(45) Gillette, WY

Thursday, February 26th: This morning was a morning of relaxation. I bundled up and walked over to the Wal-Mart to pick up some lunch and other stuff like that. It was a nice little walk around the corner and I was out of the hotel for a good hour. After I came back, I kept up my relaxing morning by handing out in my room and reading. We had a venue meeting and then headed off to load in at the Cam-Plex Heritage Center. The first thing I try to do at load in is check to see that everything was hung correctly. As I was checking through their hang, I noticed that one of the electrics was hung on the wrong pipe. We held off opening the truck until they had moved the electric to the correct pipe which only put us about 15 minutes behind schedule. The rest of load in went very well and I had plenty of time to sit and read while Eric finished up the lighting focus.

Friday, February 27th: We had a 9:30am(70) show which went very well, except of the fact that we had the wrong curtain time. Our schedules had said 9:15am but when I talked to my contact a couple of weeks before he had told me it was 9:30am. At 9:15am(our original curtain time), Caroline was giving the 15 minute call and one of the local guys said the show was at 9:45am. Apparently a school had asked them to change the time for some unknown reason. Luckily it was later rather than earlier! After the show we went back to the hotel and I took a van of people to Wal-Mart to get lunch. When I got back to the hotel it was time to get down to more work. I won’t write it all out here, but it was an afternoon of quenching fires. First was issues we were having with our venue in Stockton. They didn’t have all the soft goods we needed for the show, so I took some time to call places in Sacremento, Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Clara looking for soft goods to rent. These called included calls to a number of people whom I had worked with in the Bay Area. Then I had a call with my contact in Cerritos, California about questions to the light plot that would let us load in the night before the show instead of the morning off(it is scheduled right now as a 5:30am load in!) Then Rudy and I took the vans to get oil changes. We went to Wal-Mart, again, and they told us it would be an hour and a half so we went around the corner to another quick change place. There they told us that we didn’t have an oil cap on one of the vans and they didn’t have one we could purchase. We then went to three different auto parts places, including the Ford Dealership, looking for the part. Finally we headed back to the hotel where I ended up called placed in Bremerton, Washington(our next stop) to find a place to order the piece. After a bit of a struggle with the Ford Dealership there, they finally ordered the part for me to pick up on Monday. And the day wasn’t over. At 5:15pm, we headed back to the Cam-Plex for a 6:30pm(71) show. Before the show, Caroline and I had a long drawn out discussion about the understudy rehearsals we were going to have at the beginning of April. Margo, who plays Tock, will be leaving after the first week in April and her understudy, Jamie, will be joining the tour. We had one hell of a time figuring out where and when the best times for rehearsal would be that week since we have 10 shows in that one week. Load out went very quickly and we were back at the hotel in no time.