Mulan Jr Squared

The plants did not get watered yesterday, so that's what I did this morning. I used to have zero indoor plants, now I have so many I lose track. The new butterwarts and capensis are being very carnivorous, lots of gnats stuck on them, which is why I got them, but there is still the occasional one in front of my computer monitor and in the bedroom hovering around the tablet when I'm reading in bed.

Had my traditional banana and hard boiled egg breakfast. Last one till I buy more bananas.

Dropped off the rent check. Wish they would go electronic.

Noon, went to Sunnyvale theater, for the 1 pm showing of Mulan, Jr. It is only roughly based on the movie, with a lot of choreography added. It looks like everyone who auditioned was cast. I also went to the 4 pm show, which was supposed to be a whole second cast, but wasn't. Close, though.

It's a children's production, but I'm spoiled, when I was a children, our director would speak to us sternly if the show started looking like a children's production, and we would shape up.

The girl who played Mulan in the first cast was very good, she totally nailed her songs and had the earmarks of an actress. The one in the second cast blew a line at the start of Reflection, and was off key here and there. One girl was in both casts as the most vocal ancestor, and she was excellent. I would have cast her as Mulan over the one in the second show. 34 people in each cast, half of them playing more than one ensemble role (dancer/soldier/hun/etc).

The scale was awesome. But a huge cast of children means a huge audience of children, and for the first show my row became a day care center, they all arrived late, and there were not enough seats for all of them in the one row. And they were too stupid to figure out that they would have been better in a block (three rows). I couldn't get out for intermission because none of them would leave, and there were too many children to crawl over.

Second show I sat in the 2nd row, which solved that problem. But again it was a full house, with too many people coming in after the show started. General seating, I think it's time for them to start using assigned seats.

There was one teeny tiny girl in the 2nd cast who was so energetic and had such a bright smile, and was in step for the whole show. I'm glad I got a chance after the show to tell her she was great. Not sure who she is, the program had all their head shots, but I'm not good at faces.

Anyhow, it was not as painful as last year's Little Mermaid.

Home, caught up online, texted with Automation Guy a little. We decided the layoff got rid of only the most attractive employees.

Wrote email to my sisters explaining all the hairy details of the layoff, and realized I ought to take a vacation. Let the job search wait for a bit. I don't want to miss Consonance, or auditions, but maybe I can go somewhere after callbacks March 14, for 2 or 3 weeks. Somewhere with a beach.

Plans for tomorrow:
Not go to work
Drop off a DVD for Janice of her Fiji disaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJgQ_jkr4s
Check tracking numbers for the SS & severance papers
Plan a vacation
Work on my audition piece

Happy Leap Day

Some more thoughts about Mulan, Jr.
Which I did not post elsewhere because these are my friends, and I don't want to hurt their feelings on national television, so to speak.

The Good I've already mostly mentioned, except for one character added for this version. MuShu is a comical dragon who normally guards the temple, but has been demoted to gong duty for making some huge honor-killing mistakes. Played by acrobatic girls in both casts, they both were pretty good, though the second one was a better actress and snuck in some clever improv lines, while the first one was the better dancer and did more acrobatics.

Also a good idea, but not well executed, was when the boring producer was half a minute into her welcome, turn off your cell phones speech, the four ancestors ran onstage, and told her to get lost, and they tag teamed their way through the announcements themselves. This would have worked better if the girls playing the ancestors had enunciated, and if the audio board operator had been awake.

Which brings me to the audio. Everyone with lines was miked. That's a lot of microphones to track. During the first show, it was a mess. Mikes were never on in time, and sometimes went south during a speech. And those idiot middle of the forehead arrangements were on half the cast, which hurt a lot. It's a lot further for sound to travel, and the mouth is not shaped to make the air on your forehead vibrate. The second cast fared better, at least for act I. But as soon as the second act started, it was a mess again. I talked to one of the producers who is an audiophile, and he was bummed too. They will be using a different audio board and person for the next production, but the person is someone I know and do not have high hopes for. Except the show is Rent, a small, cast, all of whom have legit theater voices. If I was producing it, I would not be using mikes.

The orchestra was only 5 people, but they were miked and drowned out the whole cast. The only exceptions were the solos. Not the conductor's fault, I saw him signaling "softer" to his people at the right times, but he had no control over the mikes. In that theater, with that pit, no amplification is necessary.

Costumes. The first cast was a hodge podge. I saw Chinese, Japanese, Norwegian, Renn Faire and "what's in my closet?". The specially made armor vests for the soldiers were half-off and accordioned. The second cast looked like they got dibs on the costumers, there were more chorus line costumes and the armor fit well.

What else? Oh yeah, the sets were excellent for a no-budget show. They did beautiful things with lighting, and there were a pair of stone dragons painted on flats which looked real. Thy also had a nice Japanese garden style bridge but left the creek to our imaginations. It worked for "Reflection".

The biggest thing for me, though, was the score. This is a children's production, the score was rewritten for this. But it didn't work. Or rather the casting didn't work because a high school girl, or an under-13 boy cannot do a credible man's voice. So songs like "I'll make a man out of you" were painful.

I wonder what other mischief I can get up to today. The garbage has been collected and the bins brought in, Spook's litter has been changed, the lime trees are watered, the big leaf plant has been cut up and thrown away and the pot is on the porch with a new bay laurel sprout from a friend in WA planted in it.

Spook let me trim 3 of her claws. More later, I hope.

Got a possible hit on LinkedIn from an amazon recruiter, but I bet it's an automation job like the last one I said no to.
 

The Day Nothing Happened

That pretty much says it. High point was watching the garbage truck go down the row of bins and pierce them with a pair of metal bars, lift them to the top of the truck, turn them upside down and shake them, and put them back almost exactly where they had been.

Did my due diligence on the job search. Applied for two jobs, set up a phone chat with an amazon.com recruiter for tomorrow. I'm pretty sure they are looking for an automation engineer, or a programmer, or both, but when I emailed asking for a job description all she sent me was the generic site for the Alexis device. It's a lovely machine which does impressive voice recognition, so if there's a test or QA job for it which doesn't involve coding, I'm there. But I've been through this before with Amazon last week, so I have my doubts.

It was a glorious sunny calm day, I spent time enjoying the flowers and my front porch. Have jettisoned Trout Fishing in America from my tablet, there is some juvenile cleverness in it, definitely drug-induced but nowhere near the quality of other famous addicts such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, or even Ken Kesey. Meanwhile, loaded an old friend on there, Tom Robbins.  Tibetan Peach Pie, which is autobiographical, and educational. I thought he went to the UW when I did, and we were in a class or two together. But no, he is 20 years older than me, left the UW grad school the year before I checked in as an undergrad, and he left South Bend, WA 8 years before I took a job with the newspaper in nearby Raymond. We have probably never been in the same place at the same time. But I've read all his books except this one, and am enjoying it. It's weird, but in an inspired by drugs, but no longer writing while using kind of way.

Arris sent me my final pay stub and vacation pay stub, so I have that entered in Quicken.

Ford sent me a follow-up on whether the dealership followed up on my not so nice survey. Well, on 2/23 the manager promised to get a check out to me the next day, and here we are 2/29 and no check, so they got a FAIL from me.

Looked at vacations. US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, even Mexico is more expensive per night than San Francisco. There's a cruise from San Diego through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean and Chile, coming back to Florida, and it's in my price range for a 14-day trip even with a cabin to myself. And the right dates. But I don't know...

I checked tracking numbers and both my SS docs and severance docs were delivered this morning.

Dinner was a mess of ha gow which I found in between the cracks in my fridge freezer. Oreos for dessert. Finished the cake last night.

Plans for tomorrow:
Sign up for unemployment
Roll over my 401k
Produce shopping (?)
Talk to the Amazon recruiter
Any other job stuff which comes up
Maybe take my bicycle in to be tuned up. Needs new tires for sure. Not sure if my bike rack will fit on the C-Max