Saturday afternoon was platform building time, as Alan Hall brought power tools and saw horses to tame the lumber Tommy had delivered.  in 3 hours, Alan, Roger Williams (who’s considering membership in Volunteers Anonymous, ’cause he can’t see anyone working but what he has to join in), MK Wegmann and I whipped out three platforms for the stage.  Now the performers have new navigation challenges!

Monday evening we worked on the three rivers scenes in the show, which weave together two stories that came from our January 25 "Long Winter’s Night of Stories" – the saga of the Milk Jug Lady, who went without well water for more than five months, and two young boys who made their own canoe and attempted to paddle the Chattahoochee with it.  Having the platforms in place made the final scene in the sequence work – the boys put in to the river and proceed to wreck their boat almost immediately, necessitating a rescue by a mythic character named Lester Crane.  The platforms became boulders in the river, rock ledges to bounce off of.  Which is pretty much precisely what MK and I did on Saturday afternoon, after we built platforms – we paddled the third stretch of the Chattahoochee.  We didn’t wreck the canoe, but we left plenty of paint behind.

This is a drought year – more than 60 of Georgia’s 159 counties have been declared in "extreme drought" – so it seems all the more appropriate to be doing a play that acknowledges the importance and, sometimes, the scarcity of water.  As the Milk Jug Lady tells us in her first scene, all the water on this planet now is all the water that’s ever been on this planet.  At the moment, in Georgia, a lot of that water is some place else.

Tonight, Tuesday, we will return to the magic of the opening sequence for a few hours and work some new people into it, as well as tackling a slightly revised version of the opening song.  And then we will stage the last of the three "Fishing" scenes, in which two young boys (not the same ones as in the rivers scene, but close) attempt to go fishing…explosively.

Tomorrow, we’ll focus more on music, and work on some of the transitions between scenes.  In the meantime, the production elements are beginning to come together – backdrops, costume concepts, the bear cages, the magical bed the company will build during the end of act one.

The adventure continues! 

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