You Delivered My Pizza, But Please Don’t Watch Me Eat It

We had a great weekend, even though the weather on Sunday was horrid – so cold my Christmas teddy bear got frozen to the window! Friday night was an all-night work session to finish up the planning and organization of our community theater’s awards show, which is where we went Saturday night. But first on Saturday afternoon, it was a birthday celebration for our oldest who turned 9 on Sunday with a MUCH anticipated visit from family who live out of state. We had a great time catching up and watching the kids open their birthday and Christmas presents, and the kids got to have a sleepover in the hotel with Grandma, Papa, and Uncle Bud while we went to the awards show. The awards show was lots of fun, as always, and I got to watch 2 very good friends win much-deserved achievment awards. Congratulations, guys!

It was lots of fun putting the show together, even if we didn’t have much time to do so due to last minute notice from the theater. It was fun and also rewarding to watch the individual skits, shorts, songs, and awards presentations start as ideas on paper and then watch when they came together as a whole. It’s also a fun excuse to get everyone together, and it’s always nice to see long-lost busy friends who are unable to get together but for this one night. It might be fun to produce the awards show again next year, but then again, I’d love to have my best friend sitting beside me to watch them because I missed him this year – even though he did make an excellent host. If there are a few individuals in the theater community who have a hard time because they don’t win awards, then let them have their hard time. There is talk of cancelling this awards show, and I would be very sad if that happened. It’s definitely a whole ton of fun for most of us, and I really don’t think we should let a few individuals ruin it for everyone. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now, but expect to hear more from me once this very topic is discussed at the next production board meeting.

Sunday we had major Grandma-let-down, and because we didn’t want our oldest daughter to be depressed on her actual birthday, we let her have a friend sleep over. During football season, we usually set aside Sundays for low-key stuff, like watching football, reading newspapers, and blogging, but we always end up with crazy kids so it’s never exactly low-key. But I don’t usually cook dinner on Sundays, and today we ordered pizza. Five minutes after the pizza was delivered, we noticed the delivery guy was still parked out front and that he was standing outside of his car. Turns out, he had locked himself out of the car, and so we offered him a warm place to wait for his ride. Since the temperature outside has been hovering around 0° all day, with wind chills near -20°, he gratefully accepted. And he stood in our front hall for almost 30 minutes! If he were outside, he would have frozen to death. But it did feel a little awkward eating the pizza he delivered while he stood there. We offered him a seat in the living room, but he opted to stand in the entryway, and I’m kind of glad because at least we were then eating out of his view. Our 2-year-old kept asking about “the pizza guy”, and then he became scary to her – “I scared pizza guy” – probably cuz he was just standing there, doing nothing, and she’s never seen anyone do that in our front hall before. But finally his ride came, thank goodness, and he left. I wonder if he gets paid for the time he was standing in our house? I wonder who pays for the gas that was used in his running car while he was waiting for his ride? Should we have offered him some pizza? It was kind of a weird situation, but it does make for interesting blog fodder. Of course it had to happen on the coldest day of the year – that guy has a new story to tell!

Now THAT Is One HORRIBLE Stage Manager

Wow – what happened here? Due to a props department mix-up, an actor was doing a suicide scene with a real knife instead of a fake one. Luckily, he wasn’t killed, but this qualifies as a bit more than a simple mistake, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps I’ll think twice about offering to stage manage anything in the future – apparently there’s a lot at stake. And for you actors who read this, how much trust do you have in your props people? And how much will you trust them after reading something like this?

From Time.com
by Adam Smith
Try this for an Agatha Christie plotline: performing on stage inside Vienna’s Burgtheater, one of Europe’s oldest and grandest, an actor takes a knife to his throat in his character’s desperate attempt at suicide. As audience applause fills the opulent theater, blood pours from the actor’s neck. But something’s not right. Buckling and staggering his way off stage, the actor collapses to the floor. That’s because the knife, and the harm that it’s done, are both tragically real.
Unfortunately for Daniel Hoevels, a 30-year-old actor from Hamburg, those pages from a murder-mystery came to life last Saturday night during a performance at the Burgtheater of Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller’s play about the wretched life of Mary Queen of Scots. Rushed to the nearby Lorenz Bohler hospital having sliced through skin and fat tissue but thankfully not his main artery, Hoevels was fortunate to survive. “Just a little deeper,” said Wolfgang Lenz, a doctor who treated him, “and he would have been drowning in his own blood.”
The police investigation into the calamity points more to a foul-up than foul play. Viennese police say they’re not probing the possibility of attempted murder; press reports had speculated a “jealous rival” could have had a hand in Hoevels’ injury. Instead, investigators are focusing on possible negligence within the props department of Hoevels’ Thalia Theater ensemble. According to local media, the company picked up the knife in Vienna to replace one brought from their Hamburg base that was then found to be defective. One possibility: that props staff forgot to blunt that new blade, which, police say, still had the price tag on it.
Hoevels himself seems to have put the snafu behind him. “I am now absolutely fine again,” he told local media, “but I will always for the rest of my working life have a strange feeling about this scene.” After reprising the role Sunday, albeit with neck bandaged, Hoevels headed back to Hamburg Monday in preparation for his role in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In that play, the long-suffering title character winds up shooting himself in the head. Someone might want to double-check the gun.

Review Debut!

As you may know, we are heavily involved in our local community theater. For each play in which we were involved, part of the fun was to see what the newspaper critic would publish about it. Well, the newspaper reviewer has been canned, and so my husband was asked to take over. Not wanting the responsibility of the fallout that one might incur when writing about specific individuals in a small town (not to mention his extremely busy work schedule), he agreed to only do the review about the most recent play because he and I produced it. The following is my husband’s review debut that was (supposed to be) published in the newspaper, and I’ll go ahead and give myself a secondary byline for editing. I must note however, that those of you who have seen this particular edition of the paper might notice more than a few differences between the two reviews. And my husband did not write the paragraph about his credentials that appears at the end of the print version – the newspaper wrote it with info my husband supplied when asked how he was qualified to do the review. It’s just funny that for the past few years, we’ve been assuming the quirks of our play reviews were the fault of the reviewer when in actuality, the newspaper changes much and does lots of editing!

Don’t Hug Me is a Winter Treat

This past Wednesday evening my wife and I had the privilege of attending a preview of Don’t Hug Me, a comedy by Paul Olson.

As we took our seats, my eyes were immediately drawn to the brilliantly detailed set. Just a quick glance at the rustic wood paneling, Paul Bunyan style restroom sign, and moose head beer tap and I was instantly transported to a northern Minnesota bar.

This first little scene sets the stage for the show perfectly. Minnesota gets cold in the winter, and Gunner is tired of it. He wants to escape the frigid temperatures and move to Florida, but Clara’s heart is in Minnesota . This conflict is the basic central plot throughout Don’t Hug Me and Roberts and Snider deliver it with a very nice chemistry together. Their bantering back-and-forth comes across as genuine and is also very funny.

you can almost feel the chilly Minnesota draft coming in from outside.

December 5 – 14. Tickets are $12 for adults with a discount for students and seniors. Reservations are recommended.

What’s All This About Hugh Downs?

I felt too restless to write blogs, but I’m too tired to take the kids anywhere, so it’s either write in my blog or sit here on my computer looking up scary ailments that could be afflicting my husband. So blogging it is…

As you may have read on other tangents.org blogs, our community theater is about to open its production of The Nerd – an (I still hate putting the word “an” in front of hilarious, but oh well) hilarious comedy written by Larry Shue. My husband is portraying the Nerd, a character named Rick Steadman, who is without any social ettiquette whatsoever, to put it mildly.  He does an excellent job at the part, if I do say so myself, and that’s a compliment, really it is – he’s not a nerd in real life! In the play, Rick has an autographed picture of Hugh Downs, and all this time during rehearsal, I’ve been wondering, who is Hugh Downs? The name sounds familiar, but I didn’t know anything about him, so I looked him up. Turns out he is a fellow Ohioan, born in Akron, went to high school in Lima, and he’s still alive. He anchored the newsmagazine show 20/20, hosted the Today show, was the announcer for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, and he also hosted the game show Concentration.

So having an autographed picture of Hugh Downs is quite nerdy. But then again, I looked him up on wikipedia, so what does that make me?

Spookybook Treats

Halloween is right around the corner… ok it’s 2 months away! But Halloween stuff is out all over the stores already, and while we’re planning our Haunted Tour for our community theater group, our other friends in the theater are getting ready to stage an hilarious (TANGENT ALERT: I HATE using the word “an” before words that start with h, but I guess that’s proper English, so…) production of the play called Kitchen Witches! Someone had a great idea to sell a Halloween cookbook as a fundraiser for the theater. Being a stay-at-home-mom of 4, I have a few holiday-themed recipes in my vault that are fun for the kids and adults (to eat), so I’m going to contribute my favorite Halloween recipes. Since I have to type them up to submit to the cookbook anyway, I thought I’d put them on my blog, along with a recipe for one of my favorite desserts: peanut butter bars – YUM!

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds
large pumpkins
salt
seasonings (your choice)
butter

Extract seeds from pumpkin, separate from pulp, and discard pulp. Put the seeds in a colander and run water over them to get rid of all the pulp. Drain on paper towels. Melt 1 Tablespoon of butter and toss pumpkin seeds in a bowl with the butter and salt and / or seasonings. Spread seeds out onto a cookie sheet. Toast seeds in an oven preheated to 350° for about 30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes and adding salt occasionally. Check the seeds to see if they’re done by taking a sample out, letting it cool, and tasting it. If the insides are dry, they’re done. Be careful not to burn – you want a nice golden brown color.
NOTES: I use a clean, thin dishcloth instead of paper towels since I’ve had problems in the past with the seeds sticking to the paper towels. Be creative with the seasonings; you can use popcorn seasoning, taco seasoning, garlic salt, onion powder, cayenne pepper, cajun seasoning, etc. Pumpkin seeds are high in iron, vitamin A, and zinc; if you want to make them even healthier use olive oil instead of butter.

Rice Krispies Treats Spiders
YIELD: 3-5 spiders
3 Tablespoons margerine or butter
1 package (10 oz. or about 40) marshmallows or 4 cups mini marshmallows
6 cups rice krispies cereal
food coloring
prepared frosting
candy corn
string licorice
shredded coconut

In a large microwave-safe bowl, melt margerine and marshmallows on high for 2 minutes, stirring after 1 minute. Add a few drops of food coloring and stir mixture until smooth. Add rice krispies cereal, stirring until well coated. Let cereal mixture slightly cool until it is safe to touch. With buttered hands, shape cereal mixture into spider shape and place on wax paper. Let cool. Attach decorations to the spider with frosting using candy corn for eyes, licorice for the web, and coconut for the hair. You can color the coconut by soaking in warm water with a few drops of food coloring for about 30 minutes. Dry coconut on a paper towel before using.

Peanut Butter Bars
1 lb. powdered sugar
2 cups graham cracker crumbs
2 sticks melted butter
12 oz. peanut butter

Mix all ingredients together in a 9×13 non-greased pan. Melt large bag of chocolate chips and spread on top. Cut into squares in pan and refrigerate until cold.

Hereditary Thespianism

Ok, so thespianism is not a real word, but it should be! My husband has been acting in plays since an early age, and I was even in shows way back when before the stage fright got ahold of me, so it’s only natural that we’ve been waiting for the chance to get our daughters involved in plays and community theater. Now that our oldest has finally reached the minimum age to participate in the local summer children’s theater, we find ourselves back in the world of rehearsals 3 nights a week – yuck to that part of it.

But we are greatly anticipating her stage debut in the Phantom Tollbooth… though judging from her audition, she is more like me on stage than her father. Hopefully she’ll overcome her shyness because she will have lots of fans in the audience! Performances are August 1, 2, and 3rd in case you’re wondering!

Little Women

We were privilaged to get to spend an evening without kids to take in a local community theater’s production of Little Women, the Musical.

I must be honest – the music in this musical is not my favorite. It has nothing to do with how it was performed or who sang it; it just seemed to me to be words set to random music. But I don’t know much about singing, music composition, or even good theater for that matter. That being said, I will say that it’s definitely a production worth seeing. The costumes and set were great, and the large cast of talented actors and singers seemed very cohesive and never crowded on the stage. The play took me back into civil war times, and I do like to see stories from this time period played out live. I was pleasantly surprised by a few of the characters’ performances since they were people I’ve worked with before so I thought I knew what to expect – but a few of their performances were much better than I even expected, and yes, two of those people read or are closely related to people who are regular readers of this blog 🙂

But I’m not being biased… I really was impressed. A few of the new people – performers who haven’t done much or anything for this particular theater group – were surprisingly talented also, though I have to say at least one was not. And I might even say that the beautiful wigs almost deserve a curtain call of their own… but don’t let the wigs steal your thunder, cast, because you can expect standing ovations from your audiences throughout the run of the show, I think. Overall, it was a nice evening out – the show part of the dinner and show anyway. I was so disappointed in my lack of a good meal last night that I composed this little ditty:

RIP – Maywood Restaurant in Montpelier, Ohio

They sold the restaurant but kept the name,
The tables and chairs are all that’s the same.
The food quality’s gone,
Bob’s recipes too
It’s a shame that my dinner
Tasted like old shoe.

It was once premium food
But now it’s soured my mood.
Advice I would give:
Eat here if you dare
Since I traded gourmet
For mere Sysco fare.

The ditty tells the story – basically we had this awesome restaurant nearby with very high quality food that was always cooked by the chef-owner personally. I understand that people have to retire, but it is almost a crime that they still use the same name for the restaurant. I mean, with a food quality drop this severe, it’s their duty to warn people before they are tempted to eat there! Too bad dinner didn’t work out, but if the theater keeps putting on shows like Little Women, it will be enough of a reason to drive across the county to see them.

Murder on Friday the 13th

With the kids out of town and Friday the 13th upon us, we found it to be the perfect time to break out a game we found at the thrift store months ago – a Murder Mystery Party. After a check to make sure all the contents were there, we started inviting friends to attend a murder mystery party at our house:

Dear Name of Character Here,
Hart’s untimely death casts suspicion on us all. The police report has already been filed (see enclosed). We must meet quickly in order to solve the murder and clear our good names.
Hosted By:
on Friday, June 13 at 6:00pm
Please RSVP by Wednesday, June 11
Please bring a dish to share – no poison

We sent this email to each guest along with the police report detailing the homicide. We began with our game night regulars, then when some of them couldn’t make it, we tried to cast accordingly. The casting, by the way, just happened to work out perfectly. Originally, we were going to have to make a male character female, but once we switched some things around based on which guests were coming, it all worked out. And in retrospect, the swapping male for female thing would not have worked well at all! My husband and I were originally going to be the married couple, but those characters were a few decades older than us, and the characters we did end up playing had a secret infatuation with each other, so we were both pleased to discover this in the course of the game. Unfortunately, when my turn came to come up with a ‘formal accusation’, evidence dictated that I point my finger at my husband, aka, secret crush, but that’s how you play the game. Each guest came in costume and character and stayed that way for the roughly 3 hours we played the game. All in all, a lot of fun, and we’ve already had several people who were disappointed that they couldn’t make it. So, we’ll have to scour the thrift stores and / or the intenet in hopes of finding another one of these Murder Mystery games to play… providing we can get all (almost 4!) kids out of the house for an evening again… hmmm, that might be the REAL mystery!

Walking With Dinosaurs

In case you haven’t heard of it, Walking With Dinosaurs is a traveling show that is based on the BBC documentary of the same name. It is in Fort Wayne, Indiana this week, which isn’t too far from us. They’ve been advertising it heavily, and I’ve been meaning to check out ticket info, but I kept forgetting. Thanks to our local paper who ran a story about it the other day, I was reminded about it just in time! Seems the tickets are QUITE costly! However, my computer-savvy husband went online and found a discount that saved us SO much money on tickets, but only if we went opening night… So, we dragged all the kids to Fort Wayne to see some dinosaurs on a school night. Let me say, it was SOOO worth it!

It’s been a really long time since I was really excited about something that actually ended up measuring up to my expectations. I was really excited about this show; I thought it would be a good show, but I will say that it EXCEEDED my expectations! Not only was it visually stunning, It was a perfect show for the whole family. There were lifelike dinosaurs engaging in battles, flying, and scavenging… what’s not to like?!? We have kids of all ages and bravery levels, and they were all entertained.  Our 8-year-old and our 4-year-old did get a little nervous in the beginning, but their fear quickly turned to excitement and awe once the dinosaurs started appearing. Our 19-month-old LOVED everything about the show. She is getting to the age where it’s hard for her to sit still, especially now that she can walk, but she watched every moment of this show, and clapped and laughed so hard that I was even distracted from the dinosaurs at times by my daughter’s cuteness. I wasn’t distracted too much though, cuz the dinosaurs were totally AWESOME! They were life-size and SO realistic looking, it was amazing. Our seats were great too – best in the house, front row center. These dinosaurs were even better looking than the ones in the movie Jurassic Park!  Walking With Dinosaurs operates on a $20 million dollar budget, and it shows!

I would venture to say that this is probably the best professional live show I have ever seen, and that includes musicals from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Phantom of the Opera, Camelot, and Les Miserables to other shows like Monsters Inc. on Ice, Dragon Tales Live, and dinner shows like Medieval Times, Arabian Nights, and Pirates Dinner Adventure in Orlando, Florida. This was fun for the whole family; probably even most fun for my husband and I! If the tickets weren’t so pricey, I would definitely go back and see the show again – even with the $20-30 it cost in gas money alone. My 4-year-old suffered from what I call “fundown” after the show – a feeling of disappointment when an event is over that is so intense for kids, they usually cry or throw tantrums. But I can’t say I blame her. When I realized the show was ending, I had my own “fundown” when I realized there weren’t going to be any more dinosaurs!

Totally awesome show – wait, that’s not even the right word. It was more of an experience than a show. Even better than the dinosaur-themed rides at Disney World and Universal Studios. As we were leaving the coliseum, the rest of the audience seemed very pleased as well. Everyone was smiling and jabbering about the dinosaurs a mile a minute. They also had one actor – who was upstaged by the dinosaurs, of course! – and some other props and effects in the show that made it totally awesome. Also pretty impressive were the rows upon rows of trailers parked outside that carry the dinosaurs from venue to venue. I knew it would take a few semis to cart around all those dinosaurs, but there were probably at least 25 semis parked out there! It is understandable that all these lifesize dinosaurs would create such an entourage, since the Brachiosaurus alone was 36 feet tall and 56 feet from nose to tail.

If this live show experience is going to be anywhere near your hometown, I highly recommend that you do your best to get tickets. It is a perfect show for the young and old, dinosaur fans, skeptics, or even those who are indifferent to the world’s history; I don’t see how anyone could NOT enjoy Walking With Dinosaurs!

Bring Him Home

We organized a concert in January with our local theater group where we had a collection of totally awesome singers perform selections from popular musicals. My husband has an excellent singing voice – I’m not biased or anything, I swear! Plenty of other people have said so… If you were to ask him about it though, he would say much differently – he has a bit of an ego problem, but it goes in the opposite direction than that of most singers and actors – he does not have nearly enough confidence. So even though there were other songs in the concert, this one might be the only one we actually get to see because I don’t know how to post on youtube – that’s his job and he doesn’t deem the other songs worthy of posting!  And if you are a stage veteran or know someone who is, you have had to suffer thru awful recordings of stage performances. It seems that no matter how beautiful a play or song sounded on the stage, it will never translate correctly when recorded and played again – SO GET OVER IT AND JUST POST THE REST OF THE CONCERT ALREADY!!! 🙂   My favorite song from this concert was actually Bui Doi from Miss Saigon, and I was PROMISED that I would get the link to that one soon, so stay tuned! Don’t hold your breath though… I was also promised a new altered picture from a show we directed last fall because someone ducked out of it at the last second, and a picture in the director’s hall of the basement of the theater should have the show’s director in it, right?  But that hasn’t happened yet, so hopefully this will be more of a priority, even though I’ve stated how much that picture means to me…

I feel sorry for all those friends and family members who couldn’t make it to this great event – you really missed a great showcase of talent, especially if you’re a fan of showtunes! Maybe you’ll be able to make it next year if we do it again. This is a clip of Chris singing the Les Mis classic, “Bring Him Home”: