Random Updates, Links, and and general silliness

Hey everyone

Been a little while since I posted anything of substance... and the trend will continue forthwith! Following please find some stuff about our lives, some downright silly links, and other madness. Prepare to feast on the detritus that flows through my brain:

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Want proof that some people have too much time on their hands?Check out this very scholarly examination of what parts of the country refer to carbonated sugary beverages as "pop," "soda," and "coke." Really!

http://www.popvssoda.com/

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Trish has her first preview of Frankenstein at Northwest Children's Theatre tonight.
I'm waiting on her to come home, in fact... hey, here she is now!

"Hey honey, how'd it go?"

"Pretty well"

"Did the audience like it?"

"Yeah, we got a standing O.

"Can't ask for much more than that! Y'all should get to see it.

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So, Amazon wants me to buy this CD. They remember this Soulstice album I bought last year (still one of my favorite albums, incidentally... Gina Rene's voice just melts me... sigh...), and they cross-matched it with "House of Om" by the Groove Junkies.

Now, I'm not going to buy an album without knowing something about it, so I looked up the Groove Junkes and came to this web site: http://www.morehouserecords.com/ (Some very cool audio on this site... take a few minutes to explore it!).

Nowhere on this site, however, is this album "House of Om." This makes me a little suspicious, so I plug in "House of Om" "Groove Junkies" into http://www.google.com/, and I end up with this page:

http://www.karmadownload.com/album/?2134270

Now this is more like it... I get to hear a sample of each track.Ain't the internet great? Oh wait... didn't I JUST make some snarky comment about people on the internet with too much time on their hands? Crap, I think that's me...

Anyway, there's samples of all the tracks on the page above. What do you think? Should I pop for the CD? I'm kinda leaning towards no... some of it sounds fun, but Soulstice or the Chemical Brothers it ain't.

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I'm a little surprised that I have a voice left after Monday. I had my first combat choreography session with the students in Sam Barlow high school's upcoming production of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, and it was frankly exhausting. Understand, the kids weren't bad... there were just a LOT of them, and we did a very complicated fight involving just about the entire cast in a big brawl that breaks out a town social. They did their best to stay focused, but 30 teen agers standing around on stage waiting for me to work out one specific move with one small group are going to start talking and horsing around. It's just the way it is.

That being said, I think I've laid the groundwork for an interesting fight. It was a very different choreography process than I usually go through... generally I work out the moves ahead of time and write them out on paper, then work with the fighters to get the moves down and to act the intentions of the fight (stage fighting is just another style of acting, after all... it's the same principal as two people talking on stage. We're still interracting with our partner and expressing ideas... the difference is that instead of using words to do this, we're throwing punches or swinging weapons).

In this case, however, the fight comes out of a dance sequence that I knew just about nothing of, on a set I know little-to-nothing about. The actors I'm working with are, in some cases, not even sure what I mean when I say "intention" and "act the fight." I had an idea of what I wanted to happen, but a lot of the choreography was made up on the fly. It took three hours to choreograph about 3 minutes worth of fight. We'll see who remembers what when I go back to work with them tomorrow.

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Ah, I think that's it for now... I'll post more tomorrow. Hope you're all doing well!

Harold