As much as I love doing theatre and being in shows, there are a ton of advantages to not being in a show at all. I record this here to both inform and entertain my readers, but equally so to remind myself the next time I decide it is a good idea to do shows back to back right after making a sort of significant life change like buying a house. In no particular order, some of the advantages are as follows:
- My body has time to heal. I tend to be fairly hard on my body when doing shows. This includes both not stopping to be sick and throwing my body around with reckless abandon. Almost all shows that I have a significant role in, I end up bruised and aching. It’s nice to heal.
- Sleep: it’s kind of cool and I enjoy it.
- Home cooked dinner at the table with my wife. Somewhere along the way, having fast food 8 times a week stopped being the ideal way to eat. Now that we aren’t at the theatre every night, not only do we have time to get groceries, but we get to eat in our house instead of in the car on the way to the theatre.
- Who knew it was possible to go out and do fun thing or even do chores on random nights of the week?
- At no point do I ever find myself in bed/shower/work trying to peel mic tape off of my neck.
- It is actually possible to get a tan when I am not inside a a dark theatre every weekend.
I’d like to share a very short from the date night Amy and I went on last night. On our way to continue our long running putt-putt tournement, we stopped off at the mall to run a few errands. Also, since she had earlier mentioned the possibility of eating at chick-fa-la, we were required, by our own private rules, to eat there. Up to this point, things are pretty normal. What made this particular night different is that the Merritt Island mall had an entire orchestra set up just outside the food court. They were from Liberty College though that particlar factoid is wholy unimportant. If you have never experienced such a thing, let me assure you that a full orchestra soundtrack makes the food court and really the whole mall visit significantly more “epic” feeling. AfteriMAge finishing giving our order, Amy stopped the guy helping us as the music backdrop began to grow louder and more power, “and wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it….” the music peaked in a huge note and copias amounts of cymbol crahes. “Polynesian sause.” Neither I nor the guy behind the counter could really contol our laughter.
Yes, I know you probably don’t find it funny at all. You probably had to be there. Maybe next time we find ourselves ordering chicken sandwiches with live music soundtrack and I forget to order Polynesian sause just as the music peaks, you can join us. You will probably appreciate just a little more why I love my wife so much.
As of this past Monday, I have completely paid off my car that I bought four and a half years ago. Since I bought the car with less than 200 miles on it I decided to start accurately tracking my gasoline purchases starting from the very beginning, and in an amazing and uncharacteristic feat, I managed to keep up with that record keeping for the full 4.5 years. Because of that, I can tell you a number of things, in that time, I have paid as little as $1.62 and as much as $4.00, but averaged $2.68 per gallon. On average I get 28.05 miles per gallon, 54.71 miles per day, and $5.01 per day. I have driven 56,529 miles and have filled up my gas tank 169 times with a total of 1974.57 gallons at a total cost of $5276.22. It is also slightly crazy that I have a spreadsheet to tell me all of this.
I’ll leave you with a graph of my own personal price for gasoline from July 2005 – December 2009
When the wife and I got married last summer, I moved into her house. Our plan at the time was to live there possibly up to a year while finding a house and then move. Since we were planning on moving fairly quickly, we didn’t really do any significant remodeling or moving of stuff. With the exception of adding what little of my stuff was worth keeping and a few pictures, the house decor stayed, more or less, with what she had setup. At the time, it was the smart move.
Flash forward eight or nine months, and with everything that we had going on and going on in the world at large, it was looking like we were probably going to be staying here another year. And even if we don’t end up staying, we decided that it was time we did a joint remodeling of sorts to make it truly our home. Add to this fact that we got some amazingly good deals on some very nice furniture and before we knew it, we had replaced half of our furniture. If the wife had had her way, it all would have been done at once several months ago. If I had been doing it on my own, it probably would have been over a year in the making. In the end, we had the money and compromised by getting things slowly over several months.
The first step was the dining room. We got it as floor clearance models, which means that a couple small nicks knocked off 50% of the cost. The set includes a table, four regular chairs, two arm chairs and a hutch. We got our first chance to add a leaf into the table last week, and that thing is long. Closed up it is around 5 feet long; and it accepts up to two 20 inch leaves for close to 9 feet of table. I have already been promised that at some point we are going to have dinner for two at either end of the mansion sized table wearing formal attiar just for the sake of doing it.
The hutch has actually been repurposed as our entertainment center in the living room. I have to say, I love our living room furniture. It is exactly the kind of clean, sleak, huge, modern furniture I have been looking for over the last few years. I don’t have a whole lot to say here except about the decorations.
We spent a couple of months looking for a good art piece to be the center of the living room with almost zero luck. In the end, we took our pillows to Home Depot and got some sample buckets of paint to match, and I went to town one off-friday. The result is what you see there, which I think is awesome even if I do say so myself. The window treatment were all my wife’s vision. The brown curtains were actually stuff I bought several years ago for my last bachelor apartment. The red drape was the result of my wife’s first adventure with a sewing machine. I like that whole thing too.
The bedroom was the biggest job to get ready. We both loved the furniture as soon as we saw it. I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to fit, but it does wonderfully. Still nothing quite prepared me for how much bigger they looked at home than in the giant showroom.
I was able to hold out on this purchase for awhile, mostly because I feel better about making big purchases when I do. Because of this, and the stores proximity to our church, we ended up making several visits to Ethan Allen so Amy could visit it. Once we decided to do the room, we ended up painting it, one color on the wall behind the bed and a slightly lighter color else where. The painting above the bed is an old favorite of Amy’s.
At this point, we are done for a good long while, with the possible expection of a nice, big TV, eventually, whenever I cave to her suggestions.
Well, I have once again found myself right in the middle of tech week. It is only Tuesday and I already feel like I am going through life in a haze. For those of you who are not theatre people, tech week in community theatre is the final week before a show opens, and it is when everything really starts coming together. It’s crunch time. It is long rehearsals that start early and finish late. It means being distracted by new lighting, special effects, new and different costumes, new sets, physical props that you forgot you had, and a full orchestra all while trying to remember your lines, dance moves, and blocking.
My standard schedule ends up being work until the normal time, drive straight to the theatre, reherase for 4-5 hours, go home and go to bed. Lately, I seem to be making wierd choices for tech week. When Aida was in tech week, Amy and I were redecorating our bed/entire house (more on that is coming soon). This time, we ended up getting Amy’s car repaired from a parking lot hit and run, which means I get to play driver in the morning, which in all honesty shouldn’t be a problem, but I am a slacker about getting up in the morning. The other thing, which is kind of cool, is that I am becoming sort of the photographer of the Cocoa Village Playhouse, which means I randomly get called on to do a photoshoot for newspaper photos at short notice, which explains why I end up working on photos from the end of rehearsal until 2AM or so.
Now it occurs to me that this is sounding like some sort of grip fest. It is not. After all, it is pretty unlikely that I would volunteer most of my free time in 2-3 month blocks at a time for something I didn’t really enjoy. I have just found a good number of people don’t actually know what is going on when I say “tech week”. The most import thing, though, is that the whole time you know that Friday is a whole other ballgame. Actually it is the ballgame. Regardless of what is going on during tech week, you know that Friday it all changes. On Friday, there is an audience. Most show (some more than others), even on Thursday you aren’t quite sure how it is all going to come together, but it (almost) always does. For now, all I can say is lets get to Friday now.
So, guess what everyone? It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and since that is a holiday of sorts, odds are that Amy and I are celebrating an anniversary of some sort. Holiday’s are sort of a magnet for our special events. We got married on the 4th of July, engaged during Memorial Day weekend, and you could say we had our first date on St. Patrick’s Day exactly 2 years ago. That last bit was qualified a little because we have several first dates depending on how you define things.
We first went out to eat together a week or two earlier with her sister and niece. She had come to the Henegar Center Variety Show in which I was performing a Jekyll & Hyde song. A big group of people were going out as a group, but the chosen location ended up being too loud and smoky to have a 5 year old there, so we branched off from the main group.
The first time we met up to specifically hang out by ourselves was the day after St. Pat’s Day. She drove down to Melbourne and we took an extremely long and cliche walk on the beach at sunset/ in the moonlight. It wasn’t suppose to be that long, but somehow we ended up a couple of miles down the beach before we realized it, and the sun sort of snuck behind the horizon. It got very cold, very fast, but we eventually made it back with only a pulled calf muscle and an laser pointer attack. This is what we officially consider to be our first date, mostly because it is what I eventually based my proposal on, minus the pulled muscle and laser pointer.
The events of St. Patrick’s Day came about rather easily. A bunch of Henegar people were going to the Melbourne St. Patrick’s Day parade and I took it upon myself to invite Amy. That 5 minute conversation ended up being a couple hours long, at which point her sister suggested I just come to their house to hang out. I, of course, did so and the conversation ended up lasting another several hours before I sleepily drove home around 3AM. The next day, after the parade, Amy was going to a Relay for Life event, which I tagged along for. This resulted in me meeting not only her entire family, but most of her co-workers, and her entire elementary school class. With all the awkwardness that goes along with that over, we went back to Melbourne for the block party. We talked through most of that party too, in complete disregard for the fact that we had already spent 14 straight hours together. It was at the end of that, despite the lies that Amy might try to convince you are true, SHE kissed ME. (Aside to Amy: You see? It’s on the internet. I must be true, since the internet never lies.)
Zoom forward two years. We’ve been married for seven great months, and looking forward to many, many more. I love you, Amy.
For those of you who care to know these things, I am kinda-sorta going to be in Aida in a few weeks. I did not audition for the show and I did not particularly want to be in it, but somehow things worked out that I am going to be in at least 8 or 9 performances. I am going to be what they call a ‘swing’ for several people in the show. Basically, I will be filling in for cast members (2 to be exact) who have perforance conflicts. The cool thing about it, is that I do get to do the show, but without the full-time commitment that shows normally take. I will be performing one part the first weekend of the show, and a different part the third weekend. For those who don’t know, Aida is a relatively new musical with music written by Elton John based on the story of an older Opera. The story is set in Egypt and is somewhat but not really, kinda-sorta a Romeo/Juliet type of thing. From the few rehearsals I have been at, this show is going to be incredible. The voices are outstanding, and the dances are fantastic. The rehearsals for the dances are not quite as fantastic. I was sore for three days following the first dance rehearsal.
In other news, it is not looking like I am going to be doing 1776 at this point, despite the earlier impression I had. I will, however, be auditioning for The Fantasticks in a couple of weeks. We shall see how that goes.
For those of you who don’t live in Brevard County, Amy and I recently entered a photo contest hosted by Florida Today, the local newspaper. The contest was associated with a photography exhibit at the Brevard Museum of Art, which featured Annie Leibovitz portraits of women. As such, the contest theme was “Women”. Fortunately for me, I am married to a woman, so we set out trying various shots. We ended up with this:
Amy has gotten a lot of flack for the photo, presumably because you can’t see her clothes. For the record, yes she is in bed in this photo and fully clothed. Her shoulder just happens to be hiding her shirt strap.
That being said, this was exactly the expression we were trying to get. Amy has this thing she does when she does something embarrassing, cute, or any number of other things. She will hide behind whatever is available, be it a blanket, hair, her hands, whatever, and slowly peaks out. That is pretty much what is going on here.
Technically speaking, the photo was taken with my new Canon XSi with a 50mm F/1.8 lens. I was also using a 430 EX II top-mounted flash that I recently bought from the soon-to-be-gone Circuit City. Other than the conversion to Black and White, the only other editing was a slightly lightening of her eye which was shadowed a bit too much.
As most everyone in Brevard already knows, we won first prize in the judged half of the contest which was fun. This basically amounts to a big photo in the paper and a year membership to the museum. The article in the paper also had a short interview from me:
Our judging panel included Steven Maklansky (the incoming president of the Brevard Art Museum), Malcolm Denemark and Pam Harbaugh (yours truly, arts writer and theater critic for FLORIDA TODAY).
Coming in first among the judges was Jonathan Goforth, 28, of Merritt Island. He used a Canon Rebel XSi, a 50 mm lens and a top-mounted 43 EX2 flash to take this photograph of his wife, Amy.
“We took a whole bunch of pictures. Probably 30 or 40 for this one. . . . It’s her expression, something she does. I find it very cute. I shot it on that white fabric, it just
stood out better. I guess the skin tone, the colors, seemed distracting to me. Her face got framed in the pure white of the fabric. It made it stand out better to me.”
He said his visit to see the Leibovitz exhibition expanded his view of photographic portraiture and influenced his own work.
Well, after 4 family gift exchanges, 2 white elephant events, a last minute successful creation of a gag gift, 1 Christmas dinner, somewhere in the area of 15 batches of cookies, 0 loafs of pumpkin bread, 35 hours of driving, 1 bad decision to trust the GPS, 6 states and a district visited, 6 hours of Bones, 10 or so hours of Playhouse Disney, 2.2 viewings of Kung Fu Panda, a poor performance of Oliver at the King Center in Melbourne, a fantastic performance of West Side Story at the National Theatre in Washington DC, an impromptu walk to the White House, a highly anticipated visit to Orlando Ice, 4 very dead paper targets by way of a couple boxes of lead by way of 4 pistols, a wedding rehearsal, a wedding dinner, a wedding reception, an actual wedding, a fast trip to Walgreens to pick up honeymoon car decorating supplies, a wedding toast, 4 car packings, the largest game of hand and foot I ever want to play, a rousing game of Bond-opoly, a traumatic wasp sting to a sleeping 7 year old, a carsick episode 9 minutes before the end of a 9 hour trip, a sad but close Clemson bowl game, 17 relaxing days off from work, and one arrival back at home, the 2008 Christmas season is complete.