Of Julio Mata, Charlie Brown, and Summer camps

A recap!

 This past weekend we had our wonderful college friend, Julio Mata come up from Florida to stay with us. Ok in reality he came to see Norah Jones and profess his love for her and the staying with us was a side effect. If you don't know who Julio Mata is I'm surprised because everybody does. It seems like whenever he is around people from everywhere are yelling HI JULIO! I expected it to happen in Providence. The nice thing is I got to slum around town for a day and we discovered things I hadn't seen despite having lived here for a year. One example is the Providence Athenaeum. It happens to be a library. It also happens to be awesome. Example:

 

 It's pretty neat. It has push button light switches in all the stacks and it has a basement level that has a rare book vault that is pressure sealed and apparently anybody can go in it. Julio and I just looked through the door. There was more exploring and gallivanting and then on the 4th of july he flew home.

The past week or so I've been balancing prep for the ACT summer camps, the ACT Rapunzel Tour and Heather's YMCA production of Charlie Brown.

This is what we settled on between each of these 4 flats there will be 2X4 boxes creating open panels between them so that actors can literally step out of or into the comic. This was the end result of a marathon day of painting. After this picture everything got outlined in black to give it that pen inked comic quality. Today I built the doghouse for snoopy. Time consuming but surprisingly easy if you just build a giant rehearsal cube and slap triangle roof sections on the side to imply a roof that comes to a point. It still needs more work but it will be easy to bounce back and forth between my camp work and it because I can work on it while things dry. switch back while the doghouse dries. Let the next piece dry, and so on and so forth. A great, if not tiring, use of my time.


Last but not least today was the first day of my first ACT summer camp. We've got 2 classes going right now and I've got finishing touches on the set to do this week, rehearsal cubes to paint and the Rapunzel tour to build. Saturday was a nightmarish day almost 13 hours long of me trying to play tetris with my platform stock until I had an arrangement I liked. After that I blasted through the painting by just using my air sprayer which saved me a bunch of time and a lot of back hurt. Not a terrific picture but after that many hours working by myself to finish it, that was the best it was going to get. Once its touched up and the ground row for behind is it done I'll snap some better pictures. Sometime before the end of next week I'll have also made a cityscape sort of ground row, sort of hard backdrop type set up for upper stage left and right to give it a little more depth and balance the height in the center. Also as a final note, I've been listening to the soundtrack for the American Idiot musical and I really like it. A couple of great new songs and I love the sound of extra orchestration and a female voice to compliment the Billie Joe Armstrong style voice.

Time to breathe yet? Not quite. As they say, No sleep till Brooklyn.