Thursday, January 8th: When I woke up, I went downstairs for breakfast in our very ritzy hotel called the Edgewater. It is almost resort like and sits right on one of the lakes that surround Madison. The restaurant overlooks the lake and it was a gorgeous sunny morning. Out waiter’s name was Shawn and he was a performer at one point in his life. He talked with us a lot and told us about a number of great things to do in Madison. We had a $10 breakfast voucher which went pretty far at the restaurant. I went back upstairs for another work day in the morning. This time I spoke with a number of venues and got a lot accomplished. After the work and lunch, we headed out to our venue for load in. This load in went a little slower than we had expected and our local crew was divided up in a way that we didn’t expect. It took the whole five hours of load in and still needed a little bit of time to put the finishing touches of the show. Back at the hotel, Rudy, Eric and I got some Chinese delivery and played 9 holes of Wii Tiger Woods Golf.
Friday, January 9th: I had an early breakfast with a few other people on the crew, with Shawn as our waiter again, before setting out to go back to the theater. Eric, Jill, Rudy and I arrived 30 minutes earlier than normal to finish up the details of load in and the cast showed up just as usual for the microphone check. We had two more shows today at 10:00am(43) and 12:30am(44). After the show, Eric, Lindsay, Rudy and I went over the Wisconsin State Capitol building, which was only a couple of blocks from the venue and hotel. We went on a fabulous tour of the building with a fantastic guide who was extremely knowledgeable about Wisconsin history. The Capitol building has to be one of the most beautiful public buildings that I have ever seen. A number of large painting, lots of different marble and granite, and some phenomenal stained glass skylights. Then Lindsay and I went over the Madison Historical Museum and looked around there. They were having an exhibit called “Odd Wisconsin” which focused on a number of strange/funny/eccentric things that happened in the state of Wisconsin. We also looked around at the other historical facts and displays about the last 200 years of Wisconsin history. After that we walked a few blocks down Strait Street, which runs from the Capitol to the University of Wisconsin, then cut back over to our hotel. That night was all about relaxing, talking to Michelle, watching TV and going to bed at a reasonable time.
Saturday, January 10th: We had the morning off so I took the time to pack up my bags. We left the hotel and headed to the venue for our last performance at 2:00pm(45) at the Overture Center. When I got there, I plugged the truck in to warm up the gas(which had probably frozen overnight.) We’ve been trying to do this as much as possible because it helps the truck start up easier. Our performance went over well and we rolled through strike without any problems. When we started to pack the truck, I realized that our lift gate(which runs off the battery) was running a little slow. Rudy had already turned the truck on once since we started load out and it turned on fine. This time however, He tried to turn it on and it was obvious that the battery was too low to turn the engine. I told Caroline to call Ryder and tell them we killed the battery and we continued the truck pack with a ramp that the venue had. We used the lift gate for one other piece because there would have been no other way to get it up into the truck. About 15 minutes after we finished packing the truck, a road-side service pick-up truck pulled up. The guy jumped out, plugged the jumpers into his truck, clipped them onto our truck battery and had me turn the key. With one turn, the truck went on. We let it run for about 45 minutes while we went and got a slice of pizza. It was a good lesion never to use the lift gate with a cold battery. Then we set off on our 118 mile(5705 total miles) drive to Appleton, Wisconsin. After we got the hotel, Caroline, Jeffrey, Jill and I had dinner at the Texas Roadhouse, which was right next to our hotel.
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