You call that auditions?

I held auditions for our high school one act play yesterday and today after school. Prior to auditions (last week), I made a list of those students who I expected to try out. My list included 15 girls and 3 boys. Of those 18 kids, 15 came in for auditions. Two approached me to let me know that they wouldn't be audtioning. The last of the 18 stopped by at the end of the school day today to set up an alternate time to audition, since she couldn't stay after school today. So, 18 for 18. And every one of them is a student who has auditioned and been cast in previous shows. I'm not bemoaning the lack of new talent, I'm just kind of amazed at how accurately I was able to predict the turnout. Since everyone who was there was someone I knew ahead of time (and had worked with on other shows), I didn't have to do much for auditioning. Now it's just a matter of casting the show I've chosen.

A serious post

Our high school lost a student over the weekend. A young man, a senior, though someone I'd never had in class, took his own life. It was a very quiet and sobering day today at school. There's not much more I can say.

The Mystery of the Vanishing Programs

We had a strange experience the weekend of the play. On Thursday, some of the kids (mainly the actress playing Millie, who is also my T.A.) made copies of the programs, about 500 in total. We gave out maybe 200 or a few less on Friday night (big crowd); the rest were sitting in a box on the table where money was being taken for admissions. After the play, the box of programs was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere, both Friday night and later on Saturday when I went in for the next night's performance. They vanished. No one knows what happened to them, or where they went. They were never found. We had to run more copies on both Saturday and Sunday to give to attendees.

A Return to (Ab)Normal Life

It's been over a month since I lasted posted to this blog. We performed our high school musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie, last weekend. My perception, and by all accounts, the show was well done and very well received by the audience. It's also my excuse for not blogging. We spent six weeks in rehearsal. Partway through we switched from doing two-hour rehearsals (which often ran late) to doing three-hour rehearsals (which occasionally ran late), as we saw that we needed the extra time. During the penultimate week of rehearsals, I spent four days where I was at the school for 13-14 hours (from before 8:00 a.m. until well after 9:00 p.m.). Even the weekend of performances, usually a bit of a downtime for me, I was at school for more hours than normal. Usually for performances, I stand in the back and watch, figuring that my job is done. This year, I ran both the sound and light board -- which I gotta admit was a lot of fun. I've done lights before, but never sound. Mixing live sound is a challenge. I don't bring any of this up in an attempt to elicit sympathy; I know what I'm getting into when I start a show, I get paid for it (though perhaps not adequately), and I do enjoy working with the high school actors, and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end, particularly when the show turns out as well as this one did. It's simply my excuse for not contributing to this blog even semi-regularly the past six weeks or so. This week I've managed to catch up on some TV (I think I had something like 12 hours of stuff taped), did some reading (starting to whittle down that huge stack of new comics, and even got back into the novel I put aside at the start of rehearsals), and even went to three movies over the weekend. Is this normal life? Anyway, the other day I put together a rehearsal schedule for our one-act play; I plan to hold auditions for that the week after Thanksgiving, and start practices the following week. It never ends. But I do miss the theatre stuff when it's not happening.