My Wife Is A Witch!!

No, not really... Actually she's a Grand-Ma-Ma. But come on... when else am I going to get a chance to say that in public?

Trish got a lovely bit of news this week... you may remember from my last post that we both auditioned for Northwest Childrens Theatre's upcoming production of Roald Dahl's The Witches. I didn't get cast, but Trish did... as Grand Mama, one of the female leads! The show opens on October 6th, so be sure to put it on your calendars. She's, of course, going to be wonderful, and the script is a lot of fun (hopefully opening night won't be shut down by picketing Wikkens. Oh, wait! Maybe it'd be better if it was - that kind of action certainly didn't hurt the Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of The Christ or The Davinci Code. Hmmmm... attention NWCT Marketing Department...)

Lets see... what else has been going on?

We had our first set of rehearsals for Jingle Spree last week. This is going to be a very interesting process. It's a new play, which means the playwright is going to keep making revisions as time goes on (though he's in New York awaiting the birth of his second child, so he won't be present at rehearsals). The director, Lorraine Bahr, is in Minnesota and won't be coming back to Portland until two weeks before we open. So... the members of the cast are going to get together for a couple of weeks in August and September to rehearse on our own, and we'll be keeping the director informed of our process via email (Lauren, our stage manager, may videotape the rehearsals a couple of times and send Lorraine the tape... we'll see what happens there). Then, when Lorraine gets back to town, we'll have two weeks of VERY intense rehearsal before our opening on October 13. Like I say... it'll be interesting.

I'm shooting the rest of my scene in Nick Hagen's upcoming feature Dark Horizon (the name has been changed from The Lonely Apocolypse) on Sunday morning at 4am. Ah, the glamor of film work! Nick and crew will have a street in Ridgefiled, WA blocked off for the shoot, so we're starting as soon as it gets light and shooting until about 10am (so the town can have their street back as people start coming back from church). It'll be an interesting shoot... I'll be drinking lots of coffee.

Our focus for the next couple of days is going to be our garage sale tomorrow (9 - 6... come on by. You never know what's you might be able to use...). Trish has worked her butt off over the past couple of weeks cleaning out our garage (and I helped a little... but she really did the bulk of the work). We've got most of the stuff sorted out, so today we're going to pick up some tables from a party rental place, tonight we'll put price tags on the merchandise, and tomorrow we'll be sitting in our driveway hoping someone comes by. Come and keep us company! Whatever doesn't sell gets sent to Goodwill.

Pete is still playing shows at Why Not Wine in the Montavilla neighborhood. He'll be playing every Friday night in August and September - pop on by and have a glass while you listen to him. He's also going to be playing at Montavilla's 100th anniversary celebration, and he scored a gig opening for the Oregon Symphony in Harrison Park on August 26th. It's a free concert - stop on by if you have the afternoon free. He'll be playing at around 3:15pm.

Have I mentioned how awesome Netflix is? I'm sure by now you know how it works... you sign up for a mere $15 a month (or so), and they send you movies through the mail. You build a list of movies you want to see on their web site, and after you send one back they immediately pop another one in the mail to you. One of the best things about the service is that they have a wide variety of films... including films that you might have heard mumbles about when they were first out, but never bothered to go see and would actively look for in a video store. It's easy to get around to watching them with Netflix, though... you just add them to your list and they arrive in the mail. A good example is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film we watched last night. This is a total "sleeper" that most people missed when it was running in theatres. Written and directed by Shane Black (The Shield, Lethal Weapon) and starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, this movie is a truly underapreciated gem. I liked it so much I actually wrote a review of it on the Netflix page... check it out.

In the land of music, Pete returned from a trip to Seattle the other day carrying a CD by Michael Franti and Spearhead. I liked it so much I put their song Revolution on my MySpace profile. It's good stuff.

If you want to completely lose two minutes of your life, you can watch this horrible David Hasslehoff video on YouTube. I could say something about pathetic past-their-prime TV stars clinginging vainly to their past success... but hey, the video makes any snarky comment that would come out of my mouth academic. It takes care of that quite nicely. Thanks so much to Monseur Stephen Colbert for letting us all know about it... where would we be without his journalistic excellend?

I think that's it... oh, I've almost got http://www.haroldphillips.net to the point where I can take the current "temporary" page off and launch the full site. If you want to see a preview of how it's shaping up, click here.

Okee doke... gotta go get my hair trimmed so it looks like it did during my last day's shooting of Dark Horizon. Hope you're all doing well...

-Harold