So what do actors and crew do after a show? Well, at Silver Spring Stage, most Fridays, a good number of us go to Barnaby's in Wheaton. (Or at least the over-25 crowd: the youngsters in the Six Degrees seem to scatter.) Barnaby's is a neighboorhood place, with nothing special about it, but it can accommodate groups of 12 that show up at 10:30 PM, half of whom want to eat and half just to drink. I'm there for the beer and hanging out: it is a mystery to me how someone can eat a huge sandwich at half an hour to midnight. There's a pool table in the back, and you can watch the Keno monitors bounce the numbers around.

We sit around and tell war stories, just like the bowling teams that are starting to leave when we come in, or the clog dancers that we saw a couple of weeks ago. We tell stories about prop snafus, about going up on a line, about performances that were interrupted for fire alarms (I've seen it twice, and once I was on stage). There is a story that RCP people love to tell about how I shagged a piece of the set dressing that had fallen from the flies into the middle of Lady Macbeth's letter scene. We love to gossip about actors who can't remember lines, like Don, and Ray, and Bill (none of them have been in shows with me recently): ("How's he doing tonight?" "He's running at about 60%. Stay on your toes.") Actors share information about directors good and bad, and I'm sure that directors and producers do the same. We whine about bad reviews, we whine about no reviews. Local newspapers, understandably, don't allocate nearly as much space as we'd like to community theater. We talk about the next show coming up.

Something that what we don't talk about too much is an exceptionally warm reception from an audience. That's something that you enjoy on the night, but the next day you're craving more attention.

posted: 8:44:36 PM  

I don't know what reminded me to look this up: There was a TV series that I remember from when I was a kid; it must have been the early 60s. It was called Sky King, and the premise was that the hero, instead of jumping onto his horse to catch the bad guys making trouble at the mill, he jumped in his Cessna. It must have run in syndication on Saturday mornings; I don't remember. Turns out the series originally aired in the 50s, an import from radio.

Now there was another series like this, only the premise was that the hero jumped in his airboat and scooted across the Florida Everglades. I don't remember the name of that series. Leta tries to tell me it was Gentle Ben, but I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of another series.

posted: 7:18:19 PM