Bill Roper's Journal

"The Play That Goes Wrong" was the fall play over at Maine West and Julie and I went to see it today on Opening Night since the puppy training lesson was postponed. It was an absolute stitch.

Y'all should go see it if you're around here. Shows on Friday and Saturday night remain. :)

The annual drama department awards were today. K was voted Most Dedicated by the folks in her drama classes and won the Top Thespian award for her four years of work in the program. I was so proud to hear her fellow students chanting her name.

The drama teacher had wonderful things to say about her turn as student director on the winter musical, noting that she was fixing problems before he even had a chance to become aware of them.

I'm glad that she was a drama kid.

And tonight was the last performance of K's last stage show at Maine West. It was probably the best of the three performances, which is nice.

I will miss seeing her on stage.

K is off to the cast party. She has a ride home, so parents are heading towards bed. :)

Today was day one of K's last show at Maine West. This is not a show that I would have picked, but the cast worked very, very hard to pull it off. Good for them!

This was the third performance of the musical and things are going well, save for the continuing microphone malfunction problem. Today, we lost Ursula's microphone for her entire first scene. The actress soldiered on valiantly and was able to carry most of the dialog to the audience, but getting the song over the top of the orchestra was a *big* challenge.

But that was the only real mic problem for the night, so...

And now it is time to go pick up K from the cast party. :)

Tonight was Opening Night for "The Little Mermaid" over at Maine West and the show went well. There were some problems with the sound system that K promises that they are aware of and will correct by tomorrow, but the kids all did a great job. And the work on the set pieces was quite spectacular!

I'll be back tomorrow, so we'll see how day two goes. :)

They say that the third time's the charm and tonight was the third and final performance of the fall play over at Maine West. Things went well and K is now off to the cast party.

Meanwhile, we watched the second episode of the new Matlock series when I got home and Gretchen is now imagining a conversation between Matlock and Donna from Suits. I will have to hear more details on this one...

Today was opening night for "Fairycakes", the fall play over at Maine West. The cast did a fine job and K was a scarily good Pinocchio. Sam and Bonnie were able to join us, which was also a fine thing.

I got up early this morning, because one of Gretchen or I needed to take K off to rehearsal this morning, as we're less than a week from the opening of the fall play over at the high school. I grabbed the short straw without a drawing, because I *also* needed to be up to write the deposit check for the massive upcoming work on the fence. Nothing will happen there until Julie shows up to mark the utilities and I am told that they are not moving quickly at the moment, partly because the request went in on Friday and partly because Monday is a holiday. (Not for me, but for many people, including the kids.) But I am looking forward to a better fence.

Meanwhile, since I was up early, I decided that it was time to swap in the new 4K cable box. I pulled out the old box, getting covered in dust myself, plugged in the new box, and discovered that the new 4K cable box was an HD box, which is functionally identical to the box I had just dustily unplugged. I got back on a chat with an Xfinity rep and suggested that when I request a wired 4K DVR cable box that I actually need a box with all of those attributes. I have been promised that the next box that I receive will be correct and have been given a small discount for the next 12 months in compensation. This would not be nearly so irritating if I hadn't had a similar problem when trying to replace the cable box in the bedroom when we put a 4K TV in there.

Laundry, in the meantime, had been set in progress and Gretchen joined me for a quick lunch over at Texas Roadhouse. When we got back, I headed off to the basement to swap laundry and download the new plugins that I'd picked up with the Ultimate 13 upgrade from Universal Audio. I got everything installed, fired up Cubase, and Cubase refused to talk to the Apollo's Thunderbolt interface, although everything *else* was seeing the Thunderbolt connection.

*sigh* I read assorted webpages, followed the suggestions, uninstalled the software, reinstalled it, rebooted the computer, and eventually got the connection working again. Thunderbolt! It's not just an interface, it's an adventure!

But I finally managed to pull up the scratch track that I've been using to play with lately in Cubase and start auditioning the new plugins. There were some nice amplifier plugs that may be useful in some environment (although not so much with this track). The new Topline Vocal Suite might come in handy some time, but not at the moment. I was ready to button everything up when I remembered that I had the new SSL 4000E channel strip that I should check out.

Oh, my! I started fiddling with this and quickly found that it likes my voice. I mean, it likes my voice *a lot*. I am going to need to get some other people to listen to it to see if they like what it does with my voice nearly as well as I do, because it's always suspect when you are listening to your own vocals, but wow.

Now, I just need to get all of the CD orders placed for OVFF.

And I also now know who my rooting interest is for the rest of the baseball postseason. That would be Cleveland, as the remaining teams are all from New York and Los Angeles. It's been a long time since they won a World Series.

They'll do. :)

Late this afternoon, the Drama department gave out its annual awards. K was voted Most Determined by her Advanced Drama class, got an outstanding performance award for her part in "The Diary of Anne Frank", and has been elected to the Executive Board for the Drama Club next year.

I am quite proud. :)