Well, dear readers, it is June. I don’t know, is this year flying by, like a gazelle reading Better Homes and Gardens? I do believe it is. But let me just say that it is my fervent hope and prayer that June will be a month filled with health, wealth, happiness, creativity, and all things bright and beautiful.
The final day of May was a perfectly lovely one, although I did not get enough sleep. I did do a two-mile jog in the morning, then went to K’s Donuts and got a dozen (including four of my beloved chocolate peanut butter things) for our stumble-through. Our stumble-through was earlier than usual, at one. Certainly it was a very good stumble-through with wonderful performances by everyone and I do believe I took less notes than for any other stumble-through. We only had a couple of lyric flubs, including one by yours truly – not really a flub, per se, I just went to the wrong section of the song, but recovered immediately. The show order and structure worked wonderfully – it’s an odd one, order-wise, in that it’s one of the few that has several up and/or comic songs in a row. But that’s the way it felt like it would play best, and play well it did.
Afterwards, the Staitman clan and I went to their restaurant of choice, Casa Vega. I was a very good boy and only had one beef taco and one cheese enchilada and completely abstained from chips or my usual enchilada sides of guacamole and sour cream. The food was wonderful, as always. Then I came home, read through the commentary, made some little fixes and printed it out, so everything is ready. Then I was very tired, so I sat on my couch like so much fish.
Yesterday, I watched a motion picture on Blu and Ray from the U and K entitled An Inspector Calls. I actually began it and within thirty seconds was fast asleep for the next forty minutes or so. I went back to the beginning and watched the short movie (eighty minutes). The first time I’d ever seen An Inspector Calls was Stephen Daldry’s weird but wonderful 1994 production on Broadway. I loved it. The film is a different beast entirely, inserting a ton of flashbacks that don’t exist in the play so we can see a character who is only talked about in the play. Still, the film is very well acted and I quite enjoyed it. The transfer was decent, but very gray. After that, I watched the first forty minutes of one of my favorite films ever, Preston Sturges’ marvelously marvelous Sullivan’s Travels, starring two of my favorite actors, Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, and they are supported by some of the best male and female character actors of all time. The dialogue is quite brilliant and the kind they simply don’t know how to write anymore. They say it’s a new HD transfer, but it sure doesn’t look like it. It’s acceptable but not much more. It does have detail, but it’s nowhere near other black-and-white transfers that have been done from that era. Who knows, maybe they worked with the best they had (the master was made from a dupe negative and who knows how many generations down that dupe negative was). But the film is just wonderful and I’ll finish it but probably not until tomorrow.
After that, I just relaxed and played on the computer for a while, and I went through some photographs from the Richard Sherman event. Here they are. First, Richard and me.
Here we are, sitting and conversing.
Here’s Sami singing the Nonsense Words medley with Richard looking on. He loves the way Sami performs it.
Here’s Jenna doing Suddenly It Happens, a song I absolutely love. Jenna’s done it at a Kritzerland show and she really kills with it, as she did at this event.
Here I am, singing Two Roads with Richard at the piano.
And here we are at Genghis Cohen – first Sami, me and Sami’s sister Sarah.
And finally, our entire Genghis group – back row left to right: Karen Staitman, Heather Hoppus-Werner (Jenna’s mom), Barry Pearl, Cindy Dellinger, Diane Hansen with daughter Juliana next to her. Front row, left to right: Sarah Staitman, Sami Staitman, me, Jenna, Elizabeth Sherman and Richard Sherman. And the remnants of a LOT of food.
Today, I shall hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep. I’ll try to do a jog of some sort, then I’ll relax, get ready and then mosey on over to The Federal for sound check at four. Then I’ll have my usual artichoke and then it will be show time. I’m sure we’ll go to Little Toni’s afterwards, but I have learned my lesson there and will not have anything with marinara sauce. I will, of course, have a full report.
This coming week is meetings and meals, but mostly catching up with a lot of stuff I couldn’t get to while doing Li’l Abner – including finishing liner notes, doing some paperwork I need to do, and a lot of errands and whatnot. On Tuesday, Richard Sherman will be here to sign the Two Roads sheet music and we’ll be able to get them out on Wednesday probably – I think we’ve found a good thing to ship them in that won’t bend or rip. Other than that, I intend to meet with a couple of theaters about Abner and I have to see at least one show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, relax, do a sound check, do a show, and eat. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland and get in the mood for a hopefully wonderful June – and of course it is my fervent hope and prayer that June will be a month filled with health, wealth, happiness, creativity, and all things bright and beautiful.