Let’s get this show on the road…

Hey all. I’ve stuck it out with this thing. Sorta. School’s about to start and another round of Freshly Squeezed is here. I guess it’s time to do the obligatory “What I did this summer” essay.

I was a member of the student company of Theatre L’Homme Dieu, an old, rustic theatre on Lake L’Homme Dieu, which lies just outside of Alexandria, Minn. (It’s pronounced luh-HA-muh-dew; the French just gets butchered up north) There, I spent ten weeks acting, painting, building, eating, and some karaoke-ing.

The season is divided into six shows—five main stage shows and then a touring outdoors children production (yours truly played Pinocchio in that one). When I wasn’t rehearsing or performing, I was in the scene shop, chopping, sanding, bolting and painting until 5 in the morning.

I played the bratty Simon Bliss in the 1920’s British comedy, “Hay Fever” by Noel Coward.

No kidding. A show will finish on a Saturday. Right after the performance, all students tore down the set and put up the next one. There was one night I was painting Dutchmen for the walls late into the hours of the night (or early in the morning, depending how you look at it). The set has to be ready for the actors to perform on it. The next show would open the following Tuesday. That leaves little time for sleeping or anything else.

We worked hard, but it was a great summer and strangely relaxing. Perhaps the most welcome change of pace was not so much multi-tasking and running around from class to work to rehearsal to catching up on missed episodes of “Lost.” I can get that any day at Concordia.

And now it starts all over again. I’ve got a reading list for one class already. It’s going to be quite the senior year. I hope to enlighten y’all on the finer points (and perhaps not-so-finer) of what it entails. I’m actually eager for it to begin.

10 THINGS TO GET JAZZED ABOUT THIS SCHOOL YEAR
1. My own room in the new dorms. I haven’t had my own space all of college. They have got to find a better name than the RLC. Please, Please, Please. This campus is plagued with three-letter acronyms, and they ALL END IN “C.” (GC, LMC, BEC, LTC, CMC, RLC—it’s annoying)
2. New ThinkPad laptops. I’m using it right now. They’re pretty slick. I’ve missed having a laptop all summer. We use these things all the time; it’s hard to live without ‘em.
3. The election
4. Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus!
5. The next James Bond movie.
6. Creative Writing with Prof. Matt Ryan
7. Midwest Bus tour with the Christus Chorus during Holy Week
8. I’m directing a show in the Westlund Theatre (come see it in March)
9. I can go to Chipotle whenever I want (provided it’s in my budget)
10. “The Sword” should be quite the newspaper this year–I hope so anyway.