Bill Orr: Thank you for the gift!! I can't wait to find the time to read it. :-)
Is your niece's school doing RAGTIME or RAGTIME SCHOOL EDITION? I'm fairly certain other high schools have attempted to do the full, Broadway version of RAGTIME. It's been available for licensing for several years now, so I think it's safe to say they're not the first high school to do it. Maybe in Long Island, though...
There is a high school in L.I. (Trinity High, I think) that has been our test site for a lot of our "new" material for young performers, including LES MISERABLES SCHOOL EDITION and MOBY DICK: THE MUSICAL!
I'm off in a bit to see Cherry Jones in DOUBT. Before that, my friends from work are treating me to dinner at a Cajun restaurant in midtown. Very exciting...the birthday celebrations continue!
Last night, during the third act of AIDA ('round about 10:30), a fat Italian man from New Jersey sat down in the area where I was working and struck up a conversation with me. I didn't mind - it passed the time - but then he started telling me about how he doesn't tip waiters in restaurants, or anyone else for that matter, regardless of the service he receives. He likened it to throwing away money. This from a man who seconds earlier had told me his house was worth over $800,000 and he had spent $55,000 on his daughter's wedding. Anyway, we got into a discussion about how waiters and service-based workers depend on tips to complete their salary - that waiters make $2.50 an hour and need those tips to make a living. He said that if waiters needed the money that the restaurants should pay them a regular salary instead of ripping his hard-earned money out of his pocket. By this time it was the third intermission and people were walking around our area, so I said in my best stage voice (meaning as loud as I possibly could), "Well, as a person who depends on tips in order to pay my rent and put food in my mouth, I think it's shameful that you don't tip for the services you receive and I respectfully disagree with your philosophy." He replied, "Well, you would - you're on the other side of the table. Why don't you get a REAL job?"
Now, Dear Readers, I am a lot of things, but lazy is not generally one of them. I work - hard. I put in 40 hours a week at a desk job dealing with idiots who don't read a contract thoroughly enough to realize they have to sign it before it's valid. I fight with our library on a daily basis to find out where that last shipment of ANNIE librettos has gone and why Joe Blow at Pissant High School didn't receive his reference recording of BENDIGO BOSWELL. And then there are all the drama queens IN the office to deal with. And then to walk from one job straight to the other and sit through a five-hour opera listening to redneck cheap jerks telling me to get a real job?? Well, that I just couldn't handle. He was apparently smarter than I gave him credit for because he took the hint that I was about to come across that table and wring his fat neck - he got up to go "pull the car around" a full 45 minutes before the show ended. What a prick. Apparently he's not the only one with this view on tipping, either. We each walked away with five bucks in our pockets for the three hundred bags and coats we handled last night. Shame on them. Skammen!