Good morning, all! I slept in and now I am bathed and dressed and ready for whatever fresh hell comes down the pike.
Today I have to finish a big portion of THE ROSE OF ALGIERS so I can send the edits back to the conductor, and at 3:45 I will meet Bruce Pomahac at this new Dowling Music store on West 57th. We will browse, then go for dinner, and spend the evening watching DVDs and dishing. I bought earlier in the year his Christmas gift, but it's so good I think I will give it to him today.
DR vixmom, to answer your qustion from last night about my collection going to Miami U, there were two reasons: the first is that all the recording work I did for BK, the NY State Theatre Institute, other recordings, pretty much all my work from 1982-1999 has gone to the Library of Congress, but I stopped sending them things because of various disappointments, the last being the big disaster of LIFE BEGINS AT 8:40.
So, in 2008, because of the bed bug madness in the building I live in, I needed to clean out the apartment for extermination and further prevention; I inherited my mother's packrat gene, and this apartment was interesting, like a 19th Centry curio shop, but impossible to move around much. After my dad's death, I had decided to redo my will to eliminate the Macbeths, and I decided then to leave the theatre collection and work to the Miami University Theatre Dept, since I am an alumnus, along with some royalty payments.
I threw out tons of old magazines, like the complete runs of AFTER DARK, and SHOW MUSIC, 10 years of GRAMOPHONE and FANFARE, and the Kurt Weill Foundation Newsletter, carted a ton of books to a dealer who offered me very little but it was take it or tote the books elsewhere. I threw out tons of videocassettes as well, and whatever didn't end up in the Manhattan Mini-Storage space I rented needed to be tossed or go somewhere, Every trash collection day, I dragged down two or three huge trashbags with things for the garbage men, but I still had a ton of books and personal things that needed to be sorted. My first thought was the Miami University Theatre Dept. I called the director of theatre, Liz Mullenix, and asked if they would like all of the theatre-related books, plus a lot of librettos and scripts, like all of Noel Coward, Brecht, Ibsen, Chekhov, a ton of English versions of authors I like like Feydeau, Anoulh, Giraudoux, etc. Liz said yes, so I started packing up everything for the theatre.
Then, she decided there was really not enough space in the theatre dept for what I was threatening to send but she did offer from the dept's petty cash to pay for half the shipment to Oxford and she told me she would look into Special Collections at the Miami U Library. And that's how I met the wonderful Janet Stuckey, who's in charge of the Special Collections, and her staff. The initial shipment was huge, around 64 cartons as I recall, and there was a lot of tsuris about the cartons sitting in my buidlings 3rd floor hallway while I was waiting for the authorization to send them. They were finally shipped to Ohio around the end of February 2008 and later in the year I sent Janet another 20 or so. I sent more last year, and I'm up to 17 cartons to ship now.