I'm Baaaaaack - sort of!

Thanks to my heroic husband, I have my own PC back up and running - and lost a minimal amount of data. Thank you, Julio - I love you!

Also, thanks to my generous father, who loaned me his laptop for a week longer than either of us expected, I was able to keep up with my emails and communications to the school.

Bye Bye Birdie opens in just over two weeks - sounds like a lot of time, but we can only have rehearsals on Monday Tuesday and Thursday, so really there are just 6 rehearsals left. Also, next Monday and Tuesday the school has conferences until 8pm, so we won't have a music director or accompaniment until about 8:30 each of those evenings...and we're not allowed to rehearse past 10pm for any reason. So, things are tight. As usual.

We had a weird evening tonight. I got a Facebook announcement from TCR this morning, saying they needed help tonight to fill 500 goodie bags for the Rocky Horror Show, which opens this Friday (they had 1500 done, 500 to go). So Mom and Dad came over for an early soup and sandwich dinner, and we all headed over to "TCR Lindale" (temporary theater they've created out of a nearby building which used to be a movie theater, then was a dance club, but has been sitting vacant for over a year). Turns out, the message was issued YESTERDAY, but for some reason, Facebook didn't post it to the group until this morning. They got all the bags filled last night, so Harrison missed out on his first non-performing volunteer opportunity at TCR. *sigh*

So after Dad & I greeted the few people we still know who are at the theater (Damon, Laurie, Diana, Casey, Dave...wow there were a lot of new faces there!) we headed to Perkins for pie. We had just started our sugar-fest when the woman who had been working the front counter came over and invited herself to join us...

Harrison and I were only slightly less befuddled by this turn of events than Mom, Dad and Julio. She is the mother of a boy Harrison goes to school with. He and Harrison were in the same class a couple years ago, and I've seen her at school functions a couple times (whereas Mom, Dad and Julio had no idea who she was and thus assumed she was some old friend of mine). She sat and regaled us with tales of her trouble at work, problems with her 7-year-old who had to be taken away by police and put in some facility for troubled children, her high score in science when she took the GED, and her desire to somehow persuade local big businesses to start a science fair.

I asked who was watching her kids tonight while she worked (hint hint). She kept talking. Julio made a show of getting up to go pay the bill. On she talked. Dad announced that he and Mom had to get going and left. She stayed seated and chattered away. Finally Harrison asked if we could go to Grammy & Grampa's to play a game, and I said "Oh, it's getting late honey - it's practically bedtime. We've got to get you home." She agreed it was getting late, and followed me toward the door, wanting me to wait until she could find a piece of paper to give me her phone number - I frantically offered to store it in my cell phone instead, and we escaped with our lives, driving straight to Grammy & Grampa's to apologize for having our nice quiet pie outing hijacked.

Now it is bedtime. More thoughts and anecdotal moments later...