Naples, FL - Part 2

Naples, FL – Part 2
Friday, February 9th

Seriously, Naples contains the oldest population of people I can imagine. It’s not just our audience, but the whole town. Every other car on the road is a Lincoln. Today, I was stuck behind a woman driving (and I’m not making this up) 15 MPH on a 6 lane, 55 MPH roadway. She was trying to merge across 3 lanes of traffic so she could turn LEFT into Wal*Mart. Genius.

Aside from the traffic – this seems like a lovely town. 5th Avenue, the “Main Street”, is full of up-scale shops for “ladies of a certain age”. As I was walking along this afternoon, I was unable to find a place to buy a postcard amongst all the designer stores, art galleries and realtors. The street is lined with very nice restaurants and giant palm trees. It looks like a set for The Golden Girls. At the foot of all the avenues is the Gulf of Mexico. The beach stretches as far as you can see is both directions. They have one great long pier that sticks out into the Gulf. It seems to be inhabited by nut brown fisherman, their grandkids and creepy pelicans angling for the fisherman’s catch. As soon as anyone pulls anything out of the water, the pelicans waddle over, snapping their creepy big bills and making sort of low honking sounds. Very alarming.

In any event, things are humming along for me with Spamalot. I shadowed Brian backstage on Wednesday, and attempted the SL track last night (with plenty of help from Brian and the crew). I’m happy to say that my portion of the show went well (there were some unrelated hiccups). Tonight we’ll reduce the number of SMs on the deck down to one (from two) so Ken can get out front to note the show. So, I’ll be learning to run the whole deck tonight – an adventure. It’s still freaking me out a little that I’ll be teaching this to a new crew in 4 days, but everyone else on the tour knows how this stuff goes and they’ll have my back.

Headed into the 5 show weekend (1 Friday, 2 each on Saturday and Sunday) so I’ll have lots of opportunities to get this nailed down & then we’re off to Memphis!

JV