Ever been at a loss as to what to do on a day off?  I am not sure that I have ever really felt like I didn’t know what to do on a day off.  Usually it is just sleep in and hang out for a day.  I mean, last night I was practically falling asleep during the show.  Keeping myself awake was a challenge even with the fact that there are a lot of cues in the show.  This weekend though I volunteered to help load in for an ice show.

Yeah, at the time of the volunteering I didn’t realize that I would have to be at the rink, which is 20 minutes away at 8:00AM on a Sunday Morning.  Generally I wouldn’t bat an eye at this, but it has been a long week.  Whatever.  So, with a 6:45 alarm set I was out the door and up to the theatre to grab my wrench.  A quick stop at Einstein’s for  bagel and coffee and then off to the rink.  My timing worked out pretty well arriving just before 8.

This was not the most complicated setup, just six pieces of truss, five chain hoists and 46 PAR cans.  Sure, there were dimmers and a console as well.  I suppose the three followspots count too.  The truss went together pretty fast and then the just kinda turned me loose on the cabling with the help of SJ and RJ.  Some people may not think that cable looming is not fun, but I take pride in my work (and I kinda enjoy it).  We laid out the cables pretty darn fast.  I think that we were basically set with all the motor cables and the mults by the time they had dropped the points so we had the truss floated pretty fast.

Getting 46 PAR cans hung is a pretty easy job when you have a bunch of help.  The funniest part was the fact that I was the only person running around with a wrench.  So everyone put lights on the truss and came by and tightened all the c-clamps.  Worked out pretty well.  Drop color, hoist truss and we were done.  They said we were finished about three hours faster than last year.  I am happy to help.

So, that is my volunteer/community service for the weekend.  Now I am going to hang out with Ruth and her family for the rest of the day.  We had a great waffle brunch and will probably just chill for the rest of the afternoon.  My kind of Sunday.

It is quite possible that yesterday was one of the best ski days of the season.  You know that it is going to be a good day when you get to the canyon road and they are advising 4×4 or chains.  You also know that it is going to be a good day when you get to the mountain and you hear the avalanche guns going (I really want to see them actually shoot the guns, that would be cool).  Of course there is always the question of whether or not you will actually be able to get up to the mountain, but I don’t think they ever actually closed the road today.

I kicked off the day with a little fun.  Being originally from Boston I am still a Red Sox fan and I always will be.  So Sunday night was opening night at Fenway Park and they kicked off the season with quite possibly the best thing you have ever seen.  They had a five-year-old who had memorized and modified Herb Brooks’ “Miracle” speech to apply to the Red Sox.  It is amazingly cute and pretty darn cute.  Certainly inspirational and hopefully the Sox will have a good season.  Below is the clip from the game:

Of course, after seeing that video I had to call my grandparents and see if they were at the game.  They have season tickets and they usually go to opening day.  It turns out that they hadn’t been feeling up to going that night so they weren’t there.  However, they did tell me that they would be happy to take me to some games this summer or let me have tickets for a couple.  I like going to the games with them, it is a lot of fun.

So, after that I headed out to the slopes and we got off to a great start of a very strange day of skiing.  Down here in the valley it was just cloudy, not snowing or raining or anything.  By the tame we got up to Alta we were in a storm.  It wasn’t terrible in the morning so we just went for it.  The skiing was great and it was snowing, which was nice.  It was snowing so hard that almost every run our tracks filled in by the time we got back to the top.  It only started to get strange when it became a thunder storm.  Really, I can’t think of the last time that I was in a snow storm that was an electrical storm.

Just before noon all of the lifts went on lightning hold.  So, we, along with everyone else, were stranded.  Good news was that it was about lunch time, bad news was that’s what everyone was doing.  Somehow we managed to get ourselves a table.  We ended up sharing with some other people which was great.  By the time we had finished lunch they had the lifts running again.  So we hit the slopes for about another hour and a half before the storm struck again and the lifts hit a hold again.  At this point, it just made more sense to head home rather than wait it out as it seemed to be getting bad.

I am just trying to wrap my head around the fact that it is April and it is snowing like crazy.  I really do think that we have been getting the best snow of the season right now.  We have even been getting dumped on in the valley!  I dig it.

As I have mentioned many times in my last few posts, the current show at the theatre is Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  I am not sure what it is about the play, but it really speaks to me, certainly more so now than when I have read it in the past.  I am sure that a lot of that feeling comes from the fact that I am older now and I understand more of what is going on in the story.  I believe that I have also mentioned that I will probably understand even more of the story as I get older still.

For those who don’t know, the story of Our Town documents life in Grover’s Corners, a fictitious small town in southern New Hampshire at the turn of the 20th Century (that’s 1900 for those who don’t do math well).  The story is pretty timeless and deals with life issues and life-cycle events like birth, love and marriage, and death.  One of the questions that I have found myself asking as we have been working on the show was this: “Would it be possible in the next 20-30 years to write a similar story about the turn of the 21st century?”  Is the turn of the current century as important or interesting as the turn of the last was?  Is there even a similar story to tell about the turn of the 21st century?

The world is certainly a much different place today than it was in 1910.  It probably seemed like the world was a lot bigger back then.  At the turn of the century people were getting around on horses and trains, automobiles were few and far between unless you lived in a “big city.”  People still wrote letters (by hand), news traveled slower, waking up the people who fell asleep in a snow drift made the local papers.  At the turn of the 21st century we could communicate instantaneously, you can’t walk out the front door without being hit by a car, people lock their doors at night.

One of the ideas that my brother planted for me to think about is the idea that we are much more aware today than we were 100 years ago.  We have a greater understanding of how things work, how the world works and the forces that move us through.  On the other hand, I think that there are things that we have lost as well.  Today, if we forget to pay the gas bill, a quick phone call will settle things and get your furnace going again.  100 years ago, if you didn’t chop the wood for the stove, your house was cold until you did, or you couldn’t cook your meals.  While many of the mysteries of the universe remain unsolved today like if there is life on other planets, we have discovered the secrets of many things.

For many people today, even falling in love is different than it used to be.  How often today do people grow up next door to the person they marry?  How often do we spontaneously go to get ice cream sodas when walking home from school and effectively make a marriage proposal over them?  Today people do the thinking for you when you can go to a site like eHarmony and be paired with your potential “soulmate.”  Sure, there were people who were matchmakers in the past (Fiddler on the Roof anyone?), but even that was more personal than going on the internet.

We may not have discovered the meaning of life.  Maybe there isn’t really a meaning or a purpose to our existence as a whole.  We are much more aware of what is going on around us.  In some ways I think that knowledge, that awareness has really given us more to take for granted.  At the turn of the 20th century things like industrialization were just starting to take off.  The transition from horses to automobiles was barely beginning.  In the years leading up to and just after the turn of the 21st century nothing that significant was happening.  At least, it doesn’t seem like anything that significant is happening.  Maybe we won’t know until we look back on it in retrospect.

There are certainly ideas in Our Town that I think still hold some truth today about small town life in New England.  There are still towns that offer similar atmospheres, but they all have in some way embraced the advances that have been going on.  People have computers and cars and all that kind of stuff.  So, as timeless a story as Our Town is, could it be possible to tell a similar story about us now, at the turn of the 21st century?

It seems like it has been a while since I wrote anything about what is going on in life.  It has been a nice relaxing week since I don’t have to be at the theatre every night pushing the GO button.  I have been able to do things like get in a lot of skiing, see some theatre that wasn’t mine, and watch the Olympics.  I think that I only interrupted my “vacation” as-it-were, once to go to a production meeting for our next show, Our Town, in which I had nothing to say on account of the meeting was really a week earlier than usual.  In fact, pretty much no one aside from the costume shop had anything to say.

I kicked off the week skiing with friends from temple, and now I am finishing up the week skiing with my uncle and cousin.  We seem to be getting some snow at the moment which should make tomorrow pretty nice.  Probably another good day for taking out the new wider skis to go bomb around.

Aside from the skiing, probably the most fun thing this week was going to the opening night of the U of U Theatre Department’s production of The Rocky Horror Show.  It is so fun to finally see another musical produced by the department and Rocky is just a fun show to see.  the cast was great, they seem to have a great time dong the show.  While there are a couple of singers who are not the strongest, they certainly make up for it in the rest of the production.  The tough thing was finding the balance of what audience response to give and how much to just watch the show.  In any event, if you like Rocky, it is worth going to see if you are in the SLC area!

Other than that I will be hanging out with my uncle the rest of tonight and tomorrow.  Good times.