Currently Daydreaming about...

I constantly daydream about future plans.  Things, perhaps, that I would not be really interested in if I actually looked into it. Maybe??  Daydreams are an outlet.  I can imagine myself as a congresswoman, a town mayor or city engineer.  I come up with ways to save the planet! Or at least show the way.  And sometimes they are practical...involving no mind-control powers or flashy cape.  But vastly over-simplified in how easy or hard they would be...
My current daydream revolves around a concept to have a brick and mortar puppet theater that would also be an indoor fun play place to help pay the bills.  So here is the idea.  In the Pacific Northwest, we get a lot of rain.  So we have these places in malls and commercial settings that offer large safe toys for kids to play in and around.  Some of them are paired with cafes so that the parents can get a coffee and let their kids play somewhere safe and dry.  They charge you about $15 per child to let the child play all day.  You just have to stay on premises and are not required to hover.
So I like the idea of this...first of all, no place like this exists in Sammamish.  So the front of the store would be a coffee place, the middle would be the large safe toy area and the back would have the puppet theater.  It would primarily be a glove puppet theater and would feature a cast of characters similar to France's Guignol, who basically is similar to Mr. Punch but far more Bugs Bunny like in story line.  I'm inclined to continue the use of my Puppet Heap puppets...the characters of Spudbottom. But, of course, if I am to use the Puppet Heap puppets professionally, I'd probably need to get them remade for it. The $20 and $80 versions of them I have would wear out.
I envision the front being used more as a third place...we'd host game nights for parents.  We could host parenting classes...workshops etc.  I imagine, we could sell memberships like gyms.  We would host birthday parties. We would supply strong wifi for parents who need to work while their kids have Teacher In-service days and bank holidays inside.  We'd also supply a list of babysitters parents could use to leave their kids there with older kids from the community.
I envision the whole thing being a worker co-op so I'd need about 5 partners.  Because I don't know what I don't know...but to staff a place like that I imagine 6 would do the trick. Need someone who knows coffee, someone who knows kids, someone who knows financial and insurance stuff, someone who knows how to clean, and maybe another someone who knows puppets.  How could we fail if we had 6 people pulling for success!
Of course this would take a lot of research to start...I'm not sure how worker co-ops are best set up.  I don't know what sort of capital we'd need to begin. I'm not sure if such an enterprise would supply a living wage for 6 individuals.  I'm not sure which 5 individuals other than myself would wish to join this co-op. Also, to do this...I would have to retire from my engineering job.  So perhaps this is nothing more than my current daydream that gets me through the long boring meetings.

On Laughing

My friend Pam is a very loud laugher; she's also very easy to make laugh. When she came to see my show, we were all energized to have her out there laughing. I have now been to three theater productions with her, and she is free with her laughter at all times. This last Saturday we attended The Comedy of Errors free in the park in Bremerton. She thoroughly enjoyed it. I did notice once again that most of the audience twittered, giggled, or snickered softly, sometimes behind a hand as if they were watching TV or a Movie. Not Pam, and Pam was the only one that the actors came up and thanked for laughing. More than one said she had a great laugh and it was wonderful to hear it. It gave them instant positive feedback, you see, made them walk taller in spirit and do even better on stage.
We've all been trained to laugh quietly by movies and TV. "How?" you ask. It's because TV and Movies never stop and let you laugh anymore. The older ones used the laugh-track which folks were bothered by, now some of the better ones perform before a live audience. But most of the time the shows just proceed merrily along from one laugh line to the next with the merest pause in between. So you've got to laugh softly or you might miss something. In a movie it's even worse. They tell you "Silence is Golden". We are so programmed to laugh softly, that we get annoyed if anyone does laugh out loud.
My cousins once went to a movie with my mother Mary and afterwards told her they would never got to a funny movie with her again because she laugh so loud it embarrassed them!
When it comes to live theater though, laughing softly is the worst thing you can do. The actors get no energy from the soft laugh which can easily be considered a polite chuckle. To an actor, the polite chuckle is the sign that your show is falling flat. Theater is not TV. Those actors can see and hear you. They are trained to pause during a laugh so you don't miss anything. So don't be afraid to open the pipe and let out a guffaw, a roar, an LOL or even a ROTFLMAO. The show will be even better for it and the actors with thank you--and as we discovered, if the setting is small enough--they will literally thank you and shake your hand.

Weekend Alone Report

With Frank off to visit his cousin Mande and spend a few days in Portland (and see Wicked), I was faced with a weekend alone with the cats.

Saturday:

I had a class to teach virtually…so my voice and my computer made an appearance in Greater Prudhoe Bay. But though we offered 4 classes total for the weekend, only the first one on Sunday filled. So I was free after that. I got an invitation to a birthday party be a new acquaintance in the puppet guild. As I would like to turn that acquaintance into a friend, I determined myself to go.

You know what that means, right? Yep, I showed up at yet another party where the only people I knew walking in the door were the host and hostess. theBut I struck up a few conversations and wouldn’t you know it? There were actually 2 people there I had met before…at an SCA event with Dad where I demonstrated the Takadai for them! Amy and Alex knew my father from other events as well…of course…in the SCA we all dress so differently that you can hardly blame both Amy and me for not recognizing each other out of that setting. Guess what? I’m almost convinced that Amy is a polymath! She is a knitter, for one. She has a few lucets too also one could argue that knitting and luceting are the same subject. But as the conversation went along, I wasn’t thinking she was much into costuming, since they stick to the basic tunic in the SCA, until she told me she was also planning on going to the Steampunk Convention in Seattle and was currently working on her costume too. How about that? Two subjects at least!

Oh as for the party, you’ll be proud of me, Mom…I brought a whole plate of homemade deviled eggs. I dressed up a tad…the host had originally asked in the invitation for people to wear something different, so I wore the Chinese top Mandy gave me…I’m glad I didn’t go too crazy though. No one else wore anything “Different” but the host and me. He wore a very tall top hat, in fact.

Sunday: Put on my Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out there! We saw the show at 5th Avenue and we closed the town in a whirl! Yes! Mandy and I saw Hello Dolly at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle. We began our evening by putting on nifty clothes…I wore my little black dress with my silk michiyuki over it…Mandy wore hers with a black and red Chinese top and a red shawl. We looked good. Check us out! We had dinner at Red Lobster because Mandy was dying for their cheese bread rolls. I enjoyed the clam chowder like I always do. I got stuffed mushrooms too but they weren’t anything special. Our waitress was very envious that we were off to see Hello Dolly and said “I wish you were just coming back from it so you could tell me how it is!” Well, I think both Mandy and I could now tell her that we enjoyed it very much! We had cheap seats way up on the balcony. But it was a good day to go because right before the show began we could move way down. The balcony was only 2/3 full…maybe less. We rented binoculars, which I would do again now having done it once. It was so nice to see close-ups! During the show we giggled, laughed, and mouthed along with the songs we love. Oh! Musicals are wonderful and Hello Dolly is nothing short. The costumes were great and I was taking notes for my Victorian costume. Mandy and I both agreed that it would be a great thing to show up at the Harmonia Gardens and have a Hello Dolly welcome. Hello Elly and Hello Mandy would both work in the song, you know. So we had to take top-of-the-stairs pictures in the lobby. Note to Mom: you would have loved it too! They are doing South Pacific next year. I’m just sayin’…

Hello Dolly

Mandy and I are going to put on our Sunday cloths on Sunday the 15th and go see Hello Dolly at the 5th Avenue Theater. I’m really looking forward to it. I do enjoy musicals very much. Frank will also be seeing a show that day. He’s going to Wicked in Portland with friends. I’ve already seen Wicked and enjoyed it very much, but I have never seen Hello Dolly done live. I’ve seen the movie, of course, but going to the theater is a whole different thing.
Mandy and I also plan to go see “The Music Man” in Auburn the following Saturday. A group of old school mates of mine proposed going to see the show together. We found each other on Facebook, you see, and naturally that lead to a desire to meet once again face-to-face. Mandy and I both moved in the drama club circle in school, so we both know people who are going to be there. It should be interesting. Mandy has kept in touch with a lot of her school chums, I haven’t so there’s a lot of catching up to do. The drama circle was more my thing than Mandy’s, so she won’t have seen this crowd in a long time either. Oh yeah…and “Music Man” is one of our faves too. Let’s not forget that!
To round out our theater month and to get in one more blast from the past. We also plan to see “The Merchant of Venice” that weekend as well. The Seattle Shakespeare Company is presenting it at the Roundhouse Theater. In high school, Mandy and I were both in it. We played Solanio and Salerio, the two *male* gossips who serve as an effective substitute for a Greek chorus in the show. I still have old picture of the two of us with glued-on goatees.

So how about that for a theater-going month!