Not a Day Goes By

...when I don't update this blog.  Though apparently one does, since I didn't update yesterday.  Mostly because there wasn't time at all during the day, and by the time I got back, from post-show dinner and coldstone, it was pretty late and I called home rather than writing.  But that's all irrelevant.

Yesterday was a huge success, really it was.  The dress rehearsal was a pretty terrible, mostly because the kids were not behaving themselves backstage.  We had one raccoon who we had explicitly told to go the the bathroom BEFORE the start of the dress rehearsal, who started whining and grabbing himself saying he was gonna pee in his pants maybe two minutes before he had to be onstage.  Sam let him go, but told him he wasn't gonna get to practice that scene because he was gonna miss his entrance.  Well after our last little raccoon incident, tension was running high I guess and he spent the rest of the show sitting backstage sobbing and screaming because he was afraid we weren't gonna let him be in the show (though, mind you, we had informed him to the contrary- that he was still in the show, he just wasn't gonna get to practice!).  During the whole last scene, Sam and I had some dialogue together and we were trying to get through it accompanied by the sound of a wailing raccoon.

We played "ask the actors" during make-up time and I was extremely unpopular due to my great support of New England teams- I'm not sure if they were more disappointed that I was a Patriots fan or a Red Sox fan, but I held true.  They all seemed to be Packers and Broncos fans.  And YANKEES fans- why????  They also asked me about college football, and most of them didn't seem to know who the Virginia Tech Hokies were.  But I mostly said I like the Hokies because, I'm not exactly big on college football, and I know Hokies games were always popular at school.

Onward and upward to show number one.  It was a hit.  The kids did really well.  Hardly any lines were dropped, you could actually hear Red and the Girls on their song and they sang all the right words (during dress, to call that song a mess would be an understatement), the wolfgang was especially fabulous and remembered absolutely everything that they had missed in dress rehearsal, and the audience laughed without fail at every joke.  Even at things that well, weren't especially funny- like the fact that the raccoons didn't sing OR dance when they came out to the "Raccoon's Rule" song that I sing with them.  Seeing that they were doing nothing, I eventually just started running up and down the line, singing at the top of my lungs and shaking them to MAKE them do SOMETHING.  I tell ya, you build up some lung power in this job.  I also sang out all of the choreography that they do during their dance break.

The second show was even better than the first.  The raccoons actually KIND OF sang this performance!  The energy level was up all around, partially because we had a much larger audience at the second show- including some repeats.  One of them was the neighbor of two of the boys in the show.  They had asked him to come the day before, and he loved it so much, he came again.  Sam and I met him on the patio during our lunch and he was chattin' away with us, telling us how he never played tennis but thought he might get into it to stay in shape, since a lot of things he used to do he thought he couldn't do any more at sixty-five.  Seriously, I would have guessed he was late fifties, MAYBE sixty.  He looked like he was staying in shape to me.

After the shows I again had the perfect number of parents helping me out.  We finished our strike in half an hour, a personal record for Sam and myself.  I think last week took maybe forty-five minutes.  People witnessing it said that they had never seen a set come down so fast.  I'm getting it down to an art where-in I don't actually do anything but am just constantly telling people what to do and monitoring different groups doing different things.  Then our host family took us out to the awesome southwestern kind of restaurant where I had unbelievably delicious crab enchiladas.  We then went and made some good use out of the many dollars worth of coldstone gift certificates.

We're staying here in Grand Junction one more night (our homestay is letting us stay- I don't think I need say how amazing they are once again).  We're going out to Palisade today to go on a winery tour.  There are something like twenty wineries out there and also cherry/peach orchards.  Right now it is cherry season, supposedly.  Then tomorrow I think we're gonna try to determine a place to go white water rafting between here and Boulder, then head up that way to stay with the parents of some of Sam's friends.

My updates this next week may be infrequent since, frankly, I am not entirely sure where I am going to be and whether or not I will have internet access.  But I will try to update as much as possible ;-)