CollisionWorks

We are SO going to collapse on August 4 and 5.

Well, this is as it had to be. Right now, I'm taking a break from redoing (and fretting over redoing) the rehearsal schedule for all three shows another time. I had to redo things the other night, and thought I'd got something workable, but I didn't have all the conflicts in, and now that I have more (but not all) of those, the new schedule's as bad as the old one. So back to work.

I also have to get in more work on the script for Everything Must Go today, which is waiting until I finish the sched. I got on a real roll with it yesterday, but had to quit to print up what little I had and actually get to rehearsal for the show. I got to hear three pages of dialogue spoken, and it sounds good, so I'm continuing in the same vein. Amy Liszka, who had to leave the show, found her own replacement, Tory Dube, who came in and took over excellently yesterday. We staged and worked the opening and closing scenes - the entrance and exit of the cast from the office - and got them as solid as they can be right now.

I was a hair chagrined by Tory's recounting of Amy telling her about working with me - which was similar to what I've occasionally heard from other actors auditioning for me who have friends who have worked on my shows - which was along the lines of "X said that it was a lot of fun, but kind of bizarre, and sometimes unnerving and weird, and you don't know where it's going and don't think it'll work, but just trust in Ian and do what he wants and it'll all turn out great." This always makes me want to say, "Well, you know, I do sometimes fuck up," but that's just NOT the right approach to take when meeting a new actor (or around your regular ones, for that matter). I'm glad I engender trust, at least. I think I've earned it.

So today is for schedule and EMG, Friday is for Spell writing. Tomorrow, another rehearsal for Harry In Love - the only rehearsal where I'm sure of the show, date, time, and place right now . . .

Elsewhere in the online world . . .

Episode 6 of Bryan Enk & Matt Gray's Penny Dreadful, "The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned," directed by Michael Gardner and featuring my performance as George Westinghouse, is now online, along with all the previous episodes of Season One. Catch up with all of them at the Penny Dreadful site HERE. The page for this specific episode is HERE, and the video came out quite nicely on this one.

Courtesy of flyswatter, an update from the world of toys I wouldn't normally know about - specifically about the Playmobil line of figures, which I never had as a kid, but for years thought I did -- I've been confusing them with the Fisher-Price "Play Family" line, also known as "Little People;" I had plenty of those classic stubby little figures that fit into holes in their vehicles or playsets, as well as some of those sets, the airplane, the garage, the airport, etc. Loved those, and while they've been updated to charmless unrecognizability (the ones from my childhood were too easy for stupid kids to choke on, apparently, like so many cool vanished toys), at least they haven't gone with the new topical route that Playmobil has.

For Playmobil has decided to add some new little items to their line to help children get used to the USA that we now live in, These are the Playmobil Police Checkpoint and the Playmobil Security Checkpoint. Nice.

Oh, and hey if those aren't educational enough, you could also get Little Rusty his very own Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy X-Ray!

The few comments on each of these at those Amazon links are also worth reading . . .

Back to work . . .

Harry In Love: A Manic Vaudeville is staged and we did a book-in-hand (mostly, some people are nicely off-book for bits and pieces already) stumble-thru and fix-thru that went well enough to show we're in good shape. There is much work to be done, but we have the time to do that work, easily. It's going to be a serious laff-riot, really.

Spell is proceeding well, though I need to write faster on it - the text is coming, but not as I'd like (speedwise, I mean, I've wound up very happy and even surprised with what's come out for this one). The cast is good, though still incomplete - we lost an actress, as I mentioned, and the one I asked to replace her hasn't returned my contact, so I'll move on to asking another. Thank goodness the cast on this show is so cheery to work with - the show itself is pretty bleak and uncomfortable (yeah, I'm great at talking up my own shows - "Bleak and Uncomfortable!" - now that's an ad line for ya . . .).

Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2) has had more time off than I'd like, but there were cast conflicts with other shows, and marriages, and so forth. There is a lot to do on this one and not enough time scheduled - I need to find more time to dedicate to this show. Also, I'm behind in the writing on this one too - which is a surprise, as this is the kind of language that normally comes naturally and easily to me (as it did on what is now Invisible Republic #1, That's What We're Here For (an american pageant)). Next rehearsal for this one is tomorrow, and I have to have more text and choreography ready for that, so today is the writing day (mostly for EMG, I hope, and some for Spell), and tomorrow I'll schlep over to The Brick as early as I can and start really getting the choreography down.

I'm still getting over my shyness in choreographing dance on other peoples' bodies; That's What We're Here For was a big step for me, but there I had the one "real" dance for (and by) Maggie Cino and me, and the rest were mainly stylistic pastiches, and worked out a lot with the cast, while this one is mostly me doing actual personal, non-parodic work, with better dancers than I am. Nerve-wracking.

Last night was the end of The Brick's The Film Festival: A Theater Festival (except for some extensions of really good shows that you should all go and see), and we had the closing-night ceremonies and awards ceremonies. This is the second year of this post-fest party, which is on its way to being a tradition, as awards ranging from the semi-serious to outright ridiculous are given, with every piece in the fest winning at least one award (the Special Olympics of Indie Theatre, if you will), with a focus on in-jokes funny (maybe) only to festival participants, or more usually to about 10 regular members of The Brick crowd. Bottomless amounts of alcoholic beverages are served. Lisa Levy, lovely in a gorgeous dress, forces everyone entering the theatre to be interviewed as if on the red carpet as a camera broadcasts the uncomfortable results on the gigantic screen inside. Jeff Lewonczyk, "America's Funnyman," hosts and everyone groans at what he thinks is funny, as Lawrence Krauser tickles the ivories beautifully, giving an inappropriate air of an actual planned show to the whole evening. Private grievances are aired, friends and reputations are insulted, Audrey Crabtree presents awards as a character both disturbing and endearing (supposedly the "special" 13-year-old love child of one of the Brick artistic directors), I stumble around imitating a drunken Orson Welles, technical matters go awry. And it all ends in chaos. Then we drink some more. I blast some Motown over the PA. And some of the theatre-film geeks (me, Lewonczyk, Danny Bowes, James Comtois, and others) play trivia games for way too long. A good evening all around.

Last night, for the second year in a row, I received the award for "Most Misunderstood" show. In a vaguely-drunken, vaguely-Wellesian tone I pointed out that while Ian W. Hill's Hamlet was definitely misunderstood, especially by the critics - and I flinched a bit when I realized that one of the critics I was talking about was sitting right in front of me, oh well - there was no good reason why such a straightforward show as Ambersons should be misunderstood, but that the Backstage critic had managed to do it anyway. I promised to continue to aim to receive that same award EVERY year from now on in the Brick summer festivals (and I shall, oh yes, I SHALL).

Later, to my surprise, the "Ian W. Hill Lifetime Achievement Award for Lifetime Achievement" was given to my old Nada coeval Mr. Art Wallace. 40 years old now and I gots me a lifetime achievement award named for me . . . {sigh}

Oh, and there was another great party the evening before at the McKleinfeld's where grasshoppers were consumed (the drink, that is), many things were grilled and deep-fried (deep-fried Oreos! deep-fried Hershey bars!), and a lot of Rock Band was played. I now need a rest from this intensive relaxation schedule.

So, other things found online for your dining and dancing pleasure . . .

Three images from the always-wonderful Modern Mechanix site, the first announcing a new breakthrough in air travel:

A theme which continues with this important question:

Which leads to a sinister second question . . .

Anyone who knows me probably knows of my David Bowie fanaticism. Well, if you're like me, and I know I am, there's an article that will interest you more than it probably should in The Daily Mail online: He's made up and is releasing a comp of 12 of his own favorite songs of his - not exactly hits that would have shown up on the Changesbowie collections - and he's written liner notes about each song which the Mail has printed HERE. For those interested, the songs are "Life On Mars," "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)," "The Bewlay Brothers," "Lady Grinning Soul," "Win," "Some Are," "Teenage Wildlife," "Repetition," "Fantastic Voyage," "Loving The Alien," "Time Will Crawl," and "Hang On To Yourself (live in Santa Monica)."

Now I have to go make a playlist of those and see what it's like, though I'm both pleased and pissed to discover that Bowie, happy with the songs on the underrated Never Let Ne Down but, correctly, unhappy with the 80s-era production/arrangement, has gone in and rerecorded instruments and rearranged and remixed "Time Will Crawl." The song, a favorite of mine, deserves it. Now, of course, I have to buy the whole damned thing for the one track (unless I can just find the track online).

(huh . . . and of course I discover to my surprise that I don't even HAVE four of those tracks in my iTunes, as I was sure I would . . . damn)

We now have some waterfalls in NYC - to be precise, we have Olafur Eliasson's The New York City Waterfalls - four towers in the area of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges cycling out East River water in a continuous fall all day and some of the night (technically, as has been noted, a fountain, actually). There has been an air of disappointment from some quarters about how they turned out - they looked great in the computer renderings, but most of the time, from most angles, they look . . . pretty pathetic. And I've been a bit pissed off about the fact that traffic on a stretch of the BQE under the Brooklyn Heights (which I generally drive at least twice a day) has become completely slowed, if not even jammed, during waterfall operation due to the slow-down of people taking a gander at the damned one that's right there next to the road, which looks terrible from that angle anyway.

(side note - I nearly went back and fixed this, but what the hell - I have, as a result of reading too many "period" books about earlier centuries in NYC, taken to referring to that area with a now-dropped article, as "THE Brooklyn Heights" - such as "The British are massing on the Brooklyn Heights to attack Washington's troops," or "I have to drive under the Brooklyn Heights twice a damn day," or "Fuck, I wish I could afford a townhouse in the Brooklyn Heights" - I've decided to just go with this and not give a damn anymore; luckily my brief habit, gained the same way, of calling the center of Manhattan "the central park" didn't stick the same way)

Anyway, held up again in traffic last night on my way home from the Brick, and seeing that one lit up after nightfall (and from a bad angle), I began to change my opinion. Jerry Saltz, at New York, HERE sums up pretty well what I think of them now, with a photo of the best of the falls at the best time and angle.

And finally, behind the cut, two of the better humor videos I've seen in a long time - commercials for the ersatz power-drink, POWERTHIRST!

( GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY! )

Enjoy. I'm back to writing (I hope, rather than sitting at a computer screen unhappily staring and shaking nervously).

She now has 32 years behind her.

I am very very lucky.

We did a belated birthday celebration the other day for me after Sunday afternoon's rehearsal - Coney Island, Nathan's, skee-ball, soft-serve ice cream and a walk on the boardwalk, watching macho teen boys get scared in the "Top Spin" ride (they never see how bad it's going to be), the shooting gallery (still about the same as the first time I went there in 1979) - and today we'll do something she wants to do.

She's in the shower now, so I don't have to hide this post ("WHY are you posting about my birthday? No one CARES!"). Then we'll go out to breakfast and drive the car over to the area of The Brick/The Battle Ranch as we have rehearsal over there tonight.

Then we'll train on in to The American Museum of Natural History, which we like to go to, but usually wind up going too late in the day so we get kicked out before seeing everything we want to (always closes at 5.45 pm - keep it in mind if you ever go there).

We want to see all of the Evolution exhibit (which we were just into when kicked out last time) and they have temp ones up now on Horses and Snakes & Lizards that I'm looking forward to.

Then, we gots a rehearsal - sorry, hon, should have thought of this when planning the schedule - but we can have a full day to ourselves before that. That will be nice.

Oop, she's out of the shower now and I need to jump in. Should be a nice fun, then productive, day.

Back to work on the shows, Spell yesterday, Harry in Love today. Going fine.

A couple of pictures of the cats, as I missed them on Friday . . . Hooker lounging on a chair (and my jeans):

And Moni stretching up and grabbing my fingers in her paw so she can lick them . . .

And some videos of interest . . .

UPDATE: I just checked, and with some new thing YouTube is doing, if you want to see the best quality video, you have to go to the actual page for the video itself and click on "watch in high quality" - and it's worth it for the first and third videos below, so click on the embedded video below, and it should take you to the YouTube page, where you can click again and see it better)

First, Joe Cocker's Woodstock performance is closed-captioned for the soul-impaired:

( Lonely at the Bottom of the Barrel )

And here, the animated Lt. Uhura has a new attitude (courtesy of overdubbed lines from Nichelle Nichols' blaxpoitation classic, Truck Turner):

( Open THESE hailing frequencies, honky! )

And I only just discovered this, but it's been going on for several years now -- Matt Harding has been traveling the world, and videotaping himself doing a silly little dance everywhere he goes. It started as a little personal joke on a first trip, then became a "thing," which he continued on a second trip, then was discovered as such things are, then he got money and a sponsorship from Cadbury to do it some more, with better equipment, in more places, to promote some gum of theirs, and now here's his newest video of stupid, charming dancing around the world, with a cast of thousands joining in (the earlier videos, and outtakes, and other videos from the project are available at his YouTube Channel, and are also worth watching):

( Where the Hell Is Matt? (2008) )

Enjoy.

You can get a cable to perform the same job for $5.00 - but if you really REALLY want that "top of the line quality" in sending digital ones and zeros back and forth over copper wire that you can only get by buying an overpriced Monster Cable or something, you could get one for $10-20.00 (although it would probably come in a longer, more useful length than the Denon's 59", which HAS to be bad for signal or something). So what does this SERIOUS audiophile cable from Denon cost?

$500.99.

Really.

So, quite a few consumers think this shameless play for the people with too much money and not enough sense as re: their A/V systems (the same people who buy the biggest, most expensive HD monitors and then don't hook them up to actually get HD signal, or just play everything with a 4:3 aspect ratio stretched to 16:9 so that everyone onscreen has the mumps) is just TOO shameless to go unremarked and unmocked.

There is a fine collection of "Customer Reviews" for this product HERE. They're worth reading. Really.

Thanks again to everyone for the birthday wishes! And to the other everyones (with some overlaps) for the nice comments here and in emails about Ambersons!

So, here I am in Maine, with a new driver's license, trying to get some writing done and finding myself somewhat blocked (it used to be that I wrote better outside NYC, now not so much for some reason). I spent the last 7.5 hours of the first day of my 40th year driving up here - a drive that usually takes me 5.5 hours, but I spent an extra hour in traffic and another driving slowly and unnerved through a massive rain & lightning storm. Always fun. Tomorrow I have nothing to do but write, so maybe I can get something done.

Aw, man . . .

Cyd Charisse has died.

I've been crazy abut her since seeing The Band Wagon (still my favorite "classic" movie musical) at a young age, then later seeing her in Singin' in the Rain and Silk Stockings. I've also seen her in the late kinda-noir Party Girl, which is okay, and the unpleasant Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather - I don't mind "dark" films, of course, and love musicals that go for the dark, but this one is just sour and unpleasant.

But Band Wagon and Singin' . . . ? Oh, I love them. Here's two numbers from each of those films - and you get some great Astaire and Kelly work in there, too:

( GOTTA DANCE! )

Enjoy.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage went down last night with an incredible performance where the actors just owned the piece from start to finish, everything went pretty smoothly with the pace (some transitions were still making me wince, though), and the audience was terrific and seemed on the same page as us the whole time - laughing, chucking, gasping, and falling deathly silent right when they were supposed to. Lot of friends out there, and a lot of strangers out there (we were sold out and over and had people sitting on the riser edges and on mats on the floor in front), and they were all pretty effusive about it, although I again got comments asking why I turned the AC off during the show - no one believes me, but there are very few shows where the sound of the AC going during it is not a problem - it's worse for comedies, where punchlines are blunted even when fully audible -- people laugh more when they're cool, but even less when there's white noise going on in the room -- but it throws a wet blanket over everything when it's on.

I saw one performance of Robert Honeywell's Every Play Ever Written, which I saw four times, DESTROYED by the AC, which Robert rode off and on during all the shows, but mostly on for this one, and I could feel the gags (wonderfully performed by the company as always) trapped inside wet felt.

We kept it on during all the NECROPOLIS shows last August, as the entire sound for all those is pre-recorded and can be easily pumped over the AC tone, but the revivals didn't go over nearly as well with audiences, reactionwise, as the originals had. I just felt that AC sound lying across the shows, muffling them.

So we were all hot - not as bad as Tuesday, marrone!, but sweaty enough.

Oh, someone on the Wellesnet forums, someone who KNOWS his Welles, as I can tell from his postings, saw the show last night, and loved it, and said nice things about it, and I wrote a response just now, which is here, with the nice quote that made me respond:

I feel like I now know how Welles' uncut Ambersons would have played.

Wow, thanks so very very much for the complement - that's about the best I could hope for, really. The more I worked on it, the more I got that feeling myself - I had originally no "illusions" about this being any kind of true reconstruction, because of the basic differences in media between film and theatre, but I did eventually feel like I knew how especially the last act of the film would have felt, and while I don't excuse the butchers one frame of their work, I grew to have even more of an understanding of why they were so unnerved by the film - I couldn't just sneer at them simply and say, "Oh, they were scared by how DARK it was, whoa!" - I don't think it's because it was "dark," as we normally think of that, it's because of the feeling of . . . a "pained mournfulness" is about as close as I can come (an entire film that feels like Aggie Moorehead's face looks at the end of Wilbur's funeral).

There were times when we would be running scenes that were ultimately reshot, butchered, or dropped, and I would think to myself, "Dear God, Orson actually thought this would get onscreen in 1942?" There's something that changes in the whole piece when Major Amberson's monologue tips over into the metaphysical (mostly gone in the release print) that turns the whole story into something Other, and hangs over the rest of it - my favorite piece to perform as narrator of the show is the uncut intro to that speech (in a close race with the cut section of the "walk home" narration about "If space has memory . . ."). When the show worked (which, being theatre, it did at varied levels from performance to performance, last night being all around the best), everything CHANGED from that moment, and you could feel it change in the audience (being in an interesting position, seated between the actors and the audience - an uncomfortably open and vulnerable spot for me - I could really feel the interplay between the two).

In any case, thanks, and yes, I hope to do it again sometime, when I can afford to rent the costumes again, and once I'm able to under Actors Equity codes (because of the code I had to produce this under, I can't do it again at the same level for at least 13 months, but several of the actors are already pushing me to jump right back into it when that time is up).

Okay, enough Ambersons for now - I have to get this all together to post and get back to The Brick to supervise a tech.

Meanwhile, as I write this, back in the iPod:

1. "Sans Raison (I Love You For Sentimental Reasons)" - Les Chats Sauvages - Foreign Language Fun, vol. 4
2. "August Mademoiselle" - Children of the Mushroom - Pebbles Volume 9 - Southern California 2
3. "Hot Promotions" - Johnson & Johnson - Sundown
4. "Gotta Hear The Beat" - Animal Jack - Ear-Piercing Punk
5. "Beautiful Dream" - World Party - Egyptology
6. "Hold Me Baby" - Albert Washington - MOJO: Raw Soul
7. "Crazy Things" - The Quid - Pebbles volume 4
8. "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War" - Paul Simon - Hearts and Bones
9. "Love You 'Till The Day I Die" - The Heartbreakers - Dangerous Doo-Wop 3
10. "A Fine, Fine Boy" - Darlene Love - Phil Spector - Back to Mono (1958-1969)

So, a couple of recent cat photos . . . what's Hooker looking at with that silly look?

Oh, it's the whip prop Berit's making for Ambersons, dangling here at top of frame (with Hooker on the painting tarp that has been a favorite nap spot recently):

And so as to not overload this too much with images, behind the cut are 12 favorites from last night's photo call after the show - there are other good ones, but these were the ones that caught my eye immediately this morning . . .

( The Magnificence of this production ended last night . . . )

But I will include some final shots from Berit's and my cleanup after the show last night, which took us a couple of hours . . .

It was obvious that there was no point in us trying to keep the breakaway bass prop Berit made for the show . . .

It's just too big to store - and maybe we'll do the show again, but it'd be over a year and a half away, and what would we do with this in the meantime? Berit shows off the pre-broken back for just a moment . . .

And then, a moment later, shows just how we'll fit in in a trash bag to go out with The Brick's garbage:

A pretty sad end for the prop, seen here with Berit's feet in midair coming down for one more smash . . .

Damn, we should have considered we'd be doing this before the show, and let Timothy go full out on it during this last performance . . . shoot. Oh, well.

Okay, time to let this lie and run off to The Brick again

So there's a buildup of videos I've been finding and bookmarking at YouTube that I thought I'd share wit' you and yours. As I've been doing, these are all behind cuts for those whose browsers flip out if I drop a load of video on them all at once.

So to start, say hello to The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band with three videos:

"The Intro and The Outro," a classic track from Gorilla, which someone has helpfully annotated with images (later, Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzos would perform a more serious job of introducing instruments on Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells).

"Death Cab for Cutie," as performed on the pre-Monty Python kids' show from Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle (and others), Do Not Adjust Your Set (the Bonzos also did this song in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour). There's another number after this featuring Idle and The Bonzos.

And the classic 1968 single, "I'm The Urban Spaceman," produced by Paul McCartney (and Gus Dudgeon) under a pseudonym -- in a strange coincidence, I was just idly thinking about maybe or maybe not posting these Bonzos videos earlier this morning, when I looked up and saw, in an entirely non-sequitur context, someone who had used Macca's fake name - "Apollo C. Vermouth" - as their own online handle, which decided me on making the post.

( And yes, that IS actually Eric Clapton on ukulele! )

And here's a collection of videos from The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (now apparently just Blues Explosion). Always liked them, don't have enough by them (Berit had more than I did when we got together, mainly some fairly-rare import-only releases that she didn't even know were such).

The videos are for "Wail," "Bellbottoms," and "Talk About The Blues" - in the last the band members are played by Winona Ryder, Giovanni Ribisi, and John C. Reilly.

This is followed by the clip that made me look for the other videos - Jon Spencer demonstrating his theremin technique on a children's show - including some behavior that you wouldn't normally see in the context of a kids' show. I think (and hope that) he may have really broadened the minds of some young viewers here . . .

( Mommy, what's that man doing to that theremin? )

And finally, for many years while we hung out in NYC, my good friend David LM Mcintyre would occasionally get into pointless arguments with other people (usually around 3am, after shows, in East Village bars) about a ridiculous, trivial little piece of pop-culture advertising ephemera from our youth (as us Gen-Xers can be so prone in doing). This was the origin and original design/characterization of The Grimace from the McDonald's commercials. How's that for Gen-X nostalgia?

David would insist to people that The Grimace was originally a villain, called The Evil Grimace, with six arms. Nobody ever agreed with him and thought he was making it up (I was the only person who would support him at all, as I remembered the multiple arms, but nothing else).

Well, thanks to the modern conveniences of Wikipedia and YouTube, David could now prove to all that he was right (except it looks like four arms, not six), if he ever needed to again. Here's two examples.

And on top of those two pieces of early-70s televisualness included to give some of us a bit of a Proustian rush, there's also an animated report from the police chief of Leonardo, NJ on what is being done about the Mutaba Virus outbreak:

( Now let's pay Sid & Marty Krofft $1 million for ripping them off . . . )

Enjoy.

Now I just sit around and make up reasons to be nervous. Well, as Berit says, "Don't borrow trouble!"

I just want to be there and setting up for the show. But it's not even 9 in the morning, the show's at 8 pm, and I have to go supervise a tech before that at 1 pm anyway.

I just need some breakfast and coffee.

And meanwhile, what's Lex Luthor doing . . ?

Not terrible, here's today's Random Ten, out of 25,595 in the iPod:

1. "Soul Love" - The Music Machine - The Bonniwell Music Machine
2. "Lady" - Johnny Young - Oceanic Odyssey Volume 08
3. "No Time To Rhyme" - The Spirit - Pebbles Volume 13 - The Continent Strikes Back
4. "E-Bow The Letter" - R.E.M. - New Adventures In Hi-Fi
5. "Sweet Susie (trailer)/Lone Twister" - Russ Meyer/The Lone Twister - Wavy Gravy - For Adult Enthusiasts…
6. "The Place Where She Lives" - The Four Rockets - Pebbles Volume 12 - The World
7. "Good Air" - Raymond Scott - Manhattan Research, Inc.
8. "Hot Head Baby" - Frantic Flintstones - Raucous Recordings
9. "Twist and Shout" - Brian Poole & The Tremeloes - Beat of the Pops 02
10. "Bollywood" - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Ubiquity Studio Sessions Vol.1—Music and Rhythm

And there was some more time this week to take some photos of the cats. Here's Moni enjoying the open window, and dreaming of killing things beyond, if she could get through the screen:

Hooker tucked in next to me on the couch for a nap:

And the two of them together, trying to share a chair:

Nothing much to do now. I'm going to play around with playlists and iTunes to keep my mind from getting in a nervousness feedback loop . . .

We have some wonderful costumes from the TDF Costume Collection, and I've paid significantly more for the rental of them than I've ever spent on the entirety of a single show - thank heavens for the new Gemini CollisionWorks credit card and the donations already received to the company so I can pay off that card in full already - we've spent a lot, but we're not in debt. And it's worth it for this show.

I've been getting about three hours of sleep a night for a while now, but I'm doing okay. I'll collapse on Monday. Last night we were in tech until 2.30 am or so, and I then had to do some work on The Film Festival in general (I had to fill the Festival iPod with "movie-related" songs and transfer several trailers for shows in the Fest to one DVD). Then back for the last of the costumes at 10 this morning.

There's a big opening night party for the Fest going on right now. B & I have to work here at home. So it goes.

Right now, my job is to finish the sound design for the show to have at our 10 am rehearsal tomorrow. So as I prepare my SFX files, a background evening Random 10 from my own iPod:

1. "Three Small Words" - Josie & The Pussycats (90s version) - Josie & The Pussycats soundtrack
2. "Famous Blue Raincoat" - Jennifer Warnes - Famous Blue Raincoat
3. "Spanish Kiss" - Dick Dale - Surfer's Guitar
4. "Nature" - Bobby Callendar - Rainbow
5. "Skidoo/Commercials" - Harry Nilsson - Skidoo soundtrack
6. "The Love of a Bird" - Sevens - WorldBeaters 1
7. "Stephen Foster Medley" - Chet Atkins - Chet Atkins and His Guitar
8. "Acelia Dulfin" - Sunshine Reigns - Garagepunk: This Side Up
9. "The Wanderer" - Johnny Cash & U2 - Zooropa
10. "Debbie Harry" - Family Fodder - Rough Trade Shops: Post Punk 01

And don't forget, if you don't like any of the choices out there in the coming election, you can always kneel before Zod!

Oh, and posted before remembering to include the postcard I cobbled together on another near-all-nighter earlier this week. Not the best work from GCW, but it gets the job done. Here's the front and back:

Ambersons rehearsals - trying to keep other shows in play - fixing up The Brick - teching the six Tiny Theater Festival shows the last two nights, trying to get all the set pieces for Ambersons built by tomorrow. And a parental unit is coming to visit us overnight. Oy.

We were up cleaning the apartment (which had reached a condition that could be described, with no hyperbole, as "squalor") until 4.30 am. I woke up at 6, got back to sleep by 6.30, then up again for good at 8. I think the 10 or so Red Bulls I drank last night may have something to do with it (an actress in one of my plays works for the company, and had a free case dropped off at The Brick - this is dangerous . . .).

And we still have hours ahead of cleaning the home and The Brick.

Berit may have cracked - she's created the Magnificent Ambersons board game:

"You're the spoiled scion of a wealthy Midwestern family at the turn of the 20th Century! Roll the dice! Watch your path as the board spreads and darkens into a city! Pick a Morgan card - your invention flourishes and you move four spaces - uh, oh! You've landed on the Minifer chute, and you lose all your money in a headlamp company that fails! Can you avoid the boarding house path, and wind up in your new Romanesque mansion? Hey, you're hit by a car, and your old girlfriend's rich father decides to take care of you for the rest of your life! You're MAGNIFICENT!"

This is, of course, actually the scale model built by Berit so we could work out the complicated blocking of 20 actors and 16 set pieces for the show in advance (not quite scale - all the people are 4' tall, but that was necessary - and I'm just a two-dimensional outline on the floor near the lower right). I think it looks like Stratego. It wound up not working for us as we'd hoped (just too distant a system to actually block with; I need real bodies), but I think we'll have it on Berit's table tomorrow as we work everything out with the actual actors - since we'll keep being short of people at every rehearsal before we open, it'll help us remember where everyone is supposed to be, backstage, onstage, or off downstage.

From the 25,578 songs on the iPod this morning:

1. "Times About" - Dick Kent - MSR Madness 5: I Like Yellow Things
2. "He's Got The Knack" - Graffiti - Turds On A Bum Ride volume 3
3. "Hey Nonny Nonny" - Violent Femmes - Why Do Birds Sing?
4. "Give It Up Or Turnit Loose" - James Brown - Star Time
5. "The Wayward Wind" - Patsy Cline - The Legendary Patsy Cline
6. "Flashin' Red" - The Esquires - Pebbles Volume 4 - Surf'n Tunes!
7. "Help Me Rhonda" - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits
8. "I Don't Understand" - George Jackson - Lost Deep Soul Treasures 3
9. "Road Runner" - The Music Explosion - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol 5
10. "Grand Slam" - David Lindner - Soundsational Sampler

(I am punchy enough that a typo briefly in the above - "Pasty Cline" - makes me laugh WAY too damn much)

Okay, have to get back to cleaning and running around. Here's a kitty photo . . .

And here's another . . .

My duties here are discharged for the week, I'm outta here . . .