Snippets

Busy? Oh my goodness...

"A Christmas Story" opened Friday. All went well and almost all performances are sold out. V. was going to take O on Sunday, but they had another engagement with Granna, who was in town, so he and I went together- admiring his set, which I helped decorate, the costumes and our turkey.

I don't think I've mentioned the turkey: our director was hauling around a bag of great big styrofoam balls out of which he had to construct a prop turkey. So I volunteered Sarah, to relieve him of one job, and we all collaborated on the most luscious, golden brown fake turkey ever to grace the stage at TC.
I made the basic body out of carboard, large papiermache eggs and a cut up styrofoam ball to fill in the open spots and Sarah covered it with papiermache. V. made the drumsticks, out of medium p-m eggs and dowel rods. We taped those on and I swathed the whole thing in muslin. Once it had dried, I put on a base coat that I liked, but V. decided it was too orange. So he put on a glaze of brown and he was exactly right- it looked perfect! They loved it at the theater and we always enjoy it when they pull it out of the oven.
If I'd thought, we should have recorded the whole process in photos.

It occurs to me, that perhaps little boys do not hang up their costumes because they don't know how to hang up clothing. Don't laugh- one of our actors had never worn a shirt that buttoned before. I think there will have to be a lesson, as well as the usual CTJ about respecting the costume.

Holiday Store is underway. We open outrageously early - the 13th- because of Christmas falling on a Friday this year and depriving us of a weekend of distribution. That means that we will have to continue to fill food boxes during distribution, which means that the box-building station will have to stay up, along with enough back stock for however many boxes we need. We can estimate that fairly accurately, but it still entails taking up a lot of space we wouldn't otherwise.
A new wrinkle- we have lost our freezers, so we are giving out gift cards for poultry, instead of the actual birds.
The good news is that donations are not down, in spite of the economy.
And all the items we got as year-end tax write-off from corporations are good stuff.

More later- must go organize food sorter.