The View From Here #133: Liege, Belgium; Paris, France; Minneapolis, MN

Quick announcement: My long-time friend, accountant, board member of the Stage Two Theatre and Mensa member, Terry Hall, is running for Illinois State Senate! Wouldn't it be great to have someone who can balance a budget in there? Check her out at www.voteterry.com, and float a couple bucks her way!

Returning from Lincoln, Nebraska, I threw myself into editing of my Moliere scripts for submission. I would do one “pass” through a script per day, along with a rehearsal or two of “Karaoke Knights.” With each day’s rehearsal, I would re-introduce elements of the play into the mix, such as the video, the costumes or the projector. With each step I would remind myself of another layer of the play’s demands, and adjust my performance accordingly.

Finally, I videotaped myself performing the show in the basement, and virtually had to chain myself to the computer to watch the video. I am often very uncomfortable watching myself on tape, but I diverted my discomfort through my notepad, taking notes on any problems that I observed, as if I was the director, watching someone ELSE perform.




Of course, as my own worst/best critic, I had lots of notes. Most of them had to do with instances of seeing “Tim” pop up inside the five characters who were “not-Tim.” I realized all the gestures that I was doing which were so indicative of “me,” and began work on a method which would “get me out of myself,” fashioning a “psychological gesture” for each of my several characters, and using that gesture to remind me of the embodiment of each individual. (This will ultimately be yet another chapter in my eventual acting textbook.)

On July 15, I broke off from the rehearsal process and drove to Detroit, where I met Isaac and the two of us flew to Belgium, for the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of French.

The big box of flyers, discs, costumes and banners I wanted to ship to meet me there was weighing in at about 40 pounds, and the FedEx guy was estimating a cost of $400 to send it to Belgium.

I decided there was no way of justifying spending $800 to ship this (round trip), and so I stripped away all but the bare necessities and found a smaller box that I could check as baggage on the airplane. Since it was holding banners that were 31 inches wide, this made for a long box, which was still rather heavy, and unwieldy in airports and on the street.

Isaac and I arrived with no problems (other than lack of sleep), and unloaded our stuff in Belgium with nary a question being asked (other than the purpose of our trip). A couple of familiar faces from the airplane directed us toward the train station, and we took one train directly from the airport to the first stop. (We were redirected by the conductor, who informed us that we’d inadvertently sat in first class, which Isaac noted, looked like a compartment out of Harry Potter). We arrived at an extremely confusing terminal with a dozen train platforms, none of which seemed to be directed toward our ultimate destination (all the while maneuvering luggage and a clumsy, heavy box up and down stairs and ramps).

Eventually the nice guy at the information booth directed us to a train which was destined to a town with an unfamiliar name. Belgium is a multi-lingual nation, and they cannot even agree on single names for given cities. Thus “Liege” is actually known as “Luik” if you are in a Flemmish region of Belgium.

We pulled in to Liege around noon and walked the luggage and ourselves the two kilometers to the conference hall. (At this point, I was economizing on taxis.) When the struggle with the extra bag got to be too much, I relied on my strapping young son to maneuver it for a block or two, and we traded off for the remainder of the walk.

At the conference center, we dropped off the box and its contents, setting up the booth in record time, before working our way towards the hotel, which was yet another kilometer or so away. But this time, at least, we were only maneuvering our own luggage, SANS the box of display stuff, though it did choose that moment to begin raining.

We paused for a bite in a local pub, in a cobblestone alley that reminded me of New Orleans, and had our first difficulty with translation. The guy at the bar did not want to respond to English. (I had poked my head in asking “Are you open?” before realizing that even if I did have the right French words, “Are you open” was probably idiomatic to English, and he might not recognize my intent.) Meanwhile Isaac was digging for the exact French words, and I convinced the guy to respond to my awful mash of French and English phrases, enabling us to order sandwiches and cokes, before moving on to the hotel.

By the time we got to the hotel, I had learned to ask, first, “Parlez-vous Anglais?” before launching into a conversation, and we got on much better. Isaac was disappointed that this circumvented his role as the official “translator,” though he later admitted that, after three years of middle-school French, “You know, Dad, I’m learning that the French that they teach you in school is crap.”

We had a tiny hotel room, and the internet service was non-functional. I paid for 60 minutes of connectivity, and managed to download my messages in about thirty seconds, but was unable to hook up again until after we left Liege, three days later.

After a much-needed nap, we returned to the conference center, and I donned the white coat and wig for the course of the exhibit hall soiree, which is usually my best sales opportunity of this conference. (Since everyone has a ticket for a free glass of wine in the exhibit hall, just about everyone shows up and wanders past the various booths.) I caught up with lots of old friends, and folks who’d booked me and who were looking to book me in the future. I managed to hook potential hosts up with previous hosts to testify about the quality of the show, and over the course of three days, I collected info on about 40 potential bookers.

The exhibit hall soiree segued into a “walking dinner” (i.e., tall tables with no chairs, so that the attendees would continue to circulate), and we visited lots of folks, all of whom were impressed by Isaac, his French interests, his intelligence his height, his willingness to be dragged halfway around the world... Given that we were in Belgium (where 14 is an acceptable drinking age), I indulged him in a glass of wine. (In my opinion, there’s lots less binge drinking in Europe because people don’t make such a big deal about it.)

We headed back to the hotel, struggled with the internet connection for an hour or so, and slept very deeply. The next day, I got to the exhibit hall at 9 a.m., and Isaac stumbled in around noon. It was a mostly quiet day, and I was preparing for a performance the following morning.

That day I woke up at around 5 a.m., and strolled the streets of Liege, looking for a coffee shop, drilling my lines the whole time. Isaac hadn’t seen a performance of my show for perhaps four or five years, and he arrived at the conference center about five minutes before I went on, performing to an audience of twenty or so.

I chose a woman in the second row to deliver my “Tartuffe” monologue to, and as she kept a mostly straight face through the performance, I was surprised when she volunteered to play the scene across from me. She did very well, and later I invited her to join Isaac and I and some friends to dinner.

The exhibit hall closed at noon, and we packed up rather quickly, hauling the now-marginally lighter box (having given away a few dozen brochures and discs) back to the hotel. We were joined by my old friend, Jose (who has made previous appearances in these pages from the days he used to live in New York), and along with Susie (the woman from the “Tartuffe” scene), we walked through Liege, taking photos and finding a restaurant. Susie encouraged all of Isaac’s worst impulses, as he ordered the snails. Ewwww.

The next day Jose drove us to his home in Ghent, which is on the Flemish side of Belgium, a rather dark, gothic city (though the sun did manage to break through). It was a big day for some sort of a Ghent beer festival … or it was at least a festival where beer was a prominent component, and we found a table along the river overlooking tour boats that arrived and departed every couple of minutes.

The next day, Jose put Isaac and I on a train which bulleted us from Brussells to Paris in about 75 minutes (at estimated speeds of 130 mph.) This time I invested in a taxi to take us to the hotel, which was about a mile southeast of the center of Paris.

I gave Isaac the first choice of what to do, and he voted for the Eiffel Tower. We waited in line for about 45 minutes before taking the elevators all the way to the top (where the battery of my camera gave out). While my fear-of-heights was present, it wasn’t as bad as I’d recalled from the time we’d visited the Statue of Liberty, and from above I was actually able to get a feel for the layout of Paris, as we marked the several sites we wanted to visit in our three-day stop.

I had no desire to take the subway, and I think we learned the city fairly well in three days by walking everywhere. We probably walked ten miles a day (and my knee was starting to make noise once again), but the sights were amazing. It was a much lighter, aesthetically pleasing city than Ghent, and we started to feel very much at home. (Even though Isaac mistakenly attempted to order some sort of grocery store for dinner.)

Our second day in Paris, we set out for the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery. There is a marker for the grave of Moliere, which probably does not actually contain his remains (the cemetery was built in 1804, and Moliere died in 1673). We also visited the grave of Jim Morrison, which was littered not only with flowers, but cigarette butts and at least one beer can.

Jumping forward for a moment, on the very day that I returned to the U.S., I downloaded an e-mail from a Canadian theatre teacher who reported the following:

“I just want you to know that I read your translation of Moliere's 'Doctor in spite of Himself' with my Ontario students in France. The kicker is that we sat around Moliere's grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery and read the whole thing aloud, to the amusement and bemusement of passers-by. Some stayed and listened. …”

I can only imagine the thrill that I would have felt if I had only stumbled across this group myself while I was touring the cemetery.

On our last full day in Paris, Isaac and I headed to the Comedie Francaise, where I had an appointment with the “Conservateur-archiviste de la Bibliothèque-Musée” to take a tour of the building. The fellow was extremely generous in showing me around the backstage areas, and I was amazed to see the many paintingsand busts that I had long been observing in books and on-line, in their original form. He even showed me the famous “Invalid chair” which Moliere himself had sat in as part of the production of “Le Malade Imaginaire” (The Imaginary Invalid) only hours before he died. (The chair, worn and splintering, is protected inside of a glass box.)

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take photos, but the painting which most amazed me was a very large frescoe of the many characters of Moliere’s plays in various poses, as seen above.

By now, my Paris experience was complete, and we topped it off with a walk down the Champs Elysees that evening, to the Arc de Triomphe at the far end.

The next morning, we were up at 5 a.m. to catch the shuttle to the airport, and a flight directly to the Detroit Metro airport. The ticket clerk had gotten us seats by the exit door, which meant we had lots of leg room, and were much more comfortable on the flight home than we’d been going out. I said goodbye to Isaac in Detroit and continued the drive home.

Back home, I threw myself back into preparations for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Some of the Chicago area actors who were touring to the festival had put together a Mini-Fringe, and we all did 20-30 minutes of our shows in a somewhat improvised space. Unfortunately, the space had a cement floor, and I think I AGAIN did a bit of damage to my knee during my brief performance.

I was writing and re-writing my DVD, cutting the karaoke interludes of my script entirely at one point, and while I’d been performing version 6.1 of the show for over two years, I quickly found myself drafting a new variation, almost on a daily basis, and was performing KK 10.0 by the time I arrived in Minnesota.

This time around, I’d arranged a BYOV (Bringe Your Own Venue) with the fringe, performing at an Irish Pub/Karaoke Bar called McMahon’s, which had the best stage of the venues I’d visited last December.

The negotiations with the bar had been somewhat strained and uncertain, and I never knew if the agreement would fall apart at any given hurdle. The “tech rehearsal” was a bit of a struggle as the handful of bar patrons seemed hostile to a play which was drowning out their jukebox.

The fringe Out-of-Towner Showcase was a lot of fun, visiting with lots of people that I’d met in recent years, and I was glad to be the second act performing out of some 15 theatre groups. Sitting backstage while other people are performing leads me to compare myself to them in all kinds of unhealthy ways, but when I got up early, I could feel that no one had quite depicted the style that I was performing in my song, “The Dreaming Tax” before I’d gotten up to take my turn.



The next night my stage manager, Andrea, and I set up at the bar, and did the show to about a dozen in the audience. Without the karaoke numbers, there was far less audience participation, as there were no cues for the audience to sing along. There were also patrons off to the side making their usual patron noise during the show itself, as well as waitresses working their way through the crowd, taking food and drink orders. During the last song, a bar patron with a VERY LOUD VOICE was holding forth on some topic while I was trying to perform.

Many in the audience seemed pleased with the show, but I was unsatisfied with the experience. I had a chat with the woman in charge, who promised to keep the bar patrons much quieter for future shows, and I decided to restore the karaoke numbers to the performance. This, of course, meant spending another full day with the DVD, returning to version 6.1 and reworking it into version 11.0, which would trim extraneous verses of the karaoke music, and fade them in more slowly, so I was only using about 15 seconds of material for the audience to sing along with, before cutting to my own, original stuff.

Meanwhile, the first review appeared on-line, suggesting:

“… And yet, he was a trooper. He sang and danced through it all anyway. Unfortunately, his dancing was campy, and his singing was mediocre. The premise of the show was interesting, but the execution left a lot to be desired. He tried too hard to be "deep" with the song lyrics; he tried too hard to be "funny" with the characters; he just tried too hard, and missed the mark as a result.” (Stef B)

It was about this time that I got a note from Playscripts, Inc., congratulating me on the opening of the show, and insisting that if I wanted my four latest script to go into their new cataologue, they would need the proofs by Monday. This proceeded to occupy the remainder of my weekend. (The plays are already published! Go here.)

Also, around this same time, I learned that my "Uncle Blanford" had died. Horace Blanford Mooney was my dad's older brother, and had always lived on the west coast (as long as I can remember), so I only rarely saw him, but his company was always warm, appreciative and encouraging.







More reviews were starting to come in, but after the first one went on at length about the venue, every subsequent reviewer seemed to need to argue this theme, pro and con. And thus, the “frame” of the discussion for this show had been drawn around the venue itself, which left very little room for commentary on the actual content of the play.

“Extraordinary character studies of karaoke contestants. Tim Mooney establishes characters in a few seconds so he can delve into the psyches of people you just met. Meanwhile, the karaoke teleprompter is kissin' cousins with "The Word" graphic on The Colbert Report. The karaoke contest is typical, but the songs that play inside Karaoke Knights are original and revealing. The venue is not ideal for the Fringe …” (Dave Romm)

“This is a good show in a tough location. Tim is great at delineating his five different characters through the original songs he gives them -- "Dreaming Tax" was a particular stand-out. I liked the karaoke machine's own comments on the songs …” (Delano duGarm)

“I'm kind of stunned that so many people are complaining about the venue, because I thought it was perfect -- public humiliation is the point of the show, and this wouldn't have anything like the same effect in a theatre space. Surprisingly vulnerable, and that's only wonderfully abetted by the bewilderment of the bar regulars. This is exactly the kind of bizarre experience I Fringe for.” (Phillip Low)

“Tim Mooney returns to the Fringe with 'Karaoke Knights', his most schizophrenic show yet. Tim, while adhering to the one-man show format, has decided that he needs a larger cast - and he's up to the task. 'Karaoke Knights' is a great ride, a journey through the minds of five contestants in a karaoke competition, delving into the reasons people go to bars, what they're hoping for on stage, and ultimately why they sing karaoke….” (Kale Ganann)

Meanwhile, the performances were improving (even as my knee was getting worse), and the reinsertion of the sing-along created the atmosphere of camaraderie I was looking for. Even so, the attendance remained very thin, with the audience numbers mostly fluctuating between ten and twenty. Late in the run, I had a performance with thirty in the house, and then for the final performance, there were 41 in the audience, which the box office workers declared to be our “sell-out” figure.

Knowing that this last show would be the best attended, I brought out my video camera, and enlisted my billeter’s brother (also in town from Chicago) to tape the show, proceeding thereafter to upload scene after scene to YouTube. (I was going to get my promotional fix out of this festival one way or another!) Considering that the most recent videotaping of this show was for an audience of only three people in Boulder, Colorado, 2005, this would prove to be an invaluable resource, demonstrating to potential bookers the style and quality of the work and the fun that the crowd was having in the process.


A fun alternative from the reviews were two on-line interviews that I did, both before and after the run of my show. You can find them at: Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine ... then proceed to click on the videos marked Minnesota Fringe Festival: Act I and Minnesota Fringe Festival: Act V.

Independent of the reception that the show was getting (by the end, I was hearing quite a number of people saying that they’d been hearing how good it was, which was validated by the final day’s attendance), I was enjoying the fringe society quite a bit. Every night, following an evening of show-going, a couple of hundred of us descended on “Fringe Central”, a theatre that had it’s own bar, including a rooftop patio, with a terrific view of downtown Minneapolis. I found myself circulating like a pinball, visiting people whose shows I’d liked, or who I’d met in previous years, or who I’d vaguely remembered from previous years.

Quite often it was they who remembered me, and there were several people who approached me to tell me how much they’d enjoyed “Criteria” which I’d performed at the Minneapolis Fringe back in 2006! It is perhaps the greatest satisfaction of what I do, to grasp the notion that some piece of who I am, or what I did, continues to mean something to people for years after I am gone. They may only come into contact with me for a single hour, but the memories of that hour make an impact that I will never quite be privy to.

Speaking of impact, my favorite production of the Minnesota Fringe this summer was a show called "The Pumpkin Pie Show," based on "Rest Area" by Clay McLeod Chapman (pictured right). Also fun were Shave & Reilly, who performed "The Department of Angels" (Caitlin Reilly is the volunteer that I grabbed for my "Bite My Tongue" video, above.")

The final night at the fringe found us partying, once more, at the First Avenue, the nightclub made somewhat famous by Prince and the movie “Purple Rain.” I managed to enjoy one last visit with friends, including the adorable stage manager from the show from "Red Tide," a show from Miami (pictured below). And while I had barely managed to get through the run of my show without damaging my knee, I couldn’t resist dancing a bit.

Monday, I was back on the road, and home in several hours. I now face a full month of time off between performances, and contemplate all the new projects that I will attempt to squeeze into that space: including three books about the theatre that are tossing around in my mind, particularly a study of Shakespeare’s most challenging soliloquies, which will also be occupying my time as I continue my attempt to memorize one monologue from each of Shakespeare’s plays! Then there’s editing more Moliere plays, possibly writing one more adaptation (of a very short one), and probably a few ventures to the karaoke bar.


Miles on the Vibe: 274,400

Temperature: A comfy 70 degrees.

Discoveries: I can make huge improvements if I can only get Tim-the-Actor to allow Tim-the-Director to contribute to the process. * While most of my acting efforts go towards unleashing my natural energy, the show grows just as much from efforts at restraint, keeping the Tim-gestures at bay, and enabling someone else to take over. * “Parlez-vous Anglais?” are probably the three most important words for a tourist to come armed with. * You can get to know a city better by walking through it than taking a taxi, or subway.* The “frame” that the first review or reviews put around your play becomes the prism through which subsequent viewers will perceive it, or at least find themselves forced to comment on someone else’s frame. * Some piece of who I am, or what I did, continues to mean something to people for years after I am gone.

Next performance: A workshop at North Park College (Sept 9), and another at Cardinal Stritch College (Sept 10), with a performance scheduled in Denver at the Alliance for Colorado Theatre Sept 19.

Political Rant: If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything around you starts looking like a nail. Apparently the only thing that John McCain sees as a cure-all to the nation's ills is to bomb the crap out of anything that doesn't toe the shifting line that lives in his feeble imagination. His answer: "Bomb Iraq." "Bomb Iran." "Surge Iraq." "Surge the Economy." Scorn his opponent for actually having done well in school!

The View From Here #132: Danville, KY; Lincoln, NE

First the immediate news! In preparation for the Minnesota Fringe Festival, four Chicago-area theatre groups are holding a Fringe preview here in Chicago on Friday, July 25! This Mini-Minne Fringe will be a the Alogon Gallery, at 1049 N. Paulina 3R (Entrance on Cortez) Starting around 8pm. There’ll be four 30-minute performances, climaxing with six numbers from “Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera!” (Admission will be $10, and there’ll be beer available.)

Next: Moliere is hipper than hip! We now have MOLIERE RINGTONES available! Be the first in your class to have your phone ring with the mellifluous “Stop, thief!” Or, for that special someone, “I’m Looking For a Groupie!” Click below to test them out!



Well, it’s been a long slog since my last blog entry, and I won’t bore you with too much of a play-by-play.

The show that concluded the Spring tour at Centre College was a blast. First of all, they designed the best poster I’ve ever seen for the show (see below), and the woman who designed the poster was generous enough to let me use it for my own purposes, including passing it on to other schools, for their publicity purposes.



My host also wrote a rather brilliant promotional e-mail to the school’s distribution, and the following went out:

Dear Colleagues and Students,

Here's an invitation to Molière Than Thou. It is a Convocation, a one-man show done superbly by Tim Mooney. Tim performs at the Combs Warehouse on this Thursday evening, April 24th, at 7:00 p.m.

If you are suffering from Molière deficiency--the basic symptoms of which are
--atrophy of the ability to distinguish between sincerity and hypocrisy,
--obsession with money and savings,
--compulsion to sacrifice friends and loved ones to grand ideas,
--and delusions of grandeur
--then Tim Mooney is the remedy you need! Get well.

Ken Keffer
Chair French

There were all sorts of difficulties with the venue, where I ended up performing on an 8x8 platform, set on a diagonal, to give me a slight more vertical and horizontal distance to travel (high school geometry was coming back to me, and memories of the calculation of the hypotenuse). The room was hot, and I was sweating under unfiltered lights … But the room was packed! We’d set up about 100 chairs, and well over 150 people showed up. I could see people watching from a staircase from at least 100 feet away. Again, the volunteers were a blast, most notably the “Doctor” volunteer, and the host was quite pleased with the results.


Racing home, I dove full time into my e-mail campaign for the 09-10 season. I spent the entire month of May sending out to Theatre, French, History and English profs. Since the theft of my computers, this was the third such mailing to this particular list, and the repetition, along with the early start this year, seems to have made a big difference. While last year I had perhaps 12 bookings on the schedule by June 1, this year I was up to 23! Six weeks further along, I’m at 34 bookings, which is quickly approaching the total set up for the whole of last year!

In the course of my massive e-mailing, a few reviews found their way back my way. This letter from the production of my version of "Imaginary Invalid" in California, where the director wrote "The show is going extremely well. Sold out nearly every performance":

I want to let you know that a large group of satisfied viewers saw THE IMAGINARY INVALID yesterday and came away with admiration and pleasure. We saw a professional production with outstanding actors in a play that seldom gets onto our stage. Imagine, a rhymed version of a French play that, in the original, was not rhymed at all! BRAVO! (Dr. Nathan and Evelyn Kravetz)

This from the Illinois Wesleyan Argus:

Mooney owns the stage in "Moliere Than Thou"
...Mooney's energy was immediately felt throughout the room the moment he took the stage. His enthusiasm quickly drew in the audience's attention, and his talent for comedic timing was nothing short of hilarious. ... [The almost bare set]allowed Mooney to fill the stage with his presence. It was all that was needed as Mooney's characters filled in what was left to the imagination.
... The audience participation made for a more intimate scene and setting, and at times it made those audience members who were not singled out laugh their hardest. ... He was infectious, causing the audience to follow his lead, getting everyone to let loose and just enjoy the show. ... Mooney [transformed] the 17th century literature into something accessible in modern times. "Moliere Than Thou" proved to be a hilariously entertaining performance, bringing the audience back in time for a brief escape from the realities of everyday life." (Allegra Gallian)

At the beginning of June, I paused for a quick trip out to Detroit for Isaac's graduation. Isaac is now, officially, taller than me ... at the age of 14!

In addition to the push for bookings, I took a weekend to work as a Pathways group leader, which was, as always, inspiring and encouraging. I threw myself back into my writing, adding more chapters to the directing book I’ve been formulating, and editing some more of my Moliere scripts into 40-Minute variations for high school competitive use. Late in June I attended the International Thespian Festival, and found myself making some terrific connections with the publishers in the exhibit hall. There was a new guy sitting at the Playscripts booth, and when I introduced myself as one of the Playscripts authors, he immediately lit up, having read several of my scripts in recent years. He was extremely encouraging, and given the fact that I had my mornings free while at this conference, I went back and edited some of the scripts that I’d been sitting on, and e-mailed them to Playscripts.

Since that conference, I have, in fact, dug out three more scripts, which I’ve been working on for publication, and between full-lengths and 40-minute variations, I could have as many as 20 plays published before long!

Meanwhile, I met up with the Acquisitions Editor at Dramatic Publishing, who I’ve been sending stuff to for over 10 years now. (I’d gotten to know her cohort, who usually runs the booth, but this time she was there.) She reminded me that they’ve been holding one of my scripts for a couple years now (an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story), and inquired about obtaining the rights!

I also got to visit with my old friend David Landis, who put me up in his lake house while I was in Lincoln. I wish I could have stayed there more, but the evenings’ schedules were filled with receptions, and I felt it was more important to be available with brocures in hand. Inevitably, if I left my room without brochures, I would immediately meet somebody who was interested in booking me!

Meanwhile, I was doing two workshops a day, and while the attendance was thin, the enthusiasm was high, with responses such as:

"The classical acting class I took from you is phenomenal and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to participate in it." (Greg Prusiewicz)

My brother Pat came out for a visit in early June, and I began planning for the mid-July American Association of Teachers of French conference, which this year is happening in Belgium! Since my son, Isaac, has been studying French for three years now, I invited him to join me and, following the conference, he and I will swing down to Paris for three days, visiting the Moliere memorials, Versailles, the Eiffel tower, and the Comedie Francaise.

I seemingly blew out my knee when jogging last spring, and it’s been a long time getting back up to speed. Ready or not, though, when July 1 hit, I had to dive back into rehearsals for “Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera,” which will be opening in a bar in Minneapolis on July 31. All has gone well, and I’m starting to get some “lift” in my grande jettes again. The show seems to be moving forward nicely, and though I’ll soon be taking a week off when I head off to Belgium, I’ll still have about a week to work on it when I get back to Chicago.



The next few days will be caught up in posters, press releases (for Minneapolis) and shipping stuff off to Belgium for the conference. I’ve invested in some new banners for my booth, and the huge copies of the publicity shots, as well as the fun poster from Centre College, should make my booth twice as eye-catching.

Miles on the Vibe: 274,000

Temperature: 50s-90s

Discoveries: People who come up with really creative ideas (posters, publicity blurbs) are more than happy to see their work live beyond the single-day’s impact. * Marketing campaigns have a cumulative impact, and the willingness to repeat my approach to the same e-mailing list gets more response with each successive assault. * I am my own worst critic, and past rejections lead me to imagine that my play submissions are an imposition, rather than a fun opportunity. * Don’t go anywhere without brochures … or business cards, for that matter. *
On the i-pod: Mastering French, discs 2-13

Next Performance: Karaoke Knights, July 25 (Chicago) and July 30-Aug 9 (Minneapolis).

Political Comment: Anybody know which of our bill of rights is still in effect?

The View From Here #131: Lake Travis, TX; Silver City, NM; Kenmore & Spokane, WA; Bristol, RI; Hempstead, NY; Paramus, NJ

I’m getting ready for the Pathways weekend, May 1-4! I did Pathways back in 2000, and proceeded to get beyond my day job, take my show on the road and enjoy the many adventures you’ve seen here. Come join me and “change your life in a weekend.”
(http://www.pathwaysseminars.com/)

I hung out in Lewisville, Texas for a couple of days, working on bringing the new computer up to speed, before dropping south to the Austin area, where I had an acting workshop at Lake Travis High School. The theatre was working on a production of “Tartuffe” (not mine, unfortunately), and I gave a two hour acting workshop, and then responded to a run-through of their performance.

The folks who put me up were great (their son wants to be an actor), and the girl playing Elmire wrote to say “I still can't believe we had the pleasure of getting your advice, probably the best we could hope for!”

And from the theatre teacher:

You were soooo helpful! We advanced yesterday with high praise from the judge, he loved us! AND, we won a ton of individual acting awards also!

(I have to include these unsolicited responses, just in case some producer reading this, is on the fence about hiring me … it’s not bragging; it’s marketing.)

From Lake Travis I drove west, with a night in El Paso, and continuing to Silver City, New Mexico, a good hour off of the beaten path of the interstate amid the mountains. The gig at Western New Mexico U had gotten cancelled in past semesters, but persistent follow up (Thanks April!) got the deal done.


The professor had neoclassical scenery already in place from a recent production. The small theatre space held about 80 in the audience, and the performance was very well received, as was an acting workshop that I gave for a much smaller group the next day. People were even buying t-shirts!

I was just getting ready to leave town when I noticed that Diana Jones, who I’d met in Tennessee, was performing in this same out-of-the-the way town, this same night. I stuck around and caught her show. She was, once again, excellent, and I particularly enjoyed her not-yet-published song about mountaintop removal. (“Appalacia”)

It was a long drive to the next performance (in Seattle), and I went by way of Los Angeles, where I was promptly invited to Easter dinner by my new friend Edwina (where a friend of hers happened to know a friend of mine from High School (Kirsten Moomey) who I hadn't seen in 30 years!), visited with my old Nebraska friends, Mari Weiss and Crystal Carson (pictured), headed through Fresno, dropping in on Rogue Theatre Fest director, “Airplane Jayne”, up through Oregon, dropping in on my brother, Pat and his family, and staying at David Yeaworth’s house in Seattle, where we visited until late in the evening. I also got a chance to visit with my good friends, and fellow playwrights, Jorj Savage and Babs Lindsay (pictured).

Inglemoor High School was hosting me on a Saturday evening, which is pretty rare for a high school, so I was really surprised when a hundred or so students came out. The show was extremely well received, and the Tartuffe volunteer was a flirtatious minx, who, at one point, wrapped her leg around mine (out of sight of the camera, though you can hear the audience reacting (clip below)). The teacher sent a collection of student responses after the fact. Here’s a very small fraction of them:

Thank you for coming to Inglemoor. You really helped me understand Moliere, I didn’t understand it at all at first. You were really funny too. And I didn’t think Moliere could be that entertaining, so THANKS!
Amanda Hall

Thank you so much for coming to Inglemoor and presenting Moliere! It was amazing and really entertaining! I enjoyed it so much! I really loved how you took skits that were written in 1600 and adapted them to make people (mainly teenagers) love it! I really think you are amazing at changing characters and an amazing actor!
Jessica Eberhardt

Your show was amazing. The way you made the plays your own was amazing and I LOVED when you came into the crowd! Great job.
(heart)
Kierra Adams

I’ve never been to such a great show such as this. Amazing performance. It’s crazy that you do a show like every night in places all over the states. You’re an amazing actor and your interpretation is hilarious. Thanks for the show!
Alex Cotige

We don’t normally get opportunities for events like this right at school, and it was a nice change. As for the performance, it was amazing! I was up front, and I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in a long time.
Thomas Mooney-Meyers [No relation]

Thanks for coming to our high school and performing a great show. I can’t think of any other way I would rather spend a Saturday night. The show was fabulous.
Noah Eakman

Thank you so much for performing for us! It was a great show and I laughed so hard. My favorite part was the “Stop Thief” part at the end. The whole show was amazing...
Kelsey Jones

Whitworth University in Spokane had hosted me six years ago, when this tour first got underway. That time, they’d put me in their hundred-seat downstairs venue. This time around, they graduated me to the big space, with over a thousand seats. There was a fifteen-foot throw, just to the first row of seats, and we worked out the lighting so that I could abandon the stage to approach the first row, and remain lit.

My friend, Joe Jacoby, who teaches theatre across the Idaho border, brought 13 of his students to see the show, many of whom had seen bits of my workshops in Joe’s classes in previous visits. Between them, and the Whitworth students who’d just performed “Tartuffe” there were great laughs throughout the show. One of the students from the previous show in Seattle, also happened to be a Whitworth student, and showed up to this show as well, asking me to autograph the t-shirt she’d bought, which in turn, gave a couple of Joe’s students the idea to pick up their own.

The theatre professor, who’d actually missed my show six years before, wrote me later to say:

I love the show – your translations, editings, segues – all work so well and do such a nice job of introducing and honoring Moliere, his works, his intentions.

I proceeded to drive from Spokane to Chicago in three days (with a brief stop in Minneapolis, to check the venue I’ll be performing at for the Minnesota Fringe) and visit with some Fringe friends, and then continued on to Rhode Island, where my next show was at Roger Williams University.

Meanwhile, a show got cancelled. Purchase College dropped me a note to indicate that they hadn’t gotten any high schools to sign on to a show they’d booked for the coming week. This made for the fourth cancellation since the beginning of the Spring semester, making it perhaps the worst semester of the tour in that regard. (This was the low point of this tour, and I started formulating incentives and disincentives to put into the contract to encourage faculty to perform the necessary follow through.)

Roger Williams had tried to host me before, but I was always across the country somewhere when they’d tried to book me. It wasn’t until after the Theatre Chair (who had wanted to book me previously) had retired, that they were actually able to work out a visit.

It turned out that only about twenty people showed up for the performance, which suggested to me that, though the retired Chair had put in a great word for the show, not everybody on the faculty was rallying behind the project. (Though my tech guy and one of the acting faculty were both enthusiastic.)

Volunteers were slow in coming, and eventually a somewhat older woman put her hand up, making for a much different scene than what we’ve seen in the past. (This pattern repeated in the very next show at Hofstra University.)

The next day, the retired chair wrote:

Terrific job last night! All those small nuances polished to perfection... and no nonsense, like hiding while doning wigs, surprising us with magical costume changes, etc. You were, in fact, just as fine and honest a performer as I supposed you'd be five or six years ago when I first hoped to employ you. ... But where were the 50 or so theatre majors? only Danya was there to represent them. I retired a year too early, I guess. BUT you didn't let that throw you; I was proud of your determination and cheered by your splendid performance.

With a couple days to spare, I dropped in on my friends, the Curtins, in New Jersey, and I introduced Dick Curtain to the Battlestar Gallactica dvd’s that I was working my way through. (BG has just begun it’s final season and I’m now caught up on episodes.)

I paused on my drive to Hofstra, to listen to a radio program, but when I went to start the car again, the battery was drained. I’ve had pretty good luck with my car over these six years of the tour, so I really don’t resent when it gives me trouble. In point of fact, it was a beautiful day, and I had plenty of time to wait for Triple-A to send a truck to give me a jump. (I suspected that, with over 200,000 miles on the car, that I might actually need that AAA membership.)

Hofstra was hosting a conference on Humor in Romance Language Literature, and I did two morning workshops on Moliere, Theatre History and Commedia. That night there were practically 200 people in the audience, and the show was fun again. Afterwards, I posted video from both the “Tartuffe” scene and the “Doctor” scene on-line, and was surprised to see the numbers of “hits” to the Doctor scene climbing sharply. Within two days, over 100 people had viewed the video, and while it was fun, it wasn’t particularly more salacious or hilarious than previous postings of the scene. Just to cover my tracks, I wrote to the host, asking him to get the volunteer’s okay. (Just in case the student was reluctant to have her image posted, I didn’t want the video to “go viral” until I had written confirmation.) She wrote me directly to say that she’d already noticed the video, and had pointed it out to a few of her friends (explaining the sudden rush of “hits”). (Yipes! It's already gotten over 1500 hits!)

This note from the workshop host to the fellow who’d coordinated the performance:

… His presentation had wit, wisdom, variety, and humor, and served the purposes of both my History of Drama class and my Intro to Theatre. His insights and comments on asides and soliloquies as well as his demonstration of commedia lazzi were very clear (and very funny), and both groups of students--when queried in Monday's classes—spoke positively of the experience.

I drove to Baltimore and hung out with my sister, Maureen, and her husband, Tim for a few days, and worked on editing new, shortened versions of my “The Misanthrope” and “Doctor in Spite of Himself,” getting both of them down to 40 minutes, which I’ll be sharing as an alternate publication with the folks at Playscripts, Inc, who are publishing my full-length versions of these plays.

Back north in New Jersey, I performed at Paramus Catholic High School. This one was arranged by the spouses of two good friends in the New York area, as the wife of playwright Michael T. Folie (whose plays I’ve produced twice in the past) teaches English, and the husband of my New York City stage manager, Suzanne DuCharme teaches Theatre, both at Parmaus. Everyone saw to it that I was well taken care of in my brief visit, but I found myself struggling through the course of the show. Among the four to five hundred or so students in attendance, there seemed to be only a handful of chaperones, and some students were chatting. (I was beginning to realize that rather than suggesting a certain ratio of chaperones in my “hosting hints,” I need to put that up front in the contract.)

I used just about every trick in my bag, including pausing, staring down the vociferous students, talking quietly to make them listen, and then talking loudly to wake them up, but by the time I got to the last monologue, there was little attention left to be paid. Later on I looked at the video of the show, shot from behind the students by Lynn Curtin (who’d come to see the show for her third or fourth time), and I had to wince at the fact that a girl in the back row turned to talk with her friend as often as she watched what was going on onstage.

The “Tartuffe” sequence was, however, a big hit with the kids, probably too big. Although the scene is thick with double-entendre, it seems they were only hearing the words’ secondary meanings. I did everything I could to pull the reins on this scene, even dropping out some of my favorite lines, just to prevent these Catholic students from turning the show into a riot of raging hormones.

That night I drove in to New York City, catching dinner with the hilarious Tom X. Chao, and enjoying the first preview of my friend Yvonne’s new show, “The Devil and Tom Walker.” (Somehow, it seems that every time I’m passing through New York, Yvonne has a show about to open.)

I headed southwest, where I look forward to wrapping up the spring tour at Centre College in Kentucky.

It will be good to get home again. And unpack the car.

Miles on the Vibe: 268,000
Temperature: Approaching mid-seventies
Discoveries: While I’ve tried to keep the performance contract as simple as possible in the past (I’ve prided myself in keeping it to a single page), it’s probably time for me to make the demands I need to guarantee the best experience I can to the hosts, as well as guaranteeing my on ability to survive from semester to semester. This is not “being a diva” but ensuring the necessary conditions for the best experience possible.
On the i-pod: Podcasts of the Rachel Maddow Show
Next performance: Centre College, Danville, IL, April 24.

The View From Here #130: Ann Arbor, MI; Bloomington, IL; Chattanooga, TN; Bristol, TN; Newberry, SC; Oklahoma City, OK

EDITOR’S NOTE: Once again, a computer crash has wiped some e-mail addresses from my memory. If you know of someone who ought to be receiving these posts, but is not, please put them in touch with me at tim_mooney@earthlink.net.

I had the first half of February at home, following through, mostly, on an e-mailing project begun in Hawaii. I was writing to the list gathered over the summer, of 11,000 Theatre, French, English and History profs, generally targeting two states per day, working my way, “virtually,” across the country.

I stumbled across news that Brother Robert Ruhl, my High School Advanced Placement English teacher, had died. While I have had teachers that I may have liked more (I was always a bit intimidated by Brother Ruhl), I must say that perhaps the measure of a great teacher is just how much that teacher’s voice remains in your head, in the years to follow. I hear Brother Ruhl’s voice repeatedly, particularly when I’m writing. Brother Ruhl ran a one-man campaign against clichés, and I have to credit him for my current unwillingness to settle for easy, flip descriptions of idiosyncratic ideas or situations. Every time I hear someone use the phrase, “Needless to say …” I have to bite back the urge to say, as Brother Ruhl did so many times “… then why say it?” I am grateful for his relentless tyranny over lazy wordsmithing.

I managed to wrap up my e-mailing a couple days before I was due to hit the road again. By this time, there were almost 75 inquiries pending for the coming year. I don’t usually track things this early, but this strikes me as nearly double the usual.

I drove to Detroit, celebrating Isaac’s birthday (14 now, and taller than I am), and continued to Ann Arbor, where I was performing at the U of Michigan’s “Residential College,” a self-contained college-within-the-university, one square block of campus containing both student housing as well as classrooms and administration. The Theatre, as well as the French faculty, had teamed up to bring me in, and I enjoyed hanging out with both for coffee before the show and beer and pizza afterwards.

I gave a commedia acting workshop in the afternoon and a performance that night. I’d wanted to videotape it, but my camera (perhaps frozen from sitting in the car while I was in Hawaii?) was suddenly not powering up. It was a nice crowd of perhaps a hundred, but a quiet-ish group. The faculty still seemed quite taken with the show, and after a very cold night in Michigan, I began to inch my way southward, this time to Bloomington, Illinois.

I’d performed at Illinois Wesleyan two years before, and I continue to make use of an unequivocally enthusiastic quote from their French professor in my advertising. (He now tells me that the show was so good that “I found myself forgetting that you were speaking in English!”) He was hosting me for a workshop, but it seemed to fall outside of their normal class schedule, and ultimately three students showed up. Attendance that evening was likewise, less than three years before (a packed house), but it so happened that I’d recruited much of the audience myself. I’d written some of the local professors at Illinois State, who sent over a contingent of students working on a production of “Tartuffe,” as well as a local high school French teacher.

It so happened that the high school group had also come to the show three years previously, and some students who were Freshmen that first time around, were now Seniors, and determined to get up for the volunteer scenes this time around.

I managed to grab a few stills from the volunteer scenes to send the high school teacher the next day. (She wrote back that her students were thrilled.) And, in a bit of a coincidence, it turned out that the woman to whom I delivered my “Tartuffe” monologue was, in fact, playing Elmire in the Illinois State “Tartuffe!”


At last I found myself driving into warm weather, and it was a relief to be able to peel off a couple of layers.

In Chattanooga, I was hosted by another French teacher who had seen my show at the conference in Baton Rouge last summer. Ginnie and her husband put me up in a gorgeous house on Signal Mountain, and I managed to get a little jogging in on the morning of the show.

The show is rarely scheduled on Sundays, and I had little expectation for a large turnout, but ultimately 75 or so came out for the show, including some big laughers, particularly Ginnie’s husband, who was an English teacher at the same school. Everything was running smoothly until the last scene, during which the lights all went into a sudden blackout! Moliere noted that “It seems that a brisk wind has suddenly blown all of the candles out …” The audience remained remarkably quiet until the lights came back on about 30 seconds later.

Ginnie has since sent along a series of enthusiastic reports from her students, including ...

• You have an amazing gift for acting and you use it for the right reasons.

• … I have never seen anyone contort their face in such ways yet still manage to portray an accurate message. …

• Bravo! Your acting performance and skills were wonderful. I especially loved the audience interaction. I also enjoyed your improvation when the lights went out! You were constantly entertaining and a thrill to watch!

• Meci beaucoup! You were fantastic and hilarious! I’m so glad you came because my weekend was boring! My favorite scene was when you were the kid with the funky hat. It was so funny how you came up into the audience and your hat was absolutely amazing! …

• … I’ve never seen a one-man show, but am glad your’s was my first. The interactions you made with the audience were hilarious … even more so because of the apparent discomfort (in a good way) you caused them. Please come back for a second performance soon! Stop thief!

• … Very many times one-man shows can become tedious and long-winded, but Moliere Than Thou was entertaining and hilarious throughout the performance …

• … I’m between two scenes to pick as my favorite. Although I think I enjoyed the love scene with Forrest’s mom. …

• … You were an incredible actor. Your use of the audience (Including my mother and me) was especially cool. My favorite scene (and maybe yours?) was the “stop thief” scene. It was a great experience to read those lines on the same stage, too. Your stage presence is amazing. …

Immediately following the show (and the brief reception that followed), I raced north once again. I had a show the next morning (and a second show the next evening) at King College in Bristol, Tennessee.

I was a bit apprehensive about this performance, perhaps most specifically because the fellow who had booked me was the college “Chaplain.” When I inquired about their tolerance-level, he laughed and told me that, while they were a rather conservative group, they had been receptive to a wide variety of performers, encouraging me to go ahead with the “PG-13” version of the show.


There were about 100 students for the morning show, and I played the first “Tartuffe” scene to a theatre student in the front row, and later pulled her up on stage for the two-person scene. During the “Scapin” scene, I found myself climbing over the pews of the chapel, and where I normally look for a student holding a program to represent the “transcription,” I realized that these students had not been provided with programs, and none of them seemed to have loose papers or a notebook in hand. I found a hymnal on the back of a seat, and cracked that open to “transcribe” upon.

I was later informed that the woman whose lap Scapin sits upon during his pass through the audience, was in fact the chaplin’s wife … who seemed to be enjoying the show just fine.

During the evening show, I spied a cute student in the second row, to whom I delivered the first “Tartuffe” scene (climbing over the front row pew), and while that played to an uproarious response, when I enlisted that same student for the scene on-stage, she was a bit too freaked out for it to be much fun. I did, however, bring the much more responsive theatre department student, who’d come back to see it again, for the “Doctor” scene.

Newberry College (in South Carolina) was bringing me in to perform the rarely-booked “Criteria,” and I was feeling pretty good about the show following a successful performances in Hawaii and Texas. My host was meticulous in getting the stage and the lighting ready for the show though, unfortunately, the fellow who headed the department was stuck at home with a sick daughter that night. I had worked the show back up to speed, and again made special arrangements to get this one videotaped, since I had so little useable footage of this performance.

I emerged and began the show, performing to perhaps 50 people in the darkened auditorium. I came on strong, pushing the action forward. But I could feel that the audience wasn’t coming with me. The occasional in-jokes of the show … wry ironic observations that are funny in the context of “what really happens” 300 years into our future, went seemingly unnoticed.

They were distanced, almost as if they were watching a movie rather than a live human being. I began getting apprehensive, and dropped a line. I paused, checked back with the book that I keep on stage with me, and resumed. Later, again, I found myself farther out on the thrust stage than expected, and a quirk of the acoustics distracted me with a sudden echo. Again, I faltered in my delivery and continued, but this time perhaps half-a-page ahead of the spot that I’d left off. This would be confusing with the guy in the booth, but thankfully unnoticible to the audience.

After the show, I met with some of the theatre students, whose typical response was that “That was really … interesting!”

The next day, I was off to Greenwood, where my friend Bess was booking me to direct and act in “The Misanthrope” next March, and we pieced together a formula which would enable me to afford the extended visit, as I would earn income from three distinct sources, with one third of the money coming from the community theatre, another third from the local college, and the final third from bookings arranged with nearby schools.

With a few extra days before heading back to Chattanooga for the Southeast Theatre Conference, and no bookings to keep me afloat, I plotted stops in towns where I figured the hotels would be relatively cheap. My first stop was in Spartanburg, SC, where there just happened to be a karaoke bar in the hotel. It turned out to be perhaps one of the liveliest karaoke bars I’ve visited (their favorite song was by Rodney Carrington, with memorable audience participation).

From there, I continued to Asheville, meeting for lunch with our good friend Sandra-the-Vegan, before pushing on to Knoxville, where I spent three days getting work done, and, in anticipation of another weekend of group-leading with my Pathways (http://www.pathwaysseminars.com/) friends in early May (May 1-4 for anyone who wants to join us), I turned my attention toward a project I’ve done two or three times in years past:

I wrote out 100 goals.

In the past, this project has been extremely revealing, as I get a look at projects unwittingly set aside. Eight years ago, while doing this, I noticed that I held the conflicting goals of quitting my day job, and getting two root-canals done. Since the day-job was necessary for the dental benefits (which made the root canals possible), my squeamishness around getting this work done was effectively keeping me from committing full time to my work. (Less than a week of completing the root canals, a call came in with an offer to direct a show!)

I found my goals fell into five separate “buckets”:

Things I can do today (Stuff like clearing out space on my hard drive, or adjusting the volume on my Preview DVD)
Things I can do in less than a single day (Like upload more scenes to YouTube, or trim “Tartuffe” down to 40 minutes)
Long projects, ranging from several days to a year (Like burn 100 Preview DVDs, or finish writing my adaptation of “Amphitryon”)
Ongoing projects that demand daily effort (Such as “Exercise Daily,” “Memorize Shakespeare Monologues,” “Work on My French”)
Eternal projects which will never be quite complete. (“End Global Warming,” or “End Torture,” or “Find Inner Peace”)

And then, as these categories surfaced, I also noted four “game changers,” goals which, if accomplished, would change the very landscape of the playing field for me.

• Publishing my collection of “Moliere Monologues”
• Getting “Moliere Than Thou” featured on a “Great Performances”-type program
• Publishing “Acting at the Speed of Life”
• Relocating to Los Angeles

In Chattanooga, at the Southeast Theatre Conference, I met up with April, who drove down to help me out. She brought down the display items for my booth, as well as my latest bit of “swag:” Moliere T-Shirts! We’ve created a new Moliere T-Shirt, with the “Moliere Bowing” logo stretched across the chest, and the “Moliere Than Thou” calligraphy on the back. Please buy one off of me the next time I’m in town!

April and I met up with my dear friend, Sabra, and her new husband, Paul, for karaoke our first night in town. We then spent Wednesday morning pulling together the last of the DVDs and creating further documentation for the exhibit booth.

However much I may prepare for a conference, different agendas arise, and about half of the pre-work goes for naught, while other things become much more important. Just about everybody, though, was quite pleased to take a brochure and a promotional DVD. And, the brochures almost ran out as the weekend continued. (The t-shirt were not especially popular, but I had actually created them so that the conference attendees might actually recognize Moliere-staff members who weren’t me.)

The booth traffic was great this year. I collected lots of business cards, lots of e-mail addresses, gave out perhaps 150 brochures and DVDs, and chatted with dozens of people interested in booking the show.

[About this time I received confirmation that I'm getting publshed again! Playscripts, Inc. has written to inform me that they'll be publishing my versions of "The Misanthrope", "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" and my 40-minute version of "Imaginary Invalid"!]

The biggest issue was that there was no self-evident watering hole where all the faculty would gather to schmooze. I happened to overhear, though, that there was a karaoke bar just a block away, and so I ended up hanging out there every night. By the end of the weekend, I had made several friends at this place, and gave one of the better singers there a Moliere T-shirt, which he proceeded to have all of the actors autograph.

Given my “Game-Changing Goals” list, I found myself focusing on the publishers who had booths in the exhibit hall, and casually asked the Samuel French representative (with whom I had a cordial saying-hello acquaintance over several of these conferences) whether they published any monologue collections (“Yes.”), and whether he might be willing to take a look at my book proposal. He said yes, and I e-mailed it to him the next morning. (It didn’t hurt that I’d enlisted April to help watch his booth while he was out speaking on a panel.)

While I was on that roll, I asked the fellows at the neighboring booth, who handle musicals, if they’d be willing to give a read/listen to my musical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day.” (Another affirmative.)

April and I packed up the booth (all the while running into old theatre friends) and headed out shopping.

I had decided it was time to get a new laptop. With the bookings rolling in, and the hard drive of my old laptop filling up (dabbling in video was using massive globs of memory), I was starting to eye new machines that could hold nearly twice as much as my current laptop. And April could translate all of the computereez that the spec sheets were describing. I ultimately settled on a Sony (Vaio), with 3 gigabytes of memory and 250 gig of storage.

And then the old computer crashed.

With astounding timing, the old computer crashed and would not revive, before I could manage to transfer over the memory from one computer to the other.

Fortunately, since the last such disaster, I’ve managed to back up my documents on a fairly regular basis. I’m now working to reconstruct information that I’d gathered since February 25 (my last back-up), but the damage done is nothing compared to the theft of two computers and a hard drive backup in the summer of 2006.

I headed west, stopping in Little Rock and Norman, Oklahoma … all the while downloading and updating and memorizing. I did a workshop at Norman North High School, where they were working on Romeo and Juliet. In anticipation, I’d been working on the Mercutio “Queen Mab” speech (one of my goals is to memorize one monologue from every Shakespeare play), and had some fun working through my insights around this piece with the students.

I continued up to Oklahoma City, where there was some last minute confusion. They thought I was supposed to be performing for them on Friday, while I was certain we’d scheduled for a Thursday show. My host quickly realized that a Thursday performance would be much better than a Friday show, considering that Spring Break began on Saturday. With less than 24 hours advance notice, he pulled together a Thursday show, and about 40-50 theatre majors showed up. … and were a FABULOUS audience.

I was in a tight, tiny thrust arrangement, with students to either side of me, as I played in between banks of audience, packed in elbow-to-elbow. In this intimate arena, they responded hysterically every time I singled one of them out as the object of a given character’s derisive reference.

I wrapped up the show, headed back to the swank hotel they had me in, and am now heading south, with a weekend in Dallas, ahead of a workshop in Austin on Monday. With two days to hole up in a hotel, I’m hoping to get these words posted, download some pics and videos, and rebuild my distribution list.

Miles on the Vibe: 260,000

In the DVD Player: Battlestar Gallactica, Season One (The best “Season One” I’ve seen since the first season of “24”)

Discoveries: The measure of a great teacher is just how much that teacher’s voice remains in your head, in the years to follow. * Scanning the student responses, the vast majority cite the “audience interaction” as being their favorite part. I need to keep that in mind when arranging the performances, so that the hosts put a priority on finding an intimate setting over a vast proscenium space. * There are projects that I have unwittingly set aside in recent years, and the dreams of accomplishing them are lying dormant just beneath the surface. * Amongst my goals are certain “game changers” which may not be as difficult or as time-consuming as the rest of my goals, but which may change the entire landscape. * However much I may prepare for a conference, about half of the pre-work goes for naught, while other things become much more important.

Temperature: 78 Degrees (in Dallas)

Quick Plug for a Friend: Risa Kaparo, who I've been coaching on her one woman show is a finalist for the John Lennon Songwriting contest! Please go to http://www.jlsc.com/vote.php and vote for her song, "The Bible, Before!" It takes about two minutes to register and you can vote once a day if you are so inclined!

Political Rant: The US Treasury is being fleeced by contractors like KBR, who, under the "cost plus" arrangement (arranged by their former CEO), have the incentive to increase their costs any way they can. As such, they triple the cost of white towels by adding embroidering with the company logo on them, thereby earning themselves triple the commission by flaunting their advertisement in the face of low-level soldiers, who get not "cost-plussed" but "stop-lossed." They used to have a phrase for it, and "war profiteering" used to be considered one step away from treason. (I wonder if the towels were made of fleece?)

Next Performance: Western New Mexico University, March 19