Reds

Began Friday with a morning show at a Little Red Schoolhouse. On the call sheet, there was a note saying that the last time ArtReach came to the school, "the cafeteria ceiling was too low for our flats," and that we would have to make do once we got into the space.

Once inside the school, I was shown the cafeteria room by the secretary. I took one look at the ceiling and, sure enough, it was too low to accommodate our set.

I asked if there was another room we could use, and we walked to the end of the building, into one of the teachers' classrooms. We would have to rearrange the room, she said: moving shelves and magazine racks, a pile of dolls in the corner, countless chairs and the tables they surround, a whole line of art projects clipped to a glittering strand spanning the length of the room. It would add, in a most conservative estimate, fifteen minutes to the load-in and the load-out. But the ceiling slanted upwards in a kind of hypotenuse slope to one side of the room, and it was at least high enough for the backdrop.

So we did it. We pulled the van up to a handicapped parking space and opened the fire-escape door. In came the poles and roll for the main backdrop, but the spinning flats would have to stay in the van. Props followed, and then we realized that the bench we keep backstage to rest on between scenes and the entire sound system would not fit into the two feet of space from the back of the drop to the wall. So we asked if the teacher had a small CD-player we could use to play music, and she did; a bit hastily, we learned how to pause an skip the tracks on the football-sized player, whose volume knob we cranked all the way up.

We also had to pull the shades on the windows backstage. I have to change from a bunny into a turtle during the show, and no parents dropping off children need to see a torso of green spandex in a classroom window. Really, no one needs that.

Children came in with teachers, and they crammed into the tiny room with our abbreviated set. The shelves and stacked chairs pushed them forward, shrinking their space even more.

But we did it, and they loved the show. We found out later that as soon as we left, they booked ArtReach for next year.

This is a perfect example of how our group works with the school to accomplish the most successful show possible, given any circumstance. Here we were, without two-thirds of our set, in a space one-half the size we normally use, dancing in our first number two feet away from the front row of children--and yet we pulled it off.

Thank you, Little Red Schoolhouse. We'll see you next year!

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After, we drove to Russellville, OH, to perform Town Mouse, Country Mouse for the second time that day.

We found out at the school that they were planning to dismiss forty-five minutes after we started the show. Since it normally runs about fifty minutes, we foresaw the obvious problem.

So we bumped the start time up twenty minutes. It would give them enough leeway to get the children out of the gym and onto the buses. Good thing we arrived half an hour earlier than we needed to be there--kudos to Robbie--or else we would have had either to cut the show short (bad) or figure out how to weed out ten minutes of material (also bad).

But again, by working with the administrators, we pulled it off, to heralds and acclaim.

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That night, we were invited to watch the Reds play the St. Louis Cardinals. The Children's Theatre office staff and their families were also there, and it was a great time: unlimited concessions, including lobster-and-rice dishes alongside the expected hot dogs and burgers; an exciting square-off between two great mid-America teams; and post-game fireworks.

The Reds won. We all went home happy.