Long time, no chat!

Man, it's been far too long since I posted here. I was reading a new book this morning (The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs), and realized that I haven't written on a daily basis in quite some time. Gotta get those ramblings out somewhere. I think it's pretty cathartic to do that, and keeps me from yammering in people's ears about topics they'd rather not hear about.

Anyhow, news...

Hope and I (mentioned below) have been dating for over a year now- it was a year as of April 23rd- and we've moved in together as of the start of March. We just moved into a condo (rental) at the beginning of August, and it's really nice, though we're still trying to slowly sort out our furniture situation. Watching endless design shows doesn't help- I now know what an accent wall is, and comprehend color palettes. God help me.

Hope and I, as of this morning, actually, started the South Beach diet thing- this is part of my reasoning for writing these entries- and so far it's not horrible. I just am not a huge fan of "diets", in general (I've done the Atkins thing for about two weeks, and even tried the hideous lemonade diet, once upon a time- not my favorite), but we'll have to see. I had some tuna salad (with mayonnaise, onion powder, and tomatoes) for lunch today, and a small handful of peanuts (whose second ingredient was sneaky sugar- you bastards!), but we'll see if that works. If nothing else, it'll keep me from eating out so much, get Hope and me more aware of what the hell we're eating, and save us enough for me to get some bitchin' kitchen equipment.

On the performance/improv front, Theatre Momentum is doing well. We're finishing up a run of shows this coming weekend, over at the Greenhouse Theater Center. We did a late-night run of a single show, prior to that, and it garnered pretty sparse houses. So, lesson learned, there. And this one took a little bit to get rolling, but once we did, we've been having better houses than not.

I'll admit, though- there are times when, throughout this process, I've thought, "man, this is a pain in the ass, all the work it takes to do this- I can't ever concentrate onstage." But then I have killer performances, and realize that I can sometimes really shut out the bullshit and focus on the show.

It's a lot of work. I sometimes wish I could just not want to perform, and just focus on the administrative side of things, but hell- I didn't get into this because I wanted to shuffle papers around and organize fundraisers. It's a troublesome dilemma. I love to perform, with the right people and the right show, but getting people into the door to watch those shows (which would be part of the point) is just as much (hell, more) work. I've got a slew of ideas for what we'll be doing in the next year, but I'm not going to post them all here, not right now, anyhow.

Suffice it to say, I've been reading books on marketing, pricing, and I've been generally sorting out how TM has to reinvent itself to get butts in seats (other than the usual friends and family), and I'm slowly coming up with some ideas that'll work for us. But hey, the details of the plans are reserved for company members, so off you go!

Oh, yes, we became an official company, by the way. I noticed that wasn't the case. Since last posting, we've put up Jigsaw and Mixtape, the Bailiwick Theater closed down, we moved Jigsaw to the Oracle Theater for a run and put up Eavesdrop and Poser, and we've put up two 15 Hour Projects since then, and mounted Significant Moment in the Life of... at the Greenhouse, and are running that and Status and The Steps at the same time. We ran an 8-week long improv and sketch competition and gave away a $400 prize, and we're finishing up a 5-week version of the same at the Greenhouse. We took over the studio space at the Cornelia Arts Building and tore down a couple walls and built some new ones, making it into two rehearsal studios (and we're slowly learning that soundproofing is a royal bitch), and we're still, of course, running WiP, with new directors every 4-6 weeks. And Don Hall came back as our coach for "The Woodshed" a bit of a beat-your-ass improv workshop.

Whew. Damn. That's a lot of stuff. I need to post here more often, hunh?