fancycwabs

Last night was sponsor night for the show, and also the final dress rehearsal. The show was a little off, and certainly not helped by the fact that the actress playing Gertrude got distracted backstage and failed to make an entrance TWICE during the show. Certain members of the rest of the cast wanted to kill her.

I finally grabbed my camera from the theatre, so here's some photos.

The set:

Compare to the set concept in this post

The pointy bird:

Me, in costume, taken in a mirror:

The actress who plays our Louise was discussing her gallows amusement at the urban legend of a hippopotamus eating a dwarf, and our director shared his own short person story.

It seems that many years ago he made the acquaintance of a pair of little folks who played trance music on bluegrass instrumentation at the corner of Madison and the Mid-America Mall here in Memphis. Take a minute and form a mental picture of that--and be prepared to form mental pictures for the rest of this story, no matter how disturbing things might get. Voices are delivered in a wee, high, Elmer Fudd speech pattern, without the trademark laugh)

They told him that they wanted to buy a small decommissioned airliner ("It's bettew insuwated than a twaiwer," they said), park it in the woods and live in it. He could just picture the story, straight out of Grimm's Fairy Tales, of the children who were wandering through the woods and happened upon a downed airliner. When they knocked on the door, they were greeted by a pair of dwarfs who played trance music on their mandolins and banjos and then showed the children their genitals.

We stared at him. The story had taken a weird turn.

"Little people are perverts," the director said. "After I got to know them, they'd start calling me late at night, asking me to come over:

--Chwis? Why won't you come ovaw?
--Look, it's two am, I'm really tired, I want to go to sleep.
--Oh, okay.

"Then an hour or so later, they'd call again, and the scene would repeat.
"Finally one night, my girlfriend (ed. now his wife) answered the phone, and yelled at the midget for an hour before handing it to me. 'YOU talk to him!' she said: