Well, dear readers, it is late so I must write these here notes in a hurry. So, let me just say that sometimes scheduling things is easy and sometimes it’s not easy and the not easy times make you want to eat the head of a chicken. We’re trying to schedule the recording of our cast album for Welcome to My World. Sami is off at camp until the evening of August 9. Check. Being a teenager I have no doubt she’s screaming her lungs out every day, so what kind of voice she’ll be in when she gets back is anyone’s guess. She’s supposed to run stuff every day at camp for an hour – hopefully she’s living up to that. Check. Our musical director is out of town (Solana Beach) doing a show until August 16. We go into rehearsal on the seventeenth, and my engineer leaves town on the twentieth or twenty-first until September 12, which is our opening night. The whole idea was to record at the beginning of rehearsals and have the CDs by opening night. If the engineer was not going out of town, that would all work out perfectly. So, we’ve been looking at our options. I can lose the first two days of rehearsal and do it on those evenings. And I could have two monologue-only rehearsals prior to that so that I’m not really losing that time. But whether the engineer will have time to mix it and whether I’ll have time to finesse it before he leaves is the real issue that week, not to mention that Sami starts school and it’s a new school for her and I think we all know how THAT is.
Another option is record the evening after she gets back from camp. But we’ll have had no time to get her back up to speed and who knows what her voice will be like. But the musical director can come for those two evenings. However, if Sami needed to fix stuff or do a whole new vocal pass on everything, as long as we get the tracks done, she can come back at the end of that week or on that weekend and we can plug in any replacement vocals – that way she’ll have had time to get up to speed and we can work on stuff before we go back in. That’s seeming like the option we should probably do because that would give us enough time to do the mix properly.
The last option is simply to wait until we’ve opened and do the following Monday and Tuesday nights. That way we’d be recording the rehearsed performance. However, if we choose that option that means we lose CD sales for the entire run, which doesn’t really make me all that happy. I mean, we can have flyers there and they can pre-order via the Kritzerland site, but it sure isn’t optimal – but none of the options are optimal. Optimal would have been to record the second weekend of rehearsals. So, I’m pondering away.
Yesterday, I had a rough night of sleep due to some foodstuff not agreeing with me. I hate when foodstuffs don’t agree with me – I agree with foodstuffs all the time, so you’d think foodstuffs could, at the very least, reciprocate – but noooooo. So, I kept waking up, but in the end I think I got close to eight hours of sleep and was feeling better by the time I arose.
Once up, I was interested to see that the day was very gray and that we’d had some actual droplets of rain. And we had some thunder, too. At some point it did actually rain more than droplets and that was a beautiful sight in this drought-ridden city. It didn’t last very long, but I’m hoping that we have more of it. I did pick up one teeny-tiny package, then came home and relaxed, but spent a lot of the day figuring out our recording options. Then it was time to mosey on over to Tony Slide and Bob Gitt’s dinner partay down the street. It was a small partay – me, cousins Dee Dee and Alan, composer John Scott, and Tony and Bob. Dinner was fun and the conversation even more fun. Tony made some pasta with chicken thing that was very good, and there was some excellent salad, too. Dee Dee made her famous lemon torte for dessert. I was very good and didn’t eat too much – just one helping of the main course, a couple of helpings of the salad, and one piece of the lemon torte. I do love dinner parties with smart, funny folks – I don’t go to many of them these days and I haven’t actually had one since before the Pogues moved away, and that’s probably going on close to a decade now. So, I think I must do a dinner party in the next month or two and hopefully I’ll remember how to make my patented stroganoff. Here is some photographic evidence of the dinner party. First is Tony and Dee Dee with her famous lemon torte.
Next we have the irrepressible and hugely talented film composer, John Scott. Not only is he a great film composer, but in his day he was a really sought after reed player in the UK – playing on many classic sessions. In fact, he’s the incredible sax soloist on the soundtrack of Goldfinger.
Finally, we have cousin Alan looking very serious, and Bob Gitt, who was taking my photo as I was taking his.
John and I left around ten. I walked home. Then I had yet more e-mails about the recording session and they flew back and forth for almost two hours.
Today, I should be able to spend a nice, relaxing day, then at five or so I’ll mosey on over to The Federal to sup and see a singer. I’m going with Doug Haverty and I will, of course, have a full report.
Monday I have a noon o’clock meeting, Tuesday I have a dinner with an old high school chum and he’ll give me the full report on the fiftieth reunion, which he attended last night. The rest of the week will be meetings and meals and all sorts of things.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, relax, and then sup and see a show. 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 topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, hoping that we can all work out the recording schedule so that it works and makes sense to all of us. The more I think about it the more I may just wait until after we’ve opened.