Houston Day 143

Idina Menzel is performing with the Houston Symphony Orchestra weekend! Hurrah! And I can get cheap tickets because of one of the theatre mailing lists I'm on! Hurrah! This is the kind of thing I was looking forward to about living in the U.S.  :) (It's just occurred to me that some of my readers might not know who Idina Menzel is.  She was the original Maureen in RENT on Broadway, the original Elphaba in Wicked and she does guest spots as Rachel's birth mom on Glee.  Less well-known credits include Kate in Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party.)
Things are going pretty well at the moment.  We continue to enjoy cycling around the neighbourhood, and did the Heights Bicycle Rally a couple of weekends ago with Scott and Maggie and some of their friends.  It was twenty miles around the Heights and downtown, answering riddles and clues about things as we went.
But the main reason things are going well is that I am really busy! I have five half-days of work this week and next with the Houston Grand Opera as a Lightwalker.  If you've ever been through the process of tech for a theatre show, you know there are times when you just need bodies on stage using the props and interacting with the set so that you can see how the light falls on them and tweak them just right.  Well, Houston Grand Opera has so much money they can afford to pay people to be those bodies, allowing the rest of the tech army to do their jobs.  People sometimes use the cast for that, but a) the cast are more expensive if you're paying people, b) the cast have better things to do like rehearsing or resting between rehearsals and c) the cast often confuse the tech process with them rehearsing on the stage and try to make it about them.
My job with Express Children's Theatre has also finally gotten off the ground.  For I while I really felt like they were screwing around with me, calling me at the eleventh hour for rehearsals which never happened.  But we had an honest-to-god rehearsal yesterday, which was really fun, and the guest director, who has worked with them a lot before, said that this was unusual for them in her experience, which gives me confidence.  Two other people have been cast at the last minute, and it's really refreshing working with professionals.  They both slipped into their roles so easily, and the Music Director is so brilliant he just writes the harmonies as he goes, and we got two songs off the ground and sounding great in about fifteen minutes.  I'm still a little wary, but as I get to know these people more I think I'll trust them more.