The first round-trip weekend

Let's just get down to brass tacks, shall we?

Thursday - I met with another costumer to pull from stock for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Shakespeare & Company. That was -- interesting. The area where the costumes are stored has renovated last year, and the bins are crammed nilly-willy in a small storage room. And trying to find mates for boots - fuggetahboudit! I could have spent all night going through the bins and boxes, but that wasn't practical. So I took what I could fit in my car and ran. Hopefully, I'll be able to use most of what I pulled.

Friday - I sent my kids off to school, with the intent to leave for Bemidji by 9:30 a.m. Except, my oldest daughter wasn't feeling well, and I had to pick her up from school, before I even finished packing. I threw clothes into a suitcase, packed boxes of costumes into my car, and hit the road around 11 a.m. A couple of stops, and I was in Bemidji shortly after 3 p.m. It was good to see the other tech people again, some of whom I haven't seen since last summer. And I got settled into my dorm room. Yes, we are staying in dorms! The Paul Bunyan Playhouse has an arrangement with Bemidji State University to house the actors and technical staff that come up to Bemidji from the Twin Cities. We each get our own room, with a single bed and a little refrigerator. And whatever we bring to make it like "home". It's very much like being back in college; for many of the other staff, that wasn't so long ago, but I was in college 25 years ago! I am the old lady in the group, sort of the "house mother" of theater camp, and I don't mind. Certainly several of the actors are my contemporaries, and the guest director has a good decade on me. But for the summer, I am the "older sister" to the majority of our gang.

After settling into my rooms (I get two connecting rooms, because my children will be coming up to stay with me throughout the summer - it's like having my own suite when I'm alone!), I went over to the shop to unload costumes and start cleaning my workspace, and grab the items that I had left there last summer. And had my first shock of the season: my fuzzy blue fold-up chair was missing! I could have sworn I left it under a shelf last August, but it wasn't there now! My lamp was still there, my dishes, but no chair! :-(

So, to drown my sorrow, I went out for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in Bemidji - Brigid's Cross Irish Pub. A lamb sandwich, a pint of Mighty Arrow, and the Twins baseball game on t.v., and I felt slightly better. Later, we all went out for drinks at Keg 'n' Cork, the other "Irish" pub in town, and right across the street. One of these pubs is more Irish than the other - when the owners designed Brigid's Cross, they brought an architect from Ireland to give the place an authentic feel. The same care was taken with the menu and the bar: shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, and a whiskey mushroom soup that warms my heart. Keg 'n' Cork, on the other hand, is a typical college town bar, and this is where the college crowd hangs out. It's definitely the place to go for cheap beer, shots and fried food.

Saturday - This was our first real "work" day, though we've all been planning, shopping, acquiring the various items needed for the first show at Paul Bunyan Playhouse this season: "Biloxi Blues", by Neil Simon. It is a World War II era play, based on Simon's own experiences in boot camp in Mississippi. So, no battles, no gunfire, no Blitzkrieg - just a bunch of new recruits and the sergeant who has to train them. Most of the scenes take place in the barracks, and the characters are in uniform for the entire show. So, this means finding six matching sets of khakis and fatigues, plus the sergeant's uniform. Nothing glamorous or glitzy, not even a choice of colors: khakis, and army green fatigues.

I started clearing out all the costumes from the past winter that needed to be put away, and - YAY! - found my chair! It was under the cutting table; I don't remember putting it there, it's possible somebody moved it, but it was there, intact! And now it's in my dorm room, along with the matching ottoman. My home away from home. After lunch, I put in some work in the dorm kitchen, getting all the cooking utensils, pots and pans ready for the summer, and inventorying what all we have, to let the arriving actors know what there is to work with. Then I was back on the road, heading home after a mere 24 hours in B-town.

And it's a good thing I came home when I did: something killed a lot of fish in Bald Eagle Lake in the past 48 hours, and hundreds of croppies and sunfish washed up along the shore. AND, when I did a load of laundry on Saturday night, after getting home, the washing machine decided to leak.

Sunday - this was a big clean up day at home. My family spent Sunday morning cleaning up the shoreline, scooping up the little fish corpses and burying them around the yard. There were also quite a few weeds and grasses pulled up and put to compost. Then I cleared out the laundry area and mopped up the standing water around the washing machine and laundry tub. I still need to find the cause of the water on the floor, if it is a leak or just water spraying from the washing machine hose. Finally, I got back to some costume work - buying fabric for "Midsummer" costumes, and one piece for a stripper costume I will be creating later this summer for "Gypsy", a musical based on the life of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. More on that later.

Now it's time to start on Titania's beautiful butterfly costume.