This was the closing weekend of Taming of the Shrew for me.  And with that came a whole hell of a lot of other stuff.  I'll get to that in a second.  First: the show.

(This is me mooching for food and wine before the show actually starts)

Firstly, we set a record for audience attendance with this show, so congrats to us.  It's outdoors on a lawn in a park in a small town, so the most the theater had seen before was something like 250 people.  On saturday night we had around 340.  They were scrunched in like sardines.  The gave us a  standing ovation.  It was awesome.

(This is me and co-star Ben Stowe placing the flag and singing a pirate song.  Usually it would be Jay Rogers and myself, but he had a personal emergency and had to miss Opening weekend.  The producing director of the theater, Scott Phillips learned the part in 4 hours and held Jay's place until Jay could return.)

Children, particularly loved this show, mostly because it had pirates in.  They didn't care that it was Shakespeare and couldn't understand anything we were saying.  They were rapt.  In fact, there was this one little boy named Oliver that was about 5 and made his parents bring him to almost every single show.  I think he missed two.  And he always came dressed in his own pirate garb.  It was awesome.  He would usually leave at intermission because it was his bed time, but before he left he would always come back stage (our backstage was some picnic tables and some of those stand-alone barbeque pits which nobody ever cleans out) and he would yell "Yarr!" at us.  We would yell "Yarr!" back. this would go on for several minutes until his mother or his father dragged him off in a cart that for some innocent, child reason had a huge town train in it. 

Anyway...We had to get dressed at the theater, which was about 2 blocks from the park.  Once we were dressed we would walk up the main street on our way to the theater.  Imagine about 20 people walking down the street in some podunk little town dressed as pirates and offering to buy any woman we came across, or yelling at every car that drove by as if we might run out and steal their hubcaps if they weren't carefull.  Then there was the final approach to the stage: we had to walk through a play ground and then through the crowd just to get where we were going.  I decided early on that it should be more than a walk through.  So we got a drum and marched along in cadence, yelling "RUM!" in rhythm with the drum.  It was awesome.  On closing night, just when we were gathering to start drumming and yelling, Oliver comes running up in his pirate gear, with his little pirate sword and his little pirate flag, with a little pirate mustache painted on his little pirate face.

It was the cutest thing I have ever seen.

And as a group, and completely unspoken, we decided that Oliver should lead us in.

So imagine sitting on a lawn in a park, and suddenly you start hearing drums, and people yelling...

Tum, ta-ta-tum, Ta-ta-tum, Ta-ta-tum, Ta-ta-tum 'RUM!" I threw in some penny whistle just to add to the ambience.  And here comes this group of pirates, sneering, dirty, smelly, dangerous, without moral terpitude...and a cute little blonde kid leading them all.

And when we were halfway through the crowd...Oliver sees his mom and bolts.

It was awesome.

So good closing.

Couple that with working 9-5 M-F and doing shows Thurs-Sun, while trying to find a roommate because one is moving out and having to deal with the fact that i just got a notice that my registration is expired effective 1 month ago even though I just got the notice last week, my credit card is expiring and all my online bill payments aren't going through, and I got a speeding ticket which will cost me about $1000 unless I am able to jump through more hoops than the Cirque Du Soleil...AND...I'm no good when it comes to women....AND...AND...they edited RIGHT THROUGH THE MIDDLE OF THE COMBAT ROLL....it's been a busy week.  But I did just get the last piece for my Epic PVP gear set, so that's ok.

Happy Jenday!