Conferences, improv, illnesses, and ninjas

Things are moving along at a more reasonable pace, it seems. I've actually had a few nights this last week where I just hibernated at home.

On the good news front, my Aunt June who has been suffering from Pancreatitis has been in the hospital for a good nine months is a little farther out of the woods. She was in a "have surgery or die" situation with a surgical procedure that might itself kill her. Things were looking pretty bleak, but they got her in a day early and did a different surgery that wasn't as dangerous and removed a litre and a half of fluid from her system. It seems that her intenstines were leaking. Now, that's profoundly disturbing, but if they've fixed that problem it greatly enhances her chances of getting through this.

I got the call from my Mom last night, and I knew things were looking good since her tone wasn't somber from the get go. Of course as soon as we got that good news cleared up she had problems with the new Macbook that I bought her. She managed, on her first day with it, to drag her AOL folder into the trash. Rather than take it out and put it back where she drug it from, she decided to reinstall the program and was confused.

Some would say, "oh, it's because she doesn't understand how to use a Mac", but dragging things in and out of the trash is pretty much the same action as on a PC, so that doesn't wash. I highly encouraged her to plug in her mouse and quit trying to learn the trackpad until she felt more comfortable in her new environment. The hour I spent on the phone with her was a good reminder of why I am very glad to be leaving Help Desk duties forever.

I was in a good mood, though, since I had served on a panel for the Theatre Bay Area annual conference that afternoon. I skipped the opening session and got some much needed production work done on Sweetie Tanya and, terrified that I was unprepared and underqualified to talk about "New Media and its use in Expanding Audience", I loaded up a slew of tabs in Safari with content that reflected everything I could imagine we'd talk about and packed up my LCD Projector. I didn't need the projector as the panel after us had ordered a projector for their use, so we just used that, but having everything preloaded was a godsend, since there was virtually no network connectivity in the building. Hell, there was only one power outlet in the entire room!

I got to sit on a panel with folks from California Shakespeare Festival, Impact Theatre, Killing my Lobster and promotions guru David Perry. The panel was very well attended and I think I managed to come off as reasonably competent. I had been very stressed over it, but as usual my fears had simply resulted in me being extremely over-prepared. Great motivator, Fear.

In other news, I cancelled the last half of the Submergency run, since we had virtually no audience for three shows in a row. Two people showed on to our Sunday show, and that was the most paying audience we had managed to garner. The other two shows in that space didn't fare much better, and one of them closed as well. In an excellent example of making lemonade out of lemons, we decided to use the space on Sunday night for Radiostar and to make it a live recording with a jam afterwards. A small group showed up, despite the last minute nature of the affair and the absolute lack of publicity. This was largely because it was also an unofficial sendoff for Radiostar genius Christopher DeJong. Chris and his wife Ann are going to Camaroon for a year where they will engage in do-goodery.

None of us have managed to fully accept doing Radiostar without him, and I myself am firmly in denial about the whole thing. Still, a year will go by very quickly, and we're in enough of a groove that we can continue to do great improv for Radiostar in his absence. I imagine that his return will result in lots of exciting changes as he'll be full of pent up creativity by that point.

On a totally unrelated note, Ninja Women from Pittsburgh robbed a gas station. I don't know when the world is coming to when today's ninja youth are letting themselves get caught on tape performing petty larceny. I mean, seriously, cigarettes and lotto tickets? In my day, ninja's stuck to the shadows, clung to walls, descended from ceilings and performed ruthless assassinations. Sure, maybe a few ninja might engage in theft, but only if it involved jewels large enough to sit in the eye socket of an ancient stone idol.

Kids today.