How I Spent My Break, or I Am NEVER Moving Again!

So as is typical of me when I have a stretch of time, I make grand plans. Only rarely does reality actually come close to what I envision. Here is the story of my break between tours:

So to begin with, I knew that I was going to be moving. I am hoping to continue touring as long as there is work or I grow sick of it. The thought of paying rent on a place that I was not living in was not very appealing so I consulted with Mom and Dad who agreed to let me move my stuff back to their house. Jamie too had a spare bedroom in which I could store some things.

Jeremy had kindly agreed to let me play for the first two weeks of Kiss Me Kate at the Round Barn. I was grateful for the chance because it was nice to have work, and I like the show. I had also hoped to be able to go see a few shows in Chicago. I made plans to meet up with a high school friend who discovered me on Faceboook. I also wanted to take a quick trip to Bloomington to see the Sweeney Todd tour which has several former members of The Wedding Singer company.

I was going to get on my bike and go for a ride every day, and I planned to get to the gym as often as possible. In other words, I was going to have a restful yet productive month off. Here is what really happened:




I did get into Chicago to meet my friend Jerry for dinner. She is one of the few people from high school who I have any desire to reestablish contact with. So we agreed to meet for dinner on a Wednesday so that I could kill two birds with one stone and see a show in the afternoon. I ended up seeing Jersey Boys from the limited view rush seats. The show was fine. I personally do not see what the big fuss is about, but then I am also not a huge fan of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Dinner with Jerry was fun. It was a lot of, "Can you believe that was 15 years ago. That seems so long ago." Okay that part of it was a bit depressing! She also was remembering more names of people and stories than I was. I kept wishing I had brought along a yearbook!

I was also able to get in a repeat visit to Wicked in Chicago. I had wanted to see the show again because I thought it would be fun to see right before going out on tour with The Wizard of Oz. I also wanted to actually win the lottery if for no other reason than a matter pride. Amazingly I did win. It only took 4 tries.

I then drove back to Nappanee in time to catch the last performance of Carousel at the Round Barn. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the production. The orchestra sounded fantastic. It was a combination of instruments that I frequently like to play with: piano, violin, cello, and flute. There was also a tuba player playing the string bass book. To Jim's credit, he pulled it off. Only rarely did his tuba sound like a tuba and not a bass. Afterwards I went to Mancino's with Earle and Sara, my two favorite cello players.

Thus began the packing and moving portion of my break. My plan was to be sensible, and try to eliminate as many things as I could. Jan and John decided to have another garage sale, and Mom and Dad were also planning on having one. I had lived in that apartment for 8 years, and for the normal person that is more than enough time to accumulate a bunch of junk. For a hyper obsessive person like me, that was enough time to accumulate several large mountains of junk.
My master plan was to take advantage of technology to get rid of a bunch of different things. I had planned to transfer as many old video tapes to DVD as possible. But of course I wanted to organize everything as I did it so that all of the performances from Ragtime would all be on one disc while all of the episodes of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy show were on another, and so on. I also wanted to scan and save to my computer as many of the copies of Reed books from shows that I have played in the past. One never knows when one might need the Reed I book from Anne of Green Gables for instance. I also had a bunch of old cassette tapes of shows that I wanted to digitize in my computer.

So what did I accomplish? Well I was able to eliminate over 50 video tapes. I did scan a few Reed books, but not nearly as many as I had hoped to. And well I just did not even touch the cassette tapes. All of these things take time, and as I discovered that was something I did not have enough of!

One mistake that I made was to assume that playing Kiss Me Kate was not going to impede my moving. After playing shows for 10 years, I have become a bit blase about starting a new show. Every once in a while though a show comes along and kicks my butt. That happened with Thoroughly Modern Millie a couple of years ago, and sadly it happened with Kiss Me Kate. It is a hard show. I actually had to practice it just to do a passable job. In a way it was really frustrating because I did not have enough time to learn Kate properly because I was also having to find time to practice Wizard while still making headway in the packing and moving.

Thankfully I did have help in moving. Tanya came over a couple of times to help. Mom and Dad drove out once with the pickup, and again with the pickup and a trailer to move the big items. I myself made several trips between Nappanee and Cedar Lake. Unfortunately the garage sale that Jan and John were going to have was pushed back to this last weekend so I was stuck with several big items that I had hoped to sell. But I kept chipping away, and that took me up to my last week before flying out to start the tour.

In my ideal vision of what my last week would be like, I had envisioned a leisurely trip to Bloomington to see my Sweeney Todd friends on Tuesday and then spending the night and hanging out with them on Wednesday during the day. Maybe even contacting my old flute professor Kate to try to meet up with her. I was going to be down to just my instruments, and an air mattress left at the apartment. I was going to finally have that birthday dinner with Heather and Jamie at Sushi Samba, and Jamie and I were going to go see Amadeus at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

That is not how it turned out. I did get my trip to Bloomington to see Sweeney Todd.

It turned out to be exactly what I needed. By this point I was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown because of the way things were going. I always love going back to Bloomington, but I do prefer to have time to wander around the campus, walk down Kirkwood, go to the Mall, and see all of the old sights. As it was I just barely made it in time for the show, and I was only able to stay for lunch the next day because I ended up having to play for Kiss Me Kate. I had a great visit though despite the time constraints. The show was good. Cimma was fantastic as Mrs. Lovett, and she even threw in the "fist shaking CLAUS" gesture during the curtain call. We all went to Kilroy's after the show for drinks. I love how in my picture with Cimma she appears to be removing the cap to my beer with her teeth! The next day we had lunch at The Trojan Horse. Merritt of all people had never had saganaki. Needless to say I introduced him to the pleasures of flaming cheese! I was glad that I had the chance to go visit my old Wedding Singer friends, but then I had to go back and face reality again.

I ended up playing for Kate on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon because no replacement had been found for me. Ultimately that was my downfall. That was time when I really should have been finishing up my packing and starting on the painting. My goal was to out by Friday night, but it soon became apparent that was not going to happen.

On Friday, we had arranged to have lunch with some of the old timers from the Round Barn. It was a good time, and thankfully not too sad and maudlin like it could have been. Also sadly it was in the new Mexican restaurant in Nappanee which just opened up since I started touring. The food was really good. Why couldn't it have been open for the last 10 years! Oh well that is the story of my life.

So then I had my final push to finish moving. I spent the rest of Friday practicing and painting. On Saturday instead of seeing a show like we planned, Jamie came to Nappanee to get a load of stuff. I then finished painting, said goodbye to Scott, squared up with Jan and John, and started filling my car with the last load. Unfortunately I had about two times the amount of stuff than would fit in my car.

After having one last nervous breakdown, I called to make sure someone could come out and pick up the rest of my things, and left Nappanee at 9:30pm.

The moral of this sad story? As grateful as I am to everyone who helped me move, I should have just bunged everything into a storage unit last week, and dealt with it when I have the time. Oh well!

I flew out this morning at 7am, and I am sitting in the hotel in Gainsville. I start rehearsal tomorrow, and thus begins The Wizard of Oz blog. (I am sorry to see that the weird formating issues continue even in green!)