I think every matinee I’ve ever called on this show has ended with me saying “I’m sorry. Have a good break. Please come back.”

I was grateful, though, that two of the contingencies are ones I haven’t done as the caller in years. There comes a point where so much time goes by that I want a chance to maintain a level of comfort with the procedures. I was pleased how we all did with the ones that are much rarer lately.

Sadly I was on the Toronto production at Halloween last year, but I was sent videos of the traproom at least. We’re closely guarding the secret of our office’s theme, but I’m excited about it.🎃

Departments compete to turn their workspaces into the best haunted houses. Carps, props, LX & audio do the stage. Last year they couldn’t use the stage so they filled the traproom with cobwebs, fog, lighting effects and scary sounds. And a familiar crocodile that emerged chomping from the fog.

Some of my surveys now are closer to 20 pages, but a lot of that still depends on how many hallways and stairwells there are, and if it’s a few big dressing rooms or a lot of little ones. I now add random photos of lighting & speaker positions at the end which are easy to do but take up pages.

This one is 27 pages long, and I remember that after this one I said “Maybe I don’t need pictures of literally every part of every hallway and the relationships between them. They’ll figure it out.” But the hallways here are a little confusing and it was nice to review and rebuild a mental picture.

But it was a great if short visit. The folks of Local 2 are such a treat to work with, especially to watch their mastery of their craft and teamwork when we had to disassemble the rock mid-show just to get it out of the way. They got us through a bad situation in the best way possible. Til next time

Chicago is on the short list of cities I would live in if I ever settled down. It’s like New York, but a little calmer and prettier. Like a movie set of what New York should feel like. I wish my surgery and half-week remnant of my Alaska vacation hadn’t cut down my time here so much.

There was a paper being passed around where everyone logged their guess of what the new city would be. Because we weren’t stupid, nobody picked Chicago, where we’d just had a 9-week run not even 3 years earlier. Imagine our shock to find out this emergency re-booking was an A city!

In reading women’s experiences with their recovery I see it runs the gamut from “I felt pretty good after the first day” to “I couldn’t work 8 weeks later because I was so tired and it hurt to sit down.” <record scratch> Excuse me, I need to be able to play mouse-and-keyboard computer games.

I’d love to set up FOH and be like “you guys have fun now!” but that’s not how contracts work, and given that the last time there I ended up with my body fully crashing from exhaustion and laid up in bed with a 102 fever that everyone thought was COVID, I think starting week 2 is advisable.