Bill Roper's Journal

I had to get K and one of her friends in to school early today, because a day off from school means a full day spent rehearsing the musical that opens on Thursday. Of course, I've been doing theater for a long time, which meant that I had a story I could tell them.

Many years ago, we were doing a Moebius Theatre show -- for multiple weeks! -- in an actual theater. The offstage space was in the basement, down a full flight of stairs, so we'd wait on the staircase to make our entrance. One of the sketches was a series of short bits about the planets of the Solar System. I was, as I recall, Jupiter, and would enter onto a mostly empty stage and start talking. My scene mate would follow me on stage and there would be dialogue.

The problem was that as the shows went on, she would be further and further down the stairs whispering to someone else in the basement and I would have to remind her that our cue had arrived and we needed to go. This gets tiresome after a while and I decided one evening that I was going to skip the reminder.

Our cue arrived and I hit the stage solo and started delivering my lines. When it got to the point where she was supposed to respond, I turned around, saw no one there and said loudly, "Here I am pouring out my life's story to you and you're not even listening!"

There was a clatter on the stairs and she hit the stage running to deliver her line.

She never missed that entrance again. Nor did I have to remind her. :)

If I did drink, then I'd have an excuse to buy this.

As it stands though, it would just be a waste of perfectly good vodka from my favorite former writer for Saturday Night Live.

There's been a lot of fooferaw lately because someone (who it seems should have known better) managed to get a self-published Star Wars novel listed on Amazon.com. This leads me to thinking about the subject of derivative works in general.
( As I ramble on... )