Opening Night

We just handed TR his MM (Master in Music) degree. This was worth not writing for a few nights and the various other sacrifices. The best comment, one of, at the meet-and-greet after the premier, was by a seven year-old girl, the Barnhart daughter, and I would expect no less, considering her father and the music he makes, TR was his student, after all. She said "When the lights went out, it was like she closed her eyes." Which is exactly what we intended. Going back to Wednesday, I wasn't sure we could make it happen. As a side bar, I'd mention that I keep saying I'm not going to work in the combined arts but that I stumble on projects that interest me. I'm a kind of jack of all trades, so my span of interest is quite large. Linda and Zack were great tonight, a magic connection, she listens to him, he punctuates her. It's amazing, you're sucked into her world, what it's like to be Emily. It's what I wanted to do. I tend to enable projects, a tic I picked up early; and this was a cool project, getting into Emily's mind. Linda is such a dream to work with, and Zach is a percussive genius, my job is staying out of the way. If I do my job perfectly, you'll never know I was there. It falls seamlessly into the framework that I knew exactly what plant that were talking about, I mentioned the name, more or less casually, and they both looked at at me as if I was a savant. It was a Night Blooming Cereus that John Cage had given a cutting from to Al, and it bloomed spectacularly the night Cage died. Hey, I read a lot. The weather was awful, the first part of the week, so I had come to town with several changes of clothes. Six inches of snow on the ridge, and I couldn't chance getting trapped. A roof leak at the museum, so I cleaned up the mess and made some phone calls. The boilers were not on, so I made some more calls, worked on the logistics for the coming days. Rain. Lunch on Tuesday Barb said I should come over for a drink with John after work, and we drank Irish whiskey and talked about Emily. Board members and facilities discussion all day Wednesday. More rain in the morning, but clearing when Glenn and Linda arrived, dinner at the pub, then Glenn and I walked over to Kroger and got a bottle of Bushmills, went back to Sara and Clay's apartment and talked for a couple of hours. Thursday, set up for the show, Zack arrived, set up the instrumentation and ran a technical rehearsal. Rusty, from being away from it for a few weeks, but knew we could run a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon, which was pretty good, and last night it all came together.