscenium so often and using the pit, they lost the connection with the band and we had to add in monitors following the first performance. No big deal really.

The huge benefit of Hunter over Pace are the spot lights. At Pace, often times I would find myself looking at the deck to see if the spot was actually on because I was more likely to see the shadow than actually tell the spotlight was actually hitting its target...yeah. No such problem at Hunter. Despite being probably an additional 30'-45' further back in the theater, the throw on the spots was excellent. Even the "bad" one was better than the good one at Pace. It made it much easier to diagnose spot issues and realize "Oh hey, you didn't move your spot enough when they moved." The angle was also much more helpful at Hunter and allowed the spot ops to stay off the curtains and screen when they were hitting the cast.

Speaking of the screen, the screen at Hunter was teeeeny tiiiiny. I never actually measured it, but it was probably about 8' wide, by about 10' tallish.....Not really sure, but when you consider the Pace screen was akin to a cyc screen, it was really tiny. To still get the effect we wanted of flooding the stage with color, our lighting designer actually came up with a brilliant plan to use two strip lights on the deck next to the screen on either side of the screen. He would then basically use them as a curtain warmer and "extend" the reach of the screen. So when Carrie came out for the Wicked section, the strip lights would turn green, and would match the color of the screen. Basically, think of the "ambient technology" of some flat panel tv's that match the colors on the screen and project it along the wall to make the screen seem wider.

Overall, Summer Stock NYC was a great success in my opinion. It's been a long time coming for Frank and CAP21. He has been dreaming of this for a very very long time. And I was happy to be a part of the kick off celebration. In 7 performances, we entertained over 2000 people. That's pretty damn amazing for New York Theater in the summer time. It was a wonderful experience, and I really hope I'm able to participate in whatever is decided for next summer!

Theater Stats: Pace University: Schimmel Center for the Performing Arts

2010-07-27T01:43:00.000-04:00

Name: Schimmel Center for the Performing Arts at Pace University
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: ~700

I did honestly have every intention on blogging during my experience on Summer Stock NYC however just like a real summer stock experience: who honestly has the time or the energy for long winded expansive blog posts that I usually get myself into?

The answer is no one. I did start a few posts here and there, but couldn't stay awake long enough to complete my thoughts. So those posts will be shoved back into the ether and never seen. Now, back into reality.

Summer Stock NYC is sort of like a local tour. The idea behind it is to bring theater to the public of New York that they normally don't get the chance to see. You know the ones....the ones with THE STIGMA! of being to musical theater-y to actually sell a ticket. Shows like Mame, Oklahoma!, Gypsy, Cabaret, Funny Girl etc. The future plans for CAP and Summer Stock is to create a local touring company to go to the five boroughs and bring good theater that is affordable to the general populous.

And it really went just like a real summer stock show. I don't know why I expected it to be not like a summer at Bristol Valley Theater, but some how I thought it would end up being different. Nope. Wrong. This was a real summer stock show. We started rehearsals with the principles on Tuesday July 6, and we opened July 15. Closed on the 23rd. Just like summer stock ought to be. Quick, dirty and done!

Rehearsals were long days (starting at 12:30pm, and lasting until 10:00pm at night), and tech was what you would expect it to be (10 out of 12 days). But the principle cast of AEA actresses and our student ensemble really pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and crammed a whole butt load of music, scene work and choreography together and the show looked great.

Our first home for the show was Pace University. It was a sort of perfect marriage. A good chunk of our ensemble, and production staff came from Pace so it made sense that we go there....ok honestly the Pace space was reserved before we pulled the staff and ensemble so it technically works in reverse but either way....

The Schimmel is a really nice place! Had we not been using projections, we would have had a really deep space, that is spectacularly wide. But we needed a place to put our screen for the show so we cut our Upstage/Downstage space to about 16 feet which made a lot of what the cast did very tight to the screen. The space was still really really wide though. 40'- 44' of playable space for our show. Our pit orchestra was crammed into the stage left wing, which made traversing that a little difficult, but everyone still had a nice clear path from point A to point B.

Our projections were used mainly as title cards for the numbers being performed. So it was things like "Gypsy: June and Louise" or "Wicked: Glinda" things like that. We also had a few specialty ones like "Dance Break!" and the names of our leading ladies as they were introduced.

Dressing rooms are located upstairs of stage left, and unfortunately one of them was in the midst of being renovated so our boys kinda got the short end of the stick and got to be in that room (mainly because there was only 6 of them and they could fit comfortably). The ensemble women had their own dressing room which also contained the laundry machines, and the AEA women had their own room near the "green room" (which was converted into the wardrobe room), and closest to the stairs leading to the deck.

It's about this time I should mention how tight security is at Pace. O-M-G. We had a constant battle with the security desk for the first couple of days of tech. They had our list and we had been approved to create badges that we could wear so we wouldn't have to sign in every day. But for the first couple days they wouldn't accept the badges. Eventually it got worked out and once they started to recognize us, things went very smoothly. Even to the point that when I was running around in pre-show mode, I was barreling past security and someone said something to me and I didn't register it at all because I had to go make the 15 minute call. Then I hear the security guard yell "HEY!" and I stopped and was like "But I'm with the show!" He said "Oh I know that. But you're far too serious. You should smile more!" "But I...I have....you know what? You are absolutely right!" and I flashed him a big smile and did so every time I passed the desk and he was working.

Our time at Pace went very well. We had great audiences, especially with the River to River festival which was a free performance to the general public. All you have to do is arrive early enough and you can get two free tickets to the show (per person). Great concept! Really hits to the point of what Frank was attempting to do with Summer Stock in the first place. That crowd was really interesting though because so many of them were young kids and were fidgeting and crying and talking through the whole show. Some patrons tried to cross into our spot op position to get seats even though they were clearly taped off, and were horrible sight line seats because we had people running the spots...

After 5 days at Pace, we bid it a fond farewell and moved ourselves uptown by about 70 blocks to CUNY-Hunter....and that's another post that is coming down the pike.

Leave Politics out of my Damn Parades!

2010-07-03T12:21:00.001-04:00

I am not exactly sure when this happened, but when did politics seep into every moment of our lives?

I am in Rochester right now visiting family. And Fairport decided to have it's July 4th parade today on July 3rd....stupid large amount of churches on Church St. I suppose we shall respect your day of celebration and move our musket shooting, band playing, horn honking, siren blaring parade to a different day.

I haven't been to the Fairport 4th of July parade in about a decade now. I don't recall going during college, and I know I wasn't awake during my Fairport Hots days, so this was going to be fun. I was going to get to see the Lawn Chair Brigade, and everything that makes parade's awesome.

I'm pretty certain there were always politicians in the parade. I know this because I was usually praying for them to go away so the people who were cool and throwing candy would come back. I didn't want a flier, or a handshake: I wanted tootsie rolls damnit! And to a lesser extent Bazooka Bubble Gum and Double Bubble. Salted peanuts in it's shell directly off the street? Sir yes sir! But I don't want to shake your hand or let you kiss my cheek. I'm 8 years old and I want candy!

Now, I may still act like an 8 year old (or younger if the situation warrants it), but I am far more aware of whats going on around me. Like when a certain State Senator walked down Church Street around Galusha and Briggs. And a group of someones decided to ruin the mood.

"Hey Ex-Senator! HEY! HEY EX-SENATOR!"

Ok.....that could be a friend.....maybe.....but then the elected civil servant moves to the other side of the street. Hmm....that makes this awkward....

"HEY SENATOR! ARE YOU GOING TO PASS A BUDGET THIS YEAR? NEXT YEAR? THIS CENTURY??!!"

Watching the smile leave this guys face was actually kind of heart breaking. I understand that they are public figures and thus are ripe for ridicule....and yes, I am just as ticked off at how Albany is being run these days. My sister commented the other day that she felt the governor should be able to actually read the legislation he's signing without having to read it .5 inches from his face. I won't go as far as her, but Albany is almost as bad (or worse) as the state government of California, Cali just get all the attention.

You know what though...It's a goddamn parade. It's the Independence Day Parade. Grow the hell up, and shut the f*** up. You made an ass of yourself, and you made an entire section of the parade feel like they were watching something they shouldn't see.

Write a letter, an editorial. Stand on the corner of Main St and Church with a sign not during the parade. Do what everyone else does: Complain among your friends and closest family. Make them feel awkward. Not me. I didn't come here to feel like I wanted to shove a garden hose up your nose. (heh...that rhymes...and it's kinder than saying ass).

But seriously, politics is one of those magical things you don't bring up in civilized society. You talk about anything but religion, sex and politics. Because it's too contentious and people are more likely to get offended. Especially when you consider the political slant of this particular town. The dude shouting: totally the minority. The dude walking down the street: He's been in office for a good hot minute. He obviously has the support of the majority of the people on the street.

Thanks for partially ruining my parade jackass. I'd almost rather be harassed by the NYPD vs. having to deal with that crap.

Out of my element Review: iOS4 for the iPod Touch

2010-06-25T03:56:00.001-04:00

I'm not really big into reviewing technology because honestly, there are smarter people who have more tools at their disposal for writing such things (ie Parlato). But I upgraded my iPod Touch's operating system on Tuesday with Apples release of the iOS4. I've been sitting with it for a couple days now, and I figured: What the hell. I'll dabble outside my blogging comfort zone.

First things first: The appearance and animations of the OS are improved greatly. When I would enter my password and unlock my iPod to the main screen, there used to be this horrible delay. So instead of all my apps sweeping in from the four corners as was designed it would start to show that animation, but then it would freeze for a moment and magically a second later everything would be there. I know, it's a silly critique, but it's no longer a problem with the upgraded OS.

The dock also got a small retooling and fits closer to what Snow Leopard's dock looks like. You can still only put four items max in there, but that's still not terrible. I played around with emptying the dock into Folders but it drove me crazy when I was tapping empty space where I used to have music, or safari or system preferences so I put those back down there.

One really nice addition is Wallpaper. You could always have a wallpaper on the lock screen before, but now you can create a wallpaper for the background of the OS itself so you can always have a picture of your fiancee set as a wallpaper...........and then...cover her with apps so you can't see her.....well that seems to be a bit of poor planning on both mine and Apple's part.

When you click on a link to bring you to iTunes or to a website instead of doing the scale down/scale up they've changed it to be a rotating window thing. I don't know why, but there you have it.

They've added the faces function to Photo Albums now....as I already mentioned in a previous post: I don't think I could care less about Faces. But good for them. They added it in.

In terms of the operation of some of the basics, those have been improved as well. It used to be when I opened my music and went to my podcasts, I would swipe my finger up and down (like you're supposed to do) and again it would freeze up and not show the scrolling happening because apparently the old OS hated me. The new OS loves me! So another petty improvement there.

The Folders function is kind of ok. I'm not entirely sold on the idea. While I love that I no longer have 8 pages of apps to scroll through to find Pocket God, Euchre, or any other assorted wastes of time...I just don't know how convenient it is to have 12 apps thrown into a folder to save space. Not to mention, the thumbnail of the folder that replaces the big app icon only shows you 9 apps in the folder....but....but I can fit 12....why not just make it so you can see all 12. That would seem to make the most sense.....

The biggest victory of this new OS (for me and my non iPhone-ness) is the On The Go playlist. Obviously, on the go has been a part of the iPod software for a long time. However, the past incarnation of the Touch OS would lock the On the Go playlist as an actual playlist once you synced to your computer. This would mean that you couldn't modify it anymore on the iPod itself, and you would then start to create upwards of 15 new playlists if you weren't paying attention. What the new OS does is it allows you to create a playlist (of the permanent variety) but also still allows you to create an On the Go. So you can make a for real playlist which will sync to your computer and put it into iTunes (much like what used to happen with on the go) but now your on the go list will still be able to be modified after a sync. So lets say you have 6 podcasts in your on the go list, and you want to add a 7th one to the list (because you just downloaded it to your laptop). You can sync to the laptop, and then go back to the still existing on the go, and add the 7th one. This is great for me like I said. I create podcast playlists daily and I would always forget to clear it before I synced again.

They've added an Airplane Mode to the Touch. Why is anyone's guess. Here's how you turn on airplane mode before: Turn off Wifi. Last time I checked, iPod's don't send out the same signals as a phone does. But whatever. I now feel like I have an iPhone......BRING IT TO VERIZON DAMNIT!

Sadly, multitasking on third party apps doesn't work with the Touch version of the software. *Sad Panda Face* But from what I've heard and read, it's nothing to write home about. On the iPhone multitasking means the OS freezes programs instead of allowing them to run in the background like the integrated Apple products (Mail, Music etc).

As I already mentioned, this isn't a for reals in-depth or technical review of iOS4. If you want any of those, you probably have a handy google search bar in your browser. Google it. Besides, to do a real review would require me to have an iPhone and I don't have one. So a lot of the really sexy developments aren't available for the Touch (like anything to do with cameras). But overall, I'm rather pleased with it.

And now the real reason I decided to blog about this subject was to give me one more chance to scream at Steve Jobs:

BRING THE DAMN IPHONE TO VERIZON STEVE!!!! MY BLACKBERRY IS DYING AND I'M WAITING ON YOU! IF YOU DON'T HURRY UP, I'M GONNA BUY A DROID AND TELL YOU TO STICK IT!!!!!!

Ahem.....excuse me. No disrespect Steve.

But please, you will make me (and millions of paying Verizon customers) cream ourselves if you announce it as your One More Thing in September.

An Inconvenient (NYC) Truth

2010-06-25T03:13:00.000-04:00

There are some unfortunate truths one must come to accept when living in New York: Tourists in Times Square are the enemy, Populated areas like MSG, Union Square, and Central Park on a nice day will drive you crazy. But the most inconvenient of all these truths: Late night subway rides is the suckiest suck that ever sucked.

While I adore working in theater, it does bring me head to head with the MTA's late night train schedule on a nightly basis. There's nothing quite like walking down the street to your subway station and you hear the train you need to be on pulling into the station. Or even worse, being at the turnstile swiping your card like mad to get into the subway quickly before the train you can hear rumbling down the tracks slows down just enough to throw people off, and have those waiting on the platform jump on before the conductor (who by the way really doesn't want to stop anywhere) closes the doors after having them open for just enough time for the skin cells flaking off your arm to float into the train.

It's also a horrible crap shoot in terms of the amount of people on the train. You'd figure by 11:30pm most people would be home already. And on most nights, it's true. You hop on the train, sit down in a seat and continue on your way. But if you get on the train at the same time one week later, it's suddenly pack to the brim with smelly, sweaty, crabby New Yorkers.

During the day time if you miss a train it's no big deal. Within 5 minutes or so another train will be in pulling up to the platform and you're on your merry way. But not late at night my fine non New Yorker readers. If you miss a late night train, hunker down, pull up a nice slab of concrete because it's going to be a while. On average, you will wait 20 minutes if you're taking an important train (Like the A or F trains). Lord help you if you're taking one of those freak of nature trains (like an R train or the oft rumored but hardly seen G train) because those will come maybe twice an hour if you pray hard enough and eat your vegetables and take your vitamins. (A Little Fun Side Story of the G or Ghost Train- In theory the G train stops at my local station late nights every night and on the weekends. I've been here for over a year, and I have seen it twice. Each time I saw it I rode it, and each time I felt like the only thing missing was Shaggy and Scooby trying to find out the Mystery Behind the Ghost Train)

The other horrible truth of living the night life in New York City: Cabs don't like to go places outside of Manhattan. They actually seem to really hate it. Why this is the case I'll never know because I hope I'm never silly enough to take a job as a cabby. But it seems to me if you take fares that are going further, you'll make more money. More distance=more money. Seems like a very simple equation to me. Oh but no. Tell a cab driver you're headed out to Queens and magically they have a call from dispatch that they have to pick up in 10 minutes and driving the 25 minutes there and back to Manhattan just won't work....

....Then turn your light off asshat. If you truly have a dispatch call in 10 minutes, turn off your light. Simple.

This never seemed to happen to me when I lived in Brooklyn. Granted I literally lived off the Brooklyn Bridge, so they could turn around and immediately return to the safety of the grid, but still. I never said "I'm going to Henry St in Brooklyn" and had a cab driver say get out. Twice now out of maybe 8 cab rides back out to Forest Hills have I been booted by cab drivers. I never understood why my good friend Joe broke his foot kicking a cab because it wouldn't take him home. I now know why, and I don't blame him.

So should you decide to avoid the Russian Roulette of late night train service, and you happen to live 8 miles outside of Manhattan its a painfully expensive venture. If I take a cab home from work right now, it costs me about $35 with tip. Add that up over 5 nights of avoiding trains, and that's about...oh I'd say way too much money.

But what price can you put on getting back to your apartment and into your bed while some poor bastard is still sitting at 14th street waiting for the next train to arrive?

"I'll paint yo' face while you're holdin' that mug!"

2010-06-13T22:58:00.002-04:00

Due to the scheduling of Cloaked I find myself with a rarity not often found while pursuing a career in the theater arts: A weekend! Usually, shows will run Tuesday through Sunday giving you a weekend of Monday before you're back at it again. But I get Sunday off as well as Monday which afforded Anna and myself an awesome opportunity: The Austin Street Fair (or something along those lines).

I personally didn't know this was happening, but Anna had gone down to do some shopping earlier in the week and noticed the banners hanging on the lamp posts advertising it. I tend to never go down towards 71st st unless I have no option to catch the Subway and when I do that, I usually walk up Queens Blvd because it's quicker than going up Austin to catch a train. I also tend to look at the sidewalk and not up because nothing interesting usually happens over my head in the city. I hate the tourists in Times Square who look up and say "WOW! Look at that!" Dude, it's an advertisement. You are being wowed by something you skip over on your DVR at home. Simpleton.

But she mentioned the fair yesterday as we were killing time before we went into Manhattan for the show and I got excited.

Street fairs are usually an annoyance in New York. If you're a driver, you get annoyed because suddenly 5 blocks get barricaded off and you have to go around the whole damn thing (as does every other driver in creation) and the traffic is crazy. If you're a pedestrian it's annoying because all of a sudden there are thousands of people in your way and there's no clear or good path to get you from point A to point B.

But if you're actually going to attend the fair, and have time to kill: It's excellent!

We meandered our way down Austin to the festival and the first thing we encounter was politicians! Go figure! Being more politically savvy than my lovely fiancee, I have met a fair amount of politicians in my day. I never have anything important to say to them other than "best of luck" and shake their hands, but Anna had never experienced this before. So as we were departing our second petition signing, we met the actual political figure and she shook his hand. That was her first interaction with a for real life politician. I predict she'll vote for him simply on this fact, but that's mainly because I'm an ass and like to make fun of her for things like this.

After signing our maximum two petitions to get people's names on the ballot in November (and reregistering to vote in Queens county as neither of us had done that yet, and thus made ourselves liars when we signed the petitions...oops!) we began moving down the street slowly taking in all of the wonderful smells of sausages, popcorn, cotton candy, hot dogs, and gyros as well as the sight of handmade jewelry, wooden signs, t-shirts, tapestries, and other assorted arts and crafts. Anna immediately found 18 pieces of jewelry she wanted...at about $80 a pop

Having grown up with Canal Days in Fairport, I no longer feel the urge to buy the first thing I see....I may not want to buy the kick ass wooden sword I see at the first few tents, because just a few tents further down there may be a sword and shield combination that's even more kick ass for the same price! And yes, I did often seek out wooden weapons while at Canal Days. And no, there were no kick ass wooden swords on sale this time. Curses!

When we got to the major intersection at 71st and Austin we came across a stand selling soda. No big deal of course. But when we got closer and saw they made homemade root beer, birch beer, vanilla root beer, sarsaparilla, and a few other assortments of sugary badness and we had to give it a try. They sold mugs that offered free refills all day so we did that to try as many varieties as possible. As we walked away with a brand new mug we realized...we just got a big sterling silver mug....and we have no idea what in the hell we are going to do with it beyond today...the best thing we've come up with so far is to turn it into an Herb planter later on this summer. My suggestion that it becomes our new fresh kitty litter scoop fell on deaf ears.

We continued down the street where we were then attacked by infomercials. Seriously. There was a demonstration for Sham-wows and everything. My favorite part was when the guy (wearing the headset mic and all) said "Unlike the commercial where he used a fresh one each time, I'm gonna show you how well this works through multiple uses without cleaning." Take that you hooker biting sham-wow guy!

En route to the end of the tents we found a local photographer who had some pretty amazing shots. We were flipping through all his work and he had some beautiful pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge. As that specific location holds a near and dear place in our hearts, we bought a set of three different shots: One shot from Dumbo this past winter, another from the same basic angle but further up the street but was this really cool hazy multi-exposure shot and one from directly on the bridge looking up at the American flag. The whole shot was in Sepia but the Flag was in brilliant color. Really cool!

We started to make our way back and encountered some of the more memorable people of the day. Anna was hungry so we stopped and got gyros. I have never had one before today. While I understand the appeal of a gyro, the fact that the meat is hacked off a rotating spit of indistinguishable flesh with a machete has often turned me off the idea. But Anna swears by them, and I gave it a try. While waiting for our meat to be hacked of the spit by a Jason Vorheese imitator, the other guys at the booth were peddling their wares, which included "Gyros, sausage, kabobs, and meat on a stick. GO BEEF!" and whenever they got to the "Go beef" part, everyone in the booth working stopped what they were doing and shouted "Go Beef." Pretty good way to set yourself apart from the 50 other vendors selling the same thing.

While having my first ever Gyro experience, we sat behind a booth that was making Kettle Popcorn. Now, I have seen the results of the process many times before. I have never seen it made before. There's something totally awesome about watching a guy hooked up to a generator, wearing a leather apron and a face shield like he was using an arc welder. The street around him was a complete mess from escaping kettle corn. He then dumped the kettle into waiting butter/cheese/caramel bins so they could get the appropriate topping. Lethally painful to make, oh so yummy to intake! Huzzah!

After my first Gyro experience (with all the trimmin's) we continued our walk back towards our apartment. Outside the Chase bank at 71st, there was this black woman holding a really simple sign saying "Face Painting $3" and very rarely called out to try to get customers to her chair. Anna was joking about how she wanted to get her face painted and I was joking about how I would disown her and change the locks on the apartment. While we were ribbing each other about my inability to accomplish this in the time it would take to get her face painted, the woman called out to me "HEY! I'll PAINT YO' FACE WHILE YOU'RE HOLDIN' THAT MUG!" I nearly lost it in the middle of the street laughing.

We passed a T-shirt vendor who does their own screen printing in house and they had the usual NYC pieces: I Love New York, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Long Island City, Forest Hills, plus a couple of more entertaining ones like a priceless shirt I didn't get a chance to read because the wave of people behind me forced me forward. I'm sure it was amusing....or lame. They can only fall into one of those two categories.

We had passed a tent for a Realtor on our way up through everything, and decided to check it out on the way back. If society were to start over again, but there was one landlord left over who was trying to re-establish ye oldene wayse (that's how you make things old....add an E) he would be drawn and quartered when he would propose having people pay $1400 a month to not own the place they were living in. After like....10 years for that amount of money you could own something somewhere damnit. So we're considering what we're going to do when we're married about getting our own place vs. paying for the privilege of living on top of each other with just enough room to move your toes so they don't cramp.

When we got back to that tent, we were immediately greeted by a very nice (aggressive) lady who inquired into our lives. Anna mentioned that we were starting to price things out to see what we'd be getting into after we got married. The woman immediately grabbed Anna's hand and started to ooo and aah over the ring including "Oh girl, let me get this into the shade because it's blinding me in the sunlight!" This is amusing for two reasons: One because Anna is always marveling and joking about how sparkly her...sparkly...is (I think that might be the ring's official name...or precious. One of the two.....*gollum gollum!*). and Two because Anna has personal space issues and if you don't really know her invading her personal space is a big no no. Apparently this woman had a Tongan Death Grip on her wrist and no matter how hard Anna yanked, she couldn't free herself. I half expected Anna to start chewing her hand off at the wrist, or decapitating the lady so the grip would loosen. Either one would have done the job.

Thankfully the lady let go before any blood was spilled.

We headed back to the apartment with a few new things and a few roasted skin cells. How I'm Italian really perplexes me sometimes. I thought I was supposed to handle the sun better than I do. Oh but no! Those damn Irish and Scottish genes had to win out on the skin tone. My (increasingly larger) forehead is burnt, and my arms are a little toasty too. Anna has taken great pleasure in leaving finger marks on my forehead and watching them disappear for the last couple of hours.

Man....how I wish I had a show today! If I had a show, I would be in my dark corner protected from the sunlight....and my high forehead would have been protected from the sun!

Ikea....Swiss for "Relationship destroyer!"

2010-06-02T02:03:00.001-04:00

I've been swamped in the land of Cloaked for the last few weeks. I would love to say more about the show and the process, but it was respectfully requested that I not intrude on the rehearsal process in that manner, and I have every respect for everyone involved so that's the explanation as to why I haven't been blogging about the show.

And since work related blog posts are out, that means it's just real life blog posts. And since I've been so busy, I've had no life. The only thing that has recently happened was a trip to IKEA...

....and people in relationships just should not do this.

My apartment is now finally livable (a full month after my return to NYC). It's taken a good long while to clean the apartment up, catch up on laundry, and unfortunately rearrange furniture. Anna is the type that moved her bedroom around once a year when she was growing up. I was lucky if I could see my bedroom floor once a year growing up. I've heard stories of a red shag carpet, but that's all they are to me....stories. So I never had the desire to change things around because I was basically not able to.

Well we've been here a year. And the clock struck midnight or something. Therefore it was time to change things around.

When one desires to change around one's bedroom, there are a few helpful tools to have. First and fore most is patience. Because nothing will try your patience with a loved one more than rotating a bed to fit against the windows in your bedroom and you suddenly run out of room to spin. You consider leaving the bed propped up against the molding on the floor and hope you can adjust to the slight angle you might have to sleep in for the rest of your days. But you quickly realize you care too much about your cats to risk their safety. Safety of the other person who's fault you know it just has to that the bed wouldn't fit be damned. This is the thought that went through both of our heads.

After man handling our bed frame for nearly 30 minutes we finally are victorious. The bed is now located underneath our double windows on the wall facing the LIRR. Perfect. Now we just need to slide the dresser onto.....the.....

.....Well s**t....our dresser doesn't fit. While I weigh the pros and cons of trying to find a way to elevate the dresser off the floor and attach it to the wall to some how make this work, Anna did the "smart" thing and went online to IKEA to see if they sold a low dresser about the same height and width of our bed frame. Well it's IKEA. What don't they have? I sometimes wonder why they don't flat pack midgets. They do it to everything else. And who wouldn't want a midget?

Our room is in total shambles. If we don't go get this dresser right now, we won't be able to do it until at least next weekend. And that would just suck. So we elect to drive to IKEA. This means we need to change out of our grungy apartment cleaning clothes and into respectable "real people" clothes. We do this, and this is the moment IKEA begins to drive a wedge in our relationship.

Anna noticed the bed was off centered on the wall (how she noticed this I will never know as she has worse spacial relations than Klingons and Romulans), and she tried to slide the whole thing with her hips/butt. I, meaning to be encouraging, said "Come on! You can do it! Use your colossal ass power!"

I didn't realize what I had said at the time. Mainly because I could only see the context in which I used the words "colossal" and "ass." I had meant it as a compliment. "Use the tremendous amount of sheer leg and ass power and move that bed!"

Anna is female. She heard "colossal" and "ass" and her brain shut down. But not before telling all of her limbs to flail at me all at once, hoping to connect with a devastating blow. Her combination of shock, horror, disgust, outrage, and amusement was something to behold. "Why would you say a thing like that????? TO A WOMAN??!!"

"Because I have no ability to censor myself. And it's not my fault you heard it the wrong way!"

Because I hadn't meant it in the way she heard it. But it didn't matter. It resulted in me driving to IKEA. I hate driving on Long Island. Especially in rush hour traffic. I especially hate it when daggers are being shot at me from the passenger seat. I really should be used to it by now. I tend to say something on a daily basis that makes a part of Anna's brain stem wither, and when I do that out come the eye daggers.

I somehow got us to IKEA without further stoking the flames. We eventually found the item number for the dresser, and set off in search of the night stands we were buying along with it to complete our bedroom set. It wasn't until we got downstairs to Flatpack Central Depot that we realized we had written down the item number for the wrong color. Who would have guessed that the White dresser on display wasn't the Brown/Black one we were hoping for. Thankfully, like the Denny's late night menu, there are always pictures on display for the galatically stupid...and their colossal ass powers.

We eventually find the correct ones, buy them, and amazingly fit everything in her tiny car. Usually when we're out on the Island, I drive home because Anna doesn't like driving at night and I have no issue. Today, I drove home because I had told my fiance she had a colossal ass.

The daggers had subsided on the ride home. Possibly because we were able to joke about the colossal ass thing at that point....

....I like to think she was saving them up for our arrival home.

If you've never assembled a piece of IKEA furniture: Don't do it with someone you love. Send them away. Tell them to talk a walk, go get ice cream, watch TV, whittle a tooth pick out of a full oak tree...anything to get them away from you while you are assembling. First of all, they never give you the right amount of anything. Guaranteed if you purchase a piece of IKEA furniture that requires construction, some piece of hardware will not be present.

Second: You will at some point mix up the holes where the dowel pieces go, and the lock screw thingys. So not only will you slow the process down and piss off your assembly partner, you will feel like a remedial 4th grader for not being able to put the right peg in the right hole.

Third: No matter how often you say "I want to turn this the other way can you help me?" The person you requested the help from will turn the piece the wrong way. And if this happens, you will nearly break both of your wrists and half of your toes.

After nearly 2 hours of construction, we had only assembled the outer frame. We hadn't touched the drawers. Nothing. Then came the time for the most important (yet ludicrous) step in IKEA Furniture making: Nailing the stupid piece of cardboard to the back of the item so it holds it's shape and integrity. How this happens to work, I don't understand. If you breath wrong near those things, they fall apart. I know we in the theater cheat and cut a lot of corners, but you would never work again if you used this kind of material. And we put it on the back of our furniture for its structural integrity. Excellent.

What is the most important thing needed to hammer nails into the back of your IKEA furniture? A Hammer. Guess who owns the only hammer in our apartment. Me! Guess who loaned his hammer to his fiance during tech crew in the fall and then guess who lost it among all the hammers at school and it never made it home? He's got two thumbs, and he's typing this sentence right now!

No hammer. No hammer means no flimsy piece of crap on the back of the dresser, which means dresser will fall apart and implode. I feel like if you don't complete this vital step, your furniture will burrow a hole back to the motherland to rejoin it's poorly assembled brethren. We just spent good money on this! We must find a hammer!

I head across the street to ask Manny (our local bodega cashier) if I can borrow a hammer. Apparently, someone misplaced theirs and they don't have one anymore. I went to CVS to see if they sold any. Nope. By this time, it's nearly 11pm. It's late, I'm cranky, I'm a sweaty wreck because that day happened to be the warmest in the city up to that point. When I walk back to the apartment defeated, I saw lights on upstairs. Bob and Lynda were home and awake, and they had a hammer.

While I was gone on my hammer time adventure, Anna had built all the drawers. By this time, we were both talking to each other very sheepishly and carefully as to not incite the other to anger. If we dropped something, it was met immediately with quick apologies and eyes cast to the ground for fear of making direct contact with each other.

By 12:30am, the project was done. Anna had to be up in just about 5 hours, and I had to be up in 6. But I still had crap to do for Cloaked that night, so I was up until 3am.

After nightmares about colossal asses, hammers, nails, and Swiss Miss, I fell out of bed and went to rehearsal. It was a quick day that day and I made it home in time to quickly, calmly and peacefully assemble the night stands. I even put one together wrong, but I didn't get angry about it. And I very matter of factly took it apart, fixed the mistake, and continued on. There's no way that could possibly have happened if someone else had been present in the apartment. Even Anna somewhat admitted that putting the drawers together while I was gone was a breeze and a snap.

Problem with IKEA stuff is that it's basically designed that more than one person should be putting it together. And there's almost no escaping it. The Swiss have come up with one hell of a system to test relationships.

Thankfully ours passed the test....

....No colossal asses were harmed in the recording of this blog post.

EDIT: You know, I realize I named the wrong country as the origin of IKEA. I don't care to be perfectly honest. I kinda liked my Swiss Miss Joke, and I decided to just go with it. Think less of me if you'd like, I don't necessarily care. I found it to be quite worth my while to lie.

Space Pen.....Fail?

2010-05-17T13:50:00.000-04:00

I stake no claim what so ever in saying the idea of purchasing a space pen was my own idea. Karen had it well before I did and here's the proof. I still think the entire idea that we have pens that can write in zero gravity, under water, upside down etc is awesome yet ridiculous all at the same time. There's that classic joke saying NASA spent millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that would write in space during the Cold War....The Russians used Pencils.

But I tend to like stupid geeky things, so I took Karen's recommendation that Space pens are awesome and should be purchased. And I did. I bought two pens identical to the one Karen bought. I got two because I do have this nasty habit of losing pens.

So after waiting for a week, my pens get delivered. I open up the first package and I discover that my pen looks...well a little weird.

Looks pretty normal right? but if you look to the right hand side of the picture...

Well would you look at that! The ball point is missing.....from a ball point pen. That seems to be somewhat vital to the product wouldn't you say? Did they even test this at the factory? Where's quality control when you need it!!!

This is what it's supposed to look like:

Well I guess its a good thing I bought two of them! I called the company and (miraculously in this modern day of outsourcing and relocation) I didn't even reach a menu first! I reached a real live person. And they knew the answer! Holy Hell!!!

Overall, the pen is excellent, though I have nearly lost my one functional one. I listen to my iPod on the Subway in New York because I have 45 minutes to burn each way from work. And I was listening to my iPod after rehearsal and pulled out my wallet to get to my metro card. I heard something fall, but couldn't see it because it's a black pen on dirty, gross, dark colored stairs. I thought, "hmm....wonder what that was." And I reached into my pocket and realized my (relatively) expensive pen was missing. I turned around and saw a woman holding my pen in her hand and I was thinking "Oh please don't put it in your pocket. I don't want to have to mug a lady for my $24 pen" but she did the kind thing and gave it back to me.

Which is good. I don't enjoy beating up women for pens....

....pencils on the other hand....

Strokes of Good Luck or How I Got to be a Stage Manager in New York

2010-05-17T03:27:00.000-04:00

There are two goals one attempts to achieve in their fledgling stage management career....ok well that's a lie, there are many many goals one tries to achieve. But there are two very very golden ones that I have aspired to since moving to New York:

1) Have the ability to say NO to projects you don't want to take because you are already booked.

2) Never having to send out a resume because you've made a name for yourself and people want to work with you.

There have been a sparse few occasions I have been able to say no to projects, usually because I am booked. But if I'm not, I take just about anything that comes my way right now. But as for Golden Goal #2, I have fared surprisingly well. If my current self could travel back in time and tell my college self that 5 years after graduating college, I would have sent out a grand total of 10 cold resumes since moving to New York, but I would have been working consistently for 3 years straight my college self would have told me to shove it up....well you get the idea.

Before I moved to New York, I had worked at Bristol Valley Theater in Naples, NY. I was given a great recommendation from my friend in college, Katie Everdyke, who had worked there the previous summer and she got me in. My first true professional PSM gig was on Barbra's Wedding directed by Joe Tantalo (of Godlight Theatre Company fame). Joe and I got along really well, and we stayed in touch from the summer of '05, until the fall of '07 when I made my move. I did have a false start move in the summer when I lost my potential roommate (my current fiance...figure that one out!) and had contacted Joe saying I was moving to the city and he was excited and wanted to work with me again. When I finally moved on October 10th to Brooklyn the first thing I did after unpacking and settling in: I called Joe. He gave me a job.

In the meantime, I had sent out my first resume to a company called Quo Vadimus Arts because they were looking for a sound designer and I figured it would be a nice buffer between the start of Joe's show. Turns out they were also looking for a stage manager for one of the three productions (the same one I applied for) and my sound design resume has "Stage Management resume available upon request" on it....which is good because it covers why I have about a year between each of my sound designs. So after being in New York for 5 days, I was booked through the end of February.

Around the midway point of the run of Slaughter-House Five with Joe and Godlight, the production designer for Godlight connected me to the Cherry Lane Theater and I got an interview for an Edward Albee piece being performed in March and April. In order to be hired for this show, I had to be Equity, or turn Equity. I was in New York for less than 4 months, and I already had an opportunity to join the union. But I was fairly mortified to be honest. I wasn't sure if I was prepared to get my card. Once you get it, you basically start over. I talked it over with a lot of my friends, and colleagues and decided I would do it. Ultimately, I ended up being beat out (by someone I would actually later work with) for the spot and Cherry Lane told me they would keep my resume on file... Heh, sure. Like that ever means anything good. But I knew if the opportunity for Equity came up again, I would definitely do it.

The opportunity came less than two weeks later. Joe (who told me only good things would happen if I worked with him at 59E59 Street Theaters) introduced me to his old PSM who had turned Equity and she told me she was looking for an ASM for a show at the Irish Arts Center (Ladies and Gents), and she would see if she could get me an interview with their management. She had to see if it would be ok with them/Equity if I got my card on that production. Turned out it was ok, and I can now say for the rest of my life that I earned my Equity card in a bathroom in Central Park (the show was site specific and took place in the bathrooms at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park).

After being sick for an entire week following Ladies and Gents, I got a call from Cherry Lane...wait...whoa wait! You mean... That's right! When Cherry Lane said they'd keep my resume on file, they actually meant it, and they meant they would call me in the future should something come up! Strange, I always thought that comment was supposed to be the kiss of death...Anyway, I got an ASM job working on Jailbait which was a really great show, and I had a great time working with the cast and crew of Cherry Lane.

Following that, I got my next gig by reference from a cast member from Ladies and Gents called Epitaph for George Dillon. This was great production on multiple fronts: I met my "stage management wife" and I got to work with some really great actors and a very well known director and acting coach.

Following that production, I was back with Joe and Godlight for The Basketball Diaries. This is now June '08, and I've sent out a total of 1 cold resume (for Quo Vadimus 3 days after I moved). And for the first (and only time in my career so far) I was rehearsing one show during the day, and performing one at night. I picked up the PSM spot on Love Inc. a new musical which was the first I had worked on one in nearly 3 years.

I don't recall how I got the Love Inc. job. I can't remember if I found them, or if I was recommended but I'll just go ahead and say it was a combination. So we'll count that as my second successful cold resume in New York.

Maruti Evans (he's the Godlight Production Designer) who is also a guy I've been working with since my very first professional gig all the way back in BVT called me after Love Inc. ended for an "emergency." I was coming in to support and/or replace the PSM of a production called Noon Day Sun. It was really awkward to walk into a situation like that because the PSM knew why I was there and we spoke about it as soon as she walked in the door on opening night. Ultimately, the show was open, and she called the show just fine so she stayed as PSM, and I was billed as the Stage Manager.

I was back on the job hunt again very briefly and was again put in contact with my next job with Misfit Toys Rep. who were doing The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed in rep...lot of reps in that last sentence. Originally, I was the PSM for just Tamer Tamed but the Shrew PSM bailed for another job about a week out from opening. Since we were running in rep, I was obviously available when Taming was running, so I offered to run both shows.

Around this time, I sent out my 3rd cold resume to The Acting Company. I was trolling around trying to find something to do after Taming/Tamer. But I didn't hear back from the Acting Company so I assumed the position was filled I wasn't what they were looking for. After all, I had never toured before and that's what they do.

This is now the end of September '08. I was contacted by Cherry Lane again saying they were moving Jailbait from the showcase code we did in April to a mini-off broadway contract and as per the rules: I was offered my job. I accepted. I then contacted Joe Tantalo again to talk about his production of 1984 and was tentatively signed on for that too. I was just in the process of looking for work to carry me to those two gigs in late Winter, early Spring '09, when the Acting Company called me.

I had my interviews with TAC and then they offered me the job. Now I had to decide if I wanted to tour, or stick with the two gigs I had lined up already. Obviously from all the touring with TAC I've done and all the blogging about it I've done: one can safely assume I am either really imaginative or I took the job with TAC.

Towards the end of last years tour, I started to send out resumes again. I had one interview off a cold resume, but it would have put me out of the city for the summer in Santa Fe and I didn't really want to do it. Thankfully, they didn't pick me so I didn't have to turn it down. I sent out a few more trying to get a bite, and I did from Desipina. They were producing their long running production of 7-Eleven Convenience Theater for the final time and were looking for a PSM. Well, initially I was offered the ASM spot which I accepted because I had nothing else going on. However they let their PSM go and moved me up to the big chair.

I spent a month unemployed and then a cast member from Ladies and Gents suggested me to the producers and director of A Short Wake. As a matter of fact, it was the same guy who suggested me for Epitaph over a year previously.

Now in mid-September of '09 I had to find a show quickly or else risk be totally unemployed for two and a half months before the TAC tour started in December. I sent out another cold resume to a one man show who was supposed to rehearse in October and perform in November. Unfortunately, things popped up and the schedule changed to performances in December...when I'd be freezing my butt off in Minneapolis already. After being "jerked around" as it were, it was now the beginning of October and there was no way I could get a show between then and the start of the tour.

Then Karen Parlato got a hold of me and needed an ASM for the show she was working on. I haven't mentioned her in this post, but she's all over the place in my blog since she's my other half from TAC. She was the ASM for Inventing Avi and the PSM got hired by the Rent tour and was leaving. So I moved into that spot and finished off that run before being unemployed for only 1 month now.

For the last two months I have been constantly searching for something to do when I got off tour. Anything. And I couldn't find a thing. I actually started to write this post in the production office during the Romeo and Juliet run in Philadelphia when I suddenly got an email asking if I was available for a new musical starting in early May. Someone who had gotten my name from a colleague and passed the information onto the producers....that'll work!

So all said and done when you look at it: I have sent out 10 cold resumes since moving to New York in October 2007. From those 10, I have been hired 4 times. That's a pretty damn good percentage all things considered. I've also gotten one more interview off a cold resume for a job I didn't get right after 7-Eleven Convenience Theater. So if you look at it that way, that's 50% of my cold resumes have caught someone's eye. All the rest of my jobs have come off recommendations.

I am very lucky, and I know I've been. When I went back to Fredonia in February this year and the students asked me how I got started, I told them I got exceptionally lucky. I met the right people at the right time. I've been riding the wave of good fortune ever since October of '07 and I am having the time of my life.

Foiled by Heinrich Hertz

2010-05-11T14:17:00.000-04:00

I'd love to say that New York drivers are patient. But I think we all know for a fact they aren't even remotely close to patient. Mental patients, sure. Patient? Not so much. And you can certainly tell you're in New York when you hear horn honking every five seconds.

Usually, one can tune this annoying din out when walking around the city. Only once in a while does a car horn actually break through and distract you to the point you look around. And this story isn't even about that. It's about how a perfectly placed car horn ruining my ability to leave a voice mail message.

I was making a phone call during a break today. I have found I don't get the greatest reception unless I am outside now (COME ON VERIZON IPHONE!!!! HURRY UP!). As is nearly always the case when I call people, I don't actually get an answer. I was listening to the recorded message lady tell me about all the options that no one cares about (who ever leaves a callback number in this day of caller ID?) thinking about how I hate this stupid recording because it takes up 10 seconds of my life I will never get back. Then suddenly a car horn rang out about 50 feet away from me. And the lady stops talking. And the message restarts saying "I'm sorry. 8 is not an option" And I have to listen to the message again.

Now I've lost 20 seconds of my life because of the impatience of New York Drivers. Who would have guessed a car horn would sound so like the touch tone #8?

I have since discovered how odd this is. Touch tones on phones don't play just one frequency. Each number plays two different tones at once. It's designed that way so random noises have a harder time disrupting you when navigating menus for banks, service lines, and basically every business in this country now a days. In order for that car to have screwed with my phone call it had to play at 852hz, and 1336 hz. I do not know how in the world that actually happened considering most car horns are designed to play in the 400-500hz range. But just one frequency. How one car horn managed to play multiple frequencies is beyond me. That means at that exact moment a car horn went off, something else happened in the 1300-1400hz range that triggered the recording I was listening to 50 feet away to register the number 8 to be pressed.

Now when I think about it, including the time it took to blog about this....I've now lost a total of 20 minutes of my life that I'll never get back...

....you win this time Heinrich Hertz and your damn frequencies!

Worst Day for Spring Cleaning ever

2010-05-02T23:56:00.000-04:00

After going to bed late last night (as I am one to do when I am not doing anything the next day) I woke up relatively early this morning. I realized that I needed to be in contact with the director of my show and she was only available until noon. That pretty much meant I needed to be awake earlier than I had intended, but I did get a lot accomplished. I now only have one more piece of paperwork to generate and I'm prepped for rehearsal to begin on Tuesday.

Tomorrow I will go to Equity to pick up the Showcase packet, and some binders through the Equity Binder Project. After that, it's off to CAP21 to copy a lot of scripts and a lot of scores in preparation for first rehearsal. I'm hoping there are postcards already made for the show because I really like my system of taping the postcard to the front cover of the casts' binders and then writing their names in silver sharpie on the black gaff tape. It's a simple but nice touch, and it will also allow us to return binders to Equity as part of the Binder project should the cast give them back afterwards.

Today Anna and I spent the majority of our day cleaning up our apartment. This would be fine and dandy except today was the hottest and most humid day in New York this year. On the bright side, our bathroom and kitchen are spotless (or as spotless as it can be). Around 3pm I was absolutely dripping in sweat and sat down and watched the second period of the Habs/Penguins game on NBC and then finally pried myself off the chair to continue cleaning. Anna had to pass out because her allergies made it feel like "someone was trying to pop her eyes out of her skull through her brain." I certainly can't blame her for that nap.

After spending 2.5 hours cleaning the kitchen, cooking dinner tonight seemed like a crime against humanity. I felt like wrapping the kitchen in saran wrap just so nothing would be spilled, thus causing us to have to clean again. But we did a wonderful job cleaning up after ourselves.

Its going to be another late night for me, but this time it won't be show related things keeping me up. I have at least two more loads of laundry to get done tonight so we can continue on with the bedroom and get this place back to livable.

Stumble- Defeater of Productivity

2010-05-01T02:19:00.000-04:00

For those who are not in the know, Stumble Upon is a plug in you can install to your web browser. When you sign up you give it some parameters of things you like (ie online games, photography, news, theater etc etc) and once you've done so you will never reach the end of the internet. People like items they find interesting, and when you click the stumble button, you are taken to web pages you might enjoy per your preferences.

I have this horrible habit of stumbling a little bit before I do any of my late night work. Tonight, my work list included reading the show I'm working on starting on Tuesday. So as I was stumbling briefly before I sat down to read the script and create the actor/scene breakdown, I found this video:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

1. I forgot entirely about Bobby McFerrin
2. That was entertaining as hell (as Stumble is likely to find)
3. I had to know what the hell the context of that experiment was all about.

After fruitless google searches trying to find the lead up and aftermath of that performance, I finally found a link to the World Science Festival's homepage which contained the "full program" (in reality it cut out a bunch of stuff but it's still nearly an hour plus of pretty interesting information about music and how it is interpreted by the brain). Best thing to say about WSF is it made this subject of music and neuroscience accessible to Joe-Knows-Nothing-About-Neuroscience and it contains three stellar moments of musical performance by Bobby McFerrin. Might I suggest you watch Part 1 for Bobby's opening musical performance, and Part Five for the closing performance. The clip I embedded above is contained within Part 4 if you want to hear it partially in context, but you should really watch the whole program to get the full depth of how awesome it was. You can click here to go directly to the Notes and Neurons page.

If it weren't for my show going into tech that week, I would definitely check out the Festival as it takes place right here in good ol' New York. But I suppose I'll save the money and check out the highlights online.

As for now, it's late and I have work to do....I started my "work" tonight at midnight. It's now nearly 2:20am. I feel as though stumble should add a link to your first stumble click and it should go directly to a page that asks "Are you sure you aren't supposed to be doing something other than wasting about 2 hours of your life trolling the internet?"

Creating invoices

2010-04-29T22:00:00.000-04:00

I never got around to making a post in a timely manner when I actually pulled off one of my final gags of the tour, but Karen did make a post about it, and she summed it up rather well. So I won't reinvent the wheel. I'll just link you to her post regarding my invoice to her here.

Blackberry (and all) Technology FTW!

2010-04-29T15:27:00.000-04:00

And that FTW does not stand for "For the Win" I'm taking it back old school ECW days and using it in the way it should always be used: F*** The World!

I seriously don't know if I've just had the worst string of luck with my blackberry or if the RIM corporation is an evil empire that desires nothing more than to have people throw their phones through the wall so they'll have to buy another one, but I'm over it.

Before moving to New York, I purchased a windows mobile phone (a mistake I shall never make again) which had terrible battery life, hardly functional as a phone, and a touch screen that was nearly unresponsive over 3/4 of the time. So I moved over to Blackberry after 6 months of Windows hell. And things worked out fine for a while, I noticed that it had a problem syncing my contacts and calendars when I synced to Windows XP, but no big deal! I wasn't so concerned with that as much as I was wanting a smart phone that did what it needed to do.

Fast forward 2 years, and a Macbook later and I want to kill my phone today. Especially now that I'm off tour and I have potentially 25-30 contacts to add every two months to my phone when I get a new job, I'm over it. I hate having to input names, phone numbers, and emails into three different formats. I have to add it to my address book on my computer, I have to add them to the contact sheet that I distribute, and I have to then go and add them all to my blackberry. BUT I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DAMNIT! I should just be able to sync my phone to my computer and that's it! I shouldn't have to do this 3 friggin' times!

My contract with Verizon is up. I was eligible for an early upgrade in February, and was going to get a Droid because:
1. It's a lot more functional than my blackberry Curve is
2. It's sexy as hell and I want it!

But then of course the Apple event in January brought about all the rumors of a Verizon iPhone. So I have held off waiting for it to be released. Obviously, the iPad came out in January with no mention of iPhone (no OS updates, no deal breaking between Apple and Verizon, nothing). There's one more big landmark event this summer for Apple to finally do what everyone wants them to do. So if they don't announce it in June, I don't care anymore. I'm getting the Droid, and Apple can bite me.

Funny little technology side note: I posted my facebook status as I want a Verizon iPhone. I got three comments quickly and someone else liked it. Then magically after the third comment, it disappeared. Couldn't find it. It wasn't in my news feed, I couldn't link to it from the notification email....nothing. Then all of a sudden about 5 seconds ago, someone else commented on my status and it magically reappeared......Does AT&T own Facebook? Or is it just technology gremlins who are trying to make me pull out the rest of my little remaining hair?

I'm over technology for the rest of my day. I'm going to sit in my backyard and throw rocks at trains as they pass because that technology is too advanced. If there was an Amish community around, I'd go hang out with them for a day and raise a barn.

Tour Stop #27- Philadelphia, PA

2010-04-26T03:32:00.001-04:00

Name: University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Center Zellerbach Theatre- Philadelphia, PA
Seating Capacity- 900
Type: Proscenium

What a way to end the tour this season. Words have been failing me all week, hence the lack of posting on here. But I promised myself I would blog about every venue, so here we go...

We had a mid day load in on Monday which was not to bad for me at least. Everyone else had a slow load in because of one reason or another. Bobby eventually caught up and got back on pace, but Devon ended up loading in till very late into the morning. Apparently the venue didn't cut the gel before our arrival, so they were cutting things as they were focusing which slowed things down considerably.

We had rehearsal for Alice the next afternoon. The script was revised and I really thought it was a vast improvement from the previous version. It's really taking shape, and it's something I would really like to see/work on further down the road. Will, Kira and Micky were all at rehearsal so we had the whole crew back again to work really fast on the new script. We decided for our presentation the next day that we were going to strip down the reading and really make it much more about the language so there was no more blocking, no more entrances or exits to music stands. The cast was just sitting down and read the script.

The one tragic thing about the new script: There were nearly no Baby Pig grunts from Ray! Karen and I look forward to Ray's grunts because they are hilarious. So much so, that every time in the big show I cue Friar Laurence I grunt my response to the warning Karen gives me. For the final performance, I asked Ray if he wouldn't mind giving an authentic Baby Grunt for Karen over headset. I've apparently gotten so good at it, that Karen didn't even notice the difference between my grunts and Ray's. It's the highest compliment I was granted on tour!

We finally got back to our Guthrie masking style in Philadelphia so we had box masking again which was kinda cool because we've had nothing but legs since we left Minneapolis....or no masking what so ever. Depending on the venue of course. The shows went well, but the cast started to get somewhat restless in the middle of the long week. We had three double show days in a row, and if you include the presentation of Alice, it was actually 4 days in a row. Focus started to wane. This leg was pretty brutal in terms of the schedule.

With the arrival of the weekend also came Anna. She had agreed to drive to Philly to help me get all my stuff home....it also is convenient that her Aunt Lynne and Uncle Lloyd live in the city close to where we were staying. They are some of the final pieces of the extended family I had yet to meet. They were also the ones who continually joked with Anna that she had invented me because they had yet to meet me. All three of them came to the show on Saturday afternoon and then we went out to a great dinner close to the theater.

The final performance was great. I watched as much of it as possible because despite the fact that the show is going out again, I will not be. I'm not rejoining the tour in the fall when R+J hits the West coast so I was enjoying every last moment of watching the cast tell the story. It was really sad for me. On top of the tour ending and losing my touring family, it was the end of my life on the road.

I tried to hold off those thoughts as much as possible. The moment it really hit me was after the show once the cast was gone and strike had begun. I was staring at the road box and was looking at my empty shelf. And unlike end of tour last year, I knew I wasn't coming back. So looking at the top right hand side of the road box made me feel kinda hollow.

I don't really know how best to describe how I'm feeling now that my life on the road is done for the foreseeable future. Touring is exciting, and it's a lot of fun. It's also really stressful, and a whole lot of hard work. I also really believe in what The Acting Company stands for and the mission it fulfills across the country. It has really been an honor working with them for the last two seasons. I have met so many wonderful people and been so many wonderful places. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Acting Company. They (and Karen specifically) took a big chance on hiring me as a complete unknown entity. I was a cold resume submitted off an ad on the Equity website. And it has resulted in two years of great theater, and great friends.

But it's time to settle into New York, and dig in and restart my career here. The catch to touring all over the country is people forget about you here. I'm really excited to move forward having learned so much from Karen and from everyone on the road. I can't thank everyone at the Acting Company enough, or the Guthrie staff. The company from last year and this year: Its never goodbye. Its a small theatrical world out there, and I can't wait for us to meet again.

For a Good Time, Call...

2010-04-20T00:32:00.001-04:00

I am a big Man-Child. If something doesn't go my way, I through a "temper tantrum" usually involving groaning, whining, or barking....yes I bark at things when I get crabby. For instance, if I am on the truck and lets say Karen wants me to get something I just moved from the nose of the truck to the tail, I will grumble and say something along the lines of "This is information I could have used 10 seconds ago! BARK!"

But anyhew, I tend to have the mentality of a 14 year old boy on occasion. One such occasion cropped up today while I was in an elevator at the Annenberg Center here in lovely Philly. I walked into the elevator right next to the production office where Karen and I have set up shop and there was an information flier posted right near the control panel of the elevator. It's intended use is for staff of the building to know how they are expected to react to certain unenviable positions like: What to do in case of a rowdy audience member, or How to Deal with a Patron carrying a firearm.

But posted above this is a phone number for a campus service....and when I saw it, I nearly peed myself because of the way it was phrased and the associated telephone number:

Again, I know exactly what this service provides. It provides an escort across the campus late at night either with a car or on foot. But I'm a 28 year old Man-Child who sees this and immediately thinks how unfortunate to call something an Escort Service and then have the number be xxx-xxx-RIDE.

Lord help my fiance......this is who she's marrying.

Tour Stop #23 and #26- Wallingford, CT

2010-04-18T03:37:00.000-04:00

Name: Choate Rosemary Hall School, Paul Mellon Arts Center- Wallingford, CT
Seating Capacity: 770
Type: Proscenium

Previous Posts Regarding Wallingford: Full Day of Hell...Again and Boneless Cows

Wallingford is a venue when upon arrival, we all kind of stopped and went "Oh no....how is this going to work?" And not because we couldn't fit in the space, we could. But the space was seemingly so inhospitable to a touring show. There's no loading dock and it's one hell of a trek from the truck to the deck, the shop was packed full of stuff and so was the theater...so were the dressing rooms...

But following our initial reaction on our first load in on Tuesday morning, things really did go well in Wallingford. The TD of the space, Brad, was really great and got everything we needed. Both of our load ins were relatively easy. Our show Wednesday morning was a student matinee for schools in the surrounding area, and it was a student matinee complete with whoops and hollers for kissing, laughing at every penis and sex joke, but also raucous applause following the show.

During strike that day before we left for Keene to load in, I asked Brad if it would be ok if I left all my hallway signage up until we returned on Saturday. He said ok. I knew this was going to be awesome because I knew that meant my load in would probably be done even faster than normal. And I was right. I walked into the building at 8:15am, and by 8:25am I was done. I win! And the day went like that for just about everyone. We had many returning IATSE crew members (as well as some of the Choate students) so Bobby was done in record time as well. They left all the lights in the air focused for Devon so all he had to do was reinstall the scrollers and the set mounts. Sadly for Jason, and Olivia it was business as usual. And Matt had to install his entire separate sound system in the space. But even with all of that, everyone was done pretty much by the lunch break at 1pm.

I spent the afternoon watching the Sabres lose to the Bruins and napping before I went in to run the show. It was a weird dynamic because many of the Choate students were in attendance as well as the general public so it was kinda like a student matinee at 8 in the evening. The cast, even at this late hour of the tour, are still exploring and finding new and exciting things on the stage and it's always fun to hear something new happening while hiding behind the set and dashing around to watch the scene unfold anew.

Originally, we were going to head off to Philadelphia tonight, but our hotel is sold out so we wouldn't be able to get our rooms until later. So we are sitting in the hotel parking lot (the birth place of Boneless Cows) in Wallingford until 7 in the morning when Jim will drive us tantalizingly close to New York City, only to bypass it and head off to Pennsylvania for our final tour stop. It's a jam packed week full of activities: Rehearsals, performances, public appearances, more performances, more public appearances, and more performances. We have an 8 show week crunched into 5 days of performances. It's going to be a very hectic end of the tour.

I'm going to add these pictures as a post script under the idea that there must be something in the water here that makes us a little crazier than normal:

Backstage Olivia placed Sonny's party wrap on my head. She then asked for her fortune. I went around backstage and gave people their fortunes.

Olivia ripped the doorknob off the door leading to the theater. It was a "no harm, no foul" thing because we had already taped over the door latch so we weren't locked out or anything, and Brad quickly fixed it before a single actor knew what had happened. But just in case The Incredible Hulk/Olivia ripped the door knob off again during the show, I created the Olivia Proof Door Handle out of gaff tape and attached it above the door knob....just in case.

Ultimately, this isn't a funny picture....it are rather sad actually. This is Karen's macbook pro. Karen's macbook pro has been hearing for a while now how Karen wants to buy the new one. It has been trying to put forth it's best face for a while and behaving, but today Karen spoke about it seriously. About 10 minutes later, her screen display decided it was over working and decided to die on her again. I didn't have the heart to tell it that by suddenly misbehaving, the odds of her buying the new Macbook would increase exponentially. But that's ok, I paid the screen back for misbehaving. I pretended to have the Severed Alligator Head ohm-nom it....and one of it's teeth might have scratched her screen. Now, no matter what, Karen will remember working with me. If she looks on the outside of her computer, she'll see the dent from the VHS tapes that fell on it while we tried to figure out the DVR last year (which somehow required a VHS tape...), and if she opens it up, she'll see the scratch on the screen.....

.....I'm an ass. Sorry Karen. Totally my bad.

Tour Stop #25- Burlington, VT

2010-04-17T01:51:00.000-04:00

Name: Flynn Center for the Performing Arts- Burlington, VT
Seating Capacity: 1453
Type: Proscenium

After another crummy night of sleep in a hotel, I woke up and dragged myself to the bus to go to the Flynn Center for our first of two shows today. I think it's come to the point where I'm actually incapable of sleeping in a real bed now which is disturbing. Philadelphia will be good training to get used to a real bed again.

Our show this morning was a weird microcosm of bizarre. Right off the bat, someone bumbled a line and the rest of Act I went spiraling down this tube of strange onstage happenings. I'm too tired to actually remember any other ones, I just know it was a strange student show.

We honestly believe that the audience had all come down with Consumption from the sheer amount of coughing. Of course when you consider the weather had been nice the day the crew arrived to load in and there were 3 inches of snow on the ground in some areas nearby it's understandable people would be a little on the sickly side. The audience was great other than coughing so loudly and often and they really enjoyed the show.

Between shows, I remembered there was an awesome pizza place literally around the corner from the stage door. Last year we ordered a bunch of pizzas for load out because we hadn't had a chance to eat, and it was just awesome. So I went there for lunch and it was just as excellent as I remember it being. I immediately entered food coma and went to sleep from 2:30pm until 6:20pm It was epic and awesome.

The evening show went much smoother than the morning show in terms of performance. The audience really loved the show and the cast had a pretty solid performance. Sonny and Laura got an ovation following the Balcony Scene which is always nice.

The Flynn Center is such a great place to play. This year was just as good as last year and there were all manner of people I remembered from last year. I was able to remember a lot more of the faces because I hurt my elbow last year during the show in Burlington. The center sliding door of the Henry set wasn't put together properly so after months of using the same amount of force, I suddenly had to use more to close the door and I hyper-extended my right elbow. I spent the rest of the tour observing load outs so I wouldn't hurt myself anymore. So I sat on the dock last year and spoke to a lot of the locals and when I arrived today, by golly if most of those guys weren't back.

Load out tonight was a breeze even with the extra thought we had to put into it. The walls came out to us in a different order to make tomorrow's load in at Wallingford easier because it's supposed to rain and we can't load in the same way we did when we were there on Tuesday.

It's not quite 2am, but I am exhausted. Usually it takes me much longer to get tired when we're just getting underway after a load out, but today was so crappy, nothing would please me more than to crawl into my bunk and sleep until noon tomorrow. And basically I could because I already know exactly what the space is and how we're going to use it. But I'll get up with everyone else because it would be really rude to sleep all morning while everyone else is working.....no matter how appealing the idea sounds.

Final One Hour of the Season

2010-04-16T00:41:00.000-04:00

After a horrible night of sleep in the hotel with the awesome showers, I dragged myself out of the room and dropped my stuff on the cast bus so I could travel with them to Hudson, NH for the final One Hour Performance of the year.

This performance was added pretty last minute. I got the call sometime during the previous leg of the tour saying we were adding this venue for the one hour, which isn't something that normally happens with the One Hour. Traditionally, the One Hour is included as a package deal with the big show. And there was no way we could do the Big Show in Hudson because it was already scheduled to load in at Burlington, VT and we can't be two places at once. However, the high school we performed at in Hudson is truly what the mission of The Acting Company is all about and I feel like everyone in the company was very happy to go and perform.

When we arrived at the school, we were greeted by Lauren who had originally caught the attention of Justin and Paul (the head and adviser of the education department of TAC), and a few others. Lauren had on an awesome shirt which said something to the effect of "Give me Theater. Leave the Drama" which I thought was awesome. The school had set up a green room with some snack food and beverages on the ground floor, and above us in the gym they had 400 chairs, a light and sound board.

As I mentioned in my blog post regarding Tyler, TX we broke our one of our One Hour swords and we used the Big Show swords for our final run of the One Hour. The cast went through fight call with the new swords, and everything went just fine. The cast went back to the green room while I finished setting up the stage and doing a sound check.

Once the cast went to places there was a torrent of kids coming into the gym for the show. 400 kids is a lot to fit into a gym. So much so, that they actually pulled out a set of bleachers to let more kids sit down. The principal of the school did our curtain speech which was somewhat epically awesome. By the sounds of it, there's a school rule prohibiting the kids to carry their cell phones with them during school hours. It also seems as though the principal understands that the kids in the school skirt that rule on a daily basis. So he said "I know nobody has their cell phones on them of course, but if you do remember that theater etiquette says its rude to have your cell phone go off during the performance. So take this time now to turn them off or to vibrate with no worry about penalty."

Then came one of the most amusing things I have ever encountered in a student performance....ever. There were about a dozen students who were carrying around the microchipped babies for health class. The concept of this (for those not in the know) the students have to carry and care for the children for a week (or however long decided by their teacher) and they have to act like parents. If they take too long to respond to the crying child, they lose points. And of course, just like any real baby you never know exactly when it will start crying. The principal reminded those "parents" that if their baby started to cry during the performance, the proper thing to do is to quiet the child quickly and if they can't, to please leave the theater and a teacher will allow them back in once the child is done crying....

....I believe I counted all 12 babies crying during the performance. And I couldn't help but laugh because it was so hilarious!

The show itself went well, and we finally lived up to our "One Hour" title coming in at 59:59. Following the performance we had the best talk back of the season. I started it off with a quick introduction of the company which pretty much consisted of the year it was formed and that it's been touring the country ever since because as soon as I looked out at the audience I saw at least 2 dozen hands in the air so we had to get right to it. Joseph was patrolling around with the other microphone in the audience getting audience questions and asking them as soon as the cast was done answering the previous question he had a new question ready and waiting. It was a really efficient way to do things.

After the official talk back, we were cleaning up and a bunch of students came up to the apron of the stage and Laura and I ended up answering a whole bunch of additional questions from students before we went down to a lunch provided to us by the school.

I feel as though this was the most rewarding student experience we've had in the past two years. The entire audience was excellent for the entire time, they asked really good questions and were really engaged in the show. It made us all feel really good about going 90 miles in the opposite direction of where we needed to go next in order to bring Shakespeare to those who may not normally get it. Everyone at the school was really excited to have us there, and it showed. They really bent over backwards for us.

After a long drive to Burlington, VT we've had time to decompress before another day of double performances....we seem to be racking those up quickly these days. The Tour officially ends in 8 days from the time I'm posting this. It seems surreal. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts regarding the end of the tour in a wrap up post later on, but it's a little too depressing to think about right now. So I'm not going to.

Tour Stop #24- Keene, NH

2010-04-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

Name: The Colonial Theater- Keene, NH
Seating Capacity: 888
Type: Proscenium

Throughout the course of the last couple of posts, I've basically covered just about everything there is to cover about Keene, NH and the Colonial. It's a gorgeous venue, but superly tiny. We ended up pulling things off the truck, unloading what we needed from boxes and such, and then immediately loading them back into the truck and strapping them in because there just wasn't enough room for anything to be kept in the space itself. I was up far later than I originally thought I would be for load in as I was helping Olivia with the truck repack. And I was correct in assuming Devon would get to his floor mounts and cable safety around 2 in the morning. I elected to make life easier for every electrician involved and said to just cover over the cables with carpet/marley because it was quicker than having them lay tape across all the cables onstage. I think everyone working that night was thrilled at my choice. I tooled around a bit longer in the space laying out my arrows and what not before finally calling it a night around 3am and going to bed.

As I mentioned in the post about installing the understudies the first show in Keene was quite the adventure. Between shows, I ate some Chinese across the street from the theater, and took a much needed nap. I woke up and we had a little bit of time before the cast arrived from the hotel so I ate some left over Chinese and dragged myself into the space.

The second show was pretty interesting. As Karen noted, it was a really energized show because of the understudies performance earlier in the day. We had the full cast back for the evening, so it was business as usual and things went really well.

Load out was a pretty interesting. We had all the road boxes lined up on either side of the truck strapped in and we had to do some severe shuffling around in order to get things we needed in the order we needed them. This also involved bringing a couple of boxes off the truck which prompted a couple of people to say "Umm.... you're loading out wrong..."

I ended up leaving load out "early" once all the walls had come down because I was being left behind by the crew to do the final one hour performance the next morning. I carted my backpack, bus bag, and Big Show Cane Swords to the hotel. Let me tell you nothing can get your heart pumping more than carrying what are technically considered concealed weapons (no matter how dull or safe they are) down a street and having a police car pass you twice. It's somewhat disturbing, and had they stopped I'm sure I would have a fun story to tell. Thankfully, I wasn't stopped nor were the swords confiscated.

The hotel shower was everything I could ever have dreamed of. It had hot water, soap and shampoo. It felt so amazing to wash away 2-3 days worth of grime. As a matter of fact, it felt so amazing that when I woke up this morning I took another shower even though I didn't need to. But I could. So I did.

Installing Understudies (5 minutes before the show)

2010-04-14T13:15:00.000-04:00

In the almost two complete seasons, we have never had to put in an understudy with the tour....

....until today.

Christine had been fighting a migraine yesterday and successfully held it off but it came and hit her full force this morning before our 9:30am show here in Keene, NH. The decision was made to have her rest and try to get better for the evening performance. This meant that we installed Myxy as Lady Capulet and Joseph Parks (our company manager, who's also an Equity actor) into the role of Perrin (now known as Peter).

There was a chaotic rush for about 4 minutes while we ran out to the truck to get some of the costumes needed because the space here doesn't have room for any of our road boxes. There were some last minute check overs of lines, lots of well wishes and away we went.

It was such a fun experience! Things went really well! The strangest thing to get used to for the show was hearing Joseph saying Myxy's Perrin/Peter lines because we're all so used to hearing a female voice speaking those lines and then suddenly here comes this guy talking about the law on our side and things of that nature. We were also wondering how they were going to deal with all the sexual innuendo Perrin has, but it was handled beautifully and Peter quickly became "one of the guys" in the Capulet household and it worked so well.

Myxy as Lady Capulet was another wonderful happening. She carried herself with such poise, class and dignity but still had those lashes of emotion Lady Cap is prone to. Jason "re-costumed" the role so she still had all the appropriate looks: She had her day dress (which is normally Elizabeth's party gown...Elizabeth wore Christine's party gown to change her look up), a party dress (what she normally wears), and despite being 3 feet shorter than Christine (joking!) she fit into Lady Capulet's robe for Act II but she wore heels instead of slippers so it wouldn't be pooling at her feet. Myxy was so calm backstage.

Following the show, the cast did a wonderful thing and gave the final bow to Joseph and Myxy in acknowledgment of what they had accomplished this morning. It's been a while since the cast has watched the show from the wings, but every single person was watching the first scene before the umbrella brawl to see Joseph. Every time Joseph or Myxy went onstage there was a gaggle of cast watching from the wings in support of their cast mates. It was really great to see.

We now have an eon between shows compared to what we normally have. The crew is taking turns showering in the hotel, sleeping, or finding food. I decided to blog first, and now I'm going for option B and going back to bed. I'll get food before the show and then take a shower after the show since I'm staying overnight to travel with the cast for the final time this season. I thought about sleeping on their bus again, then I realized I hadn't slept in an actual bed since I left New York on April 5th. That's a loooong time to be without a real bed.

Signage Purse 2.0 (An Epic Victory)

2010-04-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

The stage management team has been fighting an ongoing battle since last season. When we created our signage last year, we used binder clips labeled "SL" "SR" "DR" "CALL" "MISC" "X-TRA" with the appropriate signs clipped into them, and then placed in a hanging file folder in our filing cabinet. I enjoyed this system, but it was ultimately a chore because if you took all of the clips out at once, the pile of signs became very unruly and would slip, and slide out of your hands easily. And if you needed to pull out a sign, you had to put down the entire pile to get the one sign, pull out the gaff tape out from under your arm, put the sign in your mouth, rip the tape, tape up the sign, and then mark it with the dry erase marker you had in your pocket. Then pick up the whole pile, and move 5 feet away to hang the next sign. Not horribly efficient.

This year, Karen and I discovered a portable file folder in our road box while we were cleaning it left by our predecessor. Our dorky Stage management wheels started turning and we thought "Hmm....we could make this our signage folder!" But we would still be stuck doing all those horrible steps to hang signs as before, except we would have now gained the ability to not carry all the slippery signs together. We punched a couple of holes in the back of the file folder and placed a long string of tie line through it and we made ourselves a little signage purse. That sounds silly enough, but to truly understand how silly it looked while I was hanging signs here's some proof:

The nice thing about it was we secured a dry erase marker to the purse with a piece of gaff tape. It was taped directly to the flap and over the lid of the marker so I could pull it out and put it back in when I needed it without fishing in my pockets. But the signage purse was bubble gum pink. I uh, I don't like bubble gum pink. It's not a color I tend to enjoy because it's... well, bubble gum pink. It was somewhat embarrassing to walk around with it on even with my subtle attempts to make it not so cute:

I tried to put on a good face regarding the signage purse and for a while it was ok. But after about 2 weeks or so, I really did get sick of walking around each venue with a bubble gum pink purse....with Matt and Jason laughing at me. I kept finding subtle ways not carry the purse around with me. I would leave it in the road box and pull out the signs I needed (just like last year) and go tape them up, or I would bring it to the dressing rooms and leave it on a table, basically anything to not have it on my person.

Around the same time I was planning my "diabolical revenge" on Karen for her marking our road box, Karen was planning something of her own. I should have known something was amiss when in Ruston, LA I walked away from the road box and into the men's dressing room, and returned quickly and overheard Karen talking to Kate about something that involved the signage purse. I immediately quipped "You talkin' about my signage purse??!!" And Karen was like "Uh...no." and came up with some kind of excuse as to why she was talking about me and my signage purse.

Following the success of Road Box Revenge, Karen implemented Operation Tactical Signage Deployment Unit. What she had been talking about in Ruston was replacing the bubble gum pink signage purse with a more apropo feel for a gentleman such as myself. She was telling Kate all about it and then she had to back track and try to cover it up.

Today, after our show in Wallingford, CT I was on the truck loading the stairs up on the load bars, and Karen removed the signage purse from the road box, and replaced it with a brand new epic signage purse....just for me!!

Not only does it have my initials on it (and they are fuzzy too!), it has a couple of pirate banners and stickers and tags of the ilk, and some footballs on it (while hockey would be more appropriate for me in general, Karen has experienced me expanding my Spaces on my laptop to 16 spaces so I could have all my work programs open and 10 football gamecasts at the same time). Also scattered throughout the cover are little army men to increase the manly factor ten fold.

I totally approve.

Boneless Cows

2010-04-13T17:45:00.004-04:00

I am really not sure how exactly the conversation went last night in the hotel restaurant we were eating at, nor at this point do I think it really matters. I know that Bobby mentioned that maybe he wanted to eat a T-Bone steak. That got us on the conversation of bones in meat. But the conversation then went back to what ever it had been about.

We were joined by Matt who ended up ordering the Hog Wings (pork shanks). When he got them and finished eating, he mentioned how he had heard that they no longer served steak with bones in jail anymore for fear of the bones being used as shivs. It was at that moment, that one of the best tour jokes I've ever seen came to life.

Like I said, i don't know who first suggested to breed cattle without bones, but someone did. And then someone else suggested it would be the most tender meat ever because without bones it couldn't move, and you would never have tough meat anywhere. We considered the difficulty of milking a cow if all it's muscles were laying on top of the utters, and we have since wondered aloud what kind of noises would a boneless cow make? Would it be able to moo? Or would it simply make a series of farting noises with its mouth without the structure of the face to support it? Could it still have bones in its tail to swat at flies? Or would it be condemned to a life of insects walking all over it?

At some point, Bobby started to move like a boneless cow would move. It is this weird undulating, spastic, and convulsive series of movements punctuated by grunts and groans. And the entire table (and the entire restaurant) got treated to one hell of a show.

After dinner, we returned to the bus. Olivia ended up in her bunk, I was in the front lounge, and Matt and Bobby were in the back playing Wii. Bobby kept coming up to the front, stopping at Olivia's bunk (who was on the phone with her fiancee) and acting like a boneless cow. She started to laugh almost uncontrollably, while I silently lost it in the front lounge, and Matt was screaming from the back lounge "GET BACK HERE! IT'S YOUR TURN!"

Usually backstage during the show, Olivia, Jason and myself partake in dance parties. But not today. Today was picturing rolling green pastures. The light sway of the lush grass in the breeze. Distant calls from fellow farm animals, a tractor plowing a field....while three boneless cows undulate and attempt to moo, but can only muster a fart sound.

I hope I can get a shot of Bobby doing his version of the boneless cow and get it up here. If I can't capture him doing it, I hope I can at least show you Jason, Olivia and myself.....and if push comes to shove just myself. I'll keep you updated.

Update: Ok, it's pretty bad camera work by yours truly, but don't worry. It will straighten out before too long, and while I'm still fighting my embedding war with youtube, at least because of the aspect ratio of this video vs. full screen videos this one actually works in the blog. Enjoy!

Full Day of Hell...again

2010-04-13T17:16:00.000-04:00

That might be an exaggeration but probably not by too much.

We spent the last two days in Wallingford, CT running the show and are now en route to Keene, NH for an evening/very early in the morning load in. The Theater Stats post of Wallingford will come on Saturday because we are going back to the same theater. It's certainly a different thing than we normally do. We have come back to a few of the same theaters this year that we'd been to last year, but never have we loaded in, done the show, loaded out, gone to two more cities and gone back to the same location before. I didn't strike all of my signage because it will make my load in easier than any I've ever had in my life.

The entire crew is asleep right now in preparation for tonight's load in, but not me. I figure that in general I'll be done by 7:45pm tonight, and can come back and go to sleep at any point after that. I'll have to go in and check on safety, cables, and floor mount positions at some point but not before midnight. And honestly it will probably be closer to 1 or 2am before Devon has gotten to the point that we're ready for that part. I could also just say screw it and I'll do it in the morning but that will make more work for him and that's just not nice.

We've had one other monster day of show, load out, and then load in before in Pittsfield, MA and that turned out pretty well so we have high hopes things will go just as smoothly tonight. We aren't keeping our hopes up just in case tonight turns into a total grind. Besides, like Scotty told Geordi la Forge in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation if you tell people the amount of time it will actually take to get something done, you won't seem like a miracle worker when you get it done earlier (I'm paraphrasing because I don't feel like looking up the quote). If we think tonight won't necessarily go well, we will all be pleasantly surprised when they do and things come together quickly.

Road Box Revenge

2010-04-10T18:14:00.007-04:00

UPDATE: Accursed Youtube/blogger/damned websites owned by Google!!!!! I can not for the life of me embed a friggin' video and have it fit. And this one really needs to be seen in full glory. So click the link here to go to my you tube page. I'm going to keep working on it though so it will be all pretty and actually on the blog itself.(UPDATE AGAIN: Nope....I give up. Screw this. Click the link)

A Final Update: Due to the new layout and format of the blog, my youtube video embeds work so much better now! Hurray! Now it's actually in the blog like I always intended it to be!
The video does all the talking, so I'll just leave it at that.

Tour Stop #22- Tyler, TX

2010-04-10T18:14:00.000-04:00

Name: University of Texas at Tyler, Cowan Arts Center
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 2000

After being in Texas for two days, I am now totally convinced that everything is bigger in Texas. The last two houses were massive! But the other things we discovered is Texas crews rock!

I spent my morning with the cast again performing the One Hour show in Orange before we moved on. Usually, when we perform these and I blog about them I tend to glance over the details of the show, but that would truly do a disservice to what happened to us yesterday. During the Tybalt/Mercutio fight one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me in theater happened: Mercutio's sword broke in the middle of the fight and went flying through the air. It was during his grand swipe of the blade which starts out towards the audience and ends upstage. Thankfully, the blade went flying upstage and not into the house. That would have been disastrous. Since no one was hurt, the audience was laughing and clapping because they had just witnessed a theatrical event. Will was petrified because he had no idea how he could continue the fight without a blade in his hand. Hugh went and picked it up and gave it back to Will who tried to put the sword back together. But it was not to be. The tang had snapped in half thus rendering it basically useless. Will finished the fights with the blade itself and Sonny did the same thing.

We had an uneventful travel day to Tyler. En route, Karen sent me a text message updating me on their progress. it was 12:53 and she said Bobby was done. This is why I say Texas crews are awesome. We couldn't pull that off last year when we weren't loading in the set. The guys in Tyler were rockin' it!

There was no runner to get me to the venue once we arrived in Tyler, and it was so close to bus call for the cast anyway that I just stayed at the hotel on the bus and waited to be taxied to the venue. The space was so huge. We could have fit two of our sets on it with room to spare. The show was again great, and I know the cast was relieved to finally get a day off after this work week.

Load out was just as fast and pressed up against our record load out time set in Orange, but t'was not to be. The crew in Tyler missed the load out record by 4 minutes and finished in 2 hours and 9 minutes. I almost guarantee that 2 hours and 5 minutes will be the record for this year.

There was one other big event that happened....and that's coming in a blog post.....right now!

Tour Stop #21- Orange, TX

2010-04-09T00:50:00.000-04:00

Name: Lutcher Theater For Performing Arts- Orange, TX
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 1442

Like I said in my post regarding Baton Rouge this place is amazing. When I arrived in the space, everything was in fantastic shape. The set was already up, Devon was working on the overstage light focus, and everything was pretty much done. I laid out my white gaff tape arrows and X's and that was pretty much it. I meandered around the space trying to find something to do, but there was nothing.

I went to the bus and watched a little bit of the Masters and saw Tiger sink his second Eagle putt of the day, and then realized that I was tired and if I continued to watch golf I would rapidly slip into a coma. I went back into the theater and had the provided dinner which was yummy! They had a great chicken and pasta dish, a soup, and Cajun Green beans. Having learned my lesson from two years of Guthrie Tech Dinners, I did not eat myself to an oblivion and ate just the right amount to survive till the free breakfast at the hotel in the morning, but not so much I would have to crawl around backstage.

The show was another great one. The cast is really hitting on all cylinders right now. The space is really lively in terms of the sound, so the language was carried really well all the way up to the back of the balcony. You could hear everything so clearly every where in the space. And if you were standing in the wings, you could hear the sound bouncing around you.

After the show, Sara Phillips (one of the show's vocal coaches) brought some of her students to talk to the cast about their process as actors and how they stay in tune with themselves. And after that, t'was back to the bus and back to the hotel. I am again sleeping in the back lounge of the bus, but today the cast is hanging out and playing basketball on the Xbox back there. I'm tossing around the idea of getting a room tonight since we don't have to be up as early as we did today, and a bed might be nice. Though, I have to say the reprisals from my fellow crew members could be fierce as we don't have a hotel room scheduled for us until the beginning of next week. But a bed might be nice. And a shower would be really nice considering the 4 hour drive to Tyler. Might have to bite the bullet. But we shall see.

Couple Quick Pics and Stories

2010-04-08T18:12:00.001-04:00

This is a picture from my trip to the Bronx Zoo....shockingly less than a week ago...Since Karen and I settled on Tiger pictures for the signage, Anna and I made a dash to the tigers first. And we both like big cats anyway.

This was my favorite picture from that day. I caught the Bald Eagle just as it was about to take flight to another part of it's cage. So cool!

I took this with my phone as we stopped to get water from the bus on our way from Shreveport, LA to Ruston, LA. The cast and crew were all crammed together into one bus since our bus wasn't ready to meet us at the airport. So there we are, all intermingled.

Yes, that deli is called Montagues Deli. Therefore, we had to take this picture. This was in the food court in Ruston.

Karen decided in Hartford to "brand" our roadbox with her initials. And she was mean about it. She put them on when I was at the One Hour performance, and then kept it hidden all day and made certain that I was the one that closed that particular door. I then splashed water on her for being mean.

Well Karen likes to be mean to me often. And when we were loading out of West Palm Beach, she backed me into the sound case. And it hurt. She said it was my fault, I say it was her fault and we shall never agree on who's fault it actually is. But she was very insistent that it was mine. So I went to the box, took out my gerber and unscrewed her KP from the door. After I was done (and hid them in the top shelf where she can't reach) she continued to be mean so I took them from their new home and was going to hide them on the bus. While doing this, I slapped the two pieces together and I broke the top part of the K off. I stopped where I was and said "Ok....joke went too far....who has gorilla glue?"

Well, after two weeks, we finally repaired and reinstalled the KP to its original glory. Karen glued the pieces back together and attached the K. While she was calling focus, I finished the job and attached the P in atonement.

That's the post load out picture with Kate from Ruston. We had offered her the option of riding in the truck for the rest of the tour so she could be there for all that lovely grunt work Karen and I don't like to do. She was game. We all ended up deciding it was better off if she didn't ride in the truck because it's not all that safe.....or comfy....

And last but not least: this is a trail of some "mysterious substance" that was trailed out of the sound workbox onto the truck during our Ruston load out. I saw it dripping as the crew was pulling it up the ramp and started to call for them to stop as soon as they got it up the ramp because it's not good to have anything leaking on a truck, much less a work box which could contain important/expensive things.

Matt happened to be on the truck so he popped the box open and looked into the bottom left hand corner of the box and I saw batteries. At the same time I saw that, one of the local crew members was saying "I wonder what it is?" as he was dipping his finger in it. I said a beat later than that (not even hearing what he had said) "Oh, it's battery acid." Apparently, he freaked out and ran back inside to wash his hands off quickly. Matt called me a dumbass and that battery acid wouldn't do that. We then discovered a cup of coffee had tipped over that we aren't sure where it came from....but it wasn't Ruston....we've been on vacation for a week. That box hasn't been opened since we were in Chattanooga. Matt isn't even sure it was from there either.

Tour Stop #20- Baton Rouge, LA

2010-04-08T17:50:00.000-04:00

Name: Baton Rouge Community College, Magnolia Pavilion- Baton Rouge, LA
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity- 530

Another one of our familiar stops from last season is BRCC. It seems we always end up there whenever the touring is about to get difficult. Last season, Baton Rouge was the last stop before we had to travel 1400 miles to Colorado in 2 days. This time, it's the second stop in our 4 day One Off Extravaganza followed by another 1400 mile drive in two days....We all must have done something really bad in a previous life.

The day started off as all my days do: Hanging signs. But the layout of the space is such that it's really simple and it took all of 15 minutes to get myself set up. I spent most of my day sitting on the bus deciding if I should take a nap or not. Usually, this is a non issue. But I was going to call an hour or so of the focus because Karen was tapped to talk to a class with Corey about theater/touring/etc. This was scheduled at 3pm and that's smack dab in the middle of light focus. So I was going to pick up the slack.

I did end up taking a quick cat nap and going in to learn exactly what I was going to be doing, and then take over. And, as if by magic, as soon as I started to call the focus things went to crap. All of a sudden there were patching issues, dead dimmers, confusion between dimmers and channels, not enough cable, not enough dimmers, and many other assorted problems. I don't have an accurate idea of how long it should take to focus lights for this tour because I've never done it before, but I know for a fact that focusing 4 lights in an hour is not a good pace to work at. Especially when you consider that the plot as designed at the Guthrie had 200 lights. That would mean the show would be over, and Devon would still be focusing lights.

When Karen returned she asked "So how did it go?" and I told her we got four lights done. I think she thought I was kidding at first. But when I showed her the paperwork she was like "Oh damn."

Somehow, by some miracle, Devon got everything done just before the cast had to be onstage for warm ups. And we were off and running. The cast is still on the post vacation high and everything is really clicking right now. The show was another great one.

Following the performance, I got the rare gift of getting out of load out. Unlike last year, it wasn't because I was injured. This time, it was because the cast had a One Hour Performance in the morning and the crew had to leave to get to Orange, TX. So I packed up as much as I could before I left with the cast and returned to the hotel while the crew struck the show (in a rainstorm...I always seem to miss the crappy weather load outs....oh darn....)

I ate a late dinner with Joseph and Corey at the hotel bar, and retired to the cast bus' back lounge where I was spending the night. I got a decent amount of sleep once I configured myself in such a way that I wasn't being blinded by the rope lights under the table back there.

I woke up early in the morning to make sure I was clothed and refreshed before people started coming onto the bus and potentially waking me up which would be awkward. I know they all knew I was sleeping on the bus, but at 7:30am people are more likely to forget things like that and I was afraid they might walk into the back lounge and go "OH CRAP!" and that's just not how I wanted to start my day.

We learned a valuable lesson from last years One Hour in Baton Rouge: Schedule it on a Tuesday or Thursday because the class schedule allows for the audience to stay for the whole performance. There was a mass exodus from the One Hour Henry last season. But we got the One Hour R+J in with a little time to spare.

I took my first of two consecutive trips with the cast to the next city and arrived in Orange, TX around 2:30pm. When I called Karen to see what the deal was with runners or taxis to the theater she said I could get a runner, and that Bobby was done and on the bus napping already. My jaw hit the ground! The only other time that happened in either season was when we didn't load in our set. This crew here is amazing. It's currently 10 minutes to 5 and even Devon is done. And that's pretty damn cool.

The crew has all retreated to the bus until a Guthrie style Tech Dinner is served at 5:30. Then we have a show, and once again I will go back with the cast to the hotel to sleep on the bus and do a One Hour in the morning. Then it's off to Tyler, TX.

Tour Stop #19- Ruston, LA

2010-04-07T12:11:00.001-04:00

Name: Louisiana Tech Concert Association, Howard Auditorium- Ruston, LA
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity- 1100

Following a long day of travel from our many vacation spots, the company reassembled in Ruston, LA yesterday to do ourselves a little show.

Everyone was very energetic throughout the day, as I think we were all chomping at the bit to get the tour underway again. Things that would have gotten on our nerves last leg, were no problem at all. The loading dock of the theater didn't allow us to back our truck up to it, so we had to drop our ramp, and then walk everything up a small hill onto another ramp and into the theater. But no one seemed to really mind the extra walk especially since the weather was so nice yesterday.

At the start of the day, the venue introduced us to Kate who is a sophomore Stage Management student at the college who basically became our PA for the rest of the day. We walked her through everything we do on a daily basis (including the signage, valuable bags, mirror signs......the extreme boredom between those tasks and light focus....). She took us around campus to the bookstore where we bought a new lock for the lock box (finally). We bought the kind with letters so we could make words as the combination, and we chose an appropriately Shakespearean word that made Karen and myself geek out.

We weren't provided breakfast so Kate then showed us where the food court was which ended up being the place where we got breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday. "Breakfast" was a turkey wrap (which was awesome), lunch was a chicken caesar salad, and dinner was a sandwich from Chic fill-a (or however that's spelled). Basically, my entire day consisted of poultry.

After breakfast we went back to the theater and did some spot organizing/tour of the roadbox so Kate could see what we carry around with us. And Karen and I collectively repaired her KP initials that I broke in West Palm Beach. I don't know if I've blogged about that, but I'll look back and explain the story in another post.

After running out of things to do in the space, we all retreated to the bus and chatted in the front lounge for a while about theater, getting into theater, and some war stories that Karen and I had. We then parted ways for lunch.

Usually at this point of a load in, I am asleep. And I stay asleep for a long time. But I really didn't feel like I needed to take a nap so I didn't. I meandered around the space trying to find things to do to occupy my time. I did a few things here and there and did safety inspections throughout the day which is basically pointless because I know the things that I need to check on, and most of those things aren't done before 5pm. And it was 2pm. So I basically was as productive as I normally am on a typical load in day, I just was awake for it.

We got to show time and things got kinda crazy. I had a lot of last minute set up stuff to deal with which Kate was around to help for. We had decided earlier in the day that she would shadow Karen from the booth for Act I because she has more interesting calls during that act, and then she would shadow me backstage for Act II for my human cuelight track.

The show went really well. The cast, much like the crew, was glad to be back at it and put on a really good show despite some of the hardships of the space. The acoustics in the theater were challenging. It's kind of hard to see in my picture, but there are lots of curves in the architecture and because of that there was a large dead zone in the middle of the orchestra section. This required the cast to really push the sound out, and really bite on their consonants to make sure everything was clear, but after a nice relaxing vacation, that wasn't top much of an issue.

The show started nearly 20 minutes late because we jammed a whole bunch of people into the house. Apparently, we had outsold anything that has ever been in the space. There was still a huge line out the door waiting for tickets at 7:30.

Kate joined me backstage for the second act, and came to understand why I (and Karen) have come to call me the human cuelight. My whole act involves wave my arm, make an actor move, sit down, repeat. Backstage was really warm, and because the headsets got pretty damn good range yesterday, I spent parts of the Act standing out on the loading dock to cool off and stand in the breezy night. Kate and I continued our previous conversations about theater life when not cuing actors, or having dance parties with Jason and Olivia.

Once we got past the Fred move, I asked Kate if she wanted to do my last few cues to get the experience of being a human cuelight. She got really excited (she may or may not have jumped up and down in a circle) and said "YES!" So I taught her the subtle nuances of holding your arm in the air, and pointing at people...I realize that sounds stupid, but there are good and bad ways to cue actors. It's good to be nice and crisp with your movements so it's very clear that you've cued them. So when we got to the Friar Jon cue, I told Jesse to keep eyes on her and she performed her cue perfectly. She also got to cue the Watch on in the Tomb scene. This resulted in the cast being goofier than normal before that moment. Usually Jesse and Isaac are joking around before they enter, so I said "Now childrens, you have to behave today. Make sure you're watching Kate." So they looked and turned in every other direction but the one she was standing waiting to cue them, turning just in time to get their cue.

Strike went really well too. Despite going up so late, we finished load out at the normal time we would expect to finish. It put Ruston in the "Above Average" load out category. When the walls started to come into the truck at 12:45am (1hour and 45 minutes after strike started) I was like "Damn, I would never have guessed we would make up that much time" She said "Yeah, we might be from Louisiana and test in the lowest percentile in the nation, but we're really good at manual labor."

Karen, Kate and myself exchanged information so we could keep in touch, and we hopped on the bus and all collapsed into our bunks. It's a long week of one offs and quick turn arounds.

Fulfilling the Role of Tourist

2010-04-03T00:14:00.000-04:00

There are many things to do in New York City. If you say there's nothing to do, you obviously aren't looking very hard (or are too lazy to take a long trek on the subway). Since moving here, I had always wanted to go to the Bronx Zoo, but had never been able to convince myself to travel all the way up to the Bronx and go.

Well, not having to take a 2 hour subway trip certainly makes the decision making process much easier. Anna has a car. Cars (while generally not useful while living in New York) make for easy traveling when the subway forces you to go into Manhattan instead of taking a direct trip to your destination. So we decided to make a day of it and go to the zoo and we'd drive up there and life would be happy.

And it was until we had to find parking. Then life became really not so hot. Apparently, we were not the only one on a bright, sunny (day off from school) day to go to the zoo. As a matter of fact, I'd say about 25% of the city had the same idea we did. We found out the normal parking lot was too full, and then we found out that the directions the zoo gives you to the next overflow parking lot are kinda crap and we got lost. Eventually, we figured out where to go but when we got there that lot was closed too. But we kept seeing people leaving the parking lot so we kinda sat in the line of traffic.....waiting for them to let us in.....or so we could break down the fence blocking our way.

Parking aside, today was fun. We got to see all the pretty aminals (yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose), and I got a new Twitter stalker by mentioning the Bronx Zoo, so now I'm being followed by the Bronx Zoo. Huzzah! I'll post some pictures up here later on. Most likely when I get back on the road and have the time again.

And I have an update on my Amazon package! It arrived today!!!!!!! I am slightly disturbed by the lipstick and glitter I found inside the box......

....I knew it went to a strip club.

Tour Stop #18- Chattanooga, TN

2010-03-30T11:49:00.000-04:00

Name: University of Tennessee, Roland Hayes Concert Hall
Seating Capacity: 500
Type: Proscenium

I almost indicated this space as the wonky proscenium like St. Louis last year but we were much closer to the audience in St. Louis and it was a lot more apparent that the seating arrangement was kinda strange. We had a nice healthy apron barrier between our marley floor and the audience here.

We had a great time in Chattanooga. The entire staff at UTC was so helpful and friendly, so much so that when I left Ray's knee pads in my backpack for our show on Sunday, the presenter (Bob) was kind enough to drive me back to the hotel to pick them up even though he had to run the box office as well. The space TD (also named Bob) was funny and knowledgeable and great to hang around with for a couple days.

The shows went pretty well here. Our run crews were great, and the cast was relaxed yet giddy because of the coming vacation. There were lots of smiles and laughs and joking around in the dressing rooms. Despite Karen's prediction, our final show yesterday didn't come in faster than average. She was thinking that the cast would really be pushing things along because the faster the show gets done, the faster vacation starts!

But that was just not to be (no matter how badly anyone would have wanted that to be) and the show came in in the middle of our usual running times. Load out was somewhat interesting because things came out in the wrong order but we managed to make a nice new truck pack. Not like...new new, just new order in which things can happen new. We basically packed everything on the driver side up to the walls while waiting for the TD box, and the final set of stairs and then the rest of the stuff rolled in just fine and dandy.

Usually we have about a half an hour waiting for things on the truck as the walls are being taken down. This is usually the time when we start goofing off and joking around and get really punchy. Last night was no different. General topics discussed yesterday were: People we know who have made gay porn for a living, hide the pickle in Phantom of the Opera, how one can tell if a certain crew member walked away to fart, and the general state of snack vending machines and their inability to take the type of money you have on your person at that moment.

Sad thing about load out: The Choreographer for UTC's production of "The Pajama Game" parked her car in the loading dock while our truck driver was gone. He then backed into the dock and blocked her in. She was exceptionally displeased that she couldn't get out and she was stuck there for our entire strike. She was finally able to escape around 1:30am.

Following strike, Jason and I went to the City Cafe (I think) which is an all night diner about 3/4 of a mile from the hotel. We had some food, talked about some tour stuff and had a nice relaxing final evening in Chattanooga.

We are now sitting in the airport waiting to go home for our vacation. I love airports that have free wi-fi because it makes everything better. You can easily entertain yourself on the interwebs when waiting for your plane for 2 hours. We get to leave the nice, warm, sunny Tennessee and go to the cold rainy New York. Joygasm...

Just in case you don't believe me that the cast was in a good mood and joking around: I present to you what the sign in sheet looked like last night. Usually, it contains the cast's initials as the arrive. Yesterday...

And just in case you don't believe me that we were all punchy and having a good time last night during load out: I may or may not have taken one of my tape arrows and given it to Devon as a gift.

Packing Up for Vacation

2010-03-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

After a month on the road, we are preparing to depart Chattanooga for our vacation following our evening show/strike. This has been a horrid ordeal. I haven't really been able to figure out exactly how to travel home for this vacation. It's hard considering I want to travel light for the next leg, but we're also going to very different climates (Baton Rouge vs. Burlington, VT) so I need to have the appropriate clothing.

This does mean I can't ditch off nearly as much stuff as I did when we were going on vacation last year. I have to keep cold weather stuff and warm weather stuff too. I also have to make sure when I come back that I have enough room in my luggage for everything in the road box that needs to be vacated in Philadelphia. I don't have as much as Karen does, but it's still a healthy amount of stuff and a lot of it's big enough that it kills luggage space.

It is the curse of being me that I over prepare for everything anyway. Anytime I cook a meal for multiple people, I always end up cooking way too much because the Italian in me kicks in and goes "Hey, nobody will go home hungry and everyone will eat a pound of pasta a piece. Cool. I know what I need to do!" Same thing applies to packing for any extended stay away from home. I may or may not have packed 3/4 of my wardrobe for the tour. Walking around with that much stuff is kinda....painful.

But I've got it basically figured out. I'm going to leave my blue duffel bag on the truck with stuff I should only need on tour (my show blacks, my Acting Company Day bag, my body pillow etc etc), I'm going to come home with my backpack full of technology, my luggage full of clean/dirty clothes (ok...dirty clothes because I'm sure I'll just walk the whole thing to the laundry room and wash all of it), and my green shoulder bag full of more clothes and books and things.

The real challenge for me will be trying to figure out what to come back with after vacation. Do I bring the two big books back that I've been carrying since Minneapolis (which I have read all of 59 pages)? Do I really need 4 weeks worth of clothing? Does my external hard drive really need to come back out on the road with me? I wonder if I could get away with not packing deodorant....

Ok, that last one is not an option. As I said before stinking on the bus isn't nice. Not to mention I'm traveling with the cast very often next leg and it will be harder to hide body odor on a bus with 16 people (including myself). As much as I joke about how horrid traveling with the cast is, I'm looking forward to it. I understand I won't have any privacy and no place to retreat to if I'm in a mood, but I'll get to hang out with them outside of performances and rehearsals which I usually don't get a chance to do.

Ok Seriously??

2010-03-27T13:37:00.001-04:00

I understand that when you don't pay for expedited shipping, your packages from online retailers can take a pretty convoluted path to arrive at your house. Usually, it will go in a relatively straight line. If it starts in Kentucky, it will move to Ohio, then Western New York, then to the middle of Pennsylvania, then to New Jersey, and finally to Forrest Hills to be brought to me so I can be happy!

Well as I mentioned before, I needed to buy new headphones because my replacement pair doesn't quite cut it.....and I also wanted a new Wii game that caught my eye a while back. So I placed my order online to be delivered to my apartment and it should arrive while I am home.

But when I looked at my package tracking this morning, I was slightly confused......

So....Apparently...my package decided to start in Phoenix, then travel to Tempe to visit some of it's friends, and family.....maybe my package had to go buy the Wii game in Tempe to be put in the box....maybe this was like the Amazon Package bachelor party and they tore it up with a bunch of strippers in Tempe before returning to Phoenix to finally ship out to New York.

My answers may be crazy and a little off kilter, but can someone else explain to me why my carbon footprint got larger because of an unnecessary trip to friggin' Tempe???? IT STARTED IN PHOENIX! THAT'S THE MOST HAPPENIN' PLACE IN ARIZONA! WTF IS IN TEMPE???!!!

iPhoto's Faces (A story of Failure)

2010-03-25T17:09:00.000-04:00

When I upgraded to Snow Leopard before leaving Minneapolis, I discovered this new thing iPhoto does which is it recognizes faces in photos and you can label them. I assume this is to easily find photos of people instead of searching through albums or events or all your photos at once.

The one "complaint" if I had one is how damn stupid the program is. While I realize that I am related to my sister Erin, I have to say we don't look so similar that it should be a prompt in photos of me "Is this Erin Tochelli?" I was also a fan of the gender bending fun the program seemed to take pleasure in. No, I don't look like Deanna. Nor does my friend Ella look anything like my niece Ella Rose. I realize the names are the same, but one would hope a program should be able to tell the difference between a 23 year old young woman and a picture of a 8 month old baby.

Not to mention the facial recognition technology isn't all that advanced, and I think my camera does a better job of isolating faces better than the computer program does. There were shots of people straight on, and it wouldn't put a tag automatically in the picture, and I would then have to add one myself. It's not even like bad pictures with peoples faces washed out or anything. Decently lit, and well framed pictures didn't get a tag. But of course, the TV's in the background at Mr. Biggs got tagged all the time. I thought about trying to figure out which basketball stars kept appearing in my photos, but I could care less.

This isn't a real critique or review of the Faces function, but ultimately a story about how stupid the facial selection process is. As I mentioned, I kept getting tags on the faces in the TV screens. But no big deal right? It's a party photo with lots of people so I was always expecting to stop every photo and tag someone. But when I got to my tour photos from this year (last night around 3:30am), I was certainly expecting nothing of the sort. I have about 4-5 shots of every theater we've been to and that's basically the majority of the pictures I take, but I was scanning through all of them stopping occasionally to tag Karen in a picture, or Jason or whomever happened to walk in my camera's path. When I got to the set of photos from Pittsfield, MA I knew I had taken a lot of pictures of the theater because it was really pretty. So I was quickly bouncing through the 20 some odd shots I took of the theater....

When suddenly I saw three faces were tagged in a picture of the architecture. Now remember, this is late late late at night, I was tired, and was already having some old timey thoughts because of the hotel. The first thing that ran across my mind was "HOLY S*** I caught a ghost on camera!!!!" So I clicked back to the picture with the three faces tagged in it and realized it was faces built into the ornamental covering of the balcony that had set off iPhoto's facial recognition algorithm.

So to summarize: Faces in iPhoto won't necessarily find perfectly clear faces you take a photo off, will assume you are your sister when obviously you are not, and will immediately tag faces on TV or little cherub looking faces carved out of wood/stone/whatever.

....Might I suggest you send this function back to beta testing?

Chattanooga Choo Choo

2010-03-25T16:34:00.002-04:00

Following our trip from West Palm Beach, we arrived in Chattanooga and had to bid a fond farewell to our home. The bus had to go back to Nashville to be refitted and fixed up and then head to Montana to pick up their next customers.

Much like the other hotels we've stayed at in Tennessee, we're at another converted train station. Last year in Nashville we had a crew room at the Union Station hotel. This year we are staying for the rest of this leg at the Chattanooga Choo Choo. This is a really nice place. There are sleeper cars still on the tracks which look like they would be a lot of fun to stay in, but after being on the bus for so long, it wouldn't be much of a reprieve from our normal day to day life.

Last night, I ended up eating at the Station House Restaurant. The entire wait staff entertains the customers by singing. This is a cool concept except it does require strategic eating and drinking because if you happen to finish your drink or want your check and your waiter has just begun their song you are stuck for about 4 minutes until you will get any service again. I learned this lesson quickly upon arrival when I had to wait 4 minutes at the front desk waiting to get a table because 4/5ths of the staff was onstage singing. Finally, I saw the one waiter not singing and I walked up to him and asked if I could just seat myself or if I had to wait some more. Then suddenly the hostess arrived and sat me. Ah, New York impatience pays off again.

The food was pretty good, though the menu is on the mid-range expensive side and not something I can continue to do here. When not singing, the staff is very attentive. Highlight of the singing from last night was a waitress who sang "Black Velvet" which she did quite well.

On my way back to my room, I walked outside between the sleeper cars, and this really cool sense of history started to sweep over me. There was a scratchy big band tune playing on the speakers outside, and the decor of the of the platform gave me this really...hard to describe feeling. I understand that living in New York I'm frequently in places that have been around longer than Chattanooga Choo Choo, but New York has been totally redone and is modern. Being in Penn Station or Grand Central doesn't really give you that feeling of "Wow, this has been here for a long time!"....maybe it has something to do with the 2 Starbucks being a stones throw from each other. Either way, the walk back to my room was excellent.

Today I met up with Jason and Olivia to eat lunch at The Pickle Barrel about half a mile from the hotel and then we stopped at this cute tea shop across the street from the hotel. As soon as I walked in, I felt really uh...out of place. Nothing about sitting next to a fireplace with a picture of Winston Churchill, with flowery everything all around me screams.....well...me. But it was a good time. I ended up ordering a small pot of Jasmine Green Tea which was perfect. And just in case you want to know how flowery is flowery: I present Exhibit A:

I'm aware most of you can't necessarily picture me with anything so dainty. So We got photographic proof of that too.

P.S.- Since arriving, I have had the first 4 lines to Chattanooga Choo Choo stuck in my head. And if it weren't for Family Guy, I would never have known the song. I shake my fist at you Family Guy and your damn Kiss episode!!

Backstage/Onstage Bloopers

2010-03-22T01:33:00.000-04:00

We have been in a space that is small. And because it's so small, we've had to change the way some of our backstage ballet happens. Its a dangerous combination: Being comfortable with your show+ making some pretty significant changes= OH CRAP! Moments. Here are a couple of the highlights from this venue:

- The most Epic Blooper (that no one but the backstage saw) came during our third show in Florida. And it's a combination between the actor involved and myself. Because the only entrances are US, we modified the entrances to the top of Act II so all three actors enter through the Capulet house and get set on the stage because it's just easier. Well, the problem with that is, he forgot and I forgot. I counted him in his correct location for normal venues, but not for the new set up. I called to Karen we had places. The sound cue to end intermission started, and Isaac was like "Where's Hugh?" and I went "OH CRAP!" and ran to get him, and I said :"Hey Hugh, you enter Center!" and so Hugh went "OH CRAP!" and ran to the USC stairs dove under the railing of the stairs, landed on the stair landing and made it out on time for the top of the act. Best Part? Hugh was having a conversation with another cast member about Late Entrances. Said cast member then missed their entrance because they were trying to figure out why Hugh had run away so quickly.

-I can't even tell you the amount of times I had an actor walk up getting ready for an entrance and I had to say "Hey, aren't you entering from somewhere else for this now?" and have them go "oh yeah..." My favorite example of that was Ray today. He had requested to change his entrance into the "Flower Tying Friar" scene because he was having problems navigating the small stairs, his long flowing costume, and a basket that is almost wider than the stairs. Corey agreed and he changed the entrance to the Hobbit Hole for Saturday evening's show. Ray came over to set up at those same stairs again this afternoon (Sunday) and I asked him if he changed his entrance again. He thought a second and went "oh yeah..." and walked to the hobbit hole.

-This isn't so much of a blooper as much as it is an amusing side effect to being on platforms. When ever anyone runs on the stage, the whole stage rocks with the movement. It's hardly noticeable out in the house, but if you're standing on the deck itself during any of the fights, you can really feel the movement (maybe 2-3 inches side to side) I have now commented many times to Lady Capulet about her and her husband's poor planning about building their house on the Verona Fault Line.

- You know how muscle memory works? You perform a task (or in this case a show) over and over again and your body basically can take over and do said task on auto pilot. But if you change the way you normally do something, you can become completely lost. Yeah, that happened to us too. Because of the weird backstage pathways, it screwed with someone's muscle memory and they thought after exiting on the stairs and then coming down to the seating area backstage meant they were done for the act. Where as in the normal staging, they would simply walk from the escape stairs across to the other side of the set to wait for their entrance. This particular instance involved having a couple people improvise onstage because I had to fight through a sea of cast to try to locate the person missing their entrance. I was told Romeo improvised the line "I miss my Mother" which is more than amusing because we cut Lady Montague from the show.

- For the first performance here, Karen had asked that we mask the Stage Manager cubby hole USL where I basically live because you could see about 60% of the house from that position. So she had us tape it up. It occurred to me how badly this was going to turn out, but I was distracted by a million something elses at that point in time, so I just taped it up and hoped it would stay for the day and I would be able to think of a better solution for the next performance. The masking lasted all of 4 scenes before it fell down... While crew was standing behind it... So lets just recap that movement: Dark corner of the stage suddenly brightens up and you can (as an audience member) see a bunch of movement as little ninja like people try to make a piece of masking stay up with old gaff tape. I then had a genius idea of taking the fabric and safety pinning it to a length of rope and tying it from the door handle, and then tying it to the orchestra railing (too bad I didn't think of it two hours earlier). It's worked out so far, the only bad thing about it is it opens up when the cast exits the stage, and has to be fixed fairly often (And no, I can't secure it on the ends because too many people have wigs and hats and the fabric needs to move with them lest they pull head wear off)

-Another lovely Crew Blooper: Fred.....that fat bastard Fred. When we were at Baruch, we only teched through the Fred move once in real time because I needed to know how bad would it be to try to uncover Fred and put him in position at the same time. And despite our best efforts, it uh...failed miserably. So we made the decision to uncover Fred during a Friar Laurence Cell scene because it's dark on SR in New York. Well, after uncovering Fred without any masking what so ever down here at the Kravis Center, and being seen by the whole audience doing so, we tried to uncover Fred while moving him into position just like we tried during tech at Baruch. It didn't work in New York, and it didn't work in Florida. Poor Juliet was sitting there waiting for these two random people dressed in black with strange devices attached to their heads to leave her bedroom so she could hide her potions and what not....we've since fixed this issue, and while it's still cutting it really close to Laura's entrance into "Juliet GTS" scene, we haven't crossed paths again.

- But the most amusing Visible Blooper belongs to Jesse. For this venue, he's coming out of the Capulet house for the Nurse Harassment scene. So he threw his hat out like always. And he kicked his hat like always, but unlike always, he ended up kicking it out into the audience. I was not able to see this in all of its humorous glory because I have a prop hand off at the time, but apparently he walked to the edge of the stage as did Hugh and a kind lady in the front row put it back on the stage so he could get it back. Instead of Jesse and Hugh exchanging a hug like normal, Hugh waved a thank you to the patron and life in Verona continued on as planned.

Tour Stop #17- West Palm Beach, FL

2010-03-22T00:39:00.000-04:00

Name: The Rinker Playhouse at The Kravis Center for Performing Arts- West Palm Beach, FL
Type: Black box
Seating Capacity: 305

The Kravis Center is all sorts of awesome! If nothing else, we get serenaded by Jersey Boys as they perform on the mainstage during our performances. I have gotten so used to where they are in their show when I'm walking through the loading dock, that this afternoon I was like "Either we are going really really fast, or they got slowed down by something" because I wasn't hearing the song I was supposed to hear at that point in time.

As awesome as the Kravis Center is, we had to squeeze ourselves into this theater. As I mentioned in my previous blog post....all of ten minutes ago....we had that meeting the day we arrived in Florida trying to figure out how in the world we were going to pull this off. As is apparently the case: I can never sleep before load ins, because I slept for all of two hours before load in and was a couple minutes late for the bus. Thankfully we can see the venue from the hotel, so we weren't late.

As per always, my load in took no time what so ever, but it was longer than normal because I was dragging my feet out of tiredness. I went back to the bus after breakfast and slept. And slept. And slept some more. I got the remainder of my normal nights sleep during that nap, and got up at 4 in the afternoon. It was about an hour earlier than I usually go back into the theater, but I had this sinking feeling this was going to take much longer to safety the set. And I was right.

Compared tp most times I'm doing my safety check where it's usually cables that need to be covered, this is a death trap. There is about 4.5 feet from the platforms to the back wall of the theater, which seems like it should be enough until you consider all the props tables and stair cases that are back there too. If there were a props table at the stair unit USC, the walkable space would be 6 inches. The stair cases are also of variable sizes, and most of the ones we are using are just barely over 2 feet wide. This has caused actors to catch costumes many times, and one time trip entirely and drop some props. The entire set is contained within orchestra railings to protect the cast from falling. But they have made all sorts of adjustments in the past, this venue just really has thrown the most changes at them at once.

The crew has been fantastic and very helpful to us through our time here. Anything we have needed, they have been able to get for us. It's definitely a venue I would love to come back to at some point on any show.

We only have one show left, and then another full day off before we head back north to Chattanooga for our final tour stop before vacation. I'm really excited to get home and just rest my weary head for a week, though after being here for a week, it's not nearly as necessary as it was when we first hit the road on this leg of the tour.

Since the Last Time...

2010-03-22T00:19:00.000-04:00

I have taken a not quite so purposeful break from blogging since leaving Ottumwa, partially because I have had not so hot interwebs coverage in the places we've been, and partially because I've been exceptionally lazy.

Following our record breaking load out of 2 hours and 13 minutes in Ottumwa, we drove overnight to Nashville as a completely impromptu stop. We had all kinda thought Jim was insane to try to make the drive to West Palm Beach in one continuous trip (excluding meal stops where he would nap). I'm not sure exactly why we made the decision to stop in Nashville for the full day. Originally we were going to be stopping for a couple of hours so I was going to let it slide because it wasn't going to be enough time to see anyone, but when I heard we were going to leave at 7 in the evening, I sent an email to all my relatives in town. It ended up working out well for all of us. Jim was able to sleep at his own home, we had a day off in civilization instead of at random truck stops, and I was able to see my Aunt Helen and Aunt Barb. The other big advantage was Jim was able to pick his wife up who was planning on meeting him down in Florida anyway and she drove with us down south.

Nashville was a good time as it always is. I woke up early to see if there were any responses to my email saying I was going to be in town longer than I had initially thought and Aunt Barb said she would be available and Aunt Helen would be too. Aunt Gunny was taking my two cousins to Texas for Spring Break so she wouldn't be around. We ended up eating lunch at a Hibachi bar which was a fun experience as I had never been to one of those places before. After, we went shopping and I finally replaced my dying headphones.

My poor poor headphones! The insulation has been cracking for months but now it's stripping away and every time I look at them, they have more and more gaff tape over the exposed wires. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and I purchased a new pair of over the ear headphones. Tragically, it is money not well spent. The wire isn't long enough to have my iPod in my pants pocket and have it not pull on my ears, and the sound quality isn't nearly as good as my old pair (exposed wires and all). So soon enough, they will become my back up pair, and I will purchase my old pair again online as I can't find them in stores anymore.

Aunt Helen brought me back to the bus just in time to catch it and head off into the sun set and head to Florida. When we arrived, it was glorious! It was in the upper 60s/lower 70s, breezy, and awesome! We had a meeting with the crew at the Kravis Center (where we would be performing for the week) to talk over a few of the space issues we knew we were going to encounter. We also discovered a couple of new space issues we hadn't been aware of like 13 of our cast members fitting in two dressing rooms only designed to handle 4 people a piece....oops.

Olivia, Karen and myself made our first trek of many to the main strip in West Palm Beach to get some lunch, and do some shopping. The rest of that day we lounged around on the bus killing time until our day at the beach!!!......

.....which never happened. We were going to drive the bus to the beach on Wednesday morning and just camp out all day but two things happened: It rained, and we also found out that the bus couldn't park at the beach because it was a commercial vehicle. So instead of me burning on the beach (because I have no doubt that's what would have happened) I did laundry. And I stayed in my hotel room. And life was good.

Complete Load Out Time Lapse

2010-03-15T23:35:00.004-04:00

Bobby has completed the full time lapse of the load out. And here it is in all it's glory!

I realize it's somewhat cut off because of all the crud I have on the side bar of the blog, but you can wait a day or two till the post moves below it, or you can follow this link: Full Load Out Time Lapse

And for those of you who wish to see Olivia more up close and personal with her experience being strapped to the truck:

Tour Stop #16- Ottumwa, IA

2010-03-15T01:03:00.000-04:00

Name: Bridge View Center- Ottumwa, IA
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 650

Today has been a pretty long one full of no sleep, lots of caffeine and lots of craziness.

Considering "Spring Ahead" nonsense happened this morning at 2am, we really started our 4am load in at 3am. Surprisingly enough, I was pretty awake for this. But I hit a wall pretty quick. By the time breakfast was done at 7am, I was already a zombie. I basically gave up, and went back to bed. I felt pretty guilty because I knew the rest of the crew was working while I was back in the bunks sleeping, but my load in only takes 40 minutes tops and after that I don't do anything. I told Karen that I felt guilty, and she said if I didn't go back to bed, she would put me there. Seeking to avoid her wrath, I decided sleep was an ok alternative.

I couldn't really sleep all that well though. People kept tearing through the bus being noisy, watching TV loudly, slamming doors etc etc. so every time I finally got back to sleep I would be woken up again. I had every intention of waking up at 11:45 in the morning so I could go back into the theater and lay out my arrows and X's on the floor and check on Devon's cabling process. After my poor nap time, and my alarm not going off and giving me a reprieve I stayed in bed until 1:05pm. It was then that I remembered I was forcing myself to do a whole lot of work in a very short amount of time because the cast would be arriving at 2pm for a 3pm show.

The cables today were in pretty good shape, but showed the haphazardness of a tired electrics crew (I'm pretty sure those guys were there from the night before striking the Little Miss Iowa Pageant). It wasn't anywhere near as bad as the first couple of tour stops, but it was still some what time consuming to fix. It was also then that I realized that I had missed putting signs on the primary Stage Left entrance to the stage because when I hung all my signs there had been 4 sets of stairs in front of the door and it could obviously never be usable as an entrance....except of course when the set was constructed and the stairs were in the air.....did I mention load in started really early in the morning?

The cast arrived, they did their thing, we did our thing and we had ourselves a little show....of course nothing can ever be easy in this company of ours: One of the Scrollers wasn't working today. Scrollers (or Color Scrollers) are things you hang in front of a light and instead of just having one color, it has a string of 16 or so colors you can cycle through and choose from. It cuts down on the amount of instruments you have to hang, and provides you with many options to light the same space on stage. Well, this is something that can happen with scrollers every once and a while, so you just go through each cue and take it out of the show and live to fight another day. Tragically, this light was the primary light in the Tomb Scene, so if we took it out for that there would be very little light on stage. So it was decided that we would drop the venue's main drop to have Devon try to fix it during intermission.

At first, he tried to use the Genie lift to get to it, but couldn't maneuver around the set to get to the offending piece of technology. We got our Blue Ladder of Happiness and he got up on the balcony and had the electric fly in. At first, he couldn't get the thing to work even after resetting it. I suggested we prepare to have the necessary Tomb gel color on standby in case the scroller wouldn't reset and start working. Karen and Devon thought that was a good idea, so I went in search of Lee 200 (if you want to be really general about it: A Blue Gel). Once I had got the gel in a frame, Devon had fixed the scroller and everything was working as it should.

The rest of our performance was pretty uneventful (aside from what happens onstage of course). We finally had a talk back following the performance! We've been canceling them left and right because of the length of the show, but we kept the one scheduled today. I was sad that Karen wanted to do it, because I love talk backs and haven't done one since we were at the Guthrie. But no skin off my back because I was able to get done with Stage Management Strike before she was done.

The crew (despite a very long day) broke our load out record by 2 minutes and got us on the road to South Florida. We were able to train for being down in Florida today: We loaded out in short sleeves! That's the first time we haven't been bundled up and it was really exciting!

P.S.- Matt was reading me type this over my shoulder and demanded I type something about him "RIGHT NOW!" I said he was happy and drunk. He approved.

Lazy Day off (because there's nothing to do)

2010-03-13T14:59:00.000-05:00

Following our fun times in Hartford, we drove over night to come to Ottumwa, IA (we really have done a lot of back and forth this year......). Tragically, there is nothing really happening in this town. We are about 5 miles from the actual town, and until about 2 hours ago, there was no internet to be had. The hotel's internet had gone down on Thursday and they hadn't gotten it fixed. And the internet on the bus is pretty bad because there is very little cell coverage out here. My phone is on Verizon, and even I'm having huge issues with connectivity.

Around 1pm yesterday, Devon, Olivia and myself took a cab into town to get something to eat. We ended up at this Mexican Restaurant that I thought was pretty good, but Devon hated it because they used American cheese on his tacos. He gorged on tortilla chips to make up for it. We then meandered around the town. There wasn't too much to speak of, because for every 1 shop that was open, there were another 4 store fronts boarded up/closed/falling apart. It was pretty depressing to see. But we did find a comic book store that was open, a combination body piercing/bookstore/music shop, a hobby shop, and a Dollar General.

Following our lunch, we came back to the hotel and I sat on the bus for a little while in the hopes that maybe the internet would magically work long enough for me to do something worth while. No such luck. We went grocery shopping for the bus, and tossed around the idea of traveling to Des Moines that night because there would be more to do around there. But it was decided Jim would take us to down town Ottumwa and there would be bar hopping to be had. I elected not to go and to stay and relax in my hotel room and goof off.

We are at this hotel for at least another 14 hours before we move out and go to the theater at 3:30am for our load in. We are somewhat concerned because tomorrow at 2am is Leap Ahead time and we are worried some people might not remember Day Light Savings and show up to load in late.

Random Pictures

2010-03-13T14:37:00.000-05:00

This picture is from my visit to Fredonia. Its a picture of my old apartment from my junior year. For all 5 years I was in Fredonia the house was known as the crack house. It would be something like this "Hey, where's your apartment?" "I'm four houses down from the Big Yellow Crack House on Temple" Not that it was actually a crack house, but the house was covered in yellow paint and the whole thing was cracking. Obviously, my landlord (or slumlord if you prefer) fleeced enough money off college students, or he sold the house to someone who actually gives a crap.

Jason McDowell-Green backstage.....I don't know why he plugged his nose and his ears with cotton....but he did.

This was a sign posted in the bathrooms in Poplar Bluff. I completely geeked out when I saw it. I soon after found Karen and asked if the women's bathroom had the same sign. It did and she was like "Wasn't that so cool??!!"

This is a picture of Matt inside of one of our ridiculously large garbage bags on the bus.

This was the menu (literally....a menu! Awesome!) in Cedar Falls, IA. Usually we make the joke about scrambled eggs because every venue gives us scrambled eggs. And we do tend to get a little tired of them, but I believe it's in our tech rider that the hot breakfast includes scrambled eggs so its certainly not the venues fault. But Cedar Falls went above and beyond awesome! No Scrambled Eggs in sight!

It's hard to see it, but that's Bam-Bam (Scotty D's truck dog) sitting in the driver seat looking like he just backed the truck up.

This was a sign posted over the Stage Left Entrance to the stage in Brainerd. I assume there was a sign over Stage Right with a Stage East sign, but I never saw it. It's not too unheard of in my experience to name positions in the theater after compass points. We did it in Fredonia in the Bartlett Theater, but that was because it was a black box in the round. This is the first time I encountered it in a proscenium house.

Karen and I have switched shelves in the roadbox because she wanted to set the printer up so it was usable right away without even pulling it out or even really plugging it in. It can just live there. So after her joking about how my shelf had no light on it, the printer is on the shelf she used to have, she moved to my shelf, and I moved to the old printer home on the top shelf.

Tour Stop #15- Hartford, WI

2010-03-13T14:09:00.002-05:00

Name: Schauer Arts and Activities Center, Ruth A. Knoll Theater, Hartford, WI
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 571

Following our time in Brainerd, we arrived the following morning in Hartford, WI. The fog arrived shortly after. I don't say this in jest. I literally didn't know what was across the street in the shopping plaza because I couldn't see past the street. It made for street crossing adventures throughout the day.

I wasn't really around the venue all that much in Hartford because I had a One Hour R+J performance at Slinger High School the next town over. I went with the crew to the venue in the morning, finished my last couple of notes for the One Hour, posted my signs in the theater, and went back to the hotel to meet the cast.

Slinger High School does something very cool that I wish more schools would do (and for all I know, they do but I have yet to encounter them)- They train their students to run the performance space and whenever something happens: The kids are in charge of the tech elements. It was really cool. I met the lighting supervisor of the space Alex who is a junior (I think) and he had all the answers to all the questions I asked. It was awesome.

The venue itself is a converted gymnasium. It has a raised stage and it had 15-20 rows of ground seating, and a large set of risers in the back that can fold up and go against the wall when they need to use the space as a gym.

The performance went well. There were a couple of hiccups from the cast mainly due to a small, yet very noisy percentage of the audience. But I'd say about 90% of the kids were well behaved. Usually one of our biggest audience indicators for the one hour show is how well they handle the intimacy (kissing) in the shows. And true to form: There were cat calls and wolf whistles and chittering whenever Romeo and Juliet kissed. Until the Tomb Scene. When Romeo kissed Juliet when she's "dead" there wasn't a peep. And same for Juliet kissing the poisoned Romeo. They were really with us from that point until the end. It's good to know that even the kids who were causing all that ruckus got so wrapped up by the end that they couldn't say a word.

Following that, I drove back with the cast to the hotel and was picked up by the venue runner and was taken back to the theater. I took a short nap and then we went into preshow mode. Taping the white arrows on the floor, setting up water stations, etc etc.

The show went really well even with the convoluted Fred path we had to take (there were random Spy like pillars in the space upstage of the set and we had to set Fred up on an angle between two of the pillars and the set). The funniest thing that happened during the show was the train that drove past the theater during the Lark scene (the scene where Romeo is leaving for Mantua). The train whistle caused Sonny and Laura to actually stop for a second or two waiting for it to stop. After Sonny exited, I met him backstage blocking his path. I said "All aboard! 9:34 to Mantua! Last call! Tickets please!" to which Sonny cracked up.

Tour Stop #14- Brainerd, MN

2010-03-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

Name: Central Lakes College , Chalberg Theatre Brainerd, MN
Type: Proscenium
Seating Capacity: 284

Brainerd was an adventure. And honestly, Karen has already done a spectacular job of describing exactly what happened there, so I shall defer to her Brainerd post in terms of the majority of the day.

The one thing she didn't cover was the backstage shenanigans because she wasn't backstage. We had a local crew who weren't prepared to run the show backstage. One of the props girls was a stage manager who had just opened her show the previous week and had been wearing black for a week. She was so excited that she could finally wear normal people clothes and not show blacks. Well, considering our masking left two huge gaps that allowed the audience to see us as we used our onstage crossover, she had to wear blacks. The lady in charge of the venue raided her costume storage and came up with black clothing for her to wear. This included pants that were way too big for her held up by suspenders, and a black button up dress shirt. The look reminded me of an olde tymey newsie. This prompted me to go to the SM work box and pull out the old yellowed newspapers, and get Hugh's hat from the show and bring it to her to complete the look (She didn't actually wear Hugh's hat because that would just be wrong). But the overall look was excellent.

The other thing is something I dubbed Inappropriate Skeleton. There was a skeleton hanging backstage on a shelf that we had two run lights on. Because of it's position between them, it was very easy to start making the skeleton do strange things.....Like this:

It's a little hard to see in the picture, but the skeleton is touching itself.....dirty bird.

Tour Stop #13- Cedar Falls, IA

2010-03-09T01:30:00.000-05:00

Name: University of Northern Iowa, Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center- Cedar Falls, IA

Type: Proscenium

Seating Capacity: 1,680

What a great space! It's big, beautiful, looks brand new and just awesome! The acoustics were unreal. At one point, I was talking to Olivia upstage about how we wanted the Fred move to work and suddenly I hit a plosive sound and I heard it ring throughout the backstage area and I went "Damn..." I knew from talking on the deck that the space was alive, but I didn't realize it was that damn lively!

The acoustics are what really sets this place apart from most of the places we've been to. The three tiered seating configuration usually sends people into a panic, but this place was designed really well. The cast came and did the prologue as a test and they realized it isn't nearly as imposing as they originally thought.

We had two performances in Cedar Falls: one for the general public, and another for a packed house of students. The student performance was quite the adventure. When we arrived, we found out we didn't have a full crew compliment provided by the space. We only had one props person (which is generally not an issue except for the Fred move), and we only had one costume person. We ended up having Bobby run the Fred move with Abby (our local crew girl) and I filled in for the missing costume crew person because most of their stuff was during Act I, and I really don't do anything during Act I. It was kinda fun. I haven't run wardrobe on a show in about 7 years or so, and it was fun to go back to that sort of thing for a day...but just for a day.

The other fun thing: Our costume girl had a class after Act I, so we had a new girl for Act II. So strange...

They do a really good job with their student performances. During the preshow, they have a powerpoint presentation running for the kids as they arrive in the house. It was trivia and facts about R+J. I didn't really get a chance to see any of the questions, but I saw a true/false question about the prologue asking if the show took place in Mantua. There was also a little preshow video they showed which I couldn't see or hear really because I was stuck behind the set at that time.

We had a nice strike, though there was a large lull between getting the back half and the front half of the truck. The halfway point of the truck is the balcony rolling in, and the front half is primarily the walls and the last few road boxes that need to come off first at the next venue. Because of this lull, Karen, Olivia, Jason and myself were hanging out in the green room slowly approaching torpor when Bobby came in and reminded us that he was doing a time lapse of the load out today and we should go be captured on the video. The four of us tangoed across the deck hoping to get caught by the time lapse camera he has set up.

Tragically we tangoed too quickly, and there's only 2 frames of us dancing across the deck. We learned our lesson though. Next time we are going to do it really, really, really slowly so we will be seen in real time crossing the deck and being dorks.

We had planned on staying in Cedar Falls for the rest of our day and take off at 11pm to get to Brainerd, MN in the morning for our load in, but Old Man Winter just won't leave us the hell alone! We had to leave our restful evening off to out run a nasty ice storm coming in off the Rockies and get to Minnesota before we got iced into Iowa. We as a crew, in general, hate traveling during the day because that means we actually have to occupy our time with things other than....sleeping. We all ended up sleeping anyway, then stopping to eat, then slept some more, and now we're kinda at a loss. I suppose we should just go back to sleep again...seems to make the most sense.

PSM FAIL!!

2010-03-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

At our last venue, Karen was calling from backstage. As she has mentioned many times in her blog she really likes calling from backstage because she really gets to interact with the cast which she doesn't get to do all that often otherwise.

Karen's calling desk backstage was pretty tall. It was definitely over 4 feet tall, probably closer to 4'6". And, as I often remind her, Karen is short and was barely able to see over the desk while standing, let alone if she were to be sitting down. So she stood for most of the show, but had a chair to sit on in those instances where she has 20 minutes between cues.

The chair she chose to sit upon wasn't anything special really. It was just a padded folding chair with arms.

During our student performance in Springfield, Karen had been standing for a good long while (as it was the Tomb scene) and decided she needed to lean on the chair. The foible of some folding chairs is they will fold up if you put pressure on the seat in the wrong place. This happened to be one of those chairs. Karen, while the Friar was explaining everything to everyone on stage about his plan for Romeo and Juliet, kneeled on her chair. And it folded on her. And she nearly fell.

The sound of the PSM nearly falling through a folding chair, and subsequently nearly falling over onto the deck is noisy. And as I previously mentioned, the Friar is holding court onstage and it is quiet. So it sounded something like this.

FL: But when I came, some minute ere I arrived, here lied true Romeo dead (CRASH KLUNK KLUNK SCRUFF SCRAPE SLAM)

I was near her when this happened. So I was able to witness this failure of epic proportions in person. After making sure she was ok, I started to crack the hell up because this was the silliest damn thing I have ever seen. And I started to joke with her, and saying she deserved a Scarlet F for FAIL!

Well, we were straight out of red spike tape, but Matt thankfully had something similar to it in his road box which he gave to me.

Let this be a lesson to all young stage managers: If you commit a foul backstage, you can and probably will be branded with the Scarlet Letter (F)

Karen was a trooper and loved this. She even wore it all the way through load out....tragically she took them off before we stopped at Denny's for our late late night dinner.

Tour Stop #12- Sangmon Auditorium- Springfield, IL

2010-03-06T13:51:00.000-05:00

Name: Sangmon Auditorium- Springfield, IL

Type: Proscenium

Seating Capacity: 2,018

This was such a fun place to be! It was easy and relaxed. We had a load in day which is always nice. We returned the next morning for our student performance, then had the entire day off until our 8pm show. So there was never the feel of "Holy crap!!! We're running out of time!" that and because the venue was an IATSE crew and really knew their stuff. Load in was a breeze, the shows ran fine, and the load out broke our load out record by two minutes (even with breaking our set...again. One of the welds in one of our flats gave way again and slammed to the deck...again thankfully no one was hurt).

I spent most of my time on load in day on the bus, though I did take a much longer time loading in because the path to the stage was long and involved many stairs. I ended up printing out about 8 more signs to be able to accurately show the path from the dressing rooms to the deck. When we went back to the hotel (WE HAD A HOTEL FOR TWO NIGHTS!!!!) Devon and I went to dinner at an Italian restaurant which was fabulous.

We got up and were completely thrown off our groove because of the start time of the student show. Usually shows start at the top of the hour, or on the half hour. But this show was starting at 9:45. So our bus call was at 7:45am instead of the usual 7:30. The cast showed up and were really anxious because they thought they were running out of time to do fight call because it was 9:00 and their internal clocks were going off saying it was happening too late.

The shows both went really well. Except for one little teeny tiny....EPIC fail on Karen's part which is a blog post to come.

Load out happened in record time, assisted by the fact that if you were standing USR, you could spit and hit the loading dock. I did my parts on the truck, and then I broke off and took a shower because I felt really gross last night for some reason. Best venue shower ever! water was really hot, and the water pressure was ripping off the first few layers of skin which was what I needed. I also reloaded my bus bag and started my laundry bag last night. So I am ready to go!

We are currently sitting outside of our hotel in Cedar Falls, IA because apparently they didn't get the memo about early check in. So we are stuck in our bus...which normally wouldn't be an issue, but most of us were looking forward to getting into our rooms and relaxing on our day off. We'll get there eventually....doesn't make it any less sucky in the present.

Time Machine: Tour Stop #8- George Mason University- Fairfax, VA

2010-03-06T13:23:00.000-05:00

Name: George Mason University Center for the Arts

Style: Proscenium

Seating Capacity- 1,935

We're heading back in time. I uploaded pictures from my camera and I forgot I sneaked a couple pictures of George Mason in before I left the tour...course I could have just cheated and used a picture from last year like I did for Poplar Bluff, but this is just easier.

This is another one of our repeat venues. So it was really simple to load in because I knew exactly where signs needed to go, I didn't need to figure out any of the venue quirks (like you can't enter the stage from SL, you can only come in from SR), I knew where the bathrooms were, I knew where our office would be set up, I knew the stage would be huge and we would have no issue fitting in. So load in was simple.

The hard part of this venue was packing up all my stuff and getting ready for my flight back to Rochester to visit family. Our load in started really early in the morning and I was booking my flight home by 6am (us having started at 4 or 5 in the morning....don't recall which one). I spent most of my day packing up all my stuff from the bus, deciding which food of mine would become community food, and which food I was going to store in a bag in our road box, trying to make sure I was going to be a good airline passenger etc etc.

About an hour before the show, I ran Bobby through my track so he could take over for that days show and for the next two venues I would be missing. My track isn't very difficult, so I wasn't at all concerned that he would be able to handle it....he handles putting up a huge set in 6 hours...I'm sure he can also wave his arms and make actors move. And he did a great job. I was able to watch him for about 65% of the show before I left to go to the airport.

I would love to write more about the show, but it's really all a big haze. I don't really remember anything specific about the show other than me offending Elizabeth during the start of the show. I told Bobby that Elizabeth likes to help me cue Sonny onstage in the blackout, but to really not listen to her because she's usually wrong and cues him late, and he should pay attention to Karen (obviously). But Elizabeth acted all offended and pouted as she went onstage. She came off the stage and tried to give me the cold shoulder before she broke down and started cracking up.

The most amazing thing happened on my flights back to the Roc...I was on two flights (one to JFK from Dulles, and then from JFK to Rochester) and I didn't have anyone sitting next to me at all. It was amazing because when I booked the flights, they were all jam packed! So I somehow lucked out and had no one near me for both flights on Jetblue Airways....meaning I had control of two TVs. I may have turned one to NBC, and the other to CNBC and watched two different channels of Olympic coverage...switching my headphones to the other jack when I wanted to listen to what ever was going on at the other channel.

And as remarkable as that was....it happened on my flight back to New York City too! I seriously couldn't believe my good fortune! But it was too early to have the Olympics on....so I was watching Good Morning America (or whatever the NBC morning show is called) and Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN2...and did the same thing as my previous flight. It was kinda awesome.

Tour Stop #11- Poplar Bluff, MO

2010-03-03T23:16:00.000-05:00

Name: Three Rivers Community College- Tinnin Fine Arts Center Theatre

Type: Proscenium

Seating Capacity: 476 (or....500...whatever)

This is the second venue we have repeated this season from last. I've been looking forward to returning to Poplar Bluff for a while because it really fits into the Acting Company's Mission. It's not a community that would traditionally get theater of this style or professionalism on a regular basis. The crew (while inexperienced and according to Rob the head of the venue not a single one of them was over 21) was very enthusiastic about working on the show. But much like last year, load in took a long time.

Also because we didn't have a gigantic half circle of a set in the way, the sight lines this year were pretty rough. It seemed the only place you were not visible to the audience while backstage was behind the set. I sometimes miss the Henry set because it made sneaking around backstage much easier. This show is far more wide open.

This year, I actually had to participate in the load out. Last year I got to go back to my hotel room while the crew loaded out in tornado conditions (high winds, thunderstorms, rain etc) because there was a One Hour show in the morning. So I got to miss out on all the fun. No tornadoes this year, but it was pretty chilly. Load out also took a pretty long time last night too. I got to the point where I set up a load strap across the truck and made a seat while waiting for the walls. Karen brought out a box of milkduds for Jason, Olivia and myself to partake in while waiting. We set up a strap for those too so when things started coming into the truck, we would have a secure place to have them while we waited for the next piece of the set.

We left around 2:30 in the morning (give or take....I turned my phone off because it was almost dead) and drove to Springfield, IL where in case you didn't know....Abe Lincoln is kind of a big deal here. I walked around the downtown area today and nearly everything (except perhaps the Subway.....they just seem to stalk me! CURSE YOU SUBWAY SANDWICH SHOP!) had Lincoln's name or face on it. I understand he was born here...I'm not dense. But I just thought it was kinda cool. Truly the pride of the city!

I don't know what it was, but apparently I was feeling very tired today because I ended up taking a three hour nap when I had every intention on reading. I sat down to read and looked at the book and the next thing I knew it was 3 hours later and I hadn't even opened the book cover. The load out from last night has taken a much larger toll on me than I had originally thought. I did more pushing of things up the ramp than I normally do. Between that and power walking around the downtown area of Springfield today, I'm pretty sore.

But tomorrow is just a load in day. I still have to get up early, but I'll be done by 10am at the latest (most likely) and then I'll be free to do what I want until the crew ends the day and we go back to the hotel. I'm considering if I hop in a cab at some point and just come back to the hotel early, but I don't feel that's necessary. The internet in the hotel is no better than the bus, and the bus has better TV selection. And of course, I still have a bunk on the bus so I can sleep if I want to.....I should just stay with my mobile hotel. Save myself the money from the cab ride. We'll see.