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Showing posts from 2008

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

During Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when I came out to ask the audience for donations, I always talked about how the Empress Theatre is all about dreams. Leo Ware's dream of restoring the Empress Theatre and producing plays, our dreams of expanding from the Empress Theatre to the Oquirrh Hills Performing Arts Complex, the dreams of our actors and other volunteers. Randy Pausch was also about dreams. If you haven't seen this video yet, you need to. Yes, it's an hour and 16 minutes long, but you need to watch it anyway. One of my early mentors once told me to live my life as if each day might be my last, but also to live as though each day was the first day of the rest of my life. That was always good advice, but Randy Pausch tells it with a little more punch than most. Today really was his last day, and he knew it was coming when he gave "the last lecture." The same mentor taught me "Someone has everything you want in life, and they will gladl

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

One of my mentors once told me to "live each day as if it is your last, and to live each day as if it is the first day of the rest of your life." Watching this video of Randy Pausch's last lecture at Carnegie Mellon kinda puts that in perspective. Pausch knew he only had 3-6 months to live when he gave the lecture. It's long, but worth watching every minute of! It'll put some priorities in the right order.

The Last Day...

Well, here it is, my last day working for the State of Utah. Everything's been packed up and taken home except for a few miscellanous things I can carry in my brief case. I've converted all of my "keeper" email to rtf and copied them to a dvd. (Jim will be so happy to get the drive space back from my email account!) I've written my "farewell" email and sent it out; several people have wished me well. All that's left is to turn in my key and badge, and wait for the bus home. Which won't be here until 4:45... almost 4 hours from now. There are some things I am going to miss. The air-conditioning is the first thing that comes to mind! And having two flat-screen monitors. The friendships with some co-workers, but there are really only a few: Brent, Bob (most of the time), Brett, Ryan, Rachael (but I haven't seen much of her for a long time), Laurie, Kaye, Janet, Bill C. Stealing pretzels from Laurie Lieb. Walking to the Tax Commission cafeteria a

Wrath of a Mad God

Wrath of a Mad God, Raymond E. Fiest, Fantasy. On a Tuesday afternoon in 1982 or 1983, I was picking up my comics from Jack Dicken's "Comic Kingdom" on University Avenue in San Diego. I leaned more toward the Marvel Universe, and as I picked my weekly fix, the man behind me started to comment on my choices, and suggested that I might want to look at some of the DC comics. A conversation ensued about the relative merits of different comics and different comic publishers. I liked the Marvel Universe mostly because the characters from Peter Parker to "The Dazzler" had their own internal conflicts in addition to fighting off the bad guys, and the good guys weren't quite as invincible as Superman and Batman. It wasn't that they were more plausable, but it wasn't as necessary to keep coming up with new ways to challenge them. As we took our selections to Susan at the cash register (the real reason I went to Comic Kingdom), I noticed a yellow flier on the c

Lighting the Empress: landings

Directors are creative and like to "think outside the box." This is a good thing, because it expands the art and creates new, enjoyable experiences for audiences. In the days of Richard Wagner's operas, they had to build whole new theatres to perform some of his operas, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that all we have to contend with is the directors tendancy to use performance areas that aren't on the stage. For today's post, I want to cover the landings (the areas at the bottom of the downstage stairs); we'll get to the stairs and the top of the proscenium in another post. Notice that the landings are both under the overhanging "orchestra bridge." (What an interesting deviation from the original meaning of the word orchestra.) Both of the landings, located on the downstage corners of the stage, offer entrance/exit opportunities for actors, so it will be a very rare production that will not use them. They also make wonderful places to

Gasoline memories and realities...

I remember a time, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, my mother was painting one of the rooms in our house and needed something to clean her paint brush. She handed me a quarter and a gallon jug and told me to go to the store on the corner and buy a gallon of gasoline. Back then, it was more economical to use gas to clean a paint brush than it was to go buy a can of paint thinner. What a concept! The other day my son Peter earned a trip to the movie of his choice. He wanted to see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D. The movie was playing at three theaters. The theatre closest to our house was charging $9/person admission, and the other two were charging only $7/person. Our first impulse was to go to the more distant, but cheaper theater. But then we started thinking about how much the gas would cost to drive our Dodge van. When we did the math, it worked out that it was less expensive to go to the closer theatre and pay the higher admission price.

Good News Bad News Kinda Day

Yesterday was one of those good news - bad news kind of days. First the good news: Amy passed her Series 66 exam yesterday, and has now completed the entire certification as a financial advisor. She will officially start with Ameriprise Financial on July 30. I will officially become Mr. Mom after August 1. (That could be bad news for my kids...) The bad news: Lessa is coming home from boot camp without having completed her training for medical reasons. She's pretty disapointed. Amy and I are very proud of her though. She did her best. She claims that her drill sergeant didn't get in her face once!

Empress Theatre lighting capacity

In order to fully understand the challenges of lighting in the Empress Theatre, it is necessary to understand the limitations imposed by the physical and electrical capacity of the theatre. Lets begin where the electrical power enters the building. At the present time, the Empress is served by a 220v split line that divides into two 200 amp circuits within the building. One of those circuits is dedicates almost, but not quite, exclusively to lighting, while the other serves all of the electrical needs of the theatre. The breaker box in the orchestra bridge divides the lighting 200 Amp circuit in to several 20A circuits. There are one or two circuits that supply power to the bridge itself that used to be used for the lighting and sound boards when they were located there, and for power needed by the orchestra, and supply the house lights and fans. The remaining twenty circuits are each dedicated to one dimmer pack. One 20 A circuit will supply 2400 Watts of power at 120 Volts, and the d

Lighting the Empress Main Stage

I'm going to start a series of posts on the challenges of lighting the Empress Theatre stage. And there are a lot of challenges.... Let's start with the main stage lighting, since it is obviously the most important performance area to light. The Empress Main Stage is the easiest performance area in the Empress to light, but the Empress' architecture still makes lighting it quite a challenge. Since the stage is essentially theatre in the round, it requires twice as many lighting instruments as it would take to light a similar space in a conventional proscenium theatre. The Empress Stage is on the small side, about 25 x 25 feet. Until recently, there were seats litterally on the stage on three sides, and there are still seats on the stage on the east side of the hall. Directors and actors need the whole space. At the same time, it would really be bad form to light the audience. So there is a challenge to keep the performers visible on the edges of the stage. As a performer mo

Decompression

When I was in high school, I had a sign in my locker that read, "As soon as the rush is over, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I worked for it, I owe to myself, and NOBODY is going to deprive me of it!" Now the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is open, and we're past the 4th of July, it's time for that nervous breakdown... This past month or so I've been so over committed it's a wonder I survived. My lighting work on Seven Brides suffered as a result of all the other things demanding my attention: Two of the people that normally do the program layout were out of town, so the program fell back to me, rather unexpectedly. We had to acquire a license for InDesign for me to complete the program. The lady that normally collects bios and such also went out of town for a while. The result was a very rushed job that should have been done better. And to top that off, I missed an error that could have cost us a lot. We had to reprint one page of the program twi

Another Anonymous Critic

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers opened at the Empress on Friday. The show was sold out, and the cast received a standing ovation at the end. I made a blog post on the Empress blog to congratulate the cast on a wonderful job. A couple of folks commented on either the blog or on Facebook that echoed my thoughts that the show was the strongest opening we've ever had at the Empress. Then this morning, I found this comment waiting, The actors were wonderful, the set looked and worked beautifully. The sound was ok, the lighting has much to be desired. I would give it a 7. Since I designed the lighting for the show, I can't help but wonder if the anonymous commentor was taking a personal stab at me. And this is not the first time an anonymous commentor has decided to use the Empress Blog as a forum to attack me. Well, Mr. Commentor, for the record, I agree with you. The lighting for this show leaves a lot to be desired. There were major parts of the lighting that just plain didn't

Quick Updates

On Tuesday, Amy passed her Utah Life and Health Insurance test and background check. Only one more test to go. Ameriprise has set a tentative start date of July 30. She'll then go into a "pre-appointment" apprenticeship, working under the tutilage of the more experineced advisors. Lessa wrote and told us she's just gotten off crutches. It seems her feet got badly bruised with all the marching. One member of her platoon has already been sent home as unable to adapt to military life.

Brazillian Inflation in 1990.

A friend of mine recently made a trip to Brazil. As we discussed her trip, it reminded me of the port call I made in Rio de Janeiro in February of 1990. This was one of my favorite port calls, but the story Betsy reminded me of was the currency. We were on a world cruise, and like all Navy ships in the 1980s and 90s, we spent a lot of time in the northern Indian Ocean. While we were patrolling our box of water, we were given a port brief for Rio. A description of the local currency is always a part of the port brief, and this was no exception. But there was a very unusual situation in Brazil at the time. It seems that Brazil was experiencing a very high inflation rate. I don't recall the exact rate, but it was in double digits per month. The Brazillian government's response to the inflation was to issue a new type of currency, the Cruzado , to replace the existing currency, the Cruzero . One Cruzado was worth 1000 Cruzeros . We were warned to pay attention to any change we rec

Money CAN Buy Happines!

A team of researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia have found that money can buy happiness -- as long as you spend it on someone else. "Intentional activities—practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage—may represent a promising route to lasting happiness. Supporting this premise, our work demonstrates that how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make," the researchers explain. "Our findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations—as little as $5 in our final study—may be sufficient to produce non-trivial gains in happiness on a given day." Well, Duh!

Why Democracy doesn't work

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a woman who recognized my name from some political work I did a couple of years ago. The issue concerned the process of drawing political boundaries around school districts, and this woman, a retired school teacher, disagreed with the way the legislature had set up the voting. When I told her that we'd have to agree to disagree, she slammed her hand onto the table and angrily stormed off, ending the conversation. I have no quarrel with her passion in standing up for something she believes is unfair; where I have a problem is that she had such a hardened viewpoint that she wasn't even willing to explore the reasoning behind the legislation. In this particular case there was a sound reason why the legislature had decided to limit who could vote in creating a new school district using a particular procedure. (There were two other procedures in the statues, one that required no vote at all and one that allowed everyone to vote.) In this particul

I want to be like Liberace...

Donor Power Blog posted this today. I thought it a bit ironic given the anonymous comment this morning. Although this is relevant to my work with OHPAA, and applies directly to the Empress, it probably belongs here rather than on the Empress blog.

Anonymous Critics

An anonymous critic posted a comment on the Empress Theatre blog criticising me for turning the Empress Theatre blog into my "personal" blog. I always find this type of criticism to be amusing, but rarely of any real worth. I've found that people who hide behind the veil of anonymity in making such comments are generally afraid that, should their identity be revealed, they would be publicly embarrased as fools. At the same time, since I have no idea who wrote the comment, I am free to speak my mind in response. I don't even have to get into serious flaming. Writing for a blog is a personal experience. Yes, I could stick strictly to a formal style and to a limited range of content, but that defeats the purpose. In fact, I could write strictly about the Empress Theatre and promptly bore everyone to death with it. (How many of you really want to know about our licensing deal with ASCAP or the details of work we're doing with Salt Lake County to pseudo pave the parkin

Test Results

Amy didn't do as well as we'd exepcted on her exam yesterday. She scored 70% (70 out of 100 questions correct.) The standard for passing was "more than 70%," so she missed passing by one measly question. To make matters worse, it seems that her study materials had left out major areas on the test, so Amy was being presented with questions she'd never encountered before. A word to the test taker in the future: look at the test objectives instead of just relying on the packaged study materials. So it looks like I get to keep working for another month until she can take the test again.

Blind leading the blind --- High tech style

What a Monday morning this is. Lessa left for boot camp in South Caroline at 4:00 AM this morning. we'd all said our good byes before she went to bed, but I heard Sgt Cranford's truck in the gravel out front and got up to say one final good bye, but she was already out the door. I got to watch her climb in the truck and saw the truck drive off. Can't quite place the emotion that caused. Not quite sure that I've really grokked that she's gone off to the Army. Sigh. Meanwhile, amy is taking her Series 66 exam this afternoon. If she passes it, we're all of a week or two away from her going to work and me becoming Mr. Mom. Amy has been writing practice tests in the 80's all week, and I'm confident she will pass the exam. On one level I've been ready to submit my resignation for months; on the other, its a bit scary to walk away from my job and take on the OHPAA cause full time. One final note on the "blind leading the blind goes high tech." Thi

Inside my mind

I've created this blog as a place to put some of the thougts I want to make public, but that don't pertain to the Empress Theatre. You're welcome to read 'em, and maybe even leave a comment or two if you want. Here you'll find movie and play reviews, thoughts on public, private and home education, and a host of other things that are of interest to me.