[ Post a Response | Much Ado About Douglas: It's All About The Sills ]
Posted by english on 8/3/2006, 3:30 am The email confirmation is in my "travel" file that's time-stamped at 12:42 p.m. on May 30, 2006. Which means I spent a lunch period ordering tickets online for a show I'd never heard of, by a composer I only knew by vague reputation, in a town I had been taught to mock by the friend who had moved to Wappinger Falls. Wappingers Falls is about 10 miles from Poughkeepsie. And Poughkeepsie was about to hold their New York Stage & Film Festival. Jerry Christmas was going to have an open workshop/staged reading of a new musical by Andrew Lippa. And this new musical was going to star Douglas Sills. At least I that's what I was hoping because the online details had been vague. Jerry Christmas and Douglas Sills were mentioned in the same post. I put my one working superpower to good use (an awesome ability to Google) and found a reference to Vassar College and the NYS&F. I sent that information to Kazumi, who put her equally excellent Google skills to excellent use and found the online box office. Not to mention train schedules, hotels that offered shuttle service, and a yummy place to have dinner. Kazumi mentions, in her diary, something about a plan. In my version, there was no plan other than buy tickets and then see what happens, which is pretty much what I did. It's only because of Kazumi that I was sheltered and transported. Had I been left to my own devices, there's a very good chance I would have taken the wrong train and/or spent two nights sleeping on the lawn of Vassar College. After sitting through a less than stellar new work in which I'm pretty convinced one of the actors fell asleep on stage during a Sondheim song, some of us were a little nervous that the evening offering would be equally bad. The four Left Coasters met up with the two East Coasters, and had a fabulous pre-theatre dinner at the Busy Bee, and then headed back to the college. Eleven chairs, eleven bottles of water, eleven musician's podiums, and eleven microphones were spread in a tight half-circle across the empty stage. A twelvth chair and podium stood apart at downstage left--that was where the narrator would sit. The center mic was raised just a tad taller than the rest, causing me to smile just a little. To the left, a fuzzy pink boa was draped across the back of another chair. A small part of me hoped that the boa had been misplaced.
68.126.219.146
There are two different ways I thought about starting this post. Either I could tell you about a friend who, in a fit of insantity, decided to move to Wappingers Falls, NY. Or I could tell you about an email that I'm about to delete.
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