okay, now that i’m done venting about that asshat majid, i have finally calmed down enough to write about the opening weekend of drunk puppet night.
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the opening was in the winningstad theatre, where it was last year… unfortunately there are no actual pictures of the puppet shows because i was too busy running sound. i stayed with lance, who is the guy whose job is to run the technical aspects of this theatre… which means from top to bottom if you want some kind of theatre magic, lance is the guy to ask. they have 300 hanging lights, and another 100-200 in a room backstage in case that wasn’t enough, that are all controlled by a board in the booth, which also houses all the audio gear and a separate board for that. josh needed a piece of gel for one of his shadow puppet sets and lance took us into a back room where they have every colour gel imaginable, all classified according to the catalogue number. we decided that the winningstad is where we want to do all of our performances, but lance says that “menopause: the musical” has bought the theatre for the next year, with options to extend another year, so next year we’re probably going to have drunk puppet night in portland in a different theatre. i got there with no clue where i was going to stay, so i was grouped with a couple of other folks from seattle who were supposed to stay at the emcee’s house, but there was only enough room for two, so i actually got to stay with lance. he and his wife both work for tears of joy puppet theatre, which was our sponsor, and they have a futon in their basement. they also have huge quantities of a wide variety of geckos and skinks in their basement, apparently lance also breeds them – for what… i didn’t ask… just the fact that they were there was cool enough for me – and, thus, they have crickets in their basement as well, which are gecko food. they also have a parrot and an iguana and a dog named dozer who was apparently starved for attention.
the first night was kind of sparse, but al franken was appearing in the theatre next door, and everybody apparently went to see him instead (slobs), but the second night there was actually a full house, which was a lot better than we expected, considering that (or because of, we weren’t able to determine which) the emcee, a guy named rale sidebottom, was smoking and drinking on stage during the performance, and was actually “fired” from his job as emcee by someone in the audience.
i got up sunday morning and left portland by 9:30 and drove straight to port townsend for the lantern festival. i arrived in port townsend at around 1:00 and spent a couple hours wandering around and re-acquainting myself with fort worden. there have been some changes at the cistern which lead me to believe that somebody official has gained access for some official purposes, but has restricted all other access. the whole area has been mowed, and the two tanks full of concrete that used to be over the access hole have been moved to the side, and a new access hole, with a steel door and a lock, has been added. because of the fact that the area was mowed, i actually discovered a second, and, potentially, a third and a fourth access point that leads to the cistern which i didn’t know about previously. one of them has a similar door and lock, and the other two can probably be accessed with a pry bar and some muscle. it’s good that someone has been looking after the space, in spite of the fact that i couldn’t get in myself. i did some harmonic singing in one of the mortar batteries, underground in the powder room, to make up for, once again, not being able to access the cistern.
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around 3:30 or so i went down to the jefferson county municipal field, which is where the lantern festival was being held. it was fairly sunny in port townsend yesterday, but when the sun went down (which, coincidentally, was when we started to play) it was suddenly evident that it was the pacific northwest in the middle of february. fortunately i had my burnoose, and my tuba was as good as a camel, as long as i was playing. unfortunately there were a lot of breaks at first, and when i stopped playing, and especially when i (frequently) had to put my horn down to get a piece of music that fred came up with on the spur of the moment, but wasn’t in the line up, it got really cold, really fast. the performance itself went surprisingly well considering that only 6 of the 25 people in the show were at the dress rehearsal last weekend. nobody caught fire that wasn’t supposed to.
it was all over, finally, around 8:30, and i drove through tacoma and got home by 10:30… whereas if i had gone through bremerton, it would have meant a 3 hour wait for the ferry to seattle, and then another 45 minutes from seattle. and i did it all without a map, despite the fact that i haven’t driven up the olympic peninsula since before my injury. i shouldn’t have worried about it… the roads tell me where to go… 8)
then, when i came home, our blindingly cute little doggie was in the bedroom, with her nose under the door, and i had to share the blinding cuteness with all of you…