Good 'morrow Kate, fou thahts yaw name I heah.

Community theatre is such an experiment in controlled catastrophe, your only recourse is to sit back and laugh at the aburdity of it all.

The Taming of The Shrew opens Friday (maybe, we'll get to that), and last night was our first start-to-finish runthrough. They still haven't quite finished the set, or the lighting, or the costumes, or having the actors off-book (myself included, but I'm about 95% there).

In the meantime, our Bianca's professors have decided to schedule surprise exams for tech week, so she'll be missing a couple of days, and they've routed opening the opening performance's audience to another day next week, so there's a strong possibility that our opening show will be cancelled. Hooray!

Also, I can't seem to get Mrs. Cwabs to stop delivering her lines with a light British accent (the easy version, done by dropping all intermediate and final r's from words).

Ah, dilemma.

I've finally got hold of all the upcoming auditions for the area, and there's two shows I'd particularly like to do: Room Service (the basis for the Marx Brother movie of the same name) and The Underpants (the newish adaptation by Steve Martin). Unfortunately, they run concurrently and therefore I can't do both.

The problem falls in the fact that while The Underpants opens a couple of weeks before Room Service, the auditions fall a month later. With 12 male roles, I figure I've got a pretty good shot for something in Room Service, whereas my odds for one of the 5 men in The Underpants are considerably slimmer--frankly, I'm only a likely candidate for one role (maybe two), but it would be ideal. Honestly, I'd rather do The Underpants than Room Service, but I'd rather do Room Service than sit around the house between February and April.

Oh, and there's also Scapin, which would also be fun, but I've no idea when auditions are--or if they're even open to the public.

I'll probably just audition for shows in order and take the first offer than comes around; I'm neither talented enough nor well-known enough to go around picking and choosing roles. Unfortunately, that's the pattern that's gotten me driving to Mississippi for Shrew when I could be fifteen minutes from home doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, and not having to build my own set and work with teenagers who have no idea what they're doing.

Anybody care to set me straight?