Tag Archives: panto

anhedonia, busking, geek stuff, moe, moe's mom, nursery, panto, players, TAA

↑D

let me see…

moe has Teaching Animals Academy up and running… at this point i’m not sure whether i am still hosting it, but i don’t think so… although i still haven’t gotten official word that i am NOT hosting it any longer, so that’s maybe something i should ask about, eventually. she also has been BUSTING HER BUTT (and mine, and anybody else’s who might be foolish enough to show up on the property) getting the house ready for two new tenants — dyllan, who is 25% owner of the business, and has spent the past few years living in her van, and courteny, who monique and i have known ever since she was a kid, who is now an adult, and works as a veterinary doctor in the clinic moe manages, but STILL LIVES WITH HER PARENTS! — which means getting rid of the nasty-ass sort-of-a-fence around the property and putting in new fences, and gates everywhere, building a door between the upstairs and the downstairs, to prevent unwanted mixing of pets, painting and refurbishing everything. another big advantage to having the house lived in by tenants is rent, which goes towards paying off the mortgage, but DOESN’T come out of our pockets. 😉 moe’s mom has been in and out of the hospital — again — so we’ve got her dog… which moe plans on dying teal and purple later on this afternoon… 😈

the nursery is doing well. i’ve got two space queen plants that are very close to being ready to switch to flowering lights, and i have 5 space queen clones which are less than a week old, so they’re still looking a bit bedraggled, but i still have hopes for at least two of them, which is pretty much all i need anyway. i’ve also got one… at this point, i can only say “dead” plant, which came from darol. i’m not sure what it is about darol’s plants, but it seems as though when i’ve tried to grow them, they either die, revegetate, or something else which makes the plants produce very little bud… on the other hand, my neighbour, who has two starts from darol on his deck, currently, is on the verge of producing another “christmas tree”, like he did last year, only this year the buds are going to be bigger, because instead of back in the shady part of the yard, he’s got them growing on his deck, which gets A LOT more sunlight, and is also where his automated watering and fertiliser rig is set up.

panto is done for the summer. now is the time for the script committee to re-insert all of the gags that we took out to make the show fit inside an hour, with no intermission, for OCF. we’ll probably start rehearsals again in october, with a somewhat modified cast, and better sets, as usual. i haven’t been out busking since i got back from the fair. i keep thinking i should take my harmonic flute and electronic rig, and busk in redmond, because it’s fairly close and has a big public park right in the middle of town, or in freeway park, or myrtle edwards park, or volunteer park, in downtown seattle… but i’ve got this problem, where i think, “yeah, i’m going to do this, i’m REALLY GOING TO DO THIS!” right up to the point where i’m ready to start loading stuff into my car, and then i talk myself out of it: i’m paranoid, or i’ll get harassed by the cops, or something like that. 😒 at this point, i’m going to blame anhedonia, because i can’t think of any other reason.

the scam/spam/text-messagers have decided that, if they give me a phone number to call, i’m GOING TO call and harass them, so they’ve moved on to a different tack: they now send me text messages where, for some reason, they call me “null” (which makes them REALLY easy to spot), and have some nonsense about my cloud account being cancelled — nonsense, because my cloud account is on the shelf, behind me, and is 12 TERABYTES of space that I CONTROL — and request that i click a random-six-character .com URI, with a solidus and six random characters after it, which, after several redirects, deposits me on a site at “riskfree-download-speed-program.autos” or “install-protect-safe-download.autos” or some other hogwash, and then tries to get me to add my credit card number to their bogus payment window… and, if i close the browser window, and click the URI again, after several redirects, i land somewhere else, which makes the whole thing REALLY difficult to track. and it only “works” on my phone. if i copy the six-character URI, and try to open it on my desktop computer, or try to open it on my tablet, it goes to google.com. the whole thing is driven by javascript, so i have taken to disabling javascript on my browsers. 😒

ocf, panto, philharmonic, players

pre-ocf update

i leave for OCF tomorrow. i’ve got my list completely filled, except for soap, which i intend to use to take a shower this evening, and then put in the box. i’ve got a 6-pack of beer in the fridge, and a 5-gallon bottle of water, and my small flip-top box to put in the car, first thing tomorrow, and i hope to leave as close to 07:00 as possible, because i still need to water my plants, and their light doesn’t switch on until 07:00.

once again, i’m putting in my 12’x24′ aluminet shade cloth, to loan to the company, because now that we have moved the fence, the backstage area is going to be bigger, and we will be able to use it this year. the weather-guessers say that it’s not going to be as hot this year, but it’s still going to be between 85° and 90°, which is plenty hot enough. and because of the fact that macque isn’t going this year, there’s no advanced mosquito advisory, but, if moving the fence a few weeks ago is any indication, it’s going to be a mild year for mosquitos.

the show — Peter Pan — is surprisingly together, for a change. our last rehearsal, last thursday, was largely off-book, which is astounding! usually when we have our final dress rehearsal at the fair, there are still a few people who have scripts in their hands, but this year, it is not to be! we’re playing up the “men dressed as women, women dressed as men” aspect of the show this year: peter pan is played by a woman, mr. smee is played by a woman, nana is played by a man, the crocodile, the lost boys, and the shadow are all being played by the same woman (amy funbuttons), wednesday WENDY is being played by a man — and, yes, there is a crossover with wendy and wednesday, from the addams family…

this year, the band doesn’t have a drummer. sasha, the last remaining drummer from the cirque de flambé days, has finally decided that he has too much trouble walking around the uneven surfaces of the fair — i remember when sasha did the traditional cossack dance, when we were at fairhaven, 40 years ago — so he’s not going to be there. the fremont philharmonic is once again being represented by “Father Guido’s Righteous Hand” — five people, and a massively cut-down arrangement of pretty much everything. we’re playing the same preshow, so that we don’t have to figure out what we can and cannot play on the fly.

anhedonia, bssb, circus, micro-tuba, ocf, panto, philharmonic, unicycle

rehearsals and performances

rehearsal season has begun. the past two weeks, i have had rehearsals on mondays, alternate tuesdays, and wednesdays, plus my classes on thursday and sunday. we’ve got one more week of panto rehearsals (monday and wednesday) before we take the show to the oregon country fair for half-a-dozen performances over three days, which should help us work out the bugs for the traditional “holiday” performances in december.

this is more a reminder to myself than anything else, but i MUST REMEMBER to take my micro-tuba to the repair shop and have them pull two stuck tuning slides which i can’t seem to get free… i MUST REMEMBER because i am taking my micro-tuba to OCF, and will need the tuning slides to work!!

macque is NOT COMING to the oregon country fair this year, for the first time in a huge gob of years (47, or something like that). he hasn’t been doing very well, health-wise, and the doctors have said that if he goes to OCF, it might just kill him. it will be interesting seeing how well this group functions without it’s titular head. we’ve been doing fairly well the past few years, but it has been because macque has been behind it all, pushing.

at the same time, i can’t help but think, “lucky bastard”… he’s got a time limit: he’s coming down the point where he can definitely point to an end of his life that he can do nothing about. it should have been me, in 2003. next time, i’ll have a DNR and an AND ready. who has those things lying around when they’re 43? 😖

then, when i get back from OCF, on monday, i have a sousa band rehearsal on tuesday, a circus class on thursday, a sousa band performance at an old folks’ home on saturday, and a unicycle class on sunday.

my unicycle class, this session, actually has 5 people in it! 4 people other than me! 😉 there’s the little girl who went from not riding at all, to riding a giraffe without a spotter, last year, and her (i think) younger sister, and their (i think) mother, plus two women who look like they’re of indian descent, one of whom is probably between 40 and 55 or thereabouts. i believe the younger one is late teens to early 20s.

busking, panto, players, poop

drng th pst wk

i’m more or less over diverticulitis. i’m still being cautious about what, and how much, i eat, but i actually went a whole week without shitting myself, even once, so that’s something… 😒

once again, our outstanding understudy, chochi, came to the rescue. this time it was no less a personage than macque, one of the founders of the troupe, who plays the lead rôle of “the dame” (in our case, she’s “Esmerelda, The Good Fairy”) who lost his voice, and so chochi stepped up, into a rôle that is NORMALLY played by a man-dressed-as-a-woman… chochi is a somewhat androgynous person, and i don’t know them well enough to posit at their pronouns, but it APPEARS that they were a woman-dressed-as-a-man-dressed-as-a-woman. once again, she had the book in her hand for the first show, and she did the next three shows completely off book, and she only screwed up one line. 👍👍 i have this fantasy of, one day, performing in a group of actors and musicians who know their material SO WELL that they can, literally, change rôles at a moment’s notice, and not have any difficulties. 😉

this coming weekend is the last four shows of this cycle. then we’ll start gearing up for the moisture festival, and the summer’s panto, which has yet to be decided upon.

we’re going busking tomorrow. last wednesday we busked and made over $50 A PIECE for one hour of busking. the hope is that this week will be similar, as it’s the day before a major holiday. i have had to listen to a surprisingly small amount of “xmas” music, this year, but that is, largely, because i don’t subscribe to any streaming services, and, for the most part, i don’t listen to music on my phone, except for music that i already own: i’ve got 3 days of .mp3s on itunes, and just under 1 TB of mostly .flac files on my NAS, which i can access from any of MY devices (computer, phone, tablet). and i have successfully “tuned out” the muzak i experience in grocery stores and suchlike. maybe my attitude will change, next year, but, this year, i am really against all forms of “xmas” cheer. let’s get rid of #drumpf and his cronies, and then we can talk about re-introducing “xmas” — particularly “xmas” music — into my reality again. 😒 even VEWPRF is pushing it.

panto, poop

during the past week…

i appear to be getting over diverticulitis — AGAIN — i’m no longer experiencing bouts of lower-gut pain 30 seconds to a minute or so before i have to rush to the bathroom or else i shit my pants, and i am experiencing FEWER “shit-my-pants emergency” trips to the bathroom, although they are still somewhat frequent, and i have A BIT more control over them, for SLIGHTLY longer than i had last week. i’m still on a more-or-less restricted diet, which is largely liquid, although solid food has become a daily occurrence again, and it hasn’t caused any visible backlash.

…

i’ll be VERY GLAD when i no longer have to worry about things like this, over which i have VERY LITTLE control, affecting my body. 😒

…

the panto is selling out. we have two more weekends (eight total shows), and, so far, they have either been sold out, or mostly sold out before they even opened the box office. the tail-end of the donkey did something wrong, and hit his head (or something like that, i never heard the details), so the understudy was supposed to play the tail-end of the donkey, but then King Oswald Montegue (played by newbie shelley douma) lost her voice, but was, otherwise, feeling fine (a common malady for someone who took on a leading role without much advance preparation or training), so she took over the donkey-ass position, and the understudy (Chochi Smiley?) took over the King’s part, and she actually did really well, including the songs. it’s really good to have an understudy who actually KNOWS ALL the parts! 👍👍

thursday is xmas. thursday is also the day when the trash-collectors normally make their rounds. i’m going to bet that they’re going to bump it to friday, but i haven’t heard anything, yet.

cannabis, panto, SACBO, wedding anniversary

step 27

tomorrow is our 27th wedding anniversary.

today is “officially” the first day of SACBO, but, because of the fact that it’s a caravan, interspersed with parties with people i, for the most part, don’t know, and places to view strange art (among other things, a “beaded fighter jet”??), i will not actually show up until tomorrow.

today i hope to finish the preparation for the grow room (hanging the mylar and the lights), and take clones from the most vigorous plant.

i have been elected to play the glockenspiel in the panto, this year, because kiki is “indisposed” (i.e. she will be on stage when the glockenspiel is supposed to be played). i actually HAVE a glockenspiel, one that i got off of freecycle, a few years ago, and i went out and bought a new pair of brass bell mallets, because now i have an excuse. 😉 however, it has one note, the middle A, which, instead of going “DING“, goes “DINK“… 😖 it has EXACTLY the same mechanisms holding it in place that the other keys do, and i have actually taken the key completely off the instrument, and inspected it closely for anything that might make a difference in the tone, but to no avail. i talked to the guy who works at lars’ old shop, who says he has never worked on a glockenspiel before, and i’m thinking of taking it to ted brown music and seeing if any of their repair technicians have any clues… otherwise the glockenspiel melody will go DING DING DING DING DINK DING DING DING DINK which, while somewhat amusing, is NOT appropriate for a panto.

anhedonia, panto, x-mas

whuf! 😕

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i survived “whamaggedon 2024” by never having heard the song “Last Christmas” by Wham… just to be sure, i went to youtube, searched it out, and listened to about half of it, just to make sure… i’m still not sure i’ve ever heard the song. it’s forgettable, and i have a brain injury… 🤷

the panto has been going unimaginably well, in spite of the fact that we had to have a substitute musician (greg powers, a guy i have known since high school) play the “baphoonium” part (part euphonium, part bassoon) on the trombone, because the bassoon player got sick and the euphonium player had another gig.

my “xmas” was about what i expected: other people getting way too excited about giving meaningless gifts to people they don’t really care about, in a desperate attempt to feel like their lives mean something to someone other than themselves, while completely, i might even say DELIBERATELY oblivious to the fact that their actual lives — and the actual world — is being deliberately DESTROYED around them, while they try to find reasons to celebrate. whee… yippy… 😒

panto

what do you know?

i was completely wrong concerning the quality of the panto performances this weekend… i anticipated that the “dress rehearsal in front of an audience”, would be “somewhat less than a controlled shit-show”, and it was essentially perfect: the band got all of the correct music cues, and responded to them perfectly, the cast gave the music cues perfectly, and had all their lines memorised, and, by the second show on sunday, we (the band) were already discussing ADDING music cues for events that happened, but DON’T have cues listed in the script. i, literally, do not know how we went from as much of a disaster as the rehearsals seemed to indicate, to a show as complete and polished as it turned out to be, but i’m definitely NOT complaining. at this point, the show can only get better, and i look forward to seeing how that manifests in reality.

house stuff, panto, rye

title

i finally moved the last of my stuff out of moe’s office, and into their new places in my re-organised office. the remaining stuff is either stuff that moe adopted (i.e. she’s going to use it in her office), or stuff that goes into freecycle. i still have a bunch of cable-management stuff, some of which i’m going to use, and a mixer in a box, at one end of my new “closet desk”. ultimately, i want to hook the piano and the synthesizer to the computer, and to the stereo, through the mixer, but it hasn’t happened yet… although it is now a lot more LIKELY to happen than it pretty much EVER been previously.

it is now, officially, panto panic season: we open on saturday, and we haven’t had a single rehearsal where we have gone through the entire play without stopping, we are still waiting for 3 pieces of music TO BE WRITTEN, we haven’t had a single rehearsal with anything close to the “entire” band that will be playing, one musician is currently sick, and isn’t sure he’s going to be able to make the first few shows (although he IS COVID negative, so far), and there are two musicians who are scheduled to play, who have never seen the music…

and yet, somehow, we will most likely pull a more-or-less finished show out of our asses, possibly as soon as the second show, saturday, and maybe even as soon as the first show on saturday.

we have a “dress rehearsal”, in front of an audience, on thursday, and, i’m guessing it’s going to be somewhat less than a controlled shit-show.

rye has continued to improve. he saw a specialist, yesterday, who confirmed that his liver values were off, but on their way back to normal. it’s a lot more likely that he will live until his 14th birthday, at least, than it was a few days ago. 👍👍

ocf, panto, philharmonic

same as it ever was…

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SW&3D OCF 2024 — Snow White and The Three Dorfs Dwarves

their names are “Hungry”, “Thurston”, and “Jes’ Fine”… 🙄

this evening we had the first of two “run-throughs” with “the entire cast” before people start leaving for OCF. we “ran through” 4 songs, two of which we have played before… well, not the entire band, because we have a new substitute guitar player, who played with us several years ago for a couple of shows, and he has never played the music for this show before… and not everybody from the band was there tonight… and the cast has performed with the music, but they have entirely new lyrics to learn, along with dance steps and trying NOT to run into one another, or trip over their feet while executing said dance steps while trying to remember the new words and not sing the old ones…

we currently have 6 songs on the list, but one of them isn’t quite ready, yet.

we have our second “run through” on wednesday, then people leave for the fair, so the first complete run through, with the entire cast, costumes, and sets, will be the DRESS REHEARSAL at the fair, on thursday, the 11th of july. 🙄

this is approximately the same as how it has worked for at least 5 previous shows, so i’m FAIRLY confident that everything will work itself out, and the shows will go well…

but it’s a little nerve wracking when i consider how little preparation has actually been done for the show, compared to the preparation of the venue, making sure everyone gets down there safely, coordinating with the “officials” from the fair (primarily hillary, who is in charge of entertainment at chelamela), and everything else that has to be done… 🙄

doggles, moe's mom, new year, panto

almost there…

just a few more days until “the holidays” are over for another year. so far, i’ve been doing fairly well staying out of it: we had a party and karaoke last saturday, which i missed most of because of the panto. then on sunday — xmas eve — we had dinner with a couple of friends, and on monday — xmas day — we had my () mother-in-law over for dinner, which meant spending the afternoon and evening having to listen to cheesey xmas music and make “small () talk”, and that was it for xmas. this weekend, i’ve got two panto performances on saturday, and one on sunday. sunday night/monday morning, frequently, we drive up into the mountains — rather like we do on the fourth of july — to get the dogs away from our neighbours and their incessant fireworks. monday — new years day — we traditionally take the dogs to double-bluff beach, which we haven’t done for a few years because the pandemic has limited our ability to travel…

appliances, mushrooms, panto, x-mas

the last two weeks of the year…

it’s time to hunker down and ignore as much “xmas” music as humanly possible, while, at the same time, having a bunch of panto performances, and various other “xmas” party-like things happening…

so far, the panto performances have been going really well, in spite of the fact that one of our star performers, in an essential, featured rôle, got covid last week and had to be replaced by the understudy. she’s no slouch, and has stepped into the rôle more or less seamlessly, but… she’s a woman playing the rôle of “the dame” (which is characteristically played by a man, dressed as a woman), and it’s just… not… right… not to mention the fact that she really does a mediocre job of acting the part: she reads her lines acceptably well, but is either too “over the top” or not “over the top” enough, and her “act” feels forced, and not real.

and, then, a week after the new year, there’s more panto performances, my son’s 41st birthday (i still don’t really understand how that happened), and then we start gearing up for the moisture festival… again.

this year’s difficulties also includes three of our six pets having pretty much identical dental problems which may or may not require surger(y/ies), and the failure of the washing machine (AGAIN! 😠) which has required draining the machine, disconnecting the power, drain, and water supply connections, and tipping it over on its side — because “modern” washing machines don’t have any “user serviceable” parts, despite the fact that it’s pretty much exactly the same washing machine that it has been for the past 50 years — to access the drain pump, which can be replaced for $50 by ordering the part number on amazon, rather than paying some “appliance repair technician” $130 to come out and tell us that modern washing machines are only designed to last for 5 years or so, and we bought this about 5 years ago… 😒 once again, the frank zappa song “Flakes” comes to mind…

in spite of all that, my mood has been surprisingly adequate, although i am nearing the end of my most recent batch of 50 microdoses, and if i recall correctly, the next 100 microdoses include quite a few (if not all) that i made “manually” (rather than “in bulk”), which means that they’re likely going to be a lot more variable in their actual dosage. the plan is to obtain another ounce… somewhere… i thought i had two reliable resources, but it turns out that one of them is only sort of reliable, and the other, while seemingly a lot more reliable, is the one i find more “sketchy” (in that they’ve been selling psychedelic mushrooms, and accepting credit card payments, more or less openly, on the web, for at least ten years, and apparently, haven’t caught the attention of anyone who has the legal authority to shut them down), and, also, costs more than twice as much.

COVID19, depression, panto

grumph! 😒

still adequate, although somewhat more meh than usual, partially because we’re in the middle of panto season and “the dame” (macque, in the part of auntie gertie) got covid last week 😒 the understudy is leah, who was responsible for the poster/banner disagreement a few years ago, and is currently responsible for the web site’s current host, wix, which is owned by the israeli government. 😒 i tested negative for covid today — it is my impression that i just got my fourth or fifth booster a little more than two months ago, so i may still be covered by that, but i tested anyway, out of an abundance of caution. i will test again before i leave for the theatre on saturday. 😒

can i just say, i am SO DONE with covid? and i am PARTICULARLY done with the predominantly-republicunt-stupidity-about-disease-enablers who are now going after RSV, which is booming in infants and people over 60. naturally, there’s a vaccine that the enablers are saying is a fake, and injects nanoparticles into your DNA, or some horse-shit like that… and — naturally — NOBODY is wearing masks any longer. 😒

i wish i had died when i had the chance. 😒

fun with the post office, microdosing, miscellaneous, panto, people, pictures, players, wolfenoot

misc. update-ish

i ordered some jewelry from an artist in poland. i’ve been tracking it for a month, now. from poland, it spent almost two weeks undergoing microscopic scrutiny in customs, in florida, and then it took another week to get from florida to kent, washington (which is right down the road from where i live)… but, after spending a full 48 hours, plus, in kent, it suddenly, this morning, makes a leap to juneau, alaska, where it is currently “preparing for delivery”… 😒 if it’s anything like the recent shipments i’ve gotten from germany, the united kingdom, or portugal, it will be delivered today, in my residential mailbox, with no further explanation for why it was reported to be in alaska, but, as this delivery is “registered mail” (because of the fact that it’s jewelry), i’m probably going to have to sign for it, rather than having them just leave it in the box.

the postal delivery person just came and went, with no registered package from poland, so i guess it HAS gone to juneau, and who knows when i’ll be seeing it. 🙄

i’ve settled down to microdosing every other day, which seems to be working A LOT better than the commercially available (legal) alternatives that i have tried (buproprion), but i’m getting frustrated again, because either, i feel “okay” (in that i do not feel as frustrated or depressed), or i feel frustrated and/or depressed about stuff that has been there, is there now, and will be there tomorrow and into the future, regardless of whether or not i am taking medication of any kind. it’s frustrating to have to be taking a microdose to feel better, rather than being able to do something constructive to rid myself of the factors which cause the frustration and depression to begin with, but which are not possible, because they require things like killing tens of thousands of #drumpf-cultists and/or making major changes in society as a whole… which is exacerbated by the knowledge that if i were taking 2.5 grams, instead of .25 grams, things would be a lot more different. i call mushrooms my “don’t give a fuck pill”, but i guess i should call the microdoses my “give a little bit less of a fuck pill”, which, i’m not totally sure, is the point.

in the upcoming 49 days, i have 25 panto-related obligations, including 18 performances and 7 rehearsals, starting next monday. wolfenoot is thursday (as is thanksgiving), when our friends from hawaii are coming for dinner (but, significantly, NOT my mother-in-law), and, on friday, moe and i, and our friends from hawaii, are all going to go get tattooed: a few years ago, pre-COVID, we rented a house on the beach, and invited a whole bunch of friends to come and visit. the only people that ended up being able to come were micah and shaya, our friends from hawaii. we spent a week in a VERY large house, under the influence of a fantastic amount of trendy chemical amusement aid, flying kites and playing board (bored?) games, which included a “boys-against-girls” round of pictionary, in which the girls won with monique’s drawing which has come to be known as “snake-camel”… so, on friday, we’re all going to get a tattoo of “snake-camel”… which looks like this:

231028 snake-camel
231028 snake-camel

the panto this year is a re-visitation of one of our previous pantos, “Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs”. we’ve got 7 rehearsals scheduled during the next two weeks, including one band-only rehearsal. marni, the flute/alto-sax player that moved to england just before the pandemic, is back, and she was the “purple” member of the group, so i don’t know how the fact that i have sort of taken over that position is going to play out. rehearsal season, this year, has been decidedly abbreviated and condensed, and i’m not sure whether or not that is a good thing.