Jovon Everett

Wandering in the Desert - Part 1: Kearny, AZ

2011-02-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

When we all got the final tour schedule, there was a bit of grumbling about the scheduled lay-off week between Tucson and Orange County. A lay-off with just two weeks to go seemed like kind of a bummer. As we got closer, though, most everyone started to warm to it. Normally, I would have been happy for a free flight home; but with just two more weeks until I'd be home for good, I decided to enjoy a week in the desert!

Scotty, our Prop man, invited a bunch of us up to his folks' house in Kearny, Arizona for the day on Monday. Kearny is just two hours north of Tucson and is home to the Ray Mine and the Hayden Smelter. The town was built in the 1950's to accomodate the employees of the Kennecott Mining Company and to relocate the residents of Ray, Sonora and Barcelona as their towns would be swallowed by Kennecott's giant open-pit copper mine. When I say that three towns would be swallowed by the mine, that gives you some idea how large the operation is.

From this vantage point, the Ray Mine stretched nearly as far as I could see in 3 directions. The pictures simply cannot do the scale of the mine justice.

Each of those terraces is big enough to allow giant dump trucks to drive along. Whole mountainsides have been removed.

Kearny sits on the Gila River. (Fun fact: the Gila was the southern border of the US from the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 until the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 extended the territory southward.) Once again, it was strange to see so much water in the desert - just yards from giant cactuses! The Gila is a wide shallow river in Kearny, but farther west so much of its water is diverted that it is a dry river for much of the year.

Scott, Berg and Cuz dip their toes in the Gila

After everyone got settled, we met up at Scott's parents' house and prepared to go four wheeling! We slathered up with sunscreen, filled coolers with beer, piled into a couple of trucks and headed out into the desert. Scott's former in-laws own a sizable cattle ranch across the river and we went exploring!

Scott's dad pilots the truck while Cuz and Miss Suzanne enjoy the ride

All of us (Berg, Suzanne, Scott's Mom, Myself, Cuz, Scott, Dumas and Scott's Dad) take a break

We visited an abandoned silver mining claim, roared up dry washes, chased off a rattlesnake and a few of us even climbed up the windmill that keeps a supply of fresh water pumped for the cattle in the middle of the desert. It was a grand afternoon out in the sunshine!

The cattle were not impressed

Dumas at the base of a giant saguaro

Yup, that's a ball of cactus stuck in my knee. I was explaining how the cholla cactus drops off parts of itself and how these balls attach to passing animals to spread the cactus, when one of the balls attached itself to me. Not to worry, I'd had several beers by then and thought the whole situation was HILARIOUS. Before I could grab it and pull it off with my hand (which would only have gotten the cactus stuck to my hand AND my leg), Scotty came to my rescue with a couple of sticks and popped the little bugger off.

As the sun started to get low in the sky, we headed back toward town.

Scott's former in-laws hosted us for dinner. As his father in-law is a cattle rancher, there was no question what we'd be having for dinner! He grilled us up some amazing steaks that had, not so long ago, been part of the herd we'd been bothering all afternoon.

A cattleman's barbecue is not a trifling thing

Both the company and the food were wonderful at the ranch. We sat and talked about Scott's exploits as a kid in Kearny while we listened to the coyotes howl in response to the whistles of the Copper Basin Railway in the mountains. It was a great way to kick off my weeklong adventures in Arizona!

Tucson

2011-02-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

The trip from San Jose to Tucson marked our last full-company travel day. So many Mondays spent in airports with our merry band (so many Bloody Marys hoisted in airport bars). While I never loved the airport, the Spamily at least made it diverting! We also had pretty good airport karma: in all those flights, I was only seriously delayed once and my luggage arrived with me every time but twice. I really did have it pretty good!

Once we arrived in Tucson, I picked up a rental car and headed for the house I shared for the week with Gurr, Paula, Matt, Satine and Patisse. Matt and Paula almost never stayed in the company hotels - since they drove the tour and traveled with two french bulldogs (Satine and Patisse), it was almost always more convenient and economically advantageous for them to find a house. Paula had the house hunting down to a science and was constantly coming up with some real finds. So, when she asked me to share a place with them in desert, I jumped at the opportunity. I'm so glad that I did - the house was a winner!

Tucked in behind all those cactuses, was our rental house.

TVFMHRW - Tucson

The Santa Catalina Mountains beyond the saguaro

Gurr put together some photo collages that show off the house:

The giant back porch that overlooked:

The pool, the hot tub and the barbecue!

We were all in the pool or the hot tub most every night after the show. As we were a ways outside of town, we could listen to the coyotes in the surrounding hills as they howled at night and the bats would swoop down to drink from the pool while we sat with cocktails on the covered porch.

That house really reminded me what a charmed life I lead on tour. While not every city was a lot of fun, I often got to combine work with vacation. Spamalot let me see a lot of North America on the company's nickel and afforded me a lot of free time to enjoy it. I really felt lucky in Tucson.

The theatre in Tucson was another civic auditorium: the Tucson Music Hall. The Music Hall was part of the city's convention center complex downtown. The the theatre was fair-sized but short on dressing rooms. The Stage Managers and Company Managers made offices for ourselves in the local symphony's rehearsal hall and lots of the performers had to double and triple up in dressing rooms. There's not a lot of theatrical work in Tucson, so our crew was sort of a mixed bag of "been there and done that" alongside "what d'ya mean by stage left" types.

The Tucson Music Hall

I wasn't sure what to expect from Tucson, beyond some really good mexican food, but had a really great time! As Tucson is tucked in amongst the mountains of the Sonoran Desert and only 60 miles from the Mexican border, it has a strong mexican flavor. Cafe Poca Cosa, downtown, was real find. The menu changes daily (even between lunch and dinner) to take advantage of whatever is fresh or strikes the chef's fancy. We enjoyed an amazing load-in lunch there and I revisited during the week.

On Monday night, I met up with the Maestro, Paul Baron and Michael Gribbin for a local specialty: carne seca (air dired beef). The beef is marinated with lemon juice and left to air dry/cure, often in a cage on the roof. The result is something like beef jerky that is often stewed or can be eaten alone as a snack. We had a great evening of margaritas and mexican food to welcome us to Arizona.

Between shows on Sunday, I made Roy ride out south of town with me for another mexican-influenced local specialty: the Sonoran hot dog. We hit the roadfood recommended BK Carne Asada and Hot Dogs for these beauties:

A Sonoran Hot Dog is wrapped in bacon before it's fried on the grill or the griddle and plopped into a closed-ended bun with all manner of tasty toppings. I could eat those things for a long time! Roy and I always joked that I only took him to eat in the classiest places (we hunted food trucks and ate on the sidewalks of L.A., hamburgers in the burger-dive Hodad's in San Diego, and enjoyed greasy diners all across America) and BK's was no exception. We drove out into the less than desirable appearing suburbs of Tucson past auto-parts places to find BK's and parked alongside a bunch of motorcycles to eat at picnic tables. Roy was always game for an adventure!

The other couldn't miss Roadfood adventure in Tucson was a diner: Gus Balone's. Before we even left San Jose, I had the outing all set with Tera-Lee, our resident baked-goods sweet-toothed swing. Gus Balone's serves up enormous & delicious sweet rolls:

Ben Davis and Tera-Lee with their sweet rolls.

Happily, there was plenty to keep me busy in Tucson (and to work off some of those sweet rolls and bacon-wrapped hot dogs). The Saguaro National Park lies on either side of Tucson and is home to thousands of its iconic, namesake cacti. They are truly amazing plants. I wasn't prepared for how large they are: they grow up to 50 feet tall and can live for 150 years. The desert outside of Tucson is studded with these amazing plants - as thick as trees in a northern forest in many places. The Maestro and I visited the western unit of the National Park and took a leisurely walk among the many-armed giants.

Here I am, providing some scale beneath a giant saguaro

The saguaros flower once a year (after the rainy season in the spring) and produce a seed-filled fruit. We arrived just after the fall rains had tricked this cactus into a few flowers.

Maestro Ben on a cactus-studded trail in Saguaro National Park

Ben and I also visited the Mission San Xavier del Bac south of town. Founded in 1699, the mission is nicknamed "the White Dove of the Desert". The modern building was actually constructed nearly 100 years later, after the original mission was destroyed by the Apache. The mission was built to serve the native people of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O'odham Nation, by the Jesuits but was taken over by the Franciscans. Today the mission stands on the Tohono O'odham San Xavier Indian Reservation and is still an active Catholic parish.

The white-washed church rises up, strikingly, out of the surrounding desert

The native people of the area are quite active - there was a demonstration for humane treatment of people crossing the border at Tucson court building which featured these dancers.

DVZ and I also got out to experience the desert - with a hike in Catalina State Park. We climbed about a thousand feet up into the mountains to Romero Canyon. Though we climbed past saguaros, ocotillos, prickly pears and agaves, there are pools in the canyon that hold water all year long! In the rainy season, the rocky canyon becomes a river bed. Though the river drains out into the washes that traverse the desert and carry much of the water to the Santa Cruz River, some water is trapped in the canyons rocky pools and makes the canyon a year round oasis. It was surreal to hike up out of the sandy desert and descend a bit to the lush canyon pools. Around the pools grass and trees grow while insects buzz around. Even though David and I got a (relatively) early start, the cool waters of the pools still made for a refreshing break from the heat before we turned around for the hike back.

DVZ and I in the Santa Catalina Mountains

Taking a dip in the Romero Pools

David dives in!

When we first arrived at the pools, David and I were crawling around on the rocks at the water's edge and trying to decide if we really were going to go for a swim. Something shiny caught David's eye at the bottom of one of the pools. He called me over and we both could see what looked like gold flecks under the clear water. On closer examination, there were lots of glints of gold in the pool! David leaned down, reaching into the water and in an instant had slipped and fallen, fully clothed, into the pool. Since he was already wet, DVZ dove down and came back with a tiny flake of pyrite. The bottom of the pool was full of fool's gold! Since DVZ was already all wet, the choice to go swimming was made for us - too bad David's iPhone had also gone for a swim. On our way back to town, we located the local Apple Store and DVZ found out exactly how much a few flecks of fool's gold can cost. Happily, David was a really good sport about the whole adventure and we had a really lovely afternoon in the mountains.

We even ran across this little guy - a roadrunner! I saw several of these speedy little birds (one was even eating lizards on the front step of our house) and can vouch for their ability to tear across the ground. Though they can fly, they run at speeds of up to 20 mph to escape predators.

I got a close-up look at some more of the native animals at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Don't let the name fool you, the Desert Museum is as much a zoo and botanical garden as museum. I went early one morning (most of the desert creatures aren't as foolish as the humans and go sleep during the hot afternoons) to learn about the desert and its inhabitants. I saw Mexican Wolves, Ocelots, Desert Tortoise, hummingbirds, and all manner of snakes and lizards in enclosures designed to mimic their natural habitats - often the animals had their homes carved from the desert of the museum's grounds.

These guys, javelina, are right at home in the desert. In fact, I saw a herd of them out and about near our house one evening. They are "new world pigs" - related to the domestic pig, but quite different. They are aggressive and destructive. The locals all told about javelina digging up ornamental planting and rooting through garbage.

Though they don't often prowl the desert amongst the saguaro, Mountain Lions stalk the mountains that surround Tucson. This guy was getting ready for his nap, even as the museum had just opened for the morning!

The desert mountains are often called "islands in the sky"; while the surrounding desserts don't get much rain, the mountains are often much more moist. As one climbs up, the landscape becomes more verdant; trees replace cactus and many more mammals thrive. There are even herds of deer in some of the mountains! (Mountain Lemmon, just north of Tucson, is the southernmost ski destination in the US. They receive an average of 180 inches of snow per year - even while the average January day hits 65 degrees in the city.)

While the variety of desert animals was amazing, it was the plant life that really surprised me. The plants are much more varied than I imagined. Of course, everything in the desert has to defend itself and its precious water. Everything had a barb, spike, poison, or some other way to make itself uninviting. There was a beauty among the prickers, though - this barrel cactus was just finishing the end of its post-rain blooms. The brief rainy periods make everything spring to life.

Tucson was another of the cities that I had no idea what to expect from. Before we arrived, I worried about the heat and wasn't sure how I felt about being in the middle of the desert. I was, however, enchanted by the landscape and really enjoyed my week there. Though it certainly was hot - the average daily temperature in September is upwards of 94 degrees - I still managed to get out and about. Our house was spectacular; it's a lot easier to take the heat with a pool and a shady porch. The vistas were amazing. The wildlife was neat. The saguaro were awesome. The food rocked. Together, they made Tucson a great stop.

Tucson sunset as seen from the Stage Door

The Way to San Jose

2009-10-15T18:00:00.001-07:00

TVFMHRW - San Diego at Sunset

Once again, rather than brave the airport, I opted to drive through California to reach my next stop of the tour. Jason and I packed up a rental car and treked up I-5 en route from San Diego to San Jose. We stopped for lunch just north of LA in Chatsworth, CA at a classic roadfood joint: the Munch Box. This shack serves up burgers and fries from within a 50's looking yellow stucco box with patio seating surrounding it. The menu is strictly burgers, dogs, fries, sodas and shakes - they're serving up what they know!

North of Los Angeles, I-5 takes an inland route to the north, running east of California's costal mountains. It was a very different landscape from the one I enjoyed on Route 1. Jason and I enjoyed driving through the fields that grow seemingly everything available on the modern American supermarket shelves and trying to guess exactly what was in each field. We also passed through huge dairy and beef operations as well as the "Garlic Capital of the World": Gilroy, CA. It was easy to identify Gilroy by the smell! Of course, all this agriculture is made possible by water brought from far away places. The trip up I-5 was a lesson in the clash of Mulholland-era water policies with modern ones: plenty of fields were empty dustbowls (often right next to bright green irrigated plots).

Our theatre-home for the week was the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. The Center for the Performing Arts is another city-owned venue. The building's architecture is more inventive than many such places - it was designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundations in the style of Lloyd Wright's Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University. The building looked like a wedding cake decorated with lollipops. It's round shape made for an unusual backstage space, but there was room for everybody and everything.

The San Jose Center for the Performing Arts

The presenters and crew in San Jose were quite friendly and welcoming. before the show on opening night there was a big medieval themed reception in front of the theatre:

Gurr snapped this picture on his way to work

And they threw us quite the opening night party after the show at a local restaurant. Our opening night was also attended by a large group of Monty Python fans. They contacted Chris Gurr (who played the King in San Diego, San Jose and Tucson) in advance via his Twitter account and told him how excited they were to be seeing our little skit. Gurr, being the good guy that he is, offered to meet up with them after the show.

Several other cast-members joined in for a photo with the "Knights of the Mathematical Table"

On Wednesday, Sheila Marie's Great-Aunt and Uncle treated me to home-cooked lunch! Dean and June Andrus make their home in nearby Saratoga, CA. They were kind enough to collect me at the hotel and open their home to me for the afternoon. They are both very actively retired and have a number of great hobbies that I was happy to learn more about. Their home overflows with paintings, baskets and weaving that June has made as well as wood turnings and mechanisms that Dean has put together. They fed me a lunch (much of which was the late harvest of their garden) and showed me around the Silicon Valley. It was a wonderful visit!

My big tourist outing in San Jose was to the infamous Winchester Mystery House. The mansion was the home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester (the second President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company). Mrs. Winchester moved to California upon the advice of a medium who allegedly told her that the spirits of those killed with Winchester arms were seeking vengeance. Mrs. Winchester believed that those spirits were responsible for the deaths of her daughter and husband. She also believed that constant construction on her home could confuse those spirits and prevent them from wreaking their vengeance on her. She bought a farmhouse in the countryside and kept up construction continuously for more than 38 years - construction continued past her death.

The resulting house is a labyrinth. It is composed of more than 160 rooms including 40 bedrooms. Rooms were constantly being added and remodeled. After an earthquake in 1906 trapped Mrs. Winchester in her bedroom, she abandoned the entire front half of the house, boarding it up and leaving much of the earthquake damage unrepaired. She spent the remaining 16 years constructing a new, larger mansion off the back of the old one.

The house is full of wackado things like this stairway that dead ends into the ceiling

And this second floor doorway that opens onto nothing

I toured the Winchester Mystery House with Lenny, Roy and Jason. We were all amazed by the place and spent several hours exploring.

Lenny, Roy & Jason in the mansion's back courtyard

After the show on Friday night, I jumped in my rental car and headed north to Berkeley, CA. My friend Cody was in Berkeley working on American Idiot at Berkeley Rep. He's was there as part of the sound design team for the new musical based on the album of the same name by Green Day. I regret that I couldn't see the show, but Cody's had a blast living la vida loca in the Bay Area and hanging out with honest to goodness rock 'n roll stars. We hung out with some of the show's on-stage band and got caught up. It was great to see a face from home!

I had a couple of foodie adventures in San Jose. The first was a barbecue delight: Henry's Hi-Life. Henry's has been smoking meat, grilling steaks and pouring beer in San Jose since 1960. Their menu is written out on a board in the bar and is simple fare from the barbecue grill done exceptionally well. I enjoyed a plate of ribs as much as I dug the whole atmosphere of the place.

Near our hotel, in downtown San Jose, was a mexican restaurant serving the cuisine of the Oaxaca region. Mezcal served all manner of specialties from the south of Mexico including an array of mole sauces. The place was the talk of the tour not for the wide variety of moles, but for another southern Mexican specialty: chapulines - toasted grasshoppers. Word quickly spread around the theatre when Miss Suzanne brought in a container of them. Everybody was in the hair room checking them out, but not so many folks were up for trying them. Never fear - team Stage Management was game:

Yup, that's all three of us with bugs in our mouths. The grasshoppers are toasted with lime, chili powder and salt and end up sort of nutty tasting. If you can get past the act of putting a bug in your mouth, they're tasty bar snacks. I only wish I had video of Ken wigging out - he never did eat his.

I mailed home a fair sized box of stuff from Silicon Valley - all the stuff that weeks of driving from place to place let me carry, but that plane travel wouldn't accommodate. For the first time in months I would have to head to the airport to make our next jump. Tucson was just too far to contemplate driving. I wasn't the only one at the Fed-Ex drop off on Saturday; as the end of the tour draws nearer, many of us as shipping stuff back home.

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Author's note: Much of this post was composed in 2009 (in tour real time). I discovered it, lo these many months later, as I returned to the blog at the urging of some of my family and friends. Even 18 months after the tour has ended I still get asked if I'll ever finish the blog. I'm finally getting around to it! This blog is as good a way for me to remember the 2 years and 8 months I spent with my Spamily as it was to share it with everyone else. So, before I forget much of it, I had better get it recorded.

San Diego

2009-09-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

After spending two months sitting down in Los Angeles, it was hard to get on the road again. Fortunately, our next move was a short one - sparing us the dramas of packing for an airplane and allowing me to drive a couple of hours with bulging bags that never would have made it across an airport scale. Roy and I drove down the California coast, stopping en route to visit the Mission at San Juan Capistrano.

I've visited several of California's 21 Spanish-era missions and found them intriguing, but the mission at San Juan Capistrano is justly known as the "crown jewel". Not only is the chapel itself beautiful, but the grounds are also extensive and well maintained. Many of the old structures have been restored and much of the archeological evidence on the grounds has been uncovered and is explained in the audio tour. Roy and I spent as much time as his load-in schedule would allow exploring.

Serra's Chapel - the only surviving church where Father Junipero Serra (the founder of CA's mission system) is known to have conducted a service.

Roy amid the ruins of the "Great Stone Church". The massive stone edifice was destroyed by an earthquake in 1812.

In the mission's courtyard

Roy and I rented a condo in the hills above downtown San Diego. It was a cute little place with a balcony looking out toward the water:

VFMHRW San Diego - looking across the airport to the navel air station and Point Loma beyond.

I really, really liked San Diego and I drug Roy out of the house every day to go exploring. On Wednesday, we drove out to the end of Point Loma. The Port of San Diego is sheltered by a thin hook of land that extends out from the north of San Diego and beds back to the south. At the tip of this hook is Point Loma. It was at Point Loma that the Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was sailing for Spain, became the first European to come ashore in modern California in September of 1542. Today, much of the peninsula is controlled by the military, but the tip is a national monument.

The view from Point Loma back across the Naval Air Station toward downtown San Diego

The Old Point Loma Lighthouse - the light has since been relocated and automated, but the lighthouse has stood on this windy bluff separating the Pacific from San Diego Bay since 1855.

The ocean side of the peninsula is rocky and dramatic. It's also home to lots of tide pools, which were all under water when Roy and I visited.

Also on the ocean-side of the peninsula is the Ocean Beach neighborhood. While I dug most all of San Diego that I saw, Ocean Beach was my favorite neighborhood. It's the hippie and surfer hang-out. While still a part of laid-back San Diego, Ocean Beach feels like it's own small beach town. Roy and I happened to visit on Farmers' Market day and were greeted with all manner of baked goods, produce and flowers as well as people cooking up meals from every corner of the globe. We enjoyed ice cream sandwiches made with warm waffles as well as one of the best hamburgers I've ever eaten. The latter was created at Hodad's. It's a burger dive in the best sense of the term - decorated with surfing knick-nacks and even the front of a VW Minibus. The house specialty is a bacon cheeseburger made with a thin patty of chopped bacon that insures that there's bacon-y goodness in every bite. I'm sure it took months off my life, but I'm still thinking about how good it was and plotting a trip back to Ocean Beach...

With my warm waffle ice cream sandwich

The other gastronomic highlight of San Diego was the coffee cake at the Big Kitchen. I know, how good can coffee cake be? Go to the Big Kitchen and you will know. It was AMAZING. The rest of our breakfast was great, too - but our waiter was right to insist that we try the coffee cake.

On Thursday, I drug Roy and Lenny around the world famous San Diego Zoo. It took all day to make a quick trip around the zoo. We started with a bus orientation tour of the place that pointed out the highlights and then we set out on foot to get closer to the zoo's inhabitants. We left with aching feet, but having seen a wide variety of the world's fauna. It's the best sort of zoo: involved in conservation and breeding programs for many endangered species, the animals all appear engaged and healthy and the enclosures mimic the natural habitat of the animals.

Pandas always look more like people in panda costumes than wild animals to me...

Koalas spend 90% of their time sleeping - the other 10% of their life is spent eating.

They're so sleepy that their enclosure was hardly an enclosure at all. All that kept them in place was the fact that their eucalyptus was in the middle, there were no bars and hardly a fence; they don't stray too far from their food. (I can relate...)

Hilarious, unless you get peed on.

On Friday, Roy and I visited Old Town San Diego. Old Town is a State Historic Park that preserves and recreates the beginnings of San Diego from around 1821 through just after the creation of the State of California. It includes commercial buildings as well as residences such as the Casa de Estudillo. The Casa de Estudillo is an original 1827 adobe home built in the Spanish Colonial style with the rooms connected via an outdoor gallery, rather than interior halls, surrounding a large courtyard and garden.

The Casa de Estudillo

We also visited the original site of the Mission San Diego de Alcala. Founded in 1769, the San Diego mission was the first of California's missions and was located atop a hill overlooking the San Diego Bay. Unfortunately, there was no good source of fresh water, scurvy ran rampant through the early settlers and the natives resented the intrusion and attacked within a month of the mission's founding. In 1774, the mission was moved to its present location nearer the river. Today, the site of the original mission is home to the Father Junipero Serra Museum and the relocated mission is still an active Catholic Parish.

The Serra Museum

Mission San Diego de Alcala

Spamalot's home for the week was the San Diego Civic Theatre. Built in 1965 and run by the city as part of their city hall complex, the Civic Theatre was a perfectly pleasant place to be for a week. Downtown San Diego has plenty of restaurants and places to hang out after the show (San Diego's home to several colleges and there are plenty of college fun seekers out and about every night). The best part about the Civic Theatre, though, was the warm welcome they gave us. Between shows on Sunday, the theatre hosted a barbecue on the plaza for us! They grilled up hot dogs, hamburger and boca burgers and provided an array of salads and accompaniments. The genius of the barbecue, however, was not in the food; it was in the array of toys they provided:

Footballs were flying in all directions after dinner!

The hula hoops provided the best photo opportunities

Turned out that we had a few hula hooping champions among us!

Of course there was a cake!

The San Diego Civic Theatre

After the show on Sunday night, Roy and I drove out to Mission Beach for a visit to Belmont Park. Belmont Park is an ocean-side amusement park and home to the Giant Dipper. The Giant Dipper (no relation to the Giant Dipper in Santa Cruz) opened in 1925. The wooden coaster fell into disrepair and closed in 1976. In the '80's vagrants were camping under the rotting wooden structure and people were calling for it's destruction, but the coaster was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The Giant Dipper re-opened in 1990 and is a great ride. With a 73' drop and 2,600' of track, the coaster is a great way to pass a minute and forty-five seconds!

San Diego has definitely been added to my list of places to return to - one week was only enough to scratch the surface. The climate was wonderful (it was 10 degrees cooler in San Diego than in Los Angeles). The city's setting against the ocean and surrounded by mountains was beautiful. The city is made up many distinct and interesting neighborhoods to explore. I look forward to a return visit to "America's Finest City"!

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

2009-09-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

Time is flying by. The calendar in our office has long been dominated by the two big blocks labeled San Francisco and Los Angeles. Suddenly, we reached the end of those 16 weeks and there was not so much Spamalot left ahead of us...

The last weeks of the LA engagement were a busy time of comings and goings. Tim Connell left and was replaced by Steven Wenslawski. Erik Hayden's track was taken over by Andrew Fitch. Nigel stayed in LA as we moved on and his swing position was filled by Billy Sprague. Fortunately, all three of the guys coming in had been with the tour before, at one time or another, and didn't need a tremendous amount of rehearsal. Our final performance in LA also marked the beginning of our break from John O'Hurley. John will not be playing the King in San Diego, San Jose or Tucson, but will rejoin us for the final engagement in Costa Mesa. In the interim, Christopher Gurr will be wearing the crown. Ch-cha-changes...

Before he left, Nigel presented the company with a gift. He has a bit of a tradition of making backstage music videos for shows he's been a part of (search for nigel1492 on Youtube and you'll find many, many of his short videos) and we had long looked forward to his creation for our show. In his final weeks, Nigel and his video camera popped up everywhere. In truth, it was getting a little annoying - but, at his final shot night, Nigel debuted the video and it was SPECTACULAR. I must have watched it a couple of dozen times now and it impresses me more every time.

Word of warning, the video has its risque moments...

If you can't get enough Spamalot backstage video fun, check out Rick Holmes' video blog on BroadwayWorld.com: here's a link to the first installment.

During our last two weeks in LA, a huge wildfire burned in the San Gabriel mountains outside of the city. Dubbed the "Station Fire" (as it originated near a Forest Service Ranger Station) it began on August 25th and is still burning nearly a month later. Thus far, the fire has consumed more than 160,000 acres, destroyed 78 homes and cost two firefighters their lives. Huge clouds of smoke (known as pyrocumulus clouds) could be seen from all over the city with flames occasionally visible from downtown as well. As the winds shifted, we could often smell smoke and were sometimes dusted with ash from the fire some 18 miles away.

The smoke cloud as seen from the stage door at the Ahmanson

The smoke in the air colored the sunlight, often to beautiful result

Disney Hall appeared aflame with the extra intense colors of the smoky setting sun

Nate, one of our carpenters, drove out a bit closer to the mountains and snapped this dramatic night photo of the flames.

While people in the hillside communities of Los Angeles had to evacuate their homes, life for much of LA was unaffected. It felt strange to be able to see a giant fire burning on the horizon, but to just go about life as usual.

A small of group of Spamily visited the Warner Brothers Studio before we bade farewell to movie-land. Having just visited Paramount Studios, I'm not sure I need another studio tour quite so soon, but I enjoyed the afternoon. The Warner Brothers tour included a few different behind the scenes glimpses including a peek into their prop warehouse and scene shop. They also have an on-site museum featuring costumes, props and script pages from all kinds of Warner Brothers productions.

Though I kept a close eye on the water tower, the Animaniacs never emerged...

The New York backlot was mid-transformation - the green cart held all manner of lighting fixtures that the prop people were installing to change the look of the facades.

Spamily (Billy, Karl, Nikki, Nigel, Ryan, Ben & Francesca) w/ Bugs Bunny

My last day off in La-la Land was spent with Shey. We visited the train collection at Travel Town in Griffith Park, had breakfast for lunch at the Original Pantry and drove out to Pasadena before stopping in Studio City for coffee with a group of MSU Theatre Department alumni. Joanne Brooks, Katie Von Till and Lisa Lenox all graduated ahead of me from State and I hadn't seen any of them since they left East Lansing. We were also joined by Michael Merritt, who graduated with Sheila Marie, and I had seen once or twice in Chicago - but it was fun to catch up with people I hadn't seen in so long!

Shey, Lisa, Joanne, Katie and Michael after our coffee date

One of Travel Town's steam engines, this one's from the Atchison, Topeka & Sante Fe

Shey's pancakes at the Original Pantry were as big as her head!

Where no Spartan fan has been in too long

For the first time in two months, I drug out the suitcases again. With the two long sit-downs, I had acquired too much stuff to easily travel. I packed a BIG box and sent it off to New York (thank you, Wife, for dealing with the seemingly endless stream of stuff I keep sending home), but still my suitcases were bulging for the trip to San Diego. I've got to get down to plane weight again...

For our final week, Spamalot played a mid-week matinee and closed the engagement with a Sunday matinee. With our free evening, the Maestro, Karl, Roy and I headed to the Hollywood Bowl! The program featured selections from Rogers and Hammerstein film sores played by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra with clips from the various films. Robert Osborne, of Turner Classic Movies fame, hosted the evening. The Hollywood Bowl is an amazing place. The arched bandshell is situated amongst the Hollywood Hills and the expansive seating area on the hillside facing the shell has seating for 17,376.

En route to the concert, we stopped off for this photo of Roy, Ben & Karl w/ the Hollywood Sign

At the Hollywood Bowl

The concert ended with a sing-a-long!

Our night at the Hollywood Bowl was a classy end to a really enjoyable 9 weeks in Los Angeles. Leaving San Francisco, I was not looking forward to LA. I wasn't looking forward to driving everyday and everywhere. I dreaded the hot weather. I was sure that I wouldn't want to seek out things to do, see and eat in such a giant, spread out town. All of my worries proved unfounded. I came to (mostly) enjoy my time in the car - the weather was more pleasant than I anticipated - and I had no trouble entertaining or feeding myself in many neighborhoods. I even went to the beach several times! I quite enjoyed LA!

Aside from having to pack up my luggage, I was ready to move on, though. For the last month and a half of Spamalot, we were going back on tour!

Birthday Fun

2009-09-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

This year, my birthday fell on a Monday. While that might be a major bummer for folks who work 9-5, it was a wonderful treat for me: I had the whole day off!

The fun began after the show on Sunday night with a bowling adventure at the Hollywood branch of Lucky Strike Lanes. While not planned as a birthday party, the fun stretched on past midnight & I was serenaded by those in attendance as we played a rousing game of beer pong.

Lenny rolls a spare

Nigel lines up his shot at beer pong

As I was, apparently, the only one in attendance who went to state school - my team kicked butt.

Costumed characters were still prowling Hollywood Blvd. posing for pictures as we left the bowling alley - we had to stop for birthday snap!

Bright and early Monday morning, Roy and I loaded up the car and headed out to meet Jeff Brewer at Knott's Berry Farm! Knott's Berry Farm began life in the 1920's as, just as the name implies, a road-side fruit stand. (In fact, it was at Walter Knott's stand that the term "boysenberry" was invented to describe the three-way cross of raspberry, blackberry and loganberry that Knott received from fellow berry-grower Rudolph Boysen.) In the 30's, to help make ends meet, Cordelia Knott began serving chicken dinners. Mother Knott's chicken became a sensation and long lines of waiting diners developed. To entertain the crowds, Walter built a ghost town of buildings relocated from actual western ghost towns. In the 1940's the first rides were added and Knott's Berry Farm became the nation's first theme park! Today, the theme park is run by the good people at Cedar Fair and the berry jams and jellies are marketed by Smuckers, but Cordelia Knott's fried chicken is still served at the park.

At the entrance to Ghost Rider - the park's wonderful wooden roller coaster.

The lines at the park were so short that we had ridden all 9 of the park's coasters before we broke for a lunch of Mother Knott's famous fried chicken!

Jeff, Roy & I took a ride around the park on a stage coach

Yup, an actual stage coach formerly used on the Butterfield Overland Mail route!

There were also plenty more traditional amusement park rides...

After we had worn ourselves out on roller coasters, Roy and I bid Jeff farewell and continued south on I-5 to Anaheim. We met up with Matt Allen, Dumas, Karl & Nikki at Angels Stadium to watch the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim take on the Detroit Tigers. It was a beautiful night for baseball with two great pitchers headed to the hill: Jared Weaver for the Halos and Justin Verlander for the Motor City Kitties. The game turned ugly in the away half of the 7th inning when the Angels surrendered 7 runs to fall behind the Tigers 10-0. The Angels' faithful streamed for the exits. But then, he appeared:

The infamous Rally Monkey!

The Angels rallied with 4 runs in the bottom half of the 6th inning and scored 3 more in the 8th. They even went so far as to bring the tying run to the plate in the 8th inning, before letting the game slip away from them with a final score of 10-7. The giant halo would not light this night.

The view of the mountains over the centerfield wall

The view of Angels Stadium from our seats.

Renovated in 1997 & 1998, the Big A is 4th oldest active ballpark in the majors (behind Fenway, Wrigley & Dodger Stadium). It's also the 13th Big League Ballpark I've visited and the 29th (and final) park I visited on while on tour.

Bobby Abreau smashed a homerun in the 8th to trigger these fireworks and a show by the fountains in centerfield

w/ Matt & Dumas outfitted, as usual, for teams not playing at the park we were sitting in...

Tuesday morning, my birthday weekend of fun concluded with a visit to Paramount Studios. Movie magic was being made just blocks from my apartment in Hollywood (in fact, Paramount Studios built the apartment complex I stayed in as company housing), so Roy, Karl and I could walk to the studio from my bungalow.

Paramount Studio's Bronson Gate

What is now Paramount Pictures began in 1912 with the creation of two companies: Famous Players Film Company founded by Adolph Zukor, and Lasky Feature Play Company founded by Joseph Lasky. In 1914 both men began releasing movies through a third company, Paramount Pictures created by a theatre owner in Utah to distribute films nation-wide. In 1916, Zukor managed a three-way merger and soon became the driving force behind the business, eventually pushing out his other partners. Paramount moved into lavish new production studios on Marathon Avenue in Hollywood in 1926 - the core of the modern studio. Today, Paramount is the only movie studio with a lot in Hollywood and is the oldest operating studio. Paramount took over the adjacent RKO lot when it acquired Desilu in the 1960's and eventually expanded it's lot across Marathon Avenue to Melrose, resulting in the city within a city that is the Paramount Lot today.

The Hollywood Sign is visible above the Paramount sound stages

Our tour was a really interesting glimpse behind the scenes of modern movie and television production with a good bit of history thrown in as well. All of the sound stages at Paramount bear plaques listing the many hit films and shows filmed within, titles like Sunset Boulevard, The Ten Commandments and Bing Crosby's "Road" movies share space with Cheers, Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy (though RKO kept less detailed records so where, exactly, Citizen Kane and other RKO classics were filmed is less sure). Our tour guide pointed out Lucille Ball's bungalow dressing room as well as the office of Edith Head and Rudolph Valentino. The most interesting part of the tour, however, was the backlot where large outdoor scenes are filmed. The day we visited, Criminal Minds was preparing to shoot a scene on "New York Street", Paramount's urban backlot.

"New York Street" can be redressed to look like almost any urban environment and features building of all kinds of architectural styles found around American cities, but it had a very New York feel - there was a building that could easily have been my own apartment! The buildings are funny though, round a corner and the style of the building may change or the building may turn out to not have another side at all!

I really enjoyed the peek behind the scenes and the reminder that very little in movies is actually what it appears to be. Making movies is all about controlling what, exactly, the viewer sees. A film doesn't need a whole building, just a facade. That facade might have appeared in hundreds of TV shows and films, but some clever redressing will render it unrecognizable. The interiors will be filmed somewhere else and on another day, but it will all be made seamless in the editing room.

w/ the iconic Paramount water tower at the end of our tour

I never expected to celebrate 3 birthdays on the Spamalot tour, but all three have been fun. (I've celebrated with tiki drinks in Portland, cheese steaks in Philadelphia and, now, fried chicken at Knott's Berry Farm.) All three have been representations of the locale where I celebrated, but none more so than my great birthday weekend in LA this year.

Life in LA with Wife

2009-09-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

Sheila Marie arrived in LA late in the evening of Thursday, August 13th. I dashed out of the theatre and headed to LAX to pick up my beloved. I arrived at the airport and surprised Wife by picking her up in a convertible! The little Yaris I had been driving around LA went back to Hertz that morning and I picked up a Solara to drive for the duration of Wife's visit. If she could only be in the California sunshine for a few days, I reasoned, there's no reason she shouldn't be able to enjoy every minute.

Shey came over to the bungalow on Friday morning and we set out for the de rigeur tourist activity when one is visiting Hollywood:

We braved the traffic on Beachwood Canyon Drive to snap some photos with the Hollywood Sign!

After a quick spin around Hollywood, with the top down - of course, I took the girls to visit a downtown Los Angeles institution: Clifton's Cafeteria. Opened in 1935, Clifton's claims to be the largest public cafeteria in the world with seating for 600 on 3 levels. The restaurant's founder, Clifford Clinton, spent time at the Brookdale Lodge in the Santa Monica Mountains as a youth and redesigned the cafeteria's interior to resemble the lodge and mountains. He hoped the surroundings would give Depression-weary patrons a respite from their ordinary lives. The decor includes towering redwoods, a mounted moose's head, animated raccoons and a waterfall cascading down into a stream that flows around the restaurant. The place is an amazing fantasy on the California wilderness.

While I spent the afternoon in rehearsal, Shey and SME visited the oldest portion of Los Angeles along Olvera Street. Founded in 1781 along the Los Angeles River, Los Angeles began its existence as a secular pueblo known as El Pueblo de Nuesta Senora Reina de los Angeles set apart from the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcangel. After unpredictable flooding of the river forced the relocation of the pueblo in the early 1800's, the city centered itself along what is now Olvera street and the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument. The girls wandered amongst the oldest buildings in Los Angeles (including the Avila Adobe dating from 1818) listening to music from the bandstand and browsing the many Mexican-inspired trinkets for sale. As Olvera street is just a few blocks east of the Music Center, I was able to join them for dinner!

Shey shaded by bouganvilla on Olvera Street

With two shows on Saturday, I didn't get to see much of my wife except at breakfast and lunch. Sheila Marie and Shey spent most of the day together at the Farmers Market and the Grove. On Sunday, however, Ken and Francesca covered the second show for me giving Sheila Marie and I an extra long weekend!

After the matinee, we put the top down and headed toward Venice Beach! Founded in 1905 as 'Venice of America', Venice was a real estate concern. Lying outside of the city of Los Angeles, the land was developed by Abbot Kinney. Kinney built a long pleasure pier, auditorium, dance hall and salt water plunge to attract visitors to the beautiful, white, sandy beach. He dug the series of canals that were to become the areas signature to drain the marshy land and offered gondola rides to tour the town (and sell housing plots). Today, the beautiful beach and its colorful boardwalk characters are still the main draw, but many of the canals replace conventional streets in the heart of the residential district.

Venice's "Grand Canal"

On a bridge over one of the side canals

All sorts of interesting, and apparently quite expensive, houses line the canals. Once known as the "slum by the sea", Venice has experienced quite a renaissance in the recent past.

After a lovely mexican dinner, Sheila Marie and I went for a sunset walk on the beach

As the sun sank into the ocean, we drove south along the Pacific Coast Highway to visit Don the Beachcomber. As the show was entering act II, SME and I were sipping tiki drinks and watching scenes from Endless Summer. Amazing.

Of course, Monday was my regularly scheduled day off and Sheila Marie and I had a perfect Southern California combo plate in mind: the beach and baseball. We picked up Shey en route to Will Rogers State Beach and spent the afternoon frolicking in the surf.

Monday night, the Dodgers played host to the Cardinals at the big ballpark in Chavez Ravine. As Matt Allen is the number one Cardinals fan, there was no chance we were going to miss that match up. A bunch of us turned out to sit along the first base foul line and cheer for the red birds. Pujols and the Cardinals proved too much for Manny and the Dodgers, the final score was 3-2 in favor of the boys from St. Louis.

SME, JV, Roy, Graham, Cara, Paula & Matt after the ballgame

Ken and Francesca continued their kindness and covered the show for me on Tuesday giving Wife and I another whole day together on Tuesday! We headed for the coast again - this time driving north on the Pacific coast Highway through Malibu. Though the marine layer never really burned off along the water, keeping it cloudy and a bit cool, we kept the top down and enjoyed the drive.

We paused at Zuma Beach on the north end of Malibu to watch the surfers and the sandpipers

We continued up the coast past Santa Barbara before we took a turn inland. Not far from the coast, the sun burst through the clouds and the temperature rose 10 degrees. Even as we drove into the mountains of the Los Padres National Forest, the mercury climbed. By the time we circled Lake Cachuma, it was a beautiful day!

Lake Cachuma is a big reservoir nestled in a valley of the Los Padres National Forest

As we descended the San Marcos Pass Road, Solvang came into view. We couldn't believe our eyes; rising above the California hills and the bell tower of Mission Santa Ines were several giant windmills! Solvang is the self-appointed Danish capital of America. Founded in 1911 by a band of Danish educators fleeing midwestern winters, Solvang has evolved from a seat of higher learning into a beautiful tourist destination full of bakeries, tchotchke shops, a professional theater and lots of Danish food.

One of 3 full sized windmills in Solvang

SME w/ a bust of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen

A similar bust graces the streets of Copenhagen

Me, being me, I was especially interested in the Danish food...

We had a HUGE meal at Bit o' Denmark - it ranged from a plate of Danish cheese and charcuterie to traditional meatballs and red cabbage.

Before it was "more Danish than Denmark", Solvang was a Spanish outpost and home to one of California's 21 missions. Mission Santa Inez was one of the last missions (founded in 1804) and was constructed to relieve the overcrowding at the missions in Santa Barbara, to the southeast, and Lompoc, to the northwest, as well as to serve the Native Americans on the east side of the Coast Range.

Sheila Marie outside Mission Santa Inez

Full of Danish food, we retraced our route back south. The cloud cover along the coast was a little less dense as evening approached and we caught some dazzling glimpses of the sunset through the clouds. We stopped off at Santa Monica to watch the sun sink into the ocean one more time:

and to play on Santa Monica Pier:

We rode the West Coaster and the Pacific Wheel:

and we played in the arcade. As the hour grew late, we were finally hungry (our Danish feast carried us through most of the day). We dropped into The Shack in Santa Monica for burgers and a beer. I'm pleased to report that Wife was as impressed with The Shack as I was!

And like that, Sheila Marie's final visit to the Spamalot tour came to an end. Wednesday morning, Sheila Marie was back on the plane headed home to NYC. Nine weeks stand between her visit to LA and my return home. In those nine weeks, though, there's no good time for a visit. So begins the long list of Spamalot lasts: my last visit with Wife. It was a wonderful visit with a wonderful woman, but I can't wait until our life together is no longer measured in such short visits.

LA: The Middle Weeks

2009-08-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

I must say that I adjusted to life in Los Angeles quite happily and easily. The constant sunshine agreed with me and, despite my fears, the summertime temperatures were quite moderate for most of our stay. For the whole middle section of the Los Angeles engagement, the temperatures were cooler in LA than New York and there was next to no humidity. I didn't turn on the air conditioning for several weeks and slept with the windows of my bungalow open every night. The sun even inspired me to hit the beach - an, until now, sort of unheard of idea for me! In the middle stretch of the run, I did fewer touristy activities and just settled into a more regular rhythm - one that didn't involve my luggage.

DVZ celebrated a birthday in LA. There was the usual cake at intermission, but there was also a celebratory night on the town. David, Roy, James and I loaded up and headed out to West Hollywood to celebrate in appropriate fashion. There were shots at midnight to welcome DVZ's birthday followed by greasy hamburgers to stave off the hangover!

David ringing in another year!

I welcomed a second set of visitors to my Hollywood bungalow - Dana and Steve were in California for a wedding and paid me a visit! It was just a quick overnight affair, but it's always good to see folks from my "real life" out here in my life on the road. Our first order of business was to properly welcome them to CA with an In-N-Out Burger followed by some catching up on all the WaHi gossip. The next morning they were off to Orange County for the wedding, but I loaded them up with breakfast from one of my new favorite spots, Vienna Cafe, before they hit the road in their convertible.

Dana and Steve show off their fancy California wheels

While I certainly enjoyed some quieter hours in the bungalow, I did get out to see and do. Alexa arranged a horseback riding adventure in the Hollywood Hills that was a hoot. Sunset Ranch provided the trail horses - like all good trail horses, these beasts knew the way and would not be deterred from the path - and Griffith Park provided a dramatic setting. We set off from the ranch, which is set in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, on the first ride of the morning and were back before lunch. Our horses carried us up to the top of Mount Hollywood for a hazy view across Los Angeles on one side and the valley on the other with the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee dividing the two.

Merle and her steed atop Mount Hollywood with Mount Lee and the Hollywood sign in the distance

Angela leads the way down the backside of the mountain

The social event of the middle weeks was a poolside barbecue hosted by the Cooper-Bowens. Graham's family calls Studio City home (his sister, Andrea, is a series regular - and two time SAG Award winner - on Desperate Housewives) and were nice enough to open their home to the Spamily. We lounged by the pool while Graham manned the grill and a seemingly endless endless procession of food emerged from the kitchen.

Is this the perfect setting for an afternoon off?!?!

(Thanks to Nate for this snap)

Horseplay abounded: Nigel and Nate canon ball their way into the pool

Carissa sums up the afternoon

One of Havasi's infamous "essence shots" - the Spamily pool-side

After all that eating and lounging, I needed get up and move. The next morning I hit the hiking trails in Temescal Canyon. Temescal Canyon begins in the Santa Monica mountains and sweeps down the Pacific Ocean at Will Rogers Beach. I hiked from Temescal Gateway Park (the former site of a Methodist Chautauqua camp) up to Skull Rock and back. The first part of the hike was dry, hot and kicked my butt as I climbed one of the canyon's walls. I hiked past cactus and through scrub as the fog from the marine layer began to retreat back to the ocean. Skull rock, at the head of the canyon, was impressive: a wind cut boulder with a beautiful view across Pacific Palisades to the Pacific. The hike back to the car was much easier as I descended to the canyon's floor and followed a small stream. Like all my other hikes in California, the variety and changeability of the terrain and flora as the water comes and goes from the landscape was really fascinating.

At the top of Temescal Canyon with Skull Rock

(Alas, I didn't run into Captain Hook or Smee at Skull Rock...)

The view from the top of Temescal Canyon toward the ocean.

As I reached Skull Rock, the fog of the marine layer was retreating. Inland, the sun was shining bright while the beach was still cloudy.

Along the floor of the canyon I encountered lots of Toyon bushes.

Toyon is also known as "California Holly" and is, allegedly, the source of the name Hollywood

Back at the theatre, Spamalot was cruising right along. We bid farewell to Sarah-Lin Johnson and welcomed Nicky Della Penta. We also welcomed Matthew Greer back to the stage as Rick Holmes' short stay with us came to an end. Otherwise, it was pretty quiet:

Darryl napping inside one of the wardrobe racks

We did get a visit from an old friend: Jamie Karen, one of our former show girls, is a LA resident and dropped by the Ahmanson. When she visited, Jamie was 9 months pregnant. She wanted to try on her old showgirl costume. With the help of Roy, some elastic and safety pins, Jamie looked great as "the Orange Girl":

Shortly after her visit, Jamie and her husband Mark welcomed Kylie Scott Deklin into the world. Both mother and baby girl are doing well. Kylie arrived as big as she looked in Jamie's belly: 8 pounds 15 ounces, 20 and a half inches long.

The whole LA engagement was building to the events of weeks #6 and 7: the last visit of Wife to Spamalot on the road! More about that next time -

Los Angeles Week #3

2009-08-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

I kicked off the third week in LA with the one and only thing I had my heart set on doing while in Southern California: a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. Ever since the childhood fascination with dinosaurs and fossils that I think afflicts every middle schooler, I've been interested in the tar pits. I'm happy to report that they are as cool as I had hoped!

Surprisingly, to me anyway, the tar pits are right in the middle of urban Los Angeles! (I suppose this surprised me because it's difficult to imagine mammoths and sabre-toothed cats wandering along Wilshire Boulevard...) All over Hancock Park asphalt, tar and methane bubble up out of the ground. The gunk is forced up through the fissures and cracks that all the seismic activity in the area has created. Sometimes, the tar comes up in big pools, but other times it just comes up through the grass or parking lot! The smell of the place is quite something - it has the powerful oder of a road construction project.

A methane bubble rising through the tar

Roy, Jason and I turned into little kids when we found a stick laying near one of the tar seeps - we couldn't help poking the stick into the tar. Sadly, some of the tar ended up on Jason; that stuff doesn't come off!

The tar has been seeping up in this area for tens of thousands of years. In prehistoric times, animals were attracted to water that floated on top of the tar or stumbled into the gooey mess that was camouflaged under a layer of dust and leaves. It took only a few inches of tar to entrap even the largest animals who either died of dehydration or were set up by predators (who often also became and entrapped and died alongside their prey). The bones of entrapped animals sank down into the tar and were preserved by the petrochemicals that seeped into them.

Nearly 400,000 fossils have been recovered from the pits to date. The most well known, of course, are the sabre-toothed cats, mammoths, and mastadons, but all kinds of animals, plants and micro-organisms have also been found. The oldest fossils are 38,000 years old (meaning that there are no dinosaurs but plenty of long-extinct creatures.) The area is still very active with paleontologists who estimate that there are at least that are hundreds of thousands more fossils yet to be unearthed.

Volunteers and professional paleontologists clean and catalog the fossils in a lab inside the Page Museum at the Tar Pits.

Roy and one of the sabre-toothed cats

As the weekend approached, Karl and I hatched a plan whereby we declared Saturday the 25th "Sausage Saturday". Unbeknownst to us, July is National Hot Dog Month, so our declaration was oddly appropriate! We kicked off "Sausage Saturday" at Pink's, the mother of all LA Hotdog Joints (and it turns out there are quite a few). Pink's is familiar to viewers of all the "Diner's, Drive-Ins and Dives"-type programs and is a local institution. It's not far from my apartment in Hollywood so I'd been eyeing it from the moment we arrived. From 9:30AM, when Pink's opens for business, until closing time (2AM on weeknights and 3AM on the weekend), there's a line. When Karl and I arrived at 11AM, the line was relatively short: only 1/2 an hour. Their chili dog is what put Pink's on the map when Paul and Betty Pink opened their hotdog stand in 1939. Since then, the menu has grown to include dogs named for celebrities and topped with all sorts of outrageous items.

Karl and I each ordered a "Martha Stewart Dog": 10" stretch dog with mustard, relish, onions, bacon, chopped tomatoes, sauerkraut and sour cream - AMAZING

Of course, the Martha Stewart is kinda hard to eat; but even the signature chili dog is a delightful mess

We continued "Sausage Saturday" between shows at Wurstkuche in downtown LA. Wurstkuche is a neuvo-German sausage joint. They feature classic bratwurst, bockwurts and Italian sausages alongside exotic fare like alligator and pork smoked andouille, rattlesnake and jackrabbit or Filipino Marharlika. They also have delicious hand-cut fries with fun dipping sauces. While sausage Saturday may not have been so good for my waistline, it was quite good for my soul!

Once I discovered that it was, in fact National Hot Dog Month, it seemed only natural to keep celebrating. I'd already sampled a Dodger Dog and Pink's infamous fare - so I sought out a couple more local hot dog legends. Skooby's on Hollywood Boulevard was delicious. The "world famous" Oki-Dog was a bit much: two hot dogs wrapped in a tortilla with pastrami, chili and cheese - too much to appreciate. Mike Berg surprised me with a couple of dogs from Wienershcnitzel ("The world's most wanted wiener"). The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog has a unique feature: the cheese is applied to the bun first, then the dog and the chili - this is GENIUS! It holds the cheese in and makes the whole affair easier to eat. I think I did a pretty good job of celebrating...

My other big food adventure of the week was my introduction to Philippe's. Phillipe's is one of two restaurants in Los Angeles that lays claim to having invented the French Dip Sandwich (the other is Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet). Philippe Mathieu immigrated from France to the US in 1901 and moved to LA in 1908, opening the first incarnation of Philippe's. There are several explanations for the invention of the French Dip - but they all result in half of a roll being dipped in a au jus and placed atop a sandwich of sliced roast meat. The restaurant doesn't appear to have changed much in 100 years, sawdust covers the floor, orders are taken at a long deli counter and customers eat a large communal tables. In addition to their famous sandwiches, Philippe's serves all manner of salads, pickled eggs, pies and homemade lemonade and ice tea. It's wonderful and a local institution. The night Jeff Brewer took me there, the lines were long, but fast moving, with crowds in Dodger Blue on their way to Chavez Ravine.

$15 gets you quite a tray of food at Philippe's...

On Sunday, Spamalot celebrated a milestone with one of our original cast members: Darryl turned thirty! We had our usual cake at intermission celebration, but then Darryl also threw a do at a bar in West Hollywood after the show. Lots of his "real-life" friends also turned up and made for a fun evening.

Darryl blows out the candles on his ice cream cakes

After all that great food, I needed to do something with my day off to work some of it off. Shey and I headed to the San Gabriel Mountains to do a bit of hiking in the Angeles National Forest. We set off early in the morning (7:30 is pretty early for me) to avoid the worst heat of the day, though it was more than 10 degrees cooler up in the mountains. The San Gabriel Mountains make up the western portion of the bowl that surrounds Los Angeles and separate LA from the Mojave Desert. Bordered on the north by the San Andreas Fault, the San Gabriels are the fastest growing mountains on earth: rising at 1/10th of an inch a year as the colliding plates heave them upwards.

Our initial destination was the Cooper Canyon Falls. We hit the trail at the Buckhorn Campground some 30 miles along the Angeles Crest Highway from the nearest town and at 6,300'. The day was brilliantly clear and sunny - perfect for hiking. As we hiked along Cooper Canyon, the scenery was constantly changing: sometimes high, rocky desert, sometimes lush with ferns and grasses and sometimes dotted with pines and redwoods. Like so much of life around Los Angeles, the terrain changes as water comes and goes. As we descended to the bottom of the canyon, things grew more and more green until we found the creek. In late July, there wasn't much water flowing, but we still managed to find the falls and the big pool at their base. We clambered down a steep trail with the aid of a rope and soaked our feet in the pool with the small trout swimming by and snacked for a while.

w/ Shey at the base of Cooper Canyon Falls

The falls had slowed to a cool, mossy trickle

The hike to the falls and back was quicker than I had expected, just a couple of hours, so Shey and I looked for another mountain adventure. The trail we had hiked part of continued on to an area known as the Devil's Punch Bowl some 10 miles farther on. The Punch Bowl sounded really interesting, so we set out to see it. To reach the Punchbowl by road, however, we had to drive almost 40 miles! The trip was really interesting as it took us down the backside of the San Gabriels into the edges of the Mojave. Again, it was amazing how quickly the landscape changed: pine trees were replaced with surreal-looking Joshua Trees.

The road to the Devil's Punchbowl took us right across the San Andreas Fault. While the fault line was pretty easy to see, it wasn't as dramatic as I had hoped. I expected a line of broken rocks and upheaval but found something more settled looking. From an ariel perspective, the fault line does appear broken as it wends through the mountains, but on the ground it's just slightly bumpy earth. (I'm told there are more dramatic-looking stretches in other areas.)

Being a Midwesterner, I'm afraid of earthquakes and was half expecting the ground to open up and swallow me as I stood on the fault line.

As we approached the Devil's Punchbowl, my need for dramatic landscapes was sated. Three fault lines come together in the area (the San Andreas, Pinyon and Punchbowl Faults) and make the area quite unstable. As the faults push together, the surrounding land is heaved up into a 'V' shape. At points in the Punchbowl formation, this 'V' is 300' deep with the sandstone on either side rising up dramatically.

Layers of sandstone pushed up to form the Devil's Punchbowl

The landscape quite dramatic with these layers of sandstone rising up hundreds of feet over the surrounding landscape

A great ranger at the Punchbowl's visitors center explained the basics of the geological forces that created the formations as well as introduced us to many of the animals that live in the area. The Punchbowl lies at the boundary where the mountains meet the desert making it a very diverse place. It receives snow in the winter but is quite arid in the summer months. All kinds of creepy snakes make their home in the area (I avoided those displays) as do mountain cats, coyotes, lots of birds and some crazy insects. It's quite an interesting place.

Shey and I were back in LA by dinner time. I whipped up a big batch of gazpacho from the many astonishingly fresh vegetables available in Souther California. (The sun just doesn't stop around here! If there's water available, one can grow almost anything in the area. While this abundance is shipped all over the country, it's at its freshest in local markets making for an amazing array of delicious choices.) I was pretty beat after a day in the mountains and sunshine, but enjoyed a bowl full of summer-tasting goodness to wrap up the first third of the LA engagement.

The Beach and a Ballgame

2009-08-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

For my second day off in the City of Angeles, I got the best of both worlds: a trip to the beach AND a trip to the ballpark!

Roy and I started the day off with a trip to Santa Monica. First, we stopped off at 'The Shack' for the Shack Burger, which came highly recommended by Erik Hayden, one of Spamalot's resident beach bums. The Shack Burger lived up to its reputation, big, juicy and topped with a butterflied Louisiana hot link! We did a bit of shopping along the 3rd Street Promenade - a really nice pedestrian mall just a few blocks from the beach. From there, it was just steps to the bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a long staircase down to the giant, white, sandy beach. We strolled along the beach and put our toes in the ocean on the way to the famous pier. We ate lunch on the pier and rode both the West Coaster and Pacific Wheel at Pacific Park on the pier.

Even on a Monday, the beach at Santa Monica was hopping

Pacific Park is an amusement park built right on the Santa Monica Pier! It's mostly kids' rides, but also features a small roller coaster (the West Coaster) and a giant solar-powered ferris wheel (the Pacific Wheel).

The view from the Pacific Wheel was spectacular!

The ocean end of the pier features a restaurant, a bait shop and a several souvenir shops. It's also a busy fishing spot and home to all manner of buskers.

From Santa Monica, we ran back to Hollywood, collected Scott and headed straight to Dodger Stadium. All I'd been hearing about the Stadium was that it wasn't a very nice ballpark - but I found the opposite to be true! The park opened in 1962 (making it, sort of strangely, the 3rd oldest park in the Major Leagues behind Fenway Park and Wrigley Field) and has much of that space age feel still in tact.

The sun sets behind left field

The evening was cool with a nice breeze and the hometown fans were jazzed to see Manny Ramirez back in the line-up. The Dodgers held a comfortable lead in their division and the Reds looked like they were going to be another sacrificial lamb. Things got interesting pretty quickly, though. The Dodgers starting pitcher, Jason Schmidt, was making his first big league start since an injury in 2007 and gave up 3 runs in a very messy first inning. The Dodger's bats responded in the home half of the first, driving in four runs to take the lead and energize the Dodger faithful. The rest of the game was fun (the Reds made it close again in the 8th, but fell short) with a final score of 7-5. The highlight of the night was Manny Ramirez's 10th home run of the season. It was career home run number 536 and tied Ramirez with Mickey Mantle for 15th on the All Time Home Run Leaders List.

Roy, Havasi, Jen Mathie, Alexa and Scott joined me at the ballpark

Merle lead the singing of 'God Bless America' at the seventh inning stretch & she sounded great!

We were sitting in the Right Field Pavilion under some of the retired numbers. Of course, number 42 is retired throughout baseball, but the Dodgers are the only team that Robinson ever wore number 42 for.

Did I forget to mention that the Right Field Pavilion is home to the "All You Can Eat Seats"? We enjoyed all the Dodger Dogs, peanuts, popcorn, nachos we could eat! Here we all are with the first round of Dodger Dogs.

It was a great night at the ballpark and a wonderful capper to a pretty great day. Dodger Stadium marked the 12th Big League Ballpark on my lifetime list and the 28th ballpark I've visited on the tour!

West Coast Googs

2009-08-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

After Spamalot opened, I had a few days to recover and get accustomed to Los Angeles. The traffic is a terrible as I had always heard, but the sunshine is also as abundant as rumored. The sun has shone, literally, every day since I've been in LA. It's occasionally cloudy in the morning, but the afternoon is alway sunny and warm. I'm happy to report that while it is hot, it's not as crazy hot as I was worried it would be - most days have topped out in the mid-80's here in Hollywood and it's been cool enough most every night open the windows.

During my first weekend, Mike Gugliotti arrived in California! Googs was in town to see the Yanks take on the Angels and check out the sights before heading down to visit another friend in San Diego. As soon as he set down his bag, we headed out for In 'N Out Burger. Mike was thrilled by all the exotic fast food choices LA has to offer, but I made him drive by Carl's Junior, Jack In the Box and Del Taco in favor of the finest fast food hamburger commercially available. I'm happy to report that he was suitably impressed with his Double/Double.

As I set out for work on Sunday, Mike headed to Anaheim:

Googs' lucky jersey failed to prevent the Yanks from falling victim to the Angels' broom

After the show, Mike needed some cheering up so we went to Santa Monica Pier. Chili cheese fries, funnel cakes and the sea air did the trick: we were both grinning like kids before the pier closed up for the night.

w/ the Pacific Wheel on Santa Monica Pier

Bright and early on Monday morning, Googs and I were off the Santa Catalina Island. We caught a 10AM ferry and were on the island before noon. We left behind the traffic of LA and exchanged it for a place where most people travel by golf cart! Catalina is part of the Channel Islands Archipelago that lies just of the Southern California Coast. Catalina is about 22 miles off the coast, but a world apart from the rest of Los Angeles County.

The major town on the island is Avalon which is home to about 3,000 residents. Avalon is the ultimate beach town. There are plenty of hotels, restaurants and tchotchke shops to go along with the beautiful beaches and hiking trails.

The village of Avalon

Googs and I on the beach in Avalon

Catalina and Avalon have long been getaways for Angelenos. William Wirgley, Jr. bought a controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company in 1919 and quickly began developing, preserving and promoting the island. His Chicago Cubs did their pre-season training and played exhibition games on the island. In addition to building hotels, a horse ranch and the island's famous Casino, Wrigley purchased two great steamships to transport tourists to the island. His vision was not just of a tourist resort, but also included preserving the natural beauty of the island's interior. Today, the Catalina Island Conservancy owns more than 42,000 acres of the island (nearly 90%) and is dedicated to preserving it in its natural state.

Mike and I toured the island's interior (and got a few glimpses of the famous Catalina Bison herd) on the this very cool 1950's "Flxible" bus.

The Avalon Casino - built by Mr. Wrigley in 1929, the Casino is home to a 1,150 seat movie theatre on the lower level and an enormous circular dance floor on the upper level. In its day, the Casino and its big bands were a huge attraction on the island - both steamers would ferry passengers over for weekend dances. It is a truly magnificent building.

As the sun set, Googs and hopped the last boat back to the mainland, having had a truly great day off. We had a relaxingly busy day (touring the island interior and the Casino, margaritas and lunch overlooking the bay, souvenir shopping, soaking or feet in the ocean, eating ice cream) but left many things undone as well (glass bottom boat tours, flying fish tours, hiking, snorkeling). Catalina begs for another visit!

Googs relaxes as the ferry leaves Avalon

The sun sinks into the Santa Barbara Channel

Before work on Tuesday, Mike and I visited the Getty Center. The Getty Center is home to much of the art collection amassed by J. Paul Getty. Getty was the founder of the Getty Oil Company and was declared by Fortune magazine to be the richest living American in 1957. He was an avid collector of art and antiques who left the bulk of his fortune toward the establishment of a museum. Along with the Getty Villa, the Getty Center houses a collection that ranges from Greek sculpture to modern photographs.

The Center was designed by Richard Meier with gardens by Robert Irwin. The combination of the buildings, the gardens and the hundreds of acres in their natural state is breathtaking.

Set in the hills of the Santa Monica Mountains in Brentwood, the Center has beautiful views of the surroundings. This is the view from the South Promontory across the cactus garden and toward downtown Los Angeles (which is, sadly, obscured in the smog at the far left).

I enjoyed the Getty Center as much for its architecture and gardens as for its vast art collection. I enjoy the works of artists from the Impressionists forward most and this is where the Getty's collection leaves off. They have one van Gogh (the beautiful Irises) and a few Toulouse-Lautrec drawings, but this is as modern has their collection gets. I did, however, very much enjoy their collection of illuminated manuscripts and gothic altarpieces.

While Googs went to visit the rest of the Getty's holdings at the Getty Villa on Wednesday, I went for a dose of somewhat lower culture: 25 members of the Spamily attended a taping of The Price Is Right! We met at the unheard of, for theatre types, hour of 9AM at CBS Television City for screening and sorting. Each member of the audience fills out a bit of paperwork and is briefly interviewed by a producer who chooses the on-stage contestants. Without giving away too much (you can watch our episode on October 21st), one of the Spam-fam was chosen to "Come on down!", somebody won "A BRAND NEW CAR!" and Plinko was played (to everyone's great delight). We had an absolute blast at the taping. Drew Carey is funny and charming in person and it was fun to see all the behind the scenes stuff that goes on between takes. I'm also a little embarrassed to tell you how easy it is to get really into The Price Is Right - when the announcer says "IT'S A BRAND NEW CAR!" I couldn't help but scream and wave my arms!

CBS confiscated our cell phones and cameras before we were admitted to the studio (which is, PS, just as cool as it looks on TV in all it 70's fabulousness), but Nigel snapped this photo of all of us waiting for our interview on the hateful benches outside CBS Television City.

I bid Googs farewell as I headed to work on Wednesday night and he headed for San Diego. We had a very busy and great time during his visit to LA. I'm looking forward to a couple more visitors in the coming weeks: Dana & Steve will make a brief appearance and then Wife will make her final visit to the SpamTour!

Bonus picture - Mike's Yankee inspired visit reminded me:

I pass this heart-breaking billboard every day on my way to the theatre.

The Dodgers have a whole series of these billboards around town. They feature both members of the ball club and various LA celebrities declaring that "This is my town: Dodgertown." (My favorite features Yoda and says: "My town this is".)

Spam In La-La Land

2009-08-03T21:30:00.001-07:00

Spamalot arrived in Los Angeles with a bang: our director, Mike Nichols, paid a surprise visit to the company! Mike, Eric Idle and assorted others watched our first (and only) preview performance at the Ahmanson Theater and gave notes after the show in anticipation of our official opening night the following day. Mercifully, Mike and Eric's notes were generally positive and the company was spared a rehearsal the next afternoon. It's always a pleasure to listen to Mike gives notes; he's both a very smart director and a genuinely funny man.

Our home for the 9 weeks of our LA engagement is the Ahmanson Theater at the Los Angeles Music Center. Much like the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Lincoln Center in New York, the Music Center is home to several performance venues and resident companies. The complex is composed of the Ahmanson Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Ahmanson is named for Philanthropist Robert H. Ahmanson and opened in 1967. It's a modern, multi-purpose performing arts facility with ample room and facilities for Spamalot.

The Ahmanson Theater

The Mark Taper Forum is a circular building designed by Welton Becket (as were the other two buildings in the original Music Center) and clad in a concrete relief designed by Jacques Overhoff.

The spectacular Disney Concert Hall sits across the street from the rest of the Music Center. Frank Gehry designed the new home of the LA Philharmonic and the LA Master Chorale. It is a beautiful building and I absolutely love that I pass it each day on the way to work!

Our opening night in the City of Angels was the biggest event of the tour since I joined 2 and a half years ago. The performance and the opening night party were attended by celebrities of varying fields and star-power. Among the invited guests were: Billy Crystal, Scott Hamilton, Kevin Nealon, Anthony LaPaglia, Laurence Fishburne, Bobcat Goldthwait, Lori Anderson and Bob Saget. (Several of us were excited to see Betty White on the guest list but were disappointed when she was a no-show.) The party was a pretty grand affair on the roof of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Gurr snapped this great picture of the party's setting

Richard Chamberlain joined us at the opening night - everyone was thrilled to see him again.

Richard, Paula, Joanne Worley & Jamie Karen (Jamie is another Spam-Tour Allum we were all happy to see again)

Eric Idle takes Merle for a spin on the dance floor

In my favorite snap of the evening, Life and Art collide as John O'Hurley and Fred Willard (the real-life Co-Host of the Purina Dog Show and the fictional Co-Host of the Mayflower Kennel Club Show) converse.

My home base for the Los Angeles engagement is a bungalow in Hollywood's Clinton Manor. The apartment complex is just a few blocks from Paramount Studios and was built in the 1920's by Paramount to house their contract players and writers. I like to imagine that the apartment I'm renting was once home to Rudolph Valentino or maybe to Bing Crosby's starlet girlfriend!

My pink bungalow in Hollywood

California Route 1

2009-08-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Spamalot closed in San Francisco with a matinee, meaning that I had an extra half day to make the trip to San Francisco. Rather than take the company flight on Monday afternoon, I decided to drive down the coast on California Route 1.

Not THIS California Root: 1

(Which is, PS, one of my wife's favorite wines)

But THIS California Route 1:

I packed up the car before the show and was ready to roll as soon as the curtain came down. During the show, I convinced Miss Suzanne to join me for the adventure! We swung by her hotel, collected her bags, and were rolling down the California Coast in the late afternoon. Even before we left San Francisco, the scenery was spectacular. We cruised past the surfers bobbing in the swells off Ocean Beach and Half Moon Bay.

Our first photo stop came at Pigeon Point:

Pigeon Point and the Pigeon Point Lighthouse take their name from the USS Carrier Pigeon that wrecked here in 1853. The Pigeon Point Light was lit in 1872 and is still an active Coast Guard light.

Around dinner time, Suzanne and I arrived in Santa Cruz. Both Francesca and Gurr spent time in Santa Cruz and had recommended all sorts of things to see, do and eat:

Right on Route 1 was the Tacqueria Santa Cruz. Suzanne and I feasted on one of their signature dishes: "49's Shrimp Burrito" (Shrimp, rice, beans, cheese, guacamole, sour cream, lettuce, salsa and enchilada sauce)

As the sun set, we arrived at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. The museum is housed in the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse right on the water at "Steamer Lane" one of the West Coast's surfing hot spots.

There were lots of surfers on the water at "Steamer Lane". I was amazed that they surf right up to the rocks along the shore!

Nearby is the Surfers Memorial "in memory of all surfers who have caught their last wave..."

Suzanne and I then hit the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for a ride on the Giant Dipper. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is a amusement park set right on the beach (it's the amusement park featured in The Lost Boys). The Boardwalk opened in 1907 and the Giant Dipper opened in 1924, making it the 6th oldest operating coaster in the US. I'm happy to report that even at 85 years-old, she's a great 2 minute ride - much like the Cyclone on Coney Island.

After our ride on one of the great wooden coasters, we headed away from the water and toward ice cream! Marriane's Ice Cream is home to more than 70 flavors. Both Francesca and Gurr put it on their "must eat" least, so I knew I was in for something good - and I wasn't disappointed. Miss Suzanne and I had already had a great road trip, and we were only a third of the way to Los Angeles!

The next morning, we got back on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed south again. For much of the drive south from Carmel, the highway lives up to its name and hugs the coastline. There are some spectacular bridges over inlets and creeks (including a few that are familiar from the many car commercials that are often filmed along the PCH). Often, the road is carved out of the cliffs and bluffs that make up the coastline.

Near Big Sur, we stopped at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park and took the short hike to McWay Falls:

McWay Falls tumble some 80 feet over a cliff and into the ocean. The setting is absolutely beautiful - there's a small sandy beach surrounded by high cliffs with this thin stream of falling water...

Our next stop was another slice of beach, this one near San Simeon, CA (home of the famous Hearst Castle). There, on a small, sandy beach about half-way between San Francisco and Los Angeles, gigantic elephant seals come to spend time ashore. For months at a time, these giant mammals live at sea, only coming ashore to molt and to mate at specific times and always returning to this one, particular spot. In early July, only the adult males are on the beach molting.

Dozens of the enormous creatures were on the beach sunning themselves

It's easy to see how the Elephant Seal got its name.... Their proboscis acts as a resonating chamber for the vocalizations (which range from the gentle "bonking" sound they were making during our visit to a much louder roar they make during mating season) and helps the animals conserve moisture when they are ashore.

There was lots of play fighting and vocalizing going on. During the mating season, this fighting becomes much more serious.

A male elephant seal can grow up to 16' long and up to 6,000 pounds. They look awkward on land, but can move with surprising speed and agility.

Suzanne and I stopped for a lovely late lunch in the beach town of Cayucos. We ate lunch overlooking the city's pier and watched a few surfers paddling out and riding back to the beach. After lunch, we had to leave the Pacific Coast Highway and take a the faster route to Los Angeles. There were rental cars to pick up and return in LA as well as keys and arrangements for our rental houses, so we needed to pick up the pace. We encountered the legendary LA traffic first around Santa Barbara and arrived in LA during the evening rush.

The trip south along Highway 1 was amazing. I'm so glad I chose to drive rather than fly & am extra glad that Suzanne came along for the ride. I'm hoping to see some more of the Pacific Coast Highway when Sheila Marie comes to visit during the LA engagement.

Goodbye to Baghdad By the Bay

2009-07-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

In the interest of catching the blog back up to date, I'm going to cram the whole last month of fun in San Francisco into one post. I'll try to be heavy on the pictures and light on the text. My abject apologies to those of you who check back all the time for not having updated in so long... Here we go:

While Mom & Dad were visiting me in San Francisco, Paul and Jenny were also in town! It made for a very busy week, but also a very fun one! I had someone to hang out with, things to do and sights to see every afternoon and every evening after the show:

Paul & Jenny in Japantown with the Peace Pagoda

Jenny and Paul shared my enthusiasm for tiki - here they are at the Tonga Room

After we made a tasty shortcake with some of the abundant fresh California strawberries, we took a ride across the Golden Gate Bridge

The marine fog kept things cool along the waterfront, but Mom, Dad and I enjoyed a walk along the beach. (The Point Bonita Lighthouse is in the upper left of this snap.)

On the way back into town, Mom & Dad surprised me with a trip down Lombard Street. It really is as wonderfully silly as I had hoped! This one block of the street makes eight switchbacks as it descends Russian Hill.

I'm happy to report that Mom & Dad shared (or at least, indulged) my love for the cable cars

The Cable Car Museum is housed in the system's powerhouse and car barn on Mason Street. In addition to exhibits on the history of the cable car system, visitors can check out the mechanics. Giant wheels drive the miles of cables that run under the city's streets at a constant 9 3/4 miles per hour.

As I bid farewell to Paul, Jenny, Mom and Dad, I also packed up my own luggage and headed to the airport. I took a week's vacation during the San Francisco engagement to return home to my Wife, apartment and friends. The week was wonderful: full of baseball, friends, favorite restaurants and sleeping in my own bed next to my beautiful wife.

One of the first orders of business was to get out to the new incarnation of Yankee Stadium. My favorite part about the big new ballpark in the Bronx is that, if you squint, you could be in the old ballpark across the street. As we arrived, Gregg, Googs and I got to bang on Freddy's pan! Some things never change...

I also got to check out the new ballpark in Queens! Jose, Elena, Deuce, Erin, Cody, SME and Gregg joined me at Cititfield where we got a private tour after the game thanks to my awesome friend Chris who gets to call Citifield his office!

My visit to NYC, happily, coincided with Diana G's visit. We all headed out to Queens to catch up!

It's always hard to say goodbye to hearth and home, but it's a lot easier when I'm headed out to somewhere as cool as San Francisco. I had only two weeks left in the City by the Bay and endeavored to make the most of the time that I had left:

I spent a lovely afternoon in Sausalito with James, Lenny & Roy. We rode the ferry over, had lunch on the water looking back at San Francisco, wandered the streets and had some ice cream before we rode back across the bay.

Postcard row: San Francisco is famous for its Victorian homes, and none of those homes are more famous than these 7 "Painted Ladies" that front Alamo Square.

I waited 'til the very last week before I tackled another of the San Francisco "must-sees". My visit to Alcatraz was really interesting. The island's history (from fortification to military prison then civilian lock-up, object of protest and now a national park) was as fascinating as the stories of the famous inmates incarcerated there.

I also visited the beautiful deco landmark atop Telegraph Hill: Coit Tower. Though the tower is only 210 feet tall, it offers a commanding view of the city as Telegraph Hill rises another 275 feet above the surrounding neighborhoods. The interior of the tower is decorated with amazing murals painted in 1933 under the auspices of the New Deal's Public Works of Art Project.

The culinary high-point of my visit to the Bay Area (and there were too many great meals to list here) came not in San Francisco, but across the Bay Bridge in Berkley. Several of us hopped aboard the BART for a pilgrimage to Chez Panisse, the birthplace of California Cuisine and the localvore movement. The meal was wonderful - as was the company. It was my first opportunity to meet Rick Holmes (pictured above with the AMAZING squid pizza). Rick was the tour's original Lancelot who left before I arrived on the road; Rick decamped for Broadway and performed the role for more than 2 years on the Rialto. He has returned to the touring company and will perform with us through the first month of the Los Angeles engagement.

My last outdoorsy excursion in San Francisco was a hike on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. Like so much of the Bay Area, Mount Tam was fascinating for the changeability of its terrain and climates. The mountain rises up right on the shores of the bay. The side that faces the water was dry and windswept, but other parts of the mountain were lush with ferns and redwoods.

The big event of my final two weeks in San Francisco was Gay Pride weekend. The festivities went on all weekend long and took place all over the city. Ground zero for gay life in San Francisco, however, is the Castro - just up the street from my house. Saturday night I wandered up the hill to the Pink Party. Several blocks of Castro and the surrounding streets were blocked off by the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" for a giant street party. Even after midnight, when the street party broke up, things were still busy into the wee hours of the morning.

The scene on Castro at the Pink Party

The main event of the weekend came on Sunday with the Pride Parade. The parade wasn't confined to the "gay-borhood", rather, the parade began at the waterfront and worked its way right up Market Street to City Hall. (In fact, Spamalot gave only an evening performance on Sunday as it would have been impossible to get an audience to the Golden Gate for a matinee at the same time as the parade and Wicked took the day off entirely.) The parade lasted more than 3 hours and was an amazing spectacle.

"Dykes on Bikes" lead the procession. Hundreds and hundreds of women on motorcycles thundered up Market Street. They were followed by people of every stripe expressing their pride in themselves and their community. I was most moved by the enormous number of queer families that took part in the parade. At one point, families with gay parents or gay children stretched as far up and down Market Street as I could see. It was incredible.

After nearly two months, it was time to say goodbye to my favorite city on the tour thus far. Before my transit pass expired, I took a ride on all three of the city's cable car lines and hopped the streetcars of the 'F' Line. David and I spent one last evening on the back patio beside the fireplace. I packed up the suitcases that I had carefully hidden away and bade farewell to the Victorian house in the Castro that I liked so much. I stopped for a scoop from Bi-Rite Creamery and then it was time to go on tour again. I kept reminding myself that touring involves moving & that if I get to leave the less than great cities, I must leave the great ones as well - that's the deal.

TVFMHRW San Francisco

Happily, Spamalot closed on a Sunday matinee giving me an extra minute to get to Los Angeles and affording me the opportunity to have a bit of adventure en route. More about that in my next post -

It Happened In Monterey

2009-06-13T18:45:00.000-07:00

Mom and Dad came to visit me in San Francisco! Neither of them had been to Bay Area before, so we had a great week of exploring together. The first weekend that they were in town, we planned a trip down the coast to see a bit more of the area. They picked me up after the Sunday matinee and whisked me off to Monterey!

Our home base for the get-away was the Gosby House, a bed and breakfast in Pacific Grove. Pacific Grove is the town at the point of the Monterey Peninsula and home to Vivolo's Chowder House where the three of us each had one of the best bowls of clam chowder we'd ever had. My friend, Jeff Brewer, recommended the place and we were all grateful. The chowder is served in a bread bowl that has been hollowed out, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with cheese and toasted before the chowder is poured in. AMAZING.

We arrived in Pacific Grove in time to check-in, get dinner and catch sunset on the beach:

Dad and a Pacific Grove Sunset

Bed and breakfasts aren't always my thing, but the turn-down service at the Gosby House was quite nice

The next day, we set about exploring the peninsula. The first item on our agenda was the famous 17 Mile Drive around Pebble Beach. In addition to being the site of one of the most famous golf courses in the world, Pebble Beach is a gated community situated on the southern coast of the Monterey Peninsula. The drive circles the community, hugging the coastline for much of its length. The views are often spectacular. Along the way, we spotted lots of wildlife: Harbor Seals, Sea Lions, Black-Tailed Deer and California Ground Squirrels.

The Lone Cypress stands on a small, rocky promontory along the Pebble Beach coastline and has been adopted as the symbol of Pebble Beach

Dad, Mom & the Lone Cypress

Several Harbor Seals were basking in the weak sunlight at Cypress Point

From Pebble Beach, we continued southward along the coast into Carmel-By-The-Sea. We had a nice Italian lunch in Carmel and did some window shopping before we found the Carmel Mission. The Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo is another of California's original Spanish Colonial Missions. The Carmel Mission was founded in 1770 and named for the Archbishop of Milan, Italy: Charles Borromeo. The mission was destroyed in the early 1800's as the Catholics withdrew and privateers sacked the mission. Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan Friar in charge of the California Missions is buried on the grounds of the beautifully restored mission that is once again an active parish church.

The Carmel Mission as seen from the courtyard

The interior of the Carmel Mission Chapel

Back in Carmel-By-The-Sea, we hit the beach. Carmel Beach City Park is a beautiful white sand crescent against the Pacific Ocean. It would be beautiful enough on its own, but it's also the site of a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home. The Walker Residence is perched on the beach jutting into the Pacific near the end of the city beach. The house and the setting are a perfect match.

Carmel Beach City Park

The Walker Residence - the living room's roof is cantilevered to allow for unobstructed window views in more than 180 degrees. The house really does seem to grow from the cliff.

Monday night, we returned to Pacific Grove for dinner and a movie. We wandered through the Pacific Grove farmers market sampling the amazing variety of local produce that's available in Northern California before we snagged some burgers and settled in to see Up. I loved Up. Such a moving and human story told in such a beautiful way.

Tuesday morning, we visited the Pacific Grove waterfront one last time. Just off-shore, several harbor seals were resting on the rocks and the tide pools right on the beach were full of sea life. Starfish, crabs, mussels and anemones all made their homes on the rocks.

So much life at the edges of the ocean

Dad spotted this Harbor Seal on Monday morning and we were happy to see him again on the same rock on Tuesday

From the beach, we finally visited Monterey itself. We wandered Cannery Row and scoured the waterfront for the elusive Sea Otter. While we didn't spot any otters, we found plenty of souvenirs!

Cannery Row - Monterey, CA - named for the Steinbeck-era sardine canneries that once lined this ocean-front street

En route back to San Francisco, we made a stop at Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Big Basin is the oldest of California's State Parks. Its nearly 11,000 acres are dominated by the old-growth Coast Redwoods. Coast Redwoods are the tallest growing species of trees on earth. The trees at Big Basin were humbling. Several trees in Big Basin are more than 300' tall and more than 16' in diameter. To think that these very trees have been growing for, literally, 1,500 years was almost too much to consider.

Dad & Mom inside the hollow core of a living Redwood tree. The tree was hollowed out by fire, but the more than 200' tall tree lives on!

Dad and Mom with a cross-section of a fallen redwood. Mom's thumb marks the tree's ring that indicates the portion of the tree's lifespan that corresponds with hers.

We left Big Bend and I returned to work at the Golden Gate, but my adventures with my parents in San Francisco were far from over!

The Biggest Little City in the World

2009-06-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Roy and I packed up the car and went for a road trip. We headed northeast past Lake Tahoe to Reno, NV. Our wanderlust was inspired by the presence in Reno of the First National Tour of the international sensation Mama Mia! and it's newest Wardrobe Assistant, Wayne Spellman. Though he left us only a few weeks ago, our paths converge so seldom that it seemed a shame not to go up and say, "Hello!"

For the trip to Reno, we took the scenic route. We got off the interstate and wandered up through the mountains on appropriately windy mountain roads until this is what lay before us:

We crested the western Sierra Nevada Mountains and saw Lake Tahoe spread out below us. Snow capped mountains ringed the brilliant blue waters of North America's largest alpine lake and made for a stunning vista. We wound our way down to the lake's edge and stopped to take some more photos.

w/ Roy at "Inspiration Point Look-Out"

A stern-wheeler paddles into Emerald Bay

The waters of Lake Tahoe are an incredible combination of brilliant blue and crystal clear. The water is also freezing cold - reaching only into the 60's at its peak in the summer months. Due to it's extreme depth (estimated at 1,645' - making it the second deepest lake in North America behind Oregon's Crater Lake), Lake Tahoe does not freeze in the winter months as the water mixes from top to bottom.

Roy and I drove along the west side of the lake enjoying the beautiful scenery all the way around. We paused for some ice cream in Tahoe City on the shores on the Truckee River (the lake's only outlet). (Fun fact: Due to it's vast size, depth and limited drainage, a drop of water that falls into Lake Tahoe stays, on average, 650 years.) We pressed on round the north side of the lake and back up into the mountains toward Reno.

Driving from San Francisco to Reno, we must have passed through a half dozen distinct landscapes and climates: the cool and damp bay area, the drier hills of wine country, the vast fertile fields of the plains nearer Sacramento, the green Sierra Nevada mountains and, finally, the dessert on the in-land side of the mountains. As we descended into Reno, things got decidedly more arid and brown. The beauty of the landscape changed from that of towering pines set against the mountainside to flashing neon against the sides of hotels.

The marquee for Circus Circus

We arrived in Reno around 5PM, got settled into our room and opened the room's connecting door to find Wayne on the other side! It was wonderful to see Wayne and to hear about his adventures in Hawaii - he even returned with presents for the whole company of Spamalot! Before long, we were off in search of one of Wayne's favorite dinners: the prime rib buffet.

Just outside our hotel was this retired version of the famous "Biggest Little City..." sign.

Before long, we wandering up and down "the Strip" visiting many of Virginia Street's fine gaming establishments. We played arcade games and took in the circus acts at Circus Circus in addition to trying our hands at various games of chance. Unfortunately, I wasn't very lucky at very many of those game; fortunately, I didn't take along much money...

The "Imperial Acrobats of China" performing hither-to-unheard-of feats of catching-metal-bowls-on-their-heads-whilst-riding-unicycles!

I found it hard to tell how Roy felt about the place...

Tuesday morning, we headed back to the buffet for breakfast before Wayne had to be at load-in. It was strange to see him headed off to load-in a show while Roy and I only waved good-bye... Roy and I took the faster route home (up through the Donner Pass!) and were back in San Francisco by mid-afternoon.

TVFMHRW - Reno, featured load-in already in progress at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts

I had a great time road tripping with Roy and visiting with Wayne. The drive around Lake Tahoe was breath-taking, but it was hanging out with a couple of great friends that was the highlight of the trip!

More Tales of the City

2009-06-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Week #2 in San Francisco brought our official opening night on Wednesday. It was a little surreal to be preparing for a big opening night that was also performance #1277, but it was fun to have that buzz in the air. Eric Idle came for opening night along John Du Prez (the show's author and composer, respectively) as did our Associate Director, General Manager and Press Agent - it was quite a night around the office. The show went super well; the audience obviously enjoyed themselves quite a lot. Afterward, we all retired to the Hotel Monaco for a fancy opening night party.

Everyone jockeyed for a photo w/ Eric: Geoff, Eric and Ken

Opening night was also Karl's birthday, so we celebrated with a round of cupcakes and a toast.

The San Francisco Chronicle accompanies all their theatre reviews with a cartoon graphic illustrating the reviewer's impression. For our review, the cartoon man was described as "wild applause". We're a hit!

Friday, I visited the oldest existent building in San Francisco, the Mission Dolores. The sixth of Calafornia's 21 Spanish Missions, the Mission San Francisco de Asis (as the Mission is formally known) was established on June 29th, 1776. The town that grew up around the Mission on the banks of the creek named Arroyo de los Dolores took the name of the Mission and became San Francisco. In 1782, construction began on the adobe mission building that still stands on the site today. The current building has withstood several major earthquakes, conversion to a secular building and back again as well as the filming of Vertigo on the grounds (the grave of "Carlotta Valdes" was in the church's adjacent cemetery). Though the Mission's chapel is still regularly used for services, the Mission Dolores Basilica stands alongside the older structure. Both rooms are magnificent, in their own way, and both are beautiful places for quiet contemplation.

The 18th Century Mission Dolores alongside the 20th Century Basilica

The interior of the Mission's chapel.

My visit to the Mission drove home the point that California had a long history separate and apart from the story of the rest of the United States. The history I learned in school focused on the events of 1776 back east and hardly mentioned the massive colonization effort that the Catholic Church and Spain were undertaking on the West Coast. To read the list of Spanish Missions in California is fascinating - so many of the Missions have grown into the major cities of modern California (Mission San Diego de Alcala, Mission Santa Cruz, and Mission Santa Barbara are but a few examples). It's interesting the way that history is viewed and taught through current prisms - the kids in California get a whole year of California specific history (like the kids in Texas also do). They build sugar cube models of the various Missions while I was learning the geological history of the Great Lakes...

The weekend passed, as it so often does, in a flurry of shows - it's been quite nice, however, to not have to pack up the show on Sunday evenings. To just do the show, wish everyone a "great day off" and walk out the stage door is refreshing! We've all settled into the Golden Gate Theatre and are making ourselves at home. Admittedly, it's a bit of a shabby home, but I'm happy to be staying for a while longer. The Golden Gate opened as a vaudeville house in 1922 and later became a major motion picture theater (even boasting a Cinerama screen when that was something to boast about) before suffering a major decline in the 1970's. The theater reopened as a legitimate venue in 1979 under the joint ownership of the Shorenstein Hayes Nederlander Group. Today, it feels a bit neglected, much like the "Tenderloin" neighborhood that surrounds it.

The Golden Gate Theater stands at the intersection of Taylor Street and Golden Gate Avenue just off of Market Street in the heart of Sketchy Town.

Sunday marked both Ken and Merle's birthdays, so a party was in order. The Spamily celebrated at the Tonga Room with tropical drinks, dancing and frivolity after shot night. A bunch of us hopped the Hyde Street Cable Car for the ride up the hill to the Fairmont Hotel. From the moment we boarded the cable car, 'til the moment we left the Tonga Room, I was grinning. I absolutely love a good tiki bar and the addition of the cable car only made things more fun!

All aboard for the tiki bar!

DVZ, Jame, Roy, Geoff, Ken, Karl & Francesca all caught a ride up the hill

Ken, Merle and Suzanne (Suzanne's birthday was the following Tuesday) share a birthday Lava Bowl

Gurr & Jeff in the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki room

And with that, the second week of our engagement in San Francisco came to an end. I've been enjoying my stay here and am excited about having a whole month still ahead of me in which to explore and ride cable cars!

And Equality for All

2009-05-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday morning the California Supreme Court issued its ruling on the challenge to the infamous Proposition 8. While I was heartened that the California Supreme Court did not annul the marriages of the more than 18,000 same-sex couples that were legally married in the state before the passage of Proposition 8, they voted 6-1 to uphold the ballot initiative cum constitutional ammendment. The result was not a surprise, but it was a disappointment nonetheless.

There were several demonstrations around San Francisco, but reaction felt remarkably resigned. That is not to say that people were not angry, just that hopes were not high that the Supreme Court of California would undo this wrong. I joined several members of the Spamily at the day's biggest protest event on the steps of City Hall before the show Tuesday evening.

We raised our placards, listened to many speakers and raised our voices in chants like: "What do we want? Equality!". The rally, itself, was a bit unfocused and rambling, but it was heartening. I was impressed with the number of people wearing slogans like: "Straight but not narrow" or holding signs like "Another heterosexual couple for marriage equality". It was the people of faith, of all stripes, that gave me the most hope, though. The most stirring speaker of the afternoon was the out, gay pastor of a black baptist church.

The more I think about this issue, the less I understand the opposition. My confusion works on two levels: 1) How is it anyone's business who marries who? 2) It frightens me that a slim majority of voters can take away the rights of whatever group they want.

The first issue is the more basic of the two. I just do not understand anyone who thinks they can stand in judgement of another person's relationship. We all know people in relationships that we don't agree with, think are bad for those involved or are sure won't last, but we can't stop them - nor should we. How is it anyone's business who another person chooses to marry? If your religious beliefs dictate who and how you can marry, fine. No one is asking any religious group to marry people they don't want to, just for the government to recognize civil marriages. The government does all sorts of things that various religious groups don't approve of, I don't understand how a contract between two people to be legally bound to one another is any different. What we're talking about here are things like property rights and custody rights, not matters usually handled by those in our religious lives.

I have no doubt that, given enough time, this first issue will be resolved. Public opinion is moving, slowly, towards civil marriage for everyone. One day, we will look back on this fight and wonder what we were doing.

It is the second issue that is a bigger problem for me. The voters of California (and several other state as well) have used their constitution to specifically exclude a group from equal protection. Proposition 8 became "necessary" when the Supreme Court of California ruled that the equal protections of the state's constitution meant that same sex couples must be allowed to marry. The voters changed the constitution to override the court's decision. The voters singled out a group and made them less than others in the eyes of their state's constitution. We have done this before, of course, and we have undone this before; but how many times are we going to make the same mistakes? ALL PEOPLE ARE EQUAL UNDER THE LAW - we are taught to believe this is the foundation of our country, why can't we mean it & live it?

A dissenter at the rally shouted, "You don't need a piece of paper to love!" He's right, clearly, you don't need a marriage license to love whomever you choose. But why should anyone who wants to marry their lover be told they don't have the right? That's what this is all about: denying people their rights. Now, it is time for all of us to live up to our highest aspirations and stop denying any of us their rights.

San Francisco Has Opened It's Golden Gate!

2009-05-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

San Francisco rocks. I'm so glad that we're staying here for more than a minute and I'll get to keep on exploring this great city, though I managed to see and do quite a bit in my first week in town.

We arrived Monday afternoon after a leisurely flight from Denver. Rather than the crack of dawn flights that have so often been a part of my touring experience, we left Denver at a more civilized hour and arrived on the West Coast around 2:30. DVZ, Roy and I piled into a van and headed straight for the house we're sharing. The house is a beautiful Victorian on a quiet street in the Castro neighborhood. DVZ and I share the upstairs while Roy has the studio apartment below us. We share a two level backyard that features a gas fireplace. All three of us are very, very happy in our home away from home.

Our rental house in the Castro

Monday was all about getting settled and feathering the nest. We grocery shopped and wandered the neighborhood. As the sun set, I made dinner for Roy and I, opened a bottle of wine and put my feet up by the fire (in what has come to be a nightly tradition).

Tuesday was the start of work for the Spamily in San Francisco - the crew started our long load-in period first thing in the morning. Since I didn't have to appear at the theatre until after supper, I went out exploring. I started with a walk along Market Street - sort of the Broadway of San Francisco. As I walked, I enjoyed the procession of street cars that run down Market Street. They date from all eras of the electric street car, come from many cities (including some trolleys from Milan, Italy) and are painted to represent the electric railways in cities across the continent. While other cities have modernized or phased out their electric streetcars, San Francisco has refurbished them and put them back into service! It wasn't long before I had bought a pass and hopped on board for a ride.

My travels that first day took me to the Ferry Building that sits at the foot of Market Street and, until the Bay Bridge, served as San Francisco's water link to the rest of the Bay Area. I went on around the waterfront to Fisherman's Wharf where I strolled out along Municipal Pier and enjoyed views across the water toward Alcatraz and back toward the city's downtown. I caught a few glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was almost entirely enshrouded in fog on Tuesday afternoon.

The view from Municipal Pier back across downtown San Francisco

Soon, it was time to head to work. From the pier, I hopped on a cable car for the ride back to Powell and Market Streets. I immediately fell in love with the cable car system. That the city still operates three cable car lines with technology invented in the late 19th Century is unbelievably cool. The cars and the technology are unchanged from when the Clay Street Hill Railroad began operation in September of 1873. I hopped aboard a car on the Powell-Hyde Line and couldn't stop smiling as I stood on the running board and hung on. I was still grinning ear-to-ear when I arrived at the Golden Gate Theatre for work.

In advance of our San Francisco opening night, we took some extra time to spruce up the show a bit. Our lighting and projection designers had a bit of time to retool and refine the work that was done in West Point. For this engagement and the LA engagement, we have added a front truss with a few more lighting instruments and we also added some more lights to the on-stage package. The orchestra has also been beefed back up to its pre-West Point numbers. We also added some more sound reinforcement equipment. All these changes, as well as some maintenance on the set and props, meant that we needed some extra time to load-in and retech the show. The crew worked all day Tuesday and Wednesday with the actors coming in for a dress rehearsal and notes on Thursday.

At the dress on Thursday, things looked pretty good, so we all got the evening off! I took advantage of the opportunity to meet up with my friend Kelly Tighe who's in the Bay Area working on a production of Cabaret. We met up near my house for dinner and were joined by one of Kelly's friends and a mutual-friend, Christopher Lentz. I've been so lucky to be able to visit with so many good friends on the road, and Thursday night's dinner was just another example of how much fun that can be!

w/ Kelly outside Tangerine on Thursday night

Not only was Friday Spamalot's first preview in San Francisco, it was the night my wife was set to arrive! Sheila Marie took advantage of the long Memorial Day weekend to make a dash to the West Coast. It was to be a short visit, but we packed a lot into it.

Saturday we were up and out of the house in time for breakfast and a second visit to Fisherman's Wharf. As soon as we stepped off the streetcar, we could hear the sea lions barking and growling and followed their sounds to the end of Pier 39. On floats near the pier, lots and lots of California Sea Lions were lounging, playing, splashing and fighting for position. The noises they made were amazing. They are wild, male sea lions that come up onto the floats to relax between hunting trips. Later in the summer, the guys will go meet their lady friends south of here for mating season. Until then, though, it's guys only at Pier 39.

Some of the sea lions at Pier 39 - they are huge & loud creatures

w/ SME and the sea lions

Once again, I was at Fisherman's wharf and needed to get back across town to get to work - time for another cable car ride! As I had been gushing about how cool the cable cars are since before Sheila Marie arrived, I was relieved when Sheila enjoyed the experience as much as I did. The two of us were both giggling and smiling the whole time.

SME on the running board of a Powell-Hyde cable car with Fisherman's Wharf and Alcatraz at the foot of Hyde Street

Sheila got this great snap of me "perpendicular hanging off a cable car" with the Transamerica Pyramid in the distance

Saturday night we went for drinks at the famous Tonga Room. Located in the basement of the Fairmont Hotel, the Tonga Room is a classic tiki bar. A large pool dominates the center of the room (in fact, the Tonga Room was constructed in the room that used to house the hotel's swimming pool) and a barge floating in the "lagoon" serves as the stage for the house band. Every half-hour, a "thunderstorm" of sound, flashing light, and piped-in rain disturbs the lagoon. The joint was jumping on Saturday night: the band was playing covers of all kinds and eras of dance music and Sheila Marie was even briefly swept away as part of a conga line! Jeff Dumas joined us at the bar and the three of us had a grand time sipping our industrial strength rum drinks in comedy glassware.

Jeff, SME and JV at the Tonga Room

On Sunday morning, we nursed our hang-overs with some comfort food at Chow, a neighborhood favorite before I had to head in for the matinee. Sheila Marie's Great Aunt June and Uncle Dean live nearby and came up for the matinee performance. We met up with them between shows and shared a tasty German meal as we got caught up. I saw Dean and June in Florida, but it had been an awfully long time since Sheila saw them in person, so I, once again, felt fortunate that the tour had brought me close to more great people.

While I did the evening performance, Sheila Marie made a trip to the grocery and laid in some supplies for an evening of entertaining at home. Karl and Gurr came home with me after the show and we had snacks while we sat around the fireplace in the garden and talked. It has been lovely to be able to have people over to the house!

Monday morning, Sheila Marie and I hiked over the hill to visit Haight-Ashbury. San Francisco's hills are no joke. There's a reason these people invented the cable car to carry them over some of these monsters. The view from the top of the hill in Buena Vista Park was quite something though... We wandered down Haight Street and found ourselves at Golden Gate Park; remembering Dean and June's recomendation, we decided to check out the Conservatory of Flowers. Constructed in 1878, the Conservatory is an elaborate Victorian greenhouse filled with a wide array of beautiful flora from around the globe. Palm trees and a giant philodendron tower over tiny, jewel-like orchids. It was a beautiful way to pass the morning!

SME outside the Conservatory of Flowers

The two of us in the "Low-Land Tropics"

After we wandered around Golden Gate Park for a while, we caught the train and headed for a meet-up with some of the Spamily at the ballpark! The Giants hosted the Braves for a Memorial Day matinee game and also welcomed Spamalot. Our very own John O'Hurley sang the National Anthem with his son, William, at his side and a dozen of us also led the singing of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the 7th Inning Stretch. We got some great seats to the game just behind first base and the chance to appear on the Jumbotron! We all had a great time and Giants easily beat the Braves 8-2.

The Spamily gathered in Centerfield: Karl, Lyn, Nigel, Jen Mathie, Roy, Matt, Angela, Chris, JV, Jeff and Merle.

SME caught the singing on video!

We gathered under the Giant baseball mitt in Centerfield for our broadcast on the Jumbotron

(I've ordered a copy of the footage that appeared on the giant screen which includes Jeff's Harry Caray-esque introduction.)

Christopher and SME got to tag along to the game as well! Here they are with the Giant mitt in the background.

Outside AT&T Park with #24, the "Say Hey Kid", Willie Mays

After the ballgame, several of us retired back to the 'hood for some AMAZING ice cream at the Bi-Rite Creamery and a relaxed dinner at home. Unfortunately (or maybe very fortunately) we were a bit TOO relaxed as we were late getting Sheila Marie to the airport and she didn't make the red-eye flight home on Monday night. We were able to rebook her for the next day and I got to spend 15 bonus hours with my beautiful wife!

Tuesday, we did our best to take advantage of the extra time. After breakfast at a great sidewalk cafe (too bad I can't find anything decent to eat in this town...), we rented a car and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge. Tuesday was bright and clear, but some of San Francisco's famous fog was racing through the straight, obscuring various parts of the bridge as it passed. This only made the views more interesting, though:

We continued on up into the Marin Headlands and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. We stopped to take a brief hike down to the water's edge and discovered a beautiful black sand beach. Though it was quite chilly up in the wind, the beach was sheltered from the wind and the sand was quite warm. We each took the opportunity to dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean.

As you might be able to tell from my face, the water was FREEZING!

Not far from the beach was the picturesque Bonita Point Light

Not wanting to have Sheila Marie miss her second plane, we had to head back across the bridge and toward the airport as soon as our feet dried off. We said goodbye outside the airport and my wife was back on her way home to the other side of the continent. I'm glad for the wonderful visit, but I'm also looking forward to the time when we aren't saying goodbye quite so often.

My first week in California flew by. I've been having a great time and don't want to let a moment get away. I'm very happy out here and am excited about all the adventures that still lay in store for me; including a visit from my Mom & Dad as well as a visit with Paul & Jenny!

Rocky Mountain High

2009-05-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Denver is a great town. I was especially pleased that the itinerary brought us back to the Mile High City, but was a little sad that it was for such a short visit. The week seemed especially short with the late afternoon flight in on Monday and the day spent hiking on Tuesday. By the time we loaded the show into the Buell Theatre and opened on Wednesday night, the week was more than half over!

This time around, I rented an apartment with Jeff Dumas in a high-rise just around the corner from the theatre. The apartment was actually owned by the Performing Arts Center as a home away from home for performers and staff in their resident companies. Since they weren't using all the apartments, we were offered the chance to rent them! Some extra income for the Denver Center and some cheap digs for us - a win, win.

The view from my apartment's balcony.

The Daniels & Fisher Tower is all that remains of the Daniels & Fisher Department Store. Built in 1910, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River at 325'.

Just as we did last time (all the way back in September of 2007), Spamalot played the Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre. It's a beautiful space and has enormous support spaces backstage. The crew loaded-in and out of the Buell in record time. (Denver marked my 33rd and 34th weeks on the tour the first time and my 119th week some 600 performances later.)

The exterior of the Buell - the theatre opens up onto the covered courtyard of the Denver Performing Arts Center which is home to 10 other performance spaces.

I got to see many old friends in Denver. On the way back from my hike on Tuesday, I stopped in Boulder and had dinner with Diana Giattino. Diana was one of my assistants at Gateway Playhouse and I absolutely adore her. She's finishing up a Master's Degree in Education at the University of Colorado while also teaching. I'm so glad I got a chance to catch up with her! It seems like she's really found herself and is doing great.

I also got to catch up with two alumni of the tour: Piper Arpan and Elaine Jarzabski. Piper (our former swing and Social Director) fell in love with a Denverite while we were there the first time and has since gotten engaged! She was in town to celebrate her birthday with her beloved and invited the Spamily to come share in the fun at her intended's bar. I miss Piper a lot - she was my main Roadfood Buddy (in fact, the man she's marrying, Dino, runs a Roadfood-approved joint) and just a fun kid to have around. Elaine, late of the hair and make-up department, lives in the mountains outside Denver and came down to say hello over the weekend. I was fortunate to share a between shows meal with Elaine and catch up!

As we had an understudy rehearsal on Thursday afternoon, Friday was my only in-town touristy day. I woke up early and took a tour of the Denver Mint. The Denver Mint is the largest producer of coins in the world. Their production has slowed a bit, due to the slowdown in the economy as a whole, but they hold the record for the most coins struck in a single day. They mint circulating coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollar coins) as well as commemorative sets.

Friday afternoon, I met DVZ at the Brown Palace Hotel for afternoon tea. The Brown Palace opened in 1892 and is a magnificent hotel. Tea is served in the hotel's atrium 8 stories below a beautiful stained glass window. Neither David or I had ever been for formal tea, and we both enjoyed it immensely. Along with our caffeine, we were served a tower of scones, tea sandwiches and pastries. What a delightful way to pass the afternoon!

Looking down into the Atrium of the Brown Palace Hotel

One lump, or two?

Denver marked the last city of our Wardrobe Supervisor, and my good friend, Wayne Spellman. Wayne turned over the reigns of the wardrobe department to Linda Lee, who held that position for the Broadway company and returned to the tour of Mama Mia. To celebrate his tenure and to wish him well, the Wardrobe Department hosted shot night after the shows on Saturday. The night had a Hawaiian theme, as Wayne's first stop with Mama Mia will be Honolulu. The room was decorated with palm trees, hula girls and lots of photos of Wayne. Nearly the whole company turned out to raise a glass.

Angela greeted everyone with a lei

Roy and Wayne

The party continued across the street in the hotel's bar - Carissa, Alexa, Sarah-Lin and Matthew turned up in hula garb!

For Sunday night's show, the whole crew (and many others as well) donned ties in Wayne's honor. (Wayne ALWAYS wore a tie to work on opening night.) At intermission, we gathered so Francesca could snap a group photo (even the French cow put on a neck tie).

People come and go, that's the nature of the business, but I'm going to miss Wayne a lot. Not only was he quite good at his job, he was one of my favorite people to hang out with. I could always count on him for a hug and a kind word. The two of us shared an awful lot of road trips and adventures. I will certainly think of him the next time I'm planning an excursion. I wish him well and look forward to our paths crossing again.

As the week ended, I could feel the excitement building in the company. The long-awaited California leg of the tour was, suddenly, upon us. For months, we'd been talking about the long sit-downs in San Francisco and Los Angeles; on Monday, it was time to go!

Cow Creek - Rocky Mountain National Park

2009-05-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

It was a long schlep from Spokane to Denver (roughly 1,100 miles). The long drive meant that the trucks wouldn't make the trip in one day and that Spamalot would not open at the Denver Center until Wednesday. I headed for the mountains on my unusual Tuesday off.

I was up early on Tuesday morning, got myself a big breakfast of huevos rancheros, and was in the car headed northwest shortly after 8AM. I was headed for the Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, CO. Traffic frustrated me a bit, slowing my progress to the mountains, but as I was arriving the at trailhead a herd of elk stopped me in my tracks. Just off the dirt road, a whole bunch of elk were grazing in a meadow, completely unconcerned about my presence.

Elk Herd #1 for the day.

These are HUGE animals - it's hard to really tell how big they are in a picture - the size of horses with the body shape of deer.

Around 10:30, I set off on the Cow Creek Trail. The trail began at the former McGraw Dude Ranch, now a National Park Service ranger and research station, and closely followed the course of Cow Creek. Near the trailhead, Cow Creek is pretty lazy - a series of beaver dams slow the creek and create splashing spillways. As I progressed up the trail, however, the creek grew more wild. Fueled by the melting mountain snow, Cow Creek is crystal clear and freezing cold. The creek traces a path through a valley climbing slowly as I moved upstream. The trailhead is at 7,800 feet in a wide meadow lined with aspens and pines.

Sheep Rock was a constant companion on the first part of the hike - above the meadow to the right of the trail.

Cow Creek

The creek was never very wide, but moved at a good pace as it tumbled down the valley.

The trail was a gentle climb over the first two miles. Pretty quickly, I noticed that I was getting short of breath. I've been doing enough hiking lately to wonder what was different here. It didn't take long for me to remember that I started the hike nearly a mile and half above sea level. As a life-long "flat-lander" the thin air was kicking my butt!

The last 1/2 mile, or so, of the trail grew steeper as the wide valley became more of a gorge. Cow Creek got wilder and louder as it tumbled past boulders and made some short falls. The sound of falling water grew louder and the rock walls on either side of the trail got steeper as I neared Bridal Veil Falls. I was paying careful attention to my footing, so the falls appearance was a surprise:

Bridal Veil Falls

When I arrived at the falls, there was a group of other hikers there and another pair that I had overtaken on the trail arrived behind me. We all said hello and set about staying out of each other's pictures. But, not long after I arrived, it suddenly clouded over and began to rain. The other hikers fled back down the trail while I tucked myself under a rock outcropping and had a snack. About ten minutes after the rain started, the dark cloud passed, the sun shine returned and I had the falls to myself!

Cow Creek tumbles more than 20 feet over a small cliff to form Bridal Veil Falls. In the summer it's possible to cross the creek and climb to the top of the falls, but the spring melt made the creek too wide to do so easily on the day I visited. While I scrambled around, taking pictures and looking for a route to the top, I let my pack rest under the outcropping where I weathered the brief rain. A fat chipmunk was exploring my belongings while I explored the falls!

I returned to see this little bugger hopping out of my backpack! He was clearly used to life at a tourist destination and was ready to help himself to some people-food.

When I heard some more people climbing up to the falls, I took one last look:

and was on my way. Unsurprisingly, the trip back down the trail was much easier than the trip up. I gained more than 1,000 feet of elevation on my hike and was happy to give it back. The trip down was no faster, however, as going downhill on rocky trails can be just as slow as going up.

As the valley opened up again, I spotted some movement at the edge of the meadow:

3 mule deer were foraging near the trees! These deer are a good bit bigger than the white-tailed deer I grew up with in Michigan. Males stand four feet tall at the shoulder and can weigh in at above 300 pounds. The deer were very alert to my presence and kept their distance.

Shortly after my encounter with the deer, I reached a confluence of trails.

It was just after 1PM, my legs felt good, and it was a beautiful day (even at this altitude, the temperatures were in the 70's with a warm breeze), so I decided to take a side trip to Balanced Rock. The Balanced Rock Trail dropped down past the Rabbit Ears backcountry campsite and crossed Cow Creek. The first part of the trail was lush and the deepest green I encountered all day. Though there's plenty of green in this part of the Rocky Mountains, it's nothing like the colors I encountered in Eugene; vegetation is much more sparse here and everything feels more delicate. Much of the trail was gravel crushed by boots and hooves from the Rocky Mountain's own rocks. The topsoil is thin and delicate. This is not to say there wasn't plenty of plant life, just that it was a beautiful contrast to what I was experiencing in the preceding days and weeks. (That's been one of my favorite aspects of life on tour - things change so quickly and frequently.)

These delicate little lavender flowers are American Pasque Flowers - one of the first flowers of spring in the Rocky Mountain alpine region. Their stems are fuzzy to help keep the frost off as they're the earliest bloomers in places with variable weather.

As I left Cow Creek behind, I began a long climb to the top of an unnamed peak in the Lumpy Ridge. As I climbed, the plant life thinned and changed. More and more fallen trees lined the path. At first, this seemed like a terrible tragedy for the hillside, but then it occurred to me: this is how the mountain gains topsoil - trees grow, are blown over, decompose, turn into dirt and slowly thicken the topsoil. On the topic of natural processes; the trail was full of animal droppings of all shapes and sizes and twice I came across bones (I'll spare you the photos). There was no question I was in a wild place.

The climb was unrelenting. Though I only gained around a 1,000 feet on the trail, it was a much tougher ascent than the Cow Creek trail. About halfway up, I stopped for lunch.

All along the route were these random outcroppings of rock. This one was 12', or so, tall and featured a few pine trees growing in the gaps and fissures. All of these outcroppings looked as if a giant child had stacked up the boulders in artsy compositions, many looked like they could collapse at any time. I ate lunch in the shadow of the biggest boulder on the smaller rock in the lower-left of the picture. Unlike the Cow Creek Trail, I saw no one on the Balanced Rock Trail - my lunch companion was a loudly chattering squirrel.

I pushed onward and upward to the top of my personal mountain. I came to the crest and then crossed over it, opening up the vista to the snowcapped, higher peaks that form the continental divide.

I gave up some of the altitude I had gained and circled around to the far side of the mountain. Just as I was beginning to wonder if Balanced Rock had lost its balance and fallen, it came into view. I literally, stopped in my tracks and gasped at its improbability.

The balancing rock is quite large and the rock it's balanced on is no bigger than me. How this came to be, I haven't the slightest idea. As soon as I saw it, the 2 and a half mile climb was worth it.

I smiled the whole way back down the mountain. As the research station came back into view, I did some quick math and calculated that I had hiked just over 11.5 miles. My feet were heavy, but I was, otherwise, feeling quite good. I rounded the rangers cabin and stopped in my tracks yet again. A herd of 18 elk (the same herd that was nearby in the morning?) was grazing on the other side of Cow Creek.

I dropped my backpack off in the car and slowly approached the herd, sat down on a rock and watched them for 15 minutes. As I moved closer, they kept a careful eye on me, but relaxed as I settled in to watch them. There were 18 of them working their way across the hillside. I was close enough to hear them munching on their grass! Eventually, I had to get in the car and head back into town...

En route back to Denver, I saw 3 more herds of elk! One great big herd before I reached Estes Park, another wandering the golf course in Estes Park and a third on a hillside as I wound through the mountains between Estes Park and Boulder. Each time, I marveled at them.

Some younger members of Herd #3 - they were cavorting in an open field and would, occasionally, stand up on their hind legs and kick at each other with their front limbs.

As I turned off the little dirt road that lead to the trailhead, there was one, last, spectacular view that capped off the whole day:

It's Official

2009-05-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

From a post on BroadwayWorld.com:

National Tour Of Monty Python's SPAMALOT Set To Close In Costa Mesa CA 10/18

The record breaking National Tour of Monty Python's SPAMALOT, the Tony Award-winning Best Musical, will close in Costa Mesa CA on October 18th. The musical's tour will have played 1408 performances over 101 separate engagements throughout North America, to an audience estimated at nearly 3.6 million people. The National Tour began in Boston in March 2006 and recouped in less than nine months on the road. In all its global productions (Broadway, West End, Australia, National Tour, Las Vegas), SPAMALOT will have been seen by approximately 6.9 million people when the tour closes.

With a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, music by John Du Prez and Eric Idle and direction by Mike Nichols, Monty Python's SPAMALOT is based on the screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by Monty Python creators Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam,Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

The SPAMALOT phenomenon began on March 17, 2005 when the show opened at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway to rave reviews, enthusiastic audiences, and, shortly after, Tony Awards (Best Musical, Best Director for Mike Nichols, and Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Sara Ramirez). The musical set house records for weekly grosses, and joined an exclusive club of shows that have grossed more than $1 million weekly on Broadway. Playing 1575 performances, the Broadway engagement of Monty Python's SPAMALOT recouped its entire investment in less than a year and grossed approximately $168 million. The National Tour is expected to have grossed more than $167 million at the time of closing.

With choreography by Casey Nicholaw, Monty Python's SPAMALOT features sets and costumes by Tony Award-winner Tim Hatley, lighting design is by Hugh Vanstone and sound design is by Acme Sound Partners. Others on the creative and production teams includeDavid Br Ian Brown (Hair & Wig Design), Gregory Meeh (Special Effects Design), Elaine McCarthy (Projection Design), Joseph A. Campayno (Make-Up Design), Larry Hochman(Orchestrations), Glen Kelly (Music Arrangements), Todd Ellison (Music Supervision and Vocal Arrangements), Peter Lawrence (Associate Director), Tara Rubin (Casting), and Gene O'Donovan (Production Manager).
Monty Python's SPAMALOT is produced by Boyett Ostar Productions, The Shubert Organization, Arielle Tepper, Stephanie McClelland/Lawrence Horowitz, Elan V. McAllister/Allan S. Gordon, Independent Presenters Network, Roy Furman, GRS Associates,Jam Theatricals, Concert Productions International and Broadway Across America.

In addition to the numerous legitimate awards Monty Python's SPAMALOT has received, the authors also won the Grammy Award for Best Cast Recording in 2006.

Some facts about the National Tour of Monty Python's SPAMALOT:

· John O'Hurley is the current King Arthur, and starred as Arthur in the Las Vegas production as well.
· The other touring "Arthurs" were Michael Siberry, Gary Beach, Jonathan Hadary andRichard Chamberlain.
· Christopher Gurr (Sir Bedevere) is the only principal to have played his role since opening night.
· Christopher Sutton (Prince Herbert) has also been with the tour from its beginning; starting in the chorus and eventually taking over the role of Herbert.
· Jeff Dumas, the tour's original Patsy, won Washington DC's Helen Hayes Award for the role, and recently returned to the show.

The tour is noteworthy for many reasons:

· 3000 pounds of confetti has been shot at The Audience
· 2000 coconuts have been used in a feeble attempt to mimic the sound of horses' hooves.
· Not a single rabbit was harmed in the touring of the show. Though we tried.
· Monty Python's SPAMALOT was one of the first Broadway tours to "go green" in the responsible methods used to haul the show around the country.

Now - or at least on October 18 - run away.

www.montypythonsspamalot.com

Jeff Wilson, one of our General Managers, was in Denver for our opening night and broke the news to the assembled company last night after sound check. I don't think anyone gathered on stage was terribly surprised, but it is never fun news. Jeff emphasized how proud of the tour everyone is and mentioned some of the milestones we will have reached by October 18th (101 separate engagements and more than 3.5 million audience members). Jeff also took the company out for a drink after the show - the first of a string of parties planned for the week in Denver.

There are still six more months to go on this adventure, and six cities that I've never been to, but it's a little weird to know, for sure, when it's coming to and end. I've set dates, for myself, for when I would leave the tour; but, obviously, none of them have stuck. I really enjoy this gig and the people I'm traveling with & I hope it stays great all the way to Costa Mesa. On the other hand, I would love to live with my wife again & I miss my apartment, my friends, my cats & NYC.

Now that it's official, if anybody out there has a job they'd like to offer me...

Countdown To Closing

Near Nature, Near Perfect

2009-05-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is borrowed from the city of Spokane's motto. I have to agree with the sentiment - Spokane was a fun city. Spokane calls itself the Inland Northwest - they're on the east side of the mountains, but it felt much like the cities of the Pacific Northwest that I've enjoyed so much. There were mountains on the horizon, a crashing river ran through town and the smell of evergreens was everywhere.

While much of the company traveled from Eugene to Spokane by bus (a 10 hour proposition) I opted to fly. It was a two segment trip & for the first half (Eugene to Seattle) we traveled on what came to be known, affectionately, as the "clown bus in the sky". The clown bus was painted to celebrate Horizon Air's 25th anniversary and made quite an impression. It was also one of the most pleasant flights I've been on in a long time. The flight attendants were pleasant, the plane had two doors for entrance and egress and they served Vernor's in-flight. Heaven in the sky!

DVZ, Ken & Roy pose in front of the "clown bus in the sky"

Spokane sits astride the eponymous Spokane River at the site of big series of waterfalls. It was the host-city of the Expo '74 ("Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment") resulting in many of the structures (including the INB Performing Arts Center that played host to Spamalot) that make up Riverfront Park. The riverfront was a beautiful place to be: it featured a carousel, skyride over the falls, IMAX movie theatre, several food vendors, some cool public art and miles of walking trails.

The largest of the Spokane Falls as seen from downstream

Some smaller falls just upstream around Canada Island (once home to the Canadian pavilions, it has since been renamed in honor of our neighbor to the north)

This giant red wagon sits in Riverfront Park near the theatre. Entitled "The Childhood Express" and created by Ken Spiering, this artwork was created in honor of Washington's centenary in 1989 and is interactive: the wagon's handle is a slide!

The INB Performing Arts Center (formerly known as the Opera House) was built as part of the Expo '74. The backstage space was large and accommodating, the crew was top notch, but, once again, the theatre was short on dressing room space. Since things went well at load-in, the big event of the day on Tuesday was watching the building across the street get torn down. When we came to work, there was a 3 story building there, by dinner time, only the facade remained. The workers used a crane, a backhoe and a bobcat to do most of the work while we all watched (and speculated on their next moves) from across the street.

Mark, Ken and David enjoy the demolition

The INB PAC on the Spokane River - the windows wrap around 3 sides of the building making it feel a part of its surroundings.

Of course, Spokane is home to Gonzaga University. Perhaps Gonzaga's most famous alum (though he holds only an honorary degree - he dropped out in his final year) is the immortal Bing Crosby. Bong was a big supporter of the university and donated the funds to build Gonzaga's library. The library has since been outgrown and converted to a student center, but still bears his name and is home to the "Crosbyana Room" which displays all manner of things Crosby-related (including the Oscar he received for Going My Way. I visited the campus and the room with the biggest Crosby fan I know, Ben Whitely. Ben is a card-carrying member of the Bing Crosby fan club!

Ben with the statue of Bing outside the Crosby Student Center - Bing's signature pipe is often stolen as a prank by Gonzaga students

The Student Center showed a sense of humor about its namesake...

Thursday night, a large contingent of the Spamily turned out to shoot at one another. Lenny set up a very successful laser tag outing after the show. Roughly 30 of us scampered about a retrofitted warehouse firing our laser rifles, ducking, dodging and laughing. We were recounting our stories of bravery and foolishness all the way home.

Between rounds of tag, our host lead us in a wild game of pass the hula-hoop - it was more fun to watch and laugh than play!

On Friday, Karl and I went on a fly fishing expedition. Karl's been talking about learning to fly fish for a while, so when I read that there was an outfitter nearby, we went for it. We trekked a half an hour east to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho for our adventure on the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. Our guide provided all the equipment and the taught us the basics. We had a nice time, but didn't get many bites (the river was running high, fast and quite cold from the snow melt in the mountains). I caught the only fish of the trip: a 7" Cutthroat Trout who wiggled away before we could snap a photo. (You'll just have to trust that this isn't a "one that got away" tale...) In any event, the scenery and the experience were something special.

Karl casting - he looks just like Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It doesn't he?

A patented "arm out photo" on the Coeur d'Alene River

I had a couple of great meals at a restaurant called "Mizuna" near the river in Spokane. They featured Northwest ingredients in unique combinations. On Monday evening I dined with DVZ and enjoyed it so much that I returned for an after-show Sunday meal with Ben Davis, Gurr and John O'Hurley. On both occasions, the meal was delightful and varied.

I crossed off two more roadfood joints during the week to bring my total to an even 50: Frank's Diner and Hudson's Hamburgers. Frank's is in a converted 1906 railroad observation car. They serve up the usual, tasty diner fare in special surroundings. At Hudson's (in Coeur d'Alene) the surroundings are decidedly downscale, it's the hamburgers that are the attraction - they had best be, since there's almost nothing else on the menu (not even french fries). Hudson's has been pounding out patties and grilling them up for very satisfied customers for more than a century and it was easy to taste why there's often a line out the door.

I shared the best sort of meal (a meal with friends) between shows on Saturday at Anthony's at Spokane Falls. Anne (subbing in hair for the vacationing Mitchell), Roy, Suzanne, Lenny, Jason & I ate outdoors overlooking the beautiful falls.

A few more photos from the natural beauty department - both of them under the heading VFMHRW:

There were amazing clouds all week in Spokane. Whether it was sunny or stormy, the clouds were always doing interesting things.

I awoke early on Friday to get ready for the fly fishing trip & this was the sky that greeted me.

The more time I spend in the Northwestern part of our country, the more I dig it. Spokane was a charming city with a great downtown. I look forward to the next time I find myself in that part of the world.

Draft Richard Chamberlain?

2009-05-09T13:35:00.000-07:00

This video and online petition just came to my attention.
Please to enjoy:

JV

The Emerald City

2009-05-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

En route from Anchorage, Alaska to Eugene, Oregon I took the logical detour through New York City. I left Anchorage at 1 AM on Saturday morning and arrived at JFK at 4PM. It was a marathon of flying, but well worth it as I was coming to town for the nuptials of Brittany Fahner and Brian Loesch. In addition to sharing in their wedding day, I got to see my wife and many, many of my friends. Their wedding was lovely and the reception that followed was a blast. Monday morning, Sheila Marie and I shared a last moment with the newlyweds at brunch before I dropped Sheila Marie back at our apartment, petted each of the cats and headed back to the airport and life on tour. All told, I was in New York for 47, fun-filled, hours...

The new Mr. & Mrs. Loesch cut their wedding cake

Sisters, sisters, never were there such devoted sisters...

Among the many people I hadn't seen in so very long and was super-pleased to spend some time with was the charming Ashley Donovan Flynt Garrett

Monday night I emerged from the airport and was immediately greeted with the distinctive smell of the Pacific Northwest - a crisp, clean, piney scent welcomed me to Eugene. The Residence Inn that I called home for the week was right on the banks of the Willamette River and was absolutely lovely. Not only was the location a dream (riverfront trails lined both sides of the river) but the hotel was newly renovated, spacious and nicely appointed.

TVFMHRW - Eugene, OR

The Willamette River was just beyond the red brick of the North Bank Cafe (a wonderful member of the McMenamin's family of pubs and restaurants).

Eugene's nicknames include "Track Town" and "The Emerald City" and both were especially apt during our stay: the Eugene Marathon was run on Sunday (tagline: "Running in the footsteps of giants.") and the early May spring-time in Eugene was one of the most vibrantly green things I have ever experienced. I got outside, as much as the rehearsal schedule allowed, for a couple of springtime hikes around town. My first hike was in the city park just across the river from the Residence Inn. Skinner Butte Park is built around a hill that steeply rises some 200 feet above the surrounding city. It was the location of a cabin built by Eugene's founder, Eugene Skinner, in 1846.

Several buttes adorn the Eugene area. (A butte is an isolated hill with steep sides, that is taller than it its top is wide. A mesa is wider at the top than it is wide.) The tallest of these buttes is Spencer Butte just south of town. I climbed Spencer Butte on Friday afternoon and was richly rewarded with an amazing view in every direction! At 2,055 feet, Spencer Butte is the tallest point in the area and allowed me views across Eugene and the Willamette Valley all the way to the snow-capped Cascade Mountains in the distance. The 3/4 mile trail rose nearly 800 feet to the summit, leaving me out of breath by the time I arrived at the top, but I had plenty of time to rest as I sat on the rocky outcroppings and marveled at the view.

The view from the top of Spencer Butte with the Willamette River shining in the middle distance

Near the beginning of the trial, I paused to take this picture of the astonishingly green landscape. As I rose, the forest turned to spruce trees and then to meadows of thick grass dotted with wildflowers.

I had a couple of really great meals in Eugene. As it is both a university town (the University of Oregon Ducks call Eugene home) and part of the Pacific Northwest, the crunchy granola quotient is quite high in Eugene. This paid off handsomely in terms of local, sustainable cuisine. Both my dinner at Adam's Place and Bruno's Chef's Kitchen were full of local goodies prepared in thoughtful ways. Among the highlights were the dates stuffed with toasted hazelnuts, wrapped in bacon and drizzled with saffron-infused honey at Adam's Place and the roasted Oregon duck breast and vegetables over fresh, crunchy cabbage at Bruno's. I had no trouble finding tasty things in Eugene... The inventive ice cream at Prince Puckler's also needs special mention.

Before the 4 show weekend completely overtook us, Karl and I took a mini-roadtrip south to Cottage Grove, the covered bridge capitol of Oregon. Turns out that Oregon has lots of covered bridges and the Cottage Grove area is home to 6 of them. The whole area was beautiful and the quaint bridges only added to the scenery.

Karl at our first stop, the Centennial Bridge in downtown Cottage Grove.

This bridge is actually a recent construction (1987) built from parts of older, demolished bridges to celebrate Cottage Grove's centennial.

w/ the Stewart Bridge and Mosby Creek

The weekend progressed much as it always does - in a blur of shows. As we packed up the circus during the second show on Sunday, though, our Head Carpenter, Keith, asked me if I'd like to stay and help load-out the show. The local crew was short on labor and could use a little help. I agreed and was hired by IATSE Local #675 as a "Pusher". (The load-out crew is divided up into categories: Deck Hands (the carpenters, electricians, props who hold full union cards and do the work of assembling the scenery, hanging the lights, etc.), Loaders (who load and secure the trucks) and Pushers (who, surprisingly, push the carts, hampers and boxes between the Deck Hands and the Loaders. I had a blast helping our crew load-out. Being a "Pusher" is sort of mindless work, someone tells you to push that hamper out onto the dock, but I had more knowledge of the show than your average Pusher and like to think that I was pretty helpful - at least I knew where to find the wardrobe room and its gondolas without having to be shown... After more than two years of hearing about the load-out, it was interesting to see how one actually worked! In appreciation of my help (as if the check I'll eventually receive from the Eugene local wasn't enough), Keith doctored up a t-shirt for me:

9:30 PM is when I started my new career as a Pusher

The theatre in Eugene was quite nice. The Hult Center for the Performing Arts features a couple of performance spaces and an art gallery. We performed in the largest space: the Silva Concert Hall. The backstage and support areas were quite nice, but were a little short on dressing rooms. The cast doubled up and we found room for everybody.

The Hult Center's exterior

The Silva Concert hall was quite pretty inside - its most notable feature was the basket weave panels that made up the ceiling and walls.

The Spamily welcomed a new member in Eugene: Vanessa Sonon took over the "Purple Showgirl" track. Vanessa was a member of the Broadway cast and dropped right into the track left vacant when Angelina left us back in Tampa. As it is the same track she performed on Broadway, Graham and Tera-Lee were able to fill her in on the differences between the Broadway and Tour staging quite quickly and got her into the show by the weekend. Vanessa is the last cast replacement on the horizon - we're all looking forward to a more settled cast as we head into the long runs of San Francisco and Los Angeles shortly!

I really liked Eugene. The city had a great vibe (as so many college towns do) and could not have been more beautiful. I like the Pacific Northwest more and more the more time I spend there. I feel right at home among the rivers, mountains and great people of the region. I'm grateful that Spamalot has introduced me to this wonderful part of the world and have a feeling I'll be back even after this touring adventure is over.

Alaska!

2009-04-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

When Anchorage appeared on the Spamalot itinerary many moons ago, I never imagined I would be traveling to the 49th state with the Spam-Fam. It was, of course, one of the stops that I was most interested in, but it was more than a year past the date I originally planned on returning to civilian life in NYC. Time is a funny thing, though, and on Monday, April 13th I found myself boarding a plane bound for Anchorage!

The flight was a marathon - I left from Newark and arrived in Anchorage 13 hours later after a brief stop in Seattle. The time on the airplane was not as terrible as I had feared it might be and as soon as I disembarked, it was clear that the long trip had been worth it. The Anchorage airport greeted me with all kinds of stuffed and mounted wildlife (including the largest halibut ever reeled in by an angler). Outside, the Chugach mountains soared over the horizon. Anchorage sits in a bowl in the space between the foot of the Chugach Range and waters of the Cook Inlet - it is a beautiful setting.

Anchorage as seen from the mountains southwest of downtown. Though it's a city of less than 300,000 people (some 40% of Alaska's total population), the city encompasses nearly 2,000 square miles. (Buffalo, NY has a roughly equivalent population in only 53 square miles.) The mountain behind the city is known as the Sleeping Lady - her head is on the left.

Though my flight arrived at 3:30 PM local time, it had been a long day already. I had only enough energy to collect my rental car, find the house I would be sharing with Paula, Matt and Gurr, and seek out some food. Right from that first dinner, the food scene in Anchorage impressed me. David and I went to dinner at the Moose's Tooth Pub and Pizzeria for our first Alaskan meal and were impressed not only by the house-brewed beers, but with the inventive and tasty pizzas. It was a theme to be repeated throughout the visit - everywhere I ate was tasty and there were delicious microbrews to be found all over town.

Our house was in the foothills rising to the south and west about 9 miles from downtown Anchorage. It was a beautiful structure with a lot of character and in a pretty setting. Chris and I had rooms on the ground floor with a sliding glass door off our living room. The second floor featured a huge living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room and two decks. Matt and Paula's bedroom on the third floor overlooked the main living room. The crowning glory of the house, however, was the cupola on top: it was a small room with windows on all four sides looking out over the stunning vistas that surrounded us. On clear days, we could see Mount Redoubt erupting in the east and Denali rising in the North.

Our Anchorage house

The view from our living room window - looking east into the Chugach Mountains

Spamalot's home was the Atwood Concert Hall in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. The building was weird on the outside; very plain and not obviously a performing arts center. The Concert Hall's interior, however, was very interesting. The proscenium arch was designed to look like the setting sun. The house curtain was variegated stripes of varying shades of orange set off by a pattern of yellow triangles extending outward over the auditorium's light green seats. The effect was quite striking. The stage house was large with plenty of space for everyone and everything. The dressing rooms, however, were more suited to a orchestral set-up than the needs of a broadway show. There were, essentially, two large rooms for the bulk of the company to share. The rooms had folding screens that visually separated the space, but couldn't disguise that they were just giant chorus rooms. The Anchorage local crew was short-staffed making load-in and load-out an extra challenge.

The Alaska Center for the Performing Arts

The interior of the Atwood Concert Hall

Tuesday morning, on my way to work, it finally happened: I saw a moose! At the end of my street, as I turned the corner, there was a great big moose in my neighbor's yard eating the shrubbery. I stopped in the middle of the street and gawked for a couple of minutes as the moose just continued to serenely chew the bushes. It was super exciting for me to see one of the giant creatures at last. After a year and half of hoping, I was so happy that I immediately called my wife and both of my parents to give them the good news. In all, I saw 8 wild moose during my time in Alaska. They're huge (as tall as 7' at the shoulder and ranging up t0 1,500 pounds) but remarkably awkward looking. Their long legs make them well suited to wading in ponds for food, but make them gangly looking on solid ground. Spring was just starting to spring in Alaska, so the moose were also at the their thinnest and perhaps extra awkward looking.

I didn't get a photo of moose #1 - I was too busy gaping - this is actually moose #5. I walked up on this moose during a hike along the Wolverine Peak Trail. I came over a small hill and discovered him 15 yards from me grazing on grass that the melting snow left exposed. We regarded one another for a while and then he went back about his business while I continued around him on the trail, snapping pictures the whole time. The encounter took my breath away.

I set out to make the most of my time in Alaska. I said, right from the beginning, that I wanted to have an adventure every day - Anchorage would not be a city where I spent a day hibernating or watching TV. I could sleep and watch Family Guy once I got back to the lower 48. I'm happy to report that I succeeded! I got up and out of the house each and every day and saw as much as I could before showtime.

I kicked off my Alaskan Adventures on Wednesday with a trip north to the Eagle River Nature Center. I hiked nine miles along and around the Eagle River, exploring the valley it has carved through the mountains. Part of the trail I hiked is the Historic Iditarod Trail. In its earliest incarnation, the Iditarod Trail connected Seward to Nome and served as a commercial route for the hauling of freight and mail. It is along this route, that the prospectors flooded into Alaska for the gold rush in the early part of the century and was also the route followed by relays of 20 teams of mushers to deliver desperately needed diphtheria serum to the residents of Nome in 1925. Today, the Ititarod Race runs over a similar route, but the exact routing of the race is different from the historic trail.

The scenery in the valley was spectacular

This Dall's Sheep surprised me near the end of my hike. He was perched on a sheer rock face hundreds of feet above the trail nibbling some unseen greenery. Dall's Sheep are the only all white mountain goats in the world. They live their lives on mountains and cliffs to avoid predators. They normally travel in herds, seeing just a single sheep is unusual.

Thursday, the maestro and I ventured up to the Anchorage Overlook (where I took the photo of Anchorage and the Sleeping Lady I used above) and then drove south toward Whitier. We stopped at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. The Conservation Center is home to all manner of native wildlife; some of the creatures are there to be rehabilitated and released into the wild after tragedies, others are part of captive breeding programs and another group were wounded and will live out there days at the center as they cannot be re-released. We saw black bears, brown bears, two kinds of bison, owls, a porcupine, elk and caribou. Even though the animals live in pens, the scale of the place is unlike any zoo I've ever been to. The animals had huge enclosures in keeping with the giant spaces around them.

One of the bison herds framed across their pasture lot and against the mountains.

On our way back toward Anchorage, Ben and I spotted moose #2 & #3 (the moose at the Conservation Center didn't count toward my wild moose count). They were picking their way along the opposite side of a riverbank from us. We pulled over and clambered around the snowbanks lining the road trying to get a better view of them. In the end, they disappeared into the woods before I could get a clearer picture than this:

Friday was the most adventuresome day of the trip to Alaska. Five of us booked ourselves on a Glacier Snowmobiling Trip. We met our guide and got outfitted 45 minutes south of Anchorage at the "Great Alaskan Tourist Trap" near Girdwood, Alaska. Once we had donned appropriate snowmobiling gear, we drove another 10 minutes south where we mounted our snowmachines and rode out into the 5.4 million acre Chugach National Forest. (The Chugach National Forest is the second largest national forest in the US.) Our guide, Matt, took us through a long valley and across a frozen lake to the foot of the Spencer Glacier. Along the way, we passed icebergs trapped in the frozen lake, heard avalanches rumbling down the mountains and forded a stream of meltwater.

Some photos:

JV, Francesca, DVZ, Ryan, James, Matt (our guide) and Random Girl Who's Name I've Forgotten as we prepared for our adventure.

Riding across the frozen lake at the foot of Spencer Glacier - those are icebergs that calved off the glacier and got trapped in the lake as it froze for the winter.

Jason, DVZ & our snow machines at the foot of the Spencer Glacier. The glacier is constantly advancing and plowing up the ice of the frozen lake, making the area where the glacier meets the lake ice very dangerous, we're still 20 yards from the glacier itself.

All five of us INSIDE the Spencer Glacier! We crawled into an ice cave and scooted around with 100' feet of glacial ice above us. It was amazingly bright inside the cave as the ice was mostly very clear or intensely blue and transmitted light from above and all sides. It was also quite slippery inside the cave as the spring melt was underway.

Later, we rode up above the glacier. The Spencer Glacier extends up this valley for some 15 miles!

The whole snowmobiling experience was totally cool. We spent five hours racing around on our machines. On the way back, we opened up the throttles and pushed the needles on our speedometers up around 70 MPH. Matt lead us over some jumps and into some wide banked turns, we all felt like snowmobiling bad-asses. We paused along the trail home to watch an avalanche come crashing down the near-side of one of the mountains. As cool as I felt, watching the forces of nature work on such a grand scale was humbling.

With two shows on Saturday and Sunday, my adventures had to be a little more contained... Saturday I visited Earthquake Park and learned about the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. The earthquake lasted more than 5 minutes and is the largest earthquake in North American history - registering 8.4 on the richter scale. Areas around Anchorage permanently dropped as much as 10 feet while other parts of the state were raised as much as 30 feet. It is because of the earthquake that Anchorage became the major port in Alaska: the ports at Valdez and Seward were completely destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis, while the Anchorage port was damaged, but operable.

On Sunday, several of us packed into my Explorer and road tripped to Wasilla. Moose #4 appeared right next to the road and kindly posed for some photographs en route. While the express purpose of the trip was a comedy photo involving the "Welcome to Wasilla" sign, a little bit of internet detective work lead us right to Governor Palin's house. While we couldn't get very close to her two story ranch house on Lake Louise, we were able to spot it and take a few pictures with it in the background...

The Palin's house is just over David's right shoulder - I think he made his feelings about Mrs. Palin's political positions clear.

Monday, I was back on the hiking trails. This time, I set out to conquer the Wolverine Peak Trail. (It was at the beginning of this hike that I encountered moose #5 and snapped the photo near the beginning of this post.) The weather was beautiful and as I climbed higher, Mt. Redoubt came into view with her plume of steam and the views of Anchorage were amazing. It became clear that I wouldn't have time to make the 11 mile round-trip and nearly 3,000 foot climb to the top of the 5,000 foot peak, but I was enjoying my hike. Somewhere along the way, I lost the trail in the snow and found myself scrambling straight up the side of the smaller peak next door. I kept following in the footsteps of whatever lost treker had gone before me until I was at the top of this lesser mountain. I was still pretty impressed with myself, though I don't even know the name of the peak I eventually stood on...

I teamed up with our Wardrobe supervisor, Wayne, on Tuesday and we set out to see the tallest peak in North America: Denali. We drove north into Denali State Park and clambered around in the snow at several unplowed viewpoints. Often we punched through the snow's crust and found ourselves up to our waists, laughing as we tried to see the mountain in the distance. (Denali State park offers some of the best views of Denali - or Mt. McKinley as it is also known - because the Susitna River wends through the park and opens up the vista toward the mountain which is some 50 miles distant.) Our efforts were rewarded with good views of Denali towering above the rest of the Alaskan Range. At 20,320', Denali is noticeably taller than any of the other very tall mountains around it. In fact, Denali is so tall that it creates its own weather; 70% of the time, Denali's peak is invisible due to the clouds it creates from the moisture coming off the Pacific Ocean. We were quite lucky, though there were wispy clouds around her top, we were able to clearly see the mountain. We also spotted several bald eagles on our trip!

Wayne with the Susitna River and Denali behind him

Denali

On our trip we also stopped in Talkeetna, Alaska for souvenirs and a different, equally wonderful, view of Denali. Talkeetna is rumored to be the inspiration for Sicily, Alaska the fictional town in Northern Exposure. I looked around hoping to glimpse Chris in the Morning, but it was not to be...

I hiked some more on Wednesday. The warming temperatures made the Middle Fork Trail a bit muddy and slowed me down quite a bit, but it was interesting to see the difference in the landscape, and especially in the river that flowed near the trail, that even just a few days of warmer weather made. At the lower elevations, nearly all the snow melted off during our 12 days in Anchorage, and the snows in the foothills around town were obviously vanishing as well. During our stay, Anchorage was also gaining daylight at a rate of more than 5 minutes a day! By the end of our run, it was still quite light outside after our show. Francesca got some great pictures of the sun setting over the Cook Inlet and behind The Sleeping Lady after the show on Tuesday evening - at nearly 10PM.

Thursday was my last real free day in Alaska. Wayne and Karl joined me for the trip down to the Alyeska Ski resort in Girdwood. Though the slopes were still open, we went specifically for the tram ride to the top of Mt. Alyeska and the view. On the car ride down, we caught sight of moose #6 & 7 in Potter's Marsh and a whole herd of Dall's Sheep on the mountain-side near Beluga Point.

The Alyeska tram carried us to the 2,300' level of Mt. Alyeska in about 7 minutes.

The view from the top of Mt. Alyeska with the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet and the Chugach Mountains behind me.

Alaska's name is actually derived from the Aleut (the native people of the Aleutian Islands in southwestern Alaska) word Alyeska meaning "great land". The developers of the ski resort took the name in the early 1960's.

I saw my last moose (moose #8) on my way home from a night out on Thursday. The moose was crossing the road very near to our rental house. Just taking his time, out for a late night stroll. The car coming the opposite way hardly even slowed as I watched the moose disappear into the woods.

On Friday morning I, reluctantly, packed up my suitcases before heading into town. I enjoyed one last "crabby omelet" (yup, an omelet filled with cheese and Alaskan crab meat, topped with avocado) at the fabulous Snow City Cafe before I visited the Ulu Factory with Wayne and Ken. An ulu is the curved knife the native people of Alaska used for practically everything (including cutting ice for igloos). Today, it's the must-have souvenir from an Alaskan visit (I didn't feel the need, but our group shipped several ulus back to the lower 48). Then I prowled around the docks and railyards taking photos of the Alaskan Railroad trains. Next time I'm in Alaska, I definitely want to make sure I book myself on one of their trains through the interior.

After the show on Friday night, it was time to return my rental car and head to the airport. As the last light faded from the sky, I headed in to wait with the world's largest halibut for the red-eye flight to Salt Lake City and a connection to JFK.

I had a great time in Anchorage and feel truly lucky that my job afforded me the opportunity to visit and gave me the free time to explore. It's a crazy thing that I've been doing for the last two years and two months. One morning I wake up in Peoria and the next I'm on top of a mountain in Alaska. There are, of course, sacrifices and trade-offs, but the trip to Alaska was one of the highlights of the tour thus far.

Near the theatre in Anchorage there were these crazy statues that were half-man, half-animal - this one, of course, caught my eye.

Life on Tour

2009-04-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

A couple of Spamalot cast members made it into an article in the Washington Post over the weekend!

I've linked the article, about life and lodgings on the road, here.

As for me, I'm home in NYC for a week on lay-off while the trucks are shipped to Alaska. Of course, the week is full of dates with friends, and a few quiet nights at home, but I'm going to try and get the blog caught up with posts about the last four stops: Austin, Atlanta, Wilmington and Cleveland. The farther behind I let this project fall, the harder it is to get caught up...