Another day, another band room.

Feeling good again today, gentle readers. Not quite as on cloud 9 as yesterday, but my view of the world is still rosy. Of course, that might be a medical condition. But that's okay--I have insurance! For now. Today's show actually went pretty well. According to the school we performed at in lovely Medford, we were the best production of this show they had seen in 14 years. And they ordered lunch for us from a nearby restaurant that had some absolutely wonderful salads. So really, food-wise the last two days have been brilliant. (For the record, the deli food we had today WAS delicious but didn't' have the love the little old lady put into hers. But that was okay--we still have more than enough of her food left over. I had some for dinner again tonight and it's still not gone!) Today's show was a little challenging. Not as bad as yesterday, but still not a walk in the park. We loaded in today from the bus lane, which meant we had to back the truck down a sidewalk perpendicular to the bus lane to a set of double doors which were not really double doors thanks to the center bar. Oh, and the sidewalk was only slightly wider than the truck. Oh, and let's not forget the tree branches hanging over the sidewalk that it was impossible to avoid. But we got the truck in there and backed it up far enough for the buses to get by. May I just spout off about something here? I am all for busing kids to school. I think that's fine. But here's my problem. The buses would probably have more room to drop off and pick up, therefore giving more room to other vehicles, such as, say, for example, touring children's theatre's trucks, if the rest of the space around the schools weren't filled with SUVs dropping off and picking up kids who live within a ten block radius. I mean come on! I've driven to schools with Boom Troupe here in Chicago where I got to the school early and ended up just making it INTO the school on time because the line of cars stretched out onto the side streets and backed up traffic for three blocks! Are all these kids invalids? When the hell did walking to school become socially unacceptable?Now, before you all start yelling at me, no, I did not walk ten miles to school when I was a kid, nor was it uphill both ways, and while I did walk through the snow, I was NOT barefoot. And yes, I was bused to middle school, but only because my middle school was a 45 minute drive away. Elementary school and high school, I walked. Everybody I know walked, unless they drove themselves. This mania for picking your kids up and dropping them off is, to me, ludicrous. Of course, part of it is the fact these parents are also whisking their kids to anyplace BUT home. There's schedules to stick to and minutes of their kid's lives to fill so there's no chance of them doing anything that might approach rebellion, or danger, or free-thinking. But for the love of whatever you call holy--LET THEM WALK HOME! It might solve two problems--greenhouse emissions would drop, and so would your kids' weight. Just saying.

But I digress (which is pretty much what this entire blog IS). Due to the positioning of the truck vis a vis the door and that lovely center bar, we couldn't use the ramp, and instead had to use the lift gate, which is a mini-elevator on the back of the truck. Great for the back, but slow. We also had a crew of about 15 middle school students, who were very happy to be there at was passes, in their world, for the butt-crack of dawn. But they were incredibly helpful, even with stuff that was way too heavy or unwieldy for them to really help with. Enthusiasm is everything. The space was too smal for the show--again--but we're becoming pros at that situation, so it really wasn't too bad, save for the fact that their auditorium had no masking. You might not think that's a big deal, but considering the number of complete costume changes we make in the wings every show, we needed to find a solution if we didn't want this to be both a literature show AND an anatomy class. Luckily, we were able to shield our modesty (such as it is) from prying eyes by placing the rolling wardrobes up along the side of the stage. And our dressing room was--you guessed it--a band room. I'm not going to know what to do when I get to a dressing room. I do have to say, I prefer the band rooms to the schools fro the last tour where we were stuck in a storage closet to change. Then again, there's a lot of schools left in February....

The show went pretty smoothly--I didn't get taken out by any kitchen appliances, and the lights worked for the most part. The only downside is that in schools like this, we aren't allowed to use the students to help us raise the proscenium, so that leaves just us, ad that sucker is heavy. Add to that slippery floors which make footing the legs a little difficult, and the fact that only three out of the six people lifting it really have the muscle mass to do it, and that is a grunty, achy, borderline fatal experience. But the kids really got into the show, which is always fun. In Tell-Tale, when I stir the police inspector's drink with the spoon I used to pop the old man's eye out of his head, I heard one girl say, "That's NASTY." That's what I live for, really. :-)  All in all, a good show. It's really a great feeling when we finish the show and the place goes nuts. And while we're all getting a little tired of how tough it is to get these shows up in these spaces, we don't have anyone who thinks the show is beneath them, so the general mood is still high. I think we're also all looking forward to a couple of weeks from now when we'll start our swing through the south, which means WARMER WEATHER! Ah, the concept of getting up in the morning and not sliding through slush and snow. (singing) To dream...the Impossible Dream....

So before I head off to shave and then fall unconscious for a few hours, I'm curious about something--has anyone seen the show Secret Millionaire, on Fox? I was watching House online and they also offer full episodes of this show, so I figured I'd watch. I had seen one episode ont he last tour and sort of wrote it off as relatively harmless, and in some ways genuinely moving. The concept is this--someone with way too damn much money pretends to be a regular person and lives in some really strapped neighborhood for a week, living on what the local welfare wage would be. During that time, they have to go around (under the guise of being in a documentary about poverty) and find deserving people. At the end of the week, they have to reveal themselves and pass out at least $100,000 of their own money to whoever they find deserving. It doesn't have to be to just one person. They can give as much as they want, but it has to be at least $100,000 in total. On the face of this, it actually seems like a reality show that is feel-good material, with no cruel twist. And as far as that goes, it is. You really do find people doing wonderful things for their fellow men being rewarded for it, and if the millionaires (MULTI-millionaires, really) are to be believed, they are shaken to the core of their being and made better people for the experience. There are many tears at the end, and everyone parts ways feeling better about the world and people in general.

Like I said I watched an episode a few months ago, and got caught up in the sweetness of the whole thing--the rewarding of people who are actually trying to make the world a better place rather than giving money to a bunch of people who can figure out the best way to screw each other over. But I watched two episodes of this show today back to back, and while I do agree it's great to see that, there's something that really gnaws at me, and that's the people who are doing the giving. Now thankfully all the millionaires I've seen on the show are self-made. We're not dealing with any inheritance babies here. (Save for the one guy who brought his 22 year old son with him. THAT was an eye opener for his kid, believe me.) No, what pisses me off is the fact that these people are so far removed from everyday life that the simple act of shopping is a life-changing experience for them. A couple who, in their own words, drop $4000-$5000 on DINNER couldn't go through a grocery store and pick up food without blowing the entire $107 they had for the week. Now, I am the first one to say that that would be difficult. I doubt I could get a week's worth of food AND still have decent money for living expenses after that. BUT the reason they had such a hard time wasn't as much because of the budget, but because they had two people who worked for them that did the shopping FOR them. The guy who had his son with him was castigating himself after meeting a family who had no health insurance and whose young daughter had 7 tumors. He said, "Remember when we tooled around for a couple of hours in the jet and burned $1200 worth of fuel. For nothing!"  I don't begrudge people who work hard and are successful the fruits of their labor. You work hard and start your own business which takes off, you are entitled to make money. But this goes back to what I was saying yesterday--the disconnect between the people with that kind of money and the real world. There's no good reason why a person with millions should be completely at a loss in a grocery store. There's no reason why you should remove yourself from the rest of the world just because you have money. Yeah, I'm not saying don't have a nice house in a good neighborhood, but the guy rented an Irish castle to throw his kid a 15th birthday party! WHAT? Of course he's going to be smacked between the eyes by what regular people go through. If people didn't use their money as an excuse to pull themselves into insulated little globes of ignorance and actually kept a foot in the real world, then maybe there'd be less need for economic stimulus. And maybe there'd be less cases of people getting ripped off and taken for everything they had because there'd actually BE a sense of connection, of brotherhood, of empathy and human feeling between Wall Street and Main Street (to borrow a phrase I really hate). And then maybe we wouldn't have to sit in front of our TVs to feel good about people helping people out. But what do I know? I get dressed in a band room.