It was a holiday weekend, but for us it was also one week before the show (and just a few days before our only full-cast rehearsal) so we kept fairly busy.

Thursday night they let us out of the office an hour early, so Shaun and I headed out to do some costume/prop shopping. We stopped at Strange Cargo and ordered some custom t-shirts for the cast and Superpunk and looked for a Tiny Tim hat, but couldn't find one. Then we drove out to Fantasy Headquarters where we found tons of the incidentals we needed -- toy guns, bunny and elephant mask, ninja hood, etc, etc. We've been planning to invest in a bear costume (Why? Why not -- what can't you do with a bear costume?) an we looked at the ones they had, but we discovered that Fantasy HQ only rents them. Somehow it seemed to me perfectly reasonable to spend $700 for a bear costume and use it for a 30 second bit (but have it for any future uses) but completely unreasonable to spend $85 to rent it for a 30 second bit.

Friday during the day we headed over to the Arabesque Dance Studio to meet with Michelle from Lavender Cabaret and two of the other dancers. Michelle was doing the choreography for the opening number and we had given her freedom to either have us stand around on stage while the dancing went on around us, or to make us part of the dance. She opted for the later and we had a full two hour dance rehearsal learning the 2 minute dance she'd choreographed.

Saturday and today we just did some run-throughs off both the show and the dance number on our own. I made a first pass at a program -- Sketchfest is likely to have a program for the whole festival, but so many people have contributed to this show I wanted to make sure they got some kind of credit.

And Ben Taylor dropped off a CD of more "bumps" (little musical introductions to the scenes). We had had a big miscommunication about one of them (the one that needed to be the shortest, say 2 secs, was the longest, about a minute and a half) but I'm sure he'll have a new one for me tomorrow. After I post this I'm going to make a first pass at putting together the sound cues CD.

Whew.

Oh, and tomorrow night we're doing a set at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport) where we'll likely be trying out some of the scenes from the show. Have I mentioned enough times how good the wings are there?