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Community Performance Inc.

May 19, 2008

The next time you're about to get a whuppin, when daddy sends you for the switch, leave the leaves on the tip. Daddy may not notice, and your legs will appreciate those soft leaves just wrapping around and not stinging near so much. Don't strip it bare.

Got Vivian into the play tonight. Vivian is the Executive Stage Manager. Oh, that's an invented term, but Vivian ought deserves such loft in her title. She speaks like a downhome girl and has a subscription to Rolling Stone. She looks like she comes straight from the hills, has a strong regional dialect and dropped to me the other day that she protested during the Vietnam War.

Tonight Vivian said she was leaving with us when we go. Coming to join the CPI team. She wants to go to Scotland where she'd heard we'd worked. That's where her people are from, she said, breaking into a bit of a Scots brogue. Though she's joking--I think--we are mightily flattered.

Vivian has got an ear now. She gave three, maybe four, corrections to Mary Ann as far as getting her to talk more regional. SAT-i-dee (the day before Sunday), PIE-zun (stuff to kill rats). She's going to double that part, the Gumlogger monologue:

GUMLOGGER
(Staggering man walking in the back ground, making his way forward.) We had a neighbor here named Bud. He’d been on a drunk, and needed a little hair of the dog to tide him over. So he got out of bed, into his buggy and couldn't find anything in Lavonia. So then he went off to Gumlog to find something. But the law had been there over the weekend and raided everybody. Bud couldn't find anything anywhere, when finally he run up on a fellow. The fellow tells him, no, there's nothing in Gumlog right now. Except I got a little in the woods that I put poison in, trying to get up with who was stealing my liquor. That’s the only liquor you'll find around here. And Mr. Bud told him,

BUD
Well, I wanted a gallon, but I'll just take a pint of that.

We sat after rehearsal for another 90 minutes and worked over the ever-changing cast list filling in the latest holes. Some roles are on their third performer. We don't fire, they retire. Don't come, get sick, too much work at work, reasons like that. Can't make the discipline. That's a big reason. We're training the organism, remember. But it's built one cell at a time.

I THINK that Bobby and Lynetta are beginning to groove. Bobby didn't come the other night even after we called him. Turns out he needed a ride. We told him we could supply that. Bobby is a comedian. And Lynetta is just plain good.

But that rehearsal for Who Fried the Rooster was just plain under-attended. Of the 15 people who should have been there, we had five, and one of those was only there for a short while. And of course, as Murphy's law would have it, those five people were only three roles. We had two sets of doubles present. But believe it or not, we made real progress. Vivian, Steve, Mary Ann, Kathy all played roles so that we had bodies in every role. There are many props in the scene, and we had to teach each new person the business (Vivian did most of the teaching). Then we had to stop and start and stop and start and....It's like a mule with two wooden legs. You have to beat it to make it go at all. It wants to stop for the least little thing, and even at its best it won't plow straight. But if you push hard enough, it will work. What gets rehearsed is the scene itself. Oh sure, Bobby, Liggy, Lynetta, Susan and Chance got better in their roles. But mostly the scene developed a shape. And Kathy's "plucked" rubber chickens looked great. She's going to slit the bellies of a couple of them and find/make some guts, to add to the fun.

Oh, by the way, Lynetta told me her mother, Rev. Linda Barnes, ORDERED the choir to be in the show. Nobody seems able to produce the Watkins girls. But today Vivian is calling their mother, Patricia.

   

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