With the move and everything, I’m feeling a wee bit overwhelmed so I’m going to use the wayback machine to post my online journal from a tour in 1998. At the time, I was touring with Tears of Joy, the second largest puppet theater in the US. The tour was a short one, only two weeks, and I covered it on my online journal. I’d just gotten a digital camera, I guess, and had a website on geocities. That was back in the day when it was all hand-coding, none of this fancy-schmancy wordpress stuff.
The puppets were twenty years old. They broke every single freakin’ day on tour. Enjoy.
Monday, October 5, 1998The picture to our left is of Joe and me realizing that we have to remember this show. We each have performed it in the past, but it’s been a couple of years and we didn’t perform with each other. I’m also doing a role in the show that I haven’t done before, so it’s an adventure. But seriously, we started by reading through the script to familiarize ourselves with each others rythmn and timing. It was also good to make sure we both know the same version of the show. Sometimes a team has deleted a section, or added an ad lib that stuck. Joe and his last partner have added things that are new to me, but they are fun, so I’ll learn them. |
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| The next stage was to get on our feet. We worked in sections today on Sungura the Hare, one of the two stories in this show. Joe is working Pembele the rhinocerous in this photo, but he won’t use all of the costume until later in the week. |  |
During the course of today’s rehearsal we discovered several repairs that need doing. These puppets are twenty years old, so they require a bit of love to work. I’m trying to fix Sungura’s ears. They are supposed to go straight up in the air when their string is pulled. Pretty much the first thing that happened today was that it broke. I’ve added the duct tape to test a repair, but the masking tape appears to be original to the puppet, because it has some fiberglass repairs on top of it.
Tomorrow, we’ll have more repairs to make and hopefully rehearse Brer Rabbit |
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Mary, have I mentioned how much I love your current haircut?..
It’s a serious improvement over the old one, I know. But, that haircut was incredibly easy to deal with on the road.