Jovon Everett: Baseball & Taxes

Tuesday, March 4th

Fort Myers, FL.

Official motto: "City of Palms"

My suggested motto: "City of Strip Malls and Old People"

Fort Myers, as a city, sucked. The freeway is two lanes in each direction and crowded. The surface streets are four lanes in each direction and crowded. Many, if not most, of the cars are piloted by folks who can't see over the steering wheel and drive fully ten miles an hour below the speed limit. You have to make a dozen U-turns on each journey. Getting anywhere takes FOREVER. The streets are lined with strip mall after strip mall. The strip malls sometimes get their own stoplight. It's a nightmare.

The hotel sucked. There were rolling blackouts all over Florida on Tuesday. There was drama with the rental cars. We had rehearsal every day - including a put-in for our new King. There was great potential for Fort Myers to be a crappy stop on the tour.

TVFMHRW - Fort Myers.

Yup, sucks.

I'm happy to say, however, that I had a good time in Fort Myers. The weather was lovely. There was baseball. There were parties and poker. I went on another wardrobe adventure. The theatre was fine.

The Barbara B Mann Performing Arts Hall sits on the Campus of Edison College. If I'm not mistaken, Edison College is a community college. The theatre is an impressive facility for a community college, but was just large enough for our 8 trucks of stuff. It was the most charm-less auditorium we have played. There is absolutely so ornamentation what-so-ever. Not a chandelier or tapestry in the joint. Just 2,600 seats all facing the same direction. The saving grace of the place was that our office had a window. That makes a huge difference to me. The window even faced a little pond. Happiness.

The Barbara B Mann Performing Arts Hall

TVFOOW (The View From Our Office Window)

I watched a hawk swoop down and scoop a fish out of the pond!

This guy was our keyboard 3 player. He is a lover of lobsters and crawfish. He decorated his keyboard with stuffed lobsters and he brought one of his pet crawfish to the theatre with him each night. A different one each night. Creepy. In this photo Crawdaddy (as we dubbed him) is showing one of his pets to Peter Lawrence.

After we got the show loaded-in and open, it was time for another Wardrobe Road Trip. Roy, Angela and I set out in search of manatees on Wednesday. We intended to go on a special manatee-devoted boat trip, but we - quite literally - missed the boat. It was pulling away just as we arrived. Instead, we stopped at a county park noted for its manatee viewing. The manatees are attracted to this particular canal because it serves as the outlet for the nearby power plant's cooling towers. When the water in the Gulf cools off the manatees like to hang out in the warmer water coming from the power plant. When we were there the water in the Gulf was quite warm, so the manatees were out frolicking. There were some bull nosed rays playing in the warm water, though. It was weird to see their wings flapping out of the water.

No actual manatees were on view, but there was this fiberglass one... JV, Manatee and Roy

Thursday was a big day. First thing on Thursday morning I had an appointment to get my taxes done. When Karl handed me an envelope with dozens of W-2s in it (one for each state we played and often for the city as well), I immediately made an appointment to have my taxes professionally done. The appointment was relatively painless. Though it looks like I might owe some money to the feds, I should be getting some of the money I paid to the various states and cities back. Well worth the money for the peace of mind of having someone else deal with that mess.

The real event of the day on Thursday was the official end of winter. Spring training began!!! Fort Myers is home to the spring training camps of both the Red Sox and Twins. The only game that lined up with our show and rehearsal schedule was the season opening exhibition game of the Red Sox versus the Eagles of Boston College. It was a glorious sunny day - there was a breeze that made it cool once the shade reached us, but beautiful for the end of February. The kids from BC were obviously nervous to be on the same field with the World Champions (PUKE). They dropped easy fly balls and let the Sox have extra bases, but it was super fun to be back out in the sunshine at a ballgame. The Sox even put a real team on the field for the first two innings. Ortiz took two at bats, Youkilis started at first, it could have been August for a while.

City of Palms Park

Matt, Scott, Wally and JV at the ballgame

Big Papi takes a cut

The rest of the week flew by. Thursday night we played poker on the patio. Friday we had Gary Beach's put-in rehearsal (I'm really looking forward to seeing him get comfortable in the role - he's really funny). After the two shows on Saturday, we had a get together to wish Wally Dunn safe travels (Gurr resumes the role of Bedevere this week). Sunday we celebrated Matt's birthday at intermission of the first show. Bright and early on Monday I was back in the car headed east on "Aligator Alley" to Miami for the load-in.