All I need's a Little Rock...

I come to you, gentle readers, from the land of Clinton. That's right--Little Rock, Arkansas. Let me say this about Arkansas. It has to be the mot uncreative state ever to grace the Republic. Not only is their state nickname--The natural state--just plain boring (I mean what, everyone was sitting around and said, "What really says Arkansas?" "Well....we're natural." The NAtural State is just a fancy way of saying there's jack shit IN your state.) but their city names are also really pathetic. They break down into a couple of different categories, none of which are particularly inspiring. They are either combinations of the state name and other states or cities (Texarkana, Arkedelphia) or they are vague amorphous concepts turned into cit names (Hope, Friendship) And then there's where I am right now, which seems to be based on whatever they happened to see first when trying to name the city (Well, hell, there's a little rock. How 'bout that?) In short, you can keep it. Thankfully, we are only hanging around here for one night before driving off early tomorrow to Virginia, the next stop on our quest to return to Pennsylvania and points north. And as far as I'm concerned, I am very happy to be leaving the South. Way too humid, way too warm, and way too many billboards proclaiming Jesus' place in my life. Jesus and I have a very nice arrangement. He knows his place in my life--it's the same as nature. Something seen from afar, but not interacted with unless absolutely necessary, and then for as short a time as possible. I stay away from him and he stays away from me. So I guess he's less like nature and more like a neighbor's dog. That makes much more sense, especially considering what dog is spelled backwards...

So the show today in Dallas went amazingly well. The venue--the Dallas Convention Center was a complex which I believe took up about ten city blocks. So all in all, slightly smaller than your average Wal-Mart. But the load-in was swift and easy, and the crew was jolly and even-tempered. The interior was more than large enough for our purposes, and we did very well in getting everything up. Flo was a particular favorite of the guy who was helping her set up sound. As she said to me later on "Schneider gets professional contact numbers. I get numbers for 'if I ever need anyone to show me around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area for a few days'." Yes, that's right--she got the digits....of a long-haired, snaggle-toothed guy who, by his own admission, "Has tattoos older than you." The glamour and romance of the road, people. Who can resist it? But the show actually went quite well, in part, I think, because for reasons that are only easily understood by a Dallasite, the crew played old O-Jays, Kool and The Gang, etc before the show. The kids were rocking out, and that energy level and amount of interest and engagement in what was going on onstage stayed throughout the show, even when Carol's opening curtain speech attempted to tamp it down and reign the children in like petulant puppies. Have I mentioned I hate our curtain speech? It's specifically designed to suck the enjoyment out of the show for ay kid not lobotomized into complete and utter compliance with everything an adult says. I honestly feel like whoever wrote it wanted to just yell, "Children should be seen and not heard!" Oy. But this crowd, of over 700 kids, was engaged and into it. That, let me tell you, was a welcome relief after the week of silent corpses we've had. What's even more amazing is that they were able to have that kind of engagement watching a show where virtually none of the lights worked. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but for some reason, we had zip front of house from the venue. We were able to use some overhead stage lights they had, and we sent one of their guys up in the catwalk to work a spot. It was ad-hoc and slapdash, and the kids didn't give a shit. That's what I like to see. Even when the Headless Horseman was in no way, shape, or form scary because all the lights were basically on and the black light and strobes were useless in that situation, they were still going right along with us, even as I rolled backwards and slid like (as Flo's mother pointed out later) Paul Blart, Mall Cop along the stage to disappear as the Horseman swung his pumpkin head at me. From what Schneider was able to tell me afterward, it seems when he uploaded his lighting disc onto their system, he wiped out every bit of information in their system. To me, that sounds catastrophic, but he insists they'll be able to remedy it. But that was what caused the huge problem with the lights. But I didn't care. I mean, hell, it's live theatre. Shit like that's going to happen. Does it suck? Yeah. But that's one of those things that you can't control. It just happens, it's nobody's fault, and you have to punt. If I have to deal with screwed-up things, I prefer to deal with things that have been screwed up through simple crap luck rather than things that have been screwed up because someone was an idiot and didn't do their job. But today I can say with complete honesty that I didn't lay any blame at anyone's feet about this. And I did what I could to take stress off of our illustrious leader, since I knew she was dealing with what had to be a stage manager's nightmare. There really is nothing worse than when the technology goes awry, because chances are it's gong to be something you cant fix in five minutes. But everybody pulled together and put out what i think was a damn good show, so I am very happy.

So tomorrow we have a 10 hour drive to Virginia, and I shall be piloting the truck, which is fine. I actually like long drives when I'm dealing with the truck, mostly because I'm basically in charge of making decisions on when to stop and things like that, AND most of the time we stop at truck stops, which, now that I've been doing this a while, makes me feel very competent indeed. I can now walk into a truck stop and actually know what the hell's going on, and speak to the people behind the counter and understand what the hell they're talking about. Good to know that if the acting thing doesn't work out, I can always get a second career as a trucker. (Thats not true at all. I look horrible in hats...) But it'd be great for the campaign--I'd come off as normal folk. Probably help me do well down here in the south. Pond in 2012--He's One Bad Mother Trucker!