Midnight May 21

I'm up late trying to finish up some work from home and thought I would finish with a blog entry. Since last Sunday we have worked on several things. Jim Keeney has built the rounded platforms for Anything Goes. He made the frames from plywood and 2x4 and then wet Masonite and paneling so that it would bend around the curved corners. Marsha Cash is madly trying to fill the last few spaces for the Lowertown festival volunteer slots. MHT is helping the Buzzard Bros. serve food at the festival and in exchange they are giving us part of the proceeds as a fundraising event. The setup for the festival starts tomorrow at 4 pm and runs through Sunday at 4 pm when we help with the tear down. Several 2 hour shifts are still in need of people and it takes no experience. The volunteers will help serve food.

Alexis has started printing out the season tickets on the new ticket stock for next season. We ordered a different color from the past year. April is finishing up her school workshops as well as continuing the Story Theatre tour of the 3 Little Kittens. They have performed 4 shows since Sunday. April has also been helping me and working late at night on the newsletter which will go out to the printers tomorrow. We will post it online and email it tomorrow as well. It takes quite a bit of time to write the articles and layout the newsletter. April and I do all the writing and layout work and then send the finished file to the printer.

Today Jim and I unloaded the Story Theatre van after its final show of the day and put new wheels on one of the rolling units and re-loaded the van. The tour only has 2 weeks left but the units get a lot of hard use. One of the casters on the sound box got stuck two days ago and the cast has had to wheel the box in continuous circles to get it into the schools for the show.

Tonight I took publicity photos of Anything Goes and worked to put the new photo on the header of our website. To put the photo on I have to photoshop the background out and resize the photo to the correct size and then merge it into the header. I stopped earlier this afternoon and picked up some costumes from creatures of habit for the photos tonight. Natalie called me to ask if we were still doing photos because she called one of the principal actors to ask him to come in for a costume fitting today and he told her he was in the hospital and couldn't make it. We contacted the actor and he was waiting to hear from the doctors as to what was wrong. Some of the options were appendicitis, gall bladder, or unknown. I don't want to mention the actors name until I find out more.

While I was at rehearsal tonight Diane Byrd the director and I discussed the actors condition and decided to wait until we know more before beginning to panic. Diane was also having a problem with a scene in which she has to get 5 people on in the scene in an area of the stage that is too small. I moved around some of the wall units that we were playing with and increased the size. We will have to build a "bunk bed" for the brig along with a cell door and two wall units. Fortunately we still had a cell door from the Story Theatre tour of Hansel and Gretel so that might speed things up a bit. I was worried that trying to climb up on the bed which also had to roll in place during a fast scene change might cause the unit to tip over. We worked out some extra walls which should stabilize the unit.

I spent some time reworking the video on the home page of the website from the Zink Back stage. I video taped the cast from Zink talking about their experience working at MHT and doing the play. The show had a great effect on the actors and the audience. A oncology doctor saw the play and told a friend that it helped her to understand what she was leaving out when she talks to patients and what the nurses who followed on behind her sometimes had to do with patients. A retired pastor of a local church saw the show and commented that it should be mandatory for all young people entering the seminary to address issues of children and illness.

Tomorrow I'll continue to photoshop the publicity photos I took tonight and create a television commercial and a newspaper ad. I also have promised to help with the setup at the lowertown festival. I communicated with Eric Hobbs and MHT will begin hosting Eric's Improv classes for adults in June. I'll post more details as we know them. Oops I almost forgot that I met with Renie Barger and one of the nominees for the board for next season today. Meetings with possible board members are always something I look forward to. It's a chance to fill someone new in on all the things we do at MHT. It's almost 12:30 am and I outa here!