Good morning, all! I'm off to Toyland and then the NYPL at 42nd Street. When I get back here, I have to deal with Kim Criswell's chart and do some writing on the Babes In Toyland critical notes. Thanks to a wonderful group of colleagues, Curtis Moore, Matthew Brookshire, Peter Foley, Chris Deschene, Tom Murray, and the mighty Skip Kennon, composer of several wonderful scores, we are now into the second volume of the critical edition, which consists of all the music Herbert extracted from Babes In Toyland for other venues and income, from a concert overture to the revised German version Spielland to a 1923 revue sketch Toyland Today and all the commercial orchestra publications of medleys and dance arrangements by Herbert's publisher, M. Witmark & Sons. It's all quite exciting to think that the edition is nearly completed.
Last night, since I had money, I finally ate something beyond canned soup and crackers in the past week, and that was fun. I also telephoned our DR Jose whose cell phone was turned off. He must have sensed I would be calling him,
TOD:
I never go without eating. Fasting is not for me.
Around 1984, I was doing charts for a company that did Cruise Line entertainments. Just like a show, you didn't get the charts till they were finalized and then there was a frenzy of work to finish the arrangement and get it to a copyist before the director, choreographer, and acts hopped on the next ship. A lot of the acts were god-awful and the boys in the bands were usually drunk or untalented/unhappy/whatever, and they always played poorly.
The weekend of July 4, I had a pile of work with a deadline and for about 4 days, I wrote, catching a nap here and there, but just grinding out endless medleys and dances. I remember going to the office - was it in the Equity Building? I forget - and dropping everything off, coming home, and having a huge crying jag before I passed out. I got the job through a very talented writer from University of Cncinnati-CCM, Mark Riese, who was from the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, as I recall. He was a very good friend who sang bass in the Gay Men's Chorus and wanted to compose Broadway shows. He was working on a very funny one about a guy whose apartment was haunted by the ghosts of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe titled JUDY MARILYN AND ME when he died of AIDS related causes around 1987 or so. Both he and his partner are long gone, and I still think about Mark often because he was such a talent.
The last year of his life, Mark and Jim went to Europe, and Mark called me to ask me what I wanted him to bring me. Since I knew they were going to Prague and Budapest, I asked him for a score for Dvorak's opera RUSALKA. I wish now that I'd ask him to sign it when he gave it to me. And those of us who survive have to tell the tale.
