clouds on vacation

The Cloudy Monday feature has been on vacation for a while, as I spend days, nights and weekends dog-paddling madly to keep my head above water with work. I'm OK, in this case no news is good news! In fact, I was able to break away with a girlfriend, her daughter, and her friend's daughter to spend a week at their time share in Grand Cayman, where this lovely picture of clouds etc was captured from our balcony. We got to do lots of scuba diving and spent evenings in a devoted madcap effort to watch every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A good time was had by all. And then, of course, I returned to the work scene behinder than ever.

On a theater note, the murder mystery weekend was a success in nearly every way but headcount. That Saturday was a major snowstorm and lots of our participants stayed home. But it was actually kind of fun to have a smaller crowd, as we got to know each of the participants and were able to keep tabs on how well they were figuring out the murderers. (We had a "plant" in the participants who wasn't detected, so he was able to clue us in on who was catching on and what we might want to do to throw them off.) By the end of the weekend, we all kind of hated to say goodbye to each other ... although I have to admit, 48 hours in character is a stretch for me!

Well, the good news is that it was so well received that a local theater group agreed to have us give several performances of the murder mystery, condensed to a single night! So the first two weekends in June we'll be performing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons, and hoping like mad the folks who see it early don't tell the later audiences whodunnit. This will be a very different experience for us as actors from the previous one, which included lots of improvisation and ad libbing. This will be scripted like a play, but all the same actors are returning, with the possible exception of one substitution for a small part, so it's really going to be fun.

And we're hearing rumors there may be another murder mystery weekend next year ... :o)