Last Saturday was “my” day. I had a very clever plan. The Marvel superhero movie Thor was in its opening weekend, and so I thought I would take Mer to see a movie. She would think it was Thor, and I would surprise her utterly by going to see a documentary on big cats called African Cats. Magnificent plan. The only problem was that Mer had never heard of Thor as a superhero, but only as the Norse god of thunder. Thus, she had no idea that I would have any real desire to see that film. Ah, well.

African Cats was cute. It focused on a pride of lions and on a mother cheetah and her five cubs. It was produced by Disney, and so had a lot of personification provided by the narrator, Samuel Jackson. Still, the narration was more entertaining than distracting, and the photography was amazing. What beautiful creatures cheetahs are. We both enjoyed the film very much.

Later in the evening, we headed to Akron, back to the music club Musica. Even though I keep swearing off Musica, our friends’ band, Bethesda, was having a CD release party for their new EP CD. Since we are very fond of Eric and Shanna, we went back to Musica to hear the group.

Mer and I were delighted in that we actually got two of the very limited number of seats in the place, and these right next to the stage. Being that close and off to the side made for slightly more musical distortion since we were behind the speakers, but it was still fun to be that close to the stage. Bethesda was headlining the show, and their were two bands on before them The first band had really good harmonies from the three vocalists, but it was the second band that really shone. They had a cello player, a double-bass player, a guitar and ukulele player, and a drummer who had some unusual drums along with the standard drum kit. They were excellent musicians, especially the bass player, who also took a turn on uke and on guitar. They had a lot of energy, and were a lot of fun.

Bethesda did a great job. You could tell they were excited for the CD release, and they clearly had a ball on stage. They interspersed the songs with several clips that told the fictional stories reflected in the songs, and that was well done. They sound was mixed well, which was a nice thing, and they had a great evening. The house was very full, and had a lot of young people in it to be enthusiastic. Since Eric teaches at CVCA, there were about six or seven of us CVCA folks there as well, including Dubbs, who found us about halfway through Bethesda’s set. Keep an ear out for Bethesda – I really think they have the sound that could get them on college and alternate radio stations across the whole country.

Last Thursday was the last Fools show for the year and, more sadly, the last show for my TWELVE seniors. I love this group. We had fourteen Fools in all, and in that group of twelve seniors, I had one four-year Fool, three three-year Fools, four two-year Fools, and four one-year Fools. It was a very tight group, and had lots of energy. They also were willing to try almost anything, so I was able to introduce five new games for this show, several of which were full of very physical comedy. I am proud of the group.

It was a long show – eighteen games that took an hour and forty-five minutes. I let the Fools pick two games they want to be in, and this show there was very little overlap, so we had a lot more games than normal (twelve games for a show is pretty typical). We had a slight disadvantage of performing between the two weekends when the musical was playing. Because of scheduling, this could not be helped. For my purposes, it presented a problem in that the stage extension we normally use to get close to the audience had been taken down for the pit orchestra, and the instrument stands were in that space. So, we were further away from the audience than normal, which means you have to have more energy to keep people engaged. In that respect, things went fine – the show was pretty high-energy. There were some occasional lags, but overall things went well.

The games went well also. I had lectured the Fools very sternly that I did not want to hear the word “no” in the show. “No” in improv generally undermines the comedy, and makes scenes much weaker. I was very pleased that I never heard “no” all night long, and I even saw a few times where the Fool in question would think for a second and then plow ahead with some sort of “yes.” It was a good time.

We had a very good audience – lots of college-aged kids were back, and they were enthusiastic. We probably had around a hundred people in attendance, and they laughed a lot. They also were pretty quick with suggestions – we are getting enough repeat customers that they come up with fun ideas.

I was also happy with the last Fools-only game of the evening (we end all shows with a game that the audience can join in on). It is a Fools tradition that I pretend to throw a party for the seniors, and all my seniors have strange quirks or personality traits. This year, it meant a party for twelve, and the game is supposed to be for three or four. In order to keep things straight, I had a junior throw the names and quirks up on a screen for the audience to see, and I think that helped. Some of the guests at my party were a pirate, a man who thought he was James Bond, the Queen, a girl who was scared of party food, a guy who loved rabbits, and a woman who thought she was a potato. It was a fun skit, and I got nine of the twelve with no help. The scared-of-party-food and the potato both threw me for a bit of a loop, but we got off stage fairly quickly.

I will miss this group of Fools. Because the program has grown, it seems very unlikely that I will have any more three-year Fools, let alone a four-year Fool. I am very proud of the work they put in, and the product was much fun to be a part of.

Sorry I’ve gotten behind on the ol’ blog, but I have been sick much of the last week, so I slept a lot.

On Wednesday, April 27th, Mer and I got to go to CVCA’s spring musical, My Fair Lady. I am a big fan of the movie version of the play, so I was very much looking forward to the production. As I have mentioned before, it also adds to the fun that Mer and I know so many of the people on stage.

We took Aunt Mary to dinner and the show as a birthday present for her. We met at the local restaurant Rockne’s, where we had a very good dinner, but Mer and I were disappointed to discover that they had eliminated their normal desserts for these very small served-in-a-shot-glass cakes and mousse. We skipped them – they were not worth the time or money for such a tiny little thing.

Before the show, Mer and I filled out “StarGrams” – you can write a message to a member of the cast or crew, and for 50 cents, it gets delivered backstage; the money gets used as a fundraiser for a missions trip to the Dominican Republic. Between me and Meredith, we filled out forty StarGrams while Aunt Mary read a book. We have a lot of students involved in the theater.

The play itself was excellent. The pit orchestra of about twelve students and a couple of adults got things going with the overture. The music was very good – there were one or two tiny mistakes, but over the course of a 2.5-hour musical (excluding intermission), that was amazing. I certainly could not have done it. The set was well done, and made up mostly of a den/library for Henry Higgins’ home and an exterior set for London. There were some other minor sets along the way as well, but the basic sets alternated between the two.

The cast of the musical was huge – there had to be thirty students involved, and there were a couple of times where they were almost all on stage (and our stage is not very big). The leads did very well, especially with staying in character with accents. It was a great show, and I enjoyed it very much.

On Friday of that week (the 29th), we headed over to Actors’ Summit theater. Mer had “won” four tickets at the CVCA auction to see the last show of the season, plus we had our normal subscriber seats. So, we had six tickets in all. We decided to use the extra tickets to invite our close family and family friends, so we invited Aunt Mary, “Aunt” Zovie, and Ray and Sara George. We though they would enjoy the evening because the show was a musical revue of Rodgers and Hammerstein music in a production called Some Enchanted Evening.

Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote some of the greatest musicals of the 40s and 50s, such as Oklahoma!, State Fair, and The Sound of Music. Needless to say, the music is pretty catchy. The musical revue was quite refreshing in that there was no attempt to make a loose story out of the music – it was just one song into another for about ninety minutes. The music was organized in a clever way so that a sappy love song might be followed by a cynical love song. The singers also acted out what was going on in the song, so there were a number of funny moments (especially in songs like “I  Cain’t Say No”). The music was all provided by a very excellent piano player, and the evening included four different actor-singers, two men and two women.

This revue was by far my favorite of the six or so that I have seen at Actors’ Summit. The music was fun and well done, and the music told its own short stories without the need to try to piece together some plot to tie them into a play. It worked really well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the music, and it was great getting to hang out with friends and family.

Last Saturday was “my” day, so after sleeping in, we took our time getting ready, and then I took Mer to Canton to see the movie Red Riding Hood at the $1.50 theater. I was seeing the movie largely on the basis of Amanda Seyfried being in the title role. I was utterly charmed by her in the movie Letters to Juliet, but quite a bit less so in the movie Dear John. Red Riding Hood fell somewhere in between – better than Dear John, but not so heart-warming and cute as Letters. I thought it was worth a risk at $3.00 for both of us.

It was a solid film. It was not too deep, and the acting was uneven in places; Amanda and Gary Oldman were very good all through the film, but some of the supporting roles were hit-or-miss. The film did a very good job with the wolf – the computer effects were not distracting at all, and the major part of the film keeps you guessing as to who the wolf really is. It was an entertaining film on the whole, and was worth the $3.00. AND I got to see a BBC America ad for Doctor Who before the film began!

On the way home from Canton, we swung by the Gurnish household to see if they would be interested in getting ice cream. They had just wrapped up killing some chickens to eat, but were happy to get ice cream. We had no problem waiting for them to get cleaned up. Nate and Rachel’s son decided to stay with the new neighbors’ two oldest girls, who are a little older than he is. An ice cream date turned down for two girls! Where are the boy’s priorities? We had a nice visit with the Gurnishes over ice cream, and then we headed home, albeit briefly.

We were pretty much only home just long enough for me to look up where in Kent our friends’ band Bethesda was playing. Having ascertained that, we headed to Kent. Bethesda was playing a twenty-five-minute set as part of a fundraiser to help a ministry raise funds that would help the poor. We had not been to a Bethesda show in months, so I wanted to support them and the cause. Sadly, the show was running about thirty or forty minutes behind, so we arrived in time to see Bethesda only to find out we had to wait. Meanwhile, a talented but very loud band played for about thirty minutes.

Bethesda finally took the stage, and it was great. They played mostly new songs, and I believe it was the debut for their new and very talented violin player. She added a nice sound that supported Shanna’s lyrical voice very well. There were a few minor sound problems (the bass amp went out during a song), but the sound was well mixed on the whole. While the show was short, it was good to see the band again, and we got to hang out with Shanna and Eric some before their set.

On the way home, on a whim, I swung into a mom-and-pop restaurant called Eddy’s. It turned out to be pretty good – the fries I had were excellent. We then headed home for the evening.

Last Tuesday, Mer took me on a late-night mid-week date to Kent State to see their production of Hamlet. She had “won” the tickets at CVCA’s auction. We have seen several productions at Kent, and I have generally liked them, so I was looking forward to the production.

The director’s notes were helpful. His vision for the play was to translate Hamlet to the near future, and to stage it in a style that emphasized corruption, scandal, and the hunger for power. He also decided to make Hamlet a Muslim, I think with the idea of making Hamlet even more of an outsider, since no one else was Muslim.

The scandal-vision of the play was evident from the opening of the play. The director felt free to shuffle scenes around, and so he opened the play with the new king, Claudius, singing a rock song while two college-aged girls in short skirts and open jackets (with bras) dance around him. He ends the song with a photo-op with Polonius, and then gives a televised speech comforting the nation about the sudden death of his brother. It worked pretty well. The vision of corruption kept coming back again and again, and it unified the beginning and end of the play. That was a great directorial choice.

One choice that was a great concept but was not carried out well was the treatment of the ghost of the play. The director had the ghost be projected around the stage using multiple projectors and using various speakers hidden around the theater. It was a brilliant idea. What was weird and undermined the effect was the fact that the director chose to make the ghost a computer-animated person. The “person” was real enough to make you do a double-take, but not real enough to maintain the illusion. Also, the ghost moved in general and generic ways, not interacting at all with the actors (because it could not). Finally, the mouth of the ghost never moved. I suppose a ghost could talk without moving its mouth, but it was a distraction that was not needed. The idea could have been carried out with a real actor being filmed backstage, to much greater effect.

The worst directorial choice was when Hamlet runs into Ophelia in the courtyard while her father and Claudius are hiding behind a curtain. The director had Ophelia deliver her lines while tipping Hamlet off to the fact that her father was there. Hamlet understands this and says some of his lines for their benefit. The problem is that by the end of the scene, Ophelia is bemoaning the fact that Hamlet is mad, and she played this to the audience and not to her hidden father. Since she has wink-wink informed Hamlet of the entire set-up, this long Hamlet-is-mad speech no longer makes any sense. By what the text is saying, Ophelia needs to really believe that Hamlet is insane. Hamlet may or may not be mad, and he may or may not know that Polonius is hiding behind the curtain, but it is really important that Ophelia really believe that Hamlet is mad.

The director made the interesting and jarring choice of having Ophelia killed by a king-and-queen bodyguard. The queen’s “Ophelia drowned” cover story becomes cover-up. It worked, but made the queen a much more sinister character than she normally is.

The director also made the strange choice of taking the most famous speech in all of English literature, and he moved it and interspersed it with Claudius’ prayer-speech, where he is trying to pray for forgiveness but cannot. It was an interesting thing to try, but the focus on stage was Claudius, and so it made “To be or not to be” become background and counterpoint for Claudius’ speech.

The acting in the play was mostly good, but it was uneven in places. Claudius and Polonius were brilliant. Gertrude was fine. I loved Ophelia when she was playfully interacting with her brother, but she was less convincing in her mad scenes. I was not a big fan of the female Horatio – I felt as if her delivery was very flat most of the time.

Hamlet was interesting. His delivery of the lines was almost flawless, and he played active scenes and mad scenes really well. However, his early scenes where he is in grief were unconvincing, and his introspective speeches were, as Mer put it, “Hamlet mellow” rather than Hamlet struggling to understand everything that was going on. The fact that Hamlet was a Muslim did not really enter into the play at all in any way that I could tell. If the director had not told me that Hamlet was a Muslim, I would have probably assumed that Hamlet was a devout religious man of some generic religion of the near future. It was not overly distracting, but felt forced.

One of the fun things that happened at the play was that Mer and I sat in front of two girls seeing the play for a class. We were able to chat with them at intermission, and helped clear up some of the things that were confusing them. It was great to get to feel smart.

I am glad I got to see the play. It ran long (about 3.5 hours with intermission), but did not feel long. It was good to see all the various new things the director tried, so I could see what worked and what did not. The strongest choice, to show political corruption, worked really well. The other choices worked less well, but the play still held together.

Last Saturday was Mer’s day, and we started it out by heading north to Lyndhurst to Hawken Middle School. A few months ago, Mer agreed to be the coach for the brand-new junior high Academic Challenge team. Academic Challenge is competitive trivia, basically, and CVCA has had a high school Academic Challenge team for years now, but the junior high team was new with Mer’s team. She has twelve seventh graders, and on this particular Saturday we were headed to the very first meet for the new team. Mer ended up having four girls and four guys come to the meet (the other four had schedule conflicts), and so she made a girls’ team and a guys’ team (a team is made up of four students, although because each round has three sections, you can have additional students substitute in).

Hawken Middle School is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The school is only three years old, and Hawken costs almost $25,000/year to attend, so the tuition buys you small classes and a stunning school. Each of the grades (six, seven, and eight) had its own wing, called a “pod.” Our meet was taking place in the seventh and eighth grade classrooms.

Hawken has a well-established team, so it was fielding four teams – two JV teams and two varsity teams. Since some junior high schools include ninth grade as well, it is permissible to have ninth graders on junior high teams. I’m pretty sure that all the members of Hawken’s varsity teams were eighth and ninth graders. They knew their stuff. The public high school from Kent also sent two teams, so there were eight teams in all. Each team went head to head against another team in a round, and so there were four matches going on during each round. Each question in a round was worth so many points, and at the end of all the matches, each team just tallied its own points, and the team with the most points won.

I was drafted to help, since they needed help running the meet. Mer and I teamed up:  she read the questions and I kept score. It was interesting. I knew the vast majority of the answers to the questions, but by no means all of them. The kids did very well, especially the Hawken varsity teams. The very last match of the day pitted our two CVCA teams against each other, and they were even in our room. It was a fun way to end the meet.

Since this was our very first meet for our team, we did not know what to expect. They did well – both teams were competitive, and our boys’ team finished third out of the eight teams, losing to the two Hawken varsity teams.

After the meet, we went home, where I napped while Mer ran and got groceries. In the evening, we went to a Teacher Appreciation Dinner thrown by the parents of one of Mer’s students. Every year, this family invites all the teachers that are teaching their sons to their house for dinner. It is a very thoughtful thank-you. We had gone last year as well, and the food is all homemade (including the pasta), and is very good. This year, the only teachers who could make it were us and the Churchills, which was a nice surprise for us, since they are such good friends. We had a wonderful dinner, and the family gave us gifts of rare coins (they collect coins) – they gave us coins from Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The older of the two sons, Steven, is in Royal Fools, so I know him pretty well, so it was a pleasant evening at the dinner table.

After dinner (and dessert – cannoli!), we all moved into the living room, where we all played each other in Wii sword fighting. It was a really funny thing to see, and Zach Churchill turned out to be the man to beat in the reaction-time sword game (a game where you need to slice fruit and other objects in a random direction faster than your opponent). I’m afraid I began to feel a bit poor for the last half hour or so, so I’m not sure I was the best company at the end of the evening. Overall, though, we spent about three hours there, and it was a good time.

Last Saturday, Mer and I slept in. Late. Since we had gotten back from the Pittsburgh airport after 1:00 am, and neither of us had slept in much or at all over break, we slept in on Saturday until about 11:00. Mer then took her time getting ready, and we headed to Akron to eat brunch at Wally Waffles. That was the first time we had been back since before the February diet; it was good to be back.

After brunch, we headed down to Aunt Mary’s old place. For about a year now, Aunt Mary has been holding on to her trundle bed (a single bed with a fold-away single bed stored underneath it) for us. Aunt Mary wanted to paint the room and clean the carpets, so we went down and took the bed apart and moved it to her old garage (I later went down on Monday with a borrowed truck and got the bed). That took about an hour. Since we were already near Canton, I drove into Canton itself, and went to Mer’s old neighborhood, to a park there that houses the McKinley Monument. It is an impressive domed structure that I had not been to since the mid-90’s. Mer is not sure she had ever been inside it. We did not stay long, but I had wanted to see the place since I had just finished a book about presidential assassinations, and McKinley was covered in the book. There is also a small and excellent museum near the monument that I have never been to, but we did not have time on Saturday to visit it.

On the way home, we swung by Nate and Rachel’s place to see if they wanted to go get ice cream at Strickland’s. They were game, so the five of us (with their son) drove our two cars over, and we ate ice cream and chatted for about 45 minutes. It was good to be mellow with the Gurnishes again – it had been awhile.

We spent a mellow evening at home. Before break, we had started watching the film version of The Kite Runner. We finished it up, and it was really well done. We have both seen a stage version of the book as well, and the film and stage version were different from each other, but both were very good. The Kite Runner was filmed in China, but I assume the landscape passes well for Afghanistan. The film also was almost entirely in Farsi (Persian) with English subtitles, so that was interesting to hear. After the film was over, we made it a fairly early evening.

Friday
– Went to Nate’s house (work at Urban Vision ministry was finished on Thursday).
– Tore off old back porch and burned the debris wood.
– I ran and got donuts about 10:30.
– Rachel made pizza and bread for everyone for lunch.
– Most students went next door to help in Brittian Bollenbacher’s house – staining and putting on polyurethane.
– Wrapped up around 3:30.
– Got back to school at 4:00.
– Should have stayed and helped clean up, but felt ill and tired and had to get Mer from the airport in Pittsburgh late, so I excused myself and went home.
– Showered and then went to bed at 4:30 – slept until 8:00.
– Left for airport at 8:45, picked Mer up at 10:45, got home around 1:00 and went to bed around 1:30.
– Good trip – as always, very impressed with the kids. They were great – hard workers and positive attitudes.
– I enjoyed the work, but especially the work Thursday with Hammer and Nails.

Thursday
– Went to Canton, to Hammer and Nails.
– Hammer and Nails is an offshoot of Habitat for Humanity – helps improve existing homes of people in need.
– Toured house that is headquarters. Hammer and Nails started out with $1,000 and one 4-foot-tall step ladder.
– They helped improve over 90 homes last year, and coordinated over 23,000 volunteer hours.
– We went to a home near Taggart’s Ice Cream.
– We tore down a back porch, dug new post holes (including needing to rent a jackhammer to break up concrete in one hole), and painted primer onto the separate garage.
– Homeowners were very nice and helpful. The gave us snacks and juice at lunch.
– I bought ice cream for everyone at Taggart’s.
– Homeowners made hamburgers and hot dogs for us before we left.
– Cleaned up and went back to CVCA. I had to return the jackhammer – got back to CVCA about 5:00.
– Went home and showered.
– Made special reel/”Sweet Dreams” mix for talent show that night. I skipped supper since I was full from the burger.
– Went over to CVCA and puttered around until the talent show.
– About ten acts – music, interpretive dance, poetry. Dubbs and I danced for about a minute to “Sweet Dreams (are made of these)” since that was a dream I had a few months back. It was pitiful, but well received.
– Had worship a little before 10:00.
– Craig let kids share about what they learned this week, then gave talk on the encounter at the Last Supper, where Jesus washes the disciples’ feet.
     – Surprising that a teacher would wash feet (servants did that).
     – Jesus models service for us – we should be ready to serve each other, and anyone God calls us to serve. Real servants serve, not just when they want to.
     – Craig challenged us to start with serving our families.
– Ended with another song.
– Came home – got home about 11:20.

Wednesday
– Hattie Larlham – made crafts with kids in morning, made Easter/spring cards in afternoon
– Stopped by Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts on way home; Dubbs bought (I got a hot chocolate)
– Home, showered, made peanut butter and chocolate bars for Diakonos kids
– Supper
– Entertainment – Nerf gun war in school; went long
– Worship
– Craig spoke on woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with her tears and perfume
     – Surprising that woman would persevere to get into house, spend expensive perfume
     – Pharisee reacts with no love toward woman or Jesus (no common hospitality)
     – Jesus tells story of two debtors; rebukes Pharisee but story still offers hope to him (not taken, as far as we      know)
     – Woman leaves with her sins forgiven through her faith
– Small group meeting – went over day and talked of risks of becoming the Pharisee – too holy and good to love people correctly; still going on when I left at 11:30.
– Home about 11:45.