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January 05, 2003
"Surfing"
Yesterday, if I had had a chance to get the computer, I would have posted "My personal life is a shambles, I'm not eating right, I've lost 5 pounds in a week, I'm not sleeping, so I guess I'm ready for the show to open."
And open we did. The house was packed. The suggestion was "surfing".
A number of things went wrong, but I'm not sure how much the audience was aware. There was a mix-up where a tape was delivered, but Greg didn't know it was, so there was dead air while he looked around the booth with a flash light. And we got rather confused about how much time we had left when we were shooting the final group scene, which meant it was short and frenetic (I'll say frenetic since I'm not using word "chaos" about my own shows anymore). Both of these problems would have been avoided if Rachel had been there in her role as TimeMaster, but she and Phillip had to miss opening night to do Superpunk at Chicago Sketchfest.
What Rachel couldn't have helped was how slow the Digital8 player was to eject and inject tapes. The audience got to see quite a bit of my new spinning-N transition. We had thought about playing music during the transitions but decided not to because I thought they wouldn't be that long, but the silence is pretty painful. We'll fix that next week.
The exact moment the show was over, I felt... exhausted. Everybody was cheering and congratulating and so on and I was just stumbling around, tearing down our gear and trying not to fall over. The cast and crew all came over to my house and I set all the gear up again and I played the show for everyone. It was pretty good. There were a few moments of camera brilliance and people said funny things and there was an awkward breakup scene and Shaun ran around without his shirt on in the snow and Beth did the robot dance (in the show, not at my house).
So my "next" is clean up the house from the party, archive the show, reblank the tapes, figure out transition music, and do it all again next week.
Posted by Fuzzy at January 5, 2003 10:04 AM
Comments
Fuzzy, I was really impressed with last night's show despite the hiccups. Yes, we knew (or at least my group guessed) there were probably problems with the tapes and even muttered to one another that some music during the transitions would have been good. But it was still cool, unique, and very enjoyable. And what a great cast!
So for an opening night, I say bravisimo!
Please eat and get some sleep though, you look damn skinny.
Posted by: diane at January 5, 2003 12:42 PM
nice, nice stuff last night. you guys should be proud. overall, two thumbs up - an enjoyable time for all!
take care of yourself. that's an order!
Posted by: speedy at January 5, 2003 12:48 PM