Last night's dress rehearsal went pretty well. It could have gone a LOT worse. Tonight will be better than last night. And we'll have our first real audience. It will be interesting to have to pause for laughter now and again.
I also auditioned for No Time For Sargeants at the Hale Center Theater in Orem. Hopefully, I'll hear something back about that in the next few days.
Sometimes, I wonder why I do theatre at all. But when I'm actually performing in front of an audience and I hear their reactions, it makes it all worth it.
Yes, it was a moment of panic last night when I turned on the only light in the basement. There is a single light bulb in the stairwell, and I was shocked when I turned it on last night.
YELLOW!!!
The painters had used the wrong color of paint. We were going to have to deal with days more of the paint smell.
ARGH!!!!!!
But then I looked at the light bulb. It was COVERED with paint, which was causing the light coming out of the bulb to be yellow. I changed the light bulb, and the panic subsided.
The paint is dry. I opened all of the windows in the basement for a while this morning to air the place out. It's looking good!
The smell DID keep me up the other night. The paint smell kept waking me up over and over. It stunk. Last night, we slept with a window cracked open. It was chilly, but it kept the fumes from building up.
Last night, after rehearsal, I went downstairs to take a look. It was an interesting sight.
All of the doors were standing up. They stood them up to paint them. How do you stand doors up? Well, they stood them up on scrap pieces of trim. The doors were arranged kind of like this:
/ \ /
And scrap pieces of trim were nailed between the doors at the top to keep them standing up.
The doors were all painted. The trim was all painted. It appeared that all of the shelves were painted. The walls and ceiling were still the color of primer. So today, I'm assuming that they will hang the doors, mask everything, and paint the walls and ceiling. And then they should be done.
There were a couple of places where paint had dripped or run down the doors. I'll have to watch that closely when we get to creating a punchlist.
The bad news is that tonight, we probably have to sleep with the window slightly open again. Hopefully, the painting will be done today and this will be the LAST night.
The other crazy thing - the painters are using a propane forced air heater down there. HELLO?? Those things pump out carbon monoxide! They're not supposed to be used in enclosed spaces. I understand that it has to be warm in order for the paint to dry properly, but this is a little ridiculous.
I'm not complaining though. These painters are hard workers. Of all the people that have worked in the basement so far, they have worked the longest days, arriving just after 7 in the morning and working until about 7 in the evening. It's tedious, smelly, messy work. But from what I've seen so far, they're doing a really good job.
The whole house stinks like paint. I'm glad I'm not a painter. This smell would drive me absolutely crazy.
Not that this is a bad thing... It means that things are progressing. And the sooner they're done painting, the sooner the stink will go away. And the sooner they're done with painting, the sooner they'll get to the finish electrical and we can turn on the lights down there. And the sooner they do that, the sooner they can put in the cabinets and cupboards and counters and sinks and tub surrounds and... Well, you get the picture.
I'm going to sleep. Hopefully, the smell won't keep waking me up.
The guy that is playing Felix in The Odd Couple told me that he has three hundred seventy-something lines. That's a LOT of lines. So it made me curious. Yesterday, I decided to count my lines. I have 464. Whoa!
On Saturday morning, I met with Felix and we ran sections of lines together. We decided it would be good to continue working extra together since this is basically a two-man show with a few more people on the periphery. So if this show is to work well, we have to be in great form and know all of our lines and cues all the time.
Then on Saturday evening, we did our first full run-through of the show. It was slower than we would have liked it to be. It's still pretty rough in parts. But it was nice to run through the entire show.
We open on Friday. That means that this is the week that we iron out all of the problems. We have to make sure all of the props are there and all of the costumes are going to work. We have to make sure that the lights and sound cues are all in place.
I think it's going to come together. And whether it does or not, the curtain goes up on Friday.
One of my favorite humor sites, bbspot, has an annual geek limerick contest. Today, I entered:
When you’re losing that chic geek physique,
Which is often more rotund than sleek,
Just eat healthy fodder,
And drink lots of water,
And do nothing but Wii for a week.
It's still moving along quickly. Since I last wrote about it, they finished the drywall, they mudded, they taped, and they textured. The texture was sprayed on only this morning. Unfortunately, they had to deliver the doors AFTER the texture was sprayed on. The problem: The french doors were quite large, so they, of course, dinged the stairway up a little bit while delivering. But there's still a hole in the drywall (left by the electricians) that needs to be patched. So they're going to be spending some quality time there in the stairway anyway, so they can touch up the problems that were created today.
The vinyl flooring was put down in the storage rooms today as well. Tomorrow and the next day, the tile guy will be laying tile. Friday and Monday, they're going to hang the doors and put up all the trim. Apparently, they're going to build the shelves in the storage room as well, because all of that wood was delivered too.
After that's all done, the painters will come and paint. Then they can do stuff like bathroom and kitchen cabinets and get going on finish electrical.
Like this weekend. We decided to watch the movie Mary Poppins on Sunday afternoon, probably because we were playing the Disney version of Trivial Pursuit that my brother gave us for Christmas this year.
Anyway... when we were playing the game, one of the questions asked for the first name of Jane and Micael Banks' mother in the move Mary Poppins. Do you know the answer? Well, think about it for a minute while I continue.
As we watched the movie, I kept listening to Mrs. Banks' voice. It sounded familiar. VERY familiar. But I couldn't quite place it. About halfway through Mrs. Banks' second scene, I made the connection. It was the same voice as Maid Jean in The Court Jester! I quickly went online to IMDB (of course) and looked it up.
Glynis Johns played both Maid Jean in The Court Jester in 1955, and Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins in 1964. Her unique voice helped me figure out this connection.
So, do you know the answer to the question yet? Did you cheat? Did you look it up on IMDB, even though I purposefully didn't link to it?
