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Tootsie Yr2: West Palm Beach Part 2
Feb. 13th, 2023 07:01 amI realized today that cuts don't work over here on DW the same way that they do on LJ.
Once you click on an entry, as opposed to seeing it in the Reading Feed or in my full journal, the cuts disappear ANYWAY.
So what is the point in making them?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thursday I woke up early to do some data entry before meeting twelve of my Tootsie peers in the hotel lobby.
We were given shirts from Broadway Serves, an organization whose motto is to "be the change beyond the stage" and that works to connect theater professionals with volunteer opportunities.
Here were are in our nice clean tees before going out to sweat it out in the Florida sun.
We loaded into rental cars and drove 30 minutes to a field behind a feed store.
From there we were instructed on how to harvest peppers and maintain safety by a gentleman (I forget his name, let's call him Charles) working with CROS Ministries, a local organization that gleans crops to feed those with limited access to fresh food.
We were given latex or vinyl gloves, bottles of water, and orange Home Depot buckets.
Charles told us to be careful not to rub our eyes because peppers are members of the nightshade family and contain irritants.
He showed us what a pepper with a fungal infection looks like and asked us not to harvest those.
He showed us a pepper about the size of an apple and said anything that size or larger was fair game.
And that was that. We got to work!
My first pepper of the day was rather colorful.
Most peppers were dark green and difficult to spot among the dark green plant leaves.
I learned to gently push the plants around to feel if there was weight on the ends of the branches, which usually meant at least one harvestable pepper. In this way I filled my bucket several times over the next three hours.
A row over from me one of our cast members started yelling that she'd found a toad.
Had to catch it!
We took turns holding it. It was pretty big!
We continued gleaning as the sun got stronger.
Our goal was to fill the large blue pallets on the main path.
We ended up filling 5-6 of these, which is about 2500-3000 pounds of peppers. Wow!
The first hour or so went easy, but it was a lot of bending and reaching and twisting, and walking through the rows to empty your bucket was tricky because there were slippery rotten peppers to walk over and swarms of gnats and flies that flew up as we passed. The sun got stronger as time went on. When I started feeling tired I thought about all the people who have to do this work not because they want to, but because they have to survive. For me it was a temporary way to help. For some people, gleaning is the whole life outlook.
We ended up stopping about 30 minutes early because we filled all of the pallets laid out for us.
Plus the cast had a rehearsal directly afterward and needed time to get cleaned up.
We each grabbed a pepper and posed in front of one of our pallets.
This was really rewarding work, and I'm grateful that Brian organized it for us.
This is the kind of stuff that I WANT to do...activity with purpose.
I hope that we'll get to do more. Brian implied that there would be other chances.
Here is Brian, btw. He's not only talented, but also charitable and caring :)
Back at the hotel I washed rotten pepper juice off my shoes in the tub, then had a shower myself and did a load of laundry.
Just my luck, the dryer somehow balled all of my clothing up, so I had to iron every single shirt and pair of pants.
After that I had lunch and drank lots of water and chilled out until it was time for the show.
The show went well, nothing to report.
Soto (MD) has been conducting us for the past two days, but I think tomorrow we're back to having Josh in the MD seat.
It's cool that they can switch out like that; it gives each of them a chance to stay fresh on the show and hear/see it from the audience perspective. I hope they'll both have musical notes for us from what they've seen and heard while doing their switcharoo.
-------------------------------------------------------
Friday, I actually slept until 8am for the first time in a while.
Had a nice slow morning.
I had gotten the rental car keys from Bill the night before, and used that to get to Dr. Limon for lunch.
It's a clean, modern-looking restaurant downtown.
There was kind of loud club music going, and the lighting was dim...I think it's really meant to be a nighttime dinner/drinks/tapas place.
There were three or four women in the kitchen and serving, all of whom were super nice and excited to explain Peruvian food when they found out I was there to try it for the first time.
They start each table with a little bowl of cancha, which is toasted corn kernels from a specific type of corn that puffs when toasted but doesn't pop like popcorn. With the cancha was a little shot of some sort of vegetable juice, I didn't catch the name of it but it tasted like a carrot-heavy V8 or a bloody mary mix. Both were very delicious, especially the corn which was scalding hot and fresh and crispy-crunchy!
Since it was early in the afternoon I got a glass of white wine as well. What the heck.
After asking the server a lot of questions, I decided to do the causa sampler.
Causa is a sort of mini-casserole, typically served as a little round cake (see a picture HERE).
It's made of yellow potatoes, mashed and mixed with crushed peppers and a little lemon or lime juice, then filled with a meat or vegetable salad and shaped using a ring mold.
Instead of being shaped into a cake, the sampler had the mashed potato served in meatball-sized spheres, topped with the meats that would normally be used as filling and drizzled with colorful tasty sauces.
The flavors are, from closest to farthest: tuna salad, octopus, crawfish(?), shrimp, and chicken salad.
Not my best photography, but the lighting was dim.
The plating was gorgeous, and it also tasted wonderful. Very fresh, and each little sample a distinct flavor.
The chicken and tuna salads were pretty standard, just like what you'd have on a chicken or tuna salad sandwich.
My favorites were the octopus because of the unique flavor and big tender tentacle chunks, and the crawfish because it was sweet but also tangy (the sauce on that one was incredible). The sauces, by the way, are a sort of thin aioli made by mixing mayonnaise with misc complementary flavors and colorings.
With food like that, I'd even brave the nighttime club vibes to come here again!
Luckily this was a pretty light meal (I didn't eat all of the potato balls) so I didn't feel overful.
I went for a little walk to a nearby Burlington for no reason other than it was 1.5 miles away, which would give me a 3-mile walk round trip on a nice sunny day. There were a few inland canals on the route, and I saw turtles and fish and even some iguana, but no manatees or alligators. Found nothing of interest at Burlington, but hadn't expected to.
Walked back and checked the Manatee Lagoon live cam to see if it was worth a drive out there to see manatees. No luck, so gave up on that idea. So it was a normal afternoon of chill until showtime.
We DID in fact get a sheet of notes for review.
This is the first time since I joined Tootsie, after 360-some shows, that we've ever gotten printed notes.
I was glad to get them, too. Being able to tweak your performance to be better, and to be in agreement with your musical peers, is super important (and also gives you a project and reason to be more involved in a show you've performed 360-some times!)
The show went well I think, but I was tired and developed a BRUTAL migraine so did not play my best :(
Some days are like that, but I was unhappy with myself for not taking a painkiller earlier so my performance wouldn't suffer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday was a busy day, two shows and a visit with some step-family between shows.
I made sure to pack everything I'd need to bring to the theatre since I wouldn't be coming back to the hotel before the last show.
The matinee was delayed because there was a car fire on the interstate causing a traffic backup (sheesh!), but once we got rolling it went as usual. Oh, wait, the fire alarm went off during intermission. We found out later that it was because the theatre next to ours was using foggers and left some door open that should have been closed.
After the show I met my step-aunt outside, she was there with a good friend.
They drove me to Howley's Restaurant, which was a really cool vintage diner-like place along South Dixie Hwy.
Everything from the tables to the rotating pie display to the rounded chrome hand dryers in the bathroom screamed "1950s".
My aunt had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich; her friend had a classic reuben that looked amazing.
I had a "TV dinner" featuring beef brisket.
What a cute presentation!
I think of "brisket" as a smoked or BBQ thing, but this was pretty much chunks of chuck.
Not complaining, it was quite good. Classic comfort food.
We also had "Southern spring rolls" for an appetizer, they were egg rolls filled with brisket and "cream cheese collards" served with a tangy honey mustard dip. Super bad for you but super delicious. It was worth being over my calories for the day to enjoy them :)
In all honestly, I don't know my step-aunt very well. The conversation mostly focused on either aspects of my work, or step-family drama, or her ailments. Which was fine, we only had a short time anyway.
Back at the theatre we hugged and parted ways, and then I checked my texts and discovered that our keyboardist (Sam) had tested positive for covid. What drove him to get tested I'm not sure, because he says he felt fine, but anyway there it was.
Poor Josh (MD) had to play both books AND conduct the show.
We've done this before so it went as good as it could go, however it's a lot of work for Josh to have to take on.
Soto (our other MD) had just gotten back to his home in New York, but he'll be flying back down to join us in Sarasota and cover that keyboard book while Sam is quarantined in West Palm.
On top of that, our reed 2 had food poisoning :(
Never a dull moment!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, I was grateful that we only have one show this afternoon AND that we will be busing to Sarasota (means we don't have to weigh our luggage).
We carpooled to the theater and had our last show, again with Josh playing both books.
It was a fairly good audience and the show went smoothly.
I had some low-key anxiety because it freaks me out when my coworkers are not feeling well.
Consider that my parents both died of awful diseases--and my friend Slick who was a trumpet player on the circus died of cancer and stood next to me in pain for a year and a half prior to his death while I hyperventilated and panicked every single day because there was nothing I could do to help him--and I think it's understandable that my fight-or-flight kicks in when people suddenly disappear due to covid, or are sitting next to me playing with a stomach bug. I just have a hard time with it, sometimes.
Anyway, ultimately everyone is fine and the show was fine.
We packed up, I refilled the rental car's tank, had a weird dinner of random leftover food items in my room, and watched an episode of The Last Of Us instead of the Super Bowl because I despise how our society values sports over STEM so I will be one less set of eyes riveted to what steriod-saturated meatheads and their beer-soaked fandom are doing.
Tomorrow we have a four hour bus ride to Sarasota, and it's a "load and go" so we'll have a show a few hours after we arrive.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Once you click on an entry, as opposed to seeing it in the Reading Feed or in my full journal, the cuts disappear ANYWAY.
So what is the point in making them?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thursday I woke up early to do some data entry before meeting twelve of my Tootsie peers in the hotel lobby.
We were given shirts from Broadway Serves, an organization whose motto is to "be the change beyond the stage" and that works to connect theater professionals with volunteer opportunities.
Here were are in our nice clean tees before going out to sweat it out in the Florida sun.
We loaded into rental cars and drove 30 minutes to a field behind a feed store.
From there we were instructed on how to harvest peppers and maintain safety by a gentleman (I forget his name, let's call him Charles) working with CROS Ministries, a local organization that gleans crops to feed those with limited access to fresh food.
We were given latex or vinyl gloves, bottles of water, and orange Home Depot buckets.
Charles told us to be careful not to rub our eyes because peppers are members of the nightshade family and contain irritants.
He showed us what a pepper with a fungal infection looks like and asked us not to harvest those.
He showed us a pepper about the size of an apple and said anything that size or larger was fair game.
And that was that. We got to work!
My first pepper of the day was rather colorful.
Most peppers were dark green and difficult to spot among the dark green plant leaves.
I learned to gently push the plants around to feel if there was weight on the ends of the branches, which usually meant at least one harvestable pepper. In this way I filled my bucket several times over the next three hours.
A row over from me one of our cast members started yelling that she'd found a toad.
Had to catch it!
We took turns holding it. It was pretty big!
We continued gleaning as the sun got stronger.
Our goal was to fill the large blue pallets on the main path.
We ended up filling 5-6 of these, which is about 2500-3000 pounds of peppers. Wow!
The first hour or so went easy, but it was a lot of bending and reaching and twisting, and walking through the rows to empty your bucket was tricky because there were slippery rotten peppers to walk over and swarms of gnats and flies that flew up as we passed. The sun got stronger as time went on. When I started feeling tired I thought about all the people who have to do this work not because they want to, but because they have to survive. For me it was a temporary way to help. For some people, gleaning is the whole life outlook.
We ended up stopping about 30 minutes early because we filled all of the pallets laid out for us.
Plus the cast had a rehearsal directly afterward and needed time to get cleaned up.
We each grabbed a pepper and posed in front of one of our pallets.
This was really rewarding work, and I'm grateful that Brian organized it for us.
This is the kind of stuff that I WANT to do...activity with purpose.
I hope that we'll get to do more. Brian implied that there would be other chances.
Here is Brian, btw. He's not only talented, but also charitable and caring :)
Back at the hotel I washed rotten pepper juice off my shoes in the tub, then had a shower myself and did a load of laundry.
Just my luck, the dryer somehow balled all of my clothing up, so I had to iron every single shirt and pair of pants.
After that I had lunch and drank lots of water and chilled out until it was time for the show.
The show went well, nothing to report.
Soto (MD) has been conducting us for the past two days, but I think tomorrow we're back to having Josh in the MD seat.
It's cool that they can switch out like that; it gives each of them a chance to stay fresh on the show and hear/see it from the audience perspective. I hope they'll both have musical notes for us from what they've seen and heard while doing their switcharoo.
-------------------------------------------------------
Friday, I actually slept until 8am for the first time in a while.
Had a nice slow morning.
I had gotten the rental car keys from Bill the night before, and used that to get to Dr. Limon for lunch.
It's a clean, modern-looking restaurant downtown.
There was kind of loud club music going, and the lighting was dim...I think it's really meant to be a nighttime dinner/drinks/tapas place.
There were three or four women in the kitchen and serving, all of whom were super nice and excited to explain Peruvian food when they found out I was there to try it for the first time.
They start each table with a little bowl of cancha, which is toasted corn kernels from a specific type of corn that puffs when toasted but doesn't pop like popcorn. With the cancha was a little shot of some sort of vegetable juice, I didn't catch the name of it but it tasted like a carrot-heavy V8 or a bloody mary mix. Both were very delicious, especially the corn which was scalding hot and fresh and crispy-crunchy!
Since it was early in the afternoon I got a glass of white wine as well. What the heck.
After asking the server a lot of questions, I decided to do the causa sampler.
Causa is a sort of mini-casserole, typically served as a little round cake (see a picture HERE).
It's made of yellow potatoes, mashed and mixed with crushed peppers and a little lemon or lime juice, then filled with a meat or vegetable salad and shaped using a ring mold.
Instead of being shaped into a cake, the sampler had the mashed potato served in meatball-sized spheres, topped with the meats that would normally be used as filling and drizzled with colorful tasty sauces.
The flavors are, from closest to farthest: tuna salad, octopus, crawfish(?), shrimp, and chicken salad.
Not my best photography, but the lighting was dim.
The plating was gorgeous, and it also tasted wonderful. Very fresh, and each little sample a distinct flavor.
The chicken and tuna salads were pretty standard, just like what you'd have on a chicken or tuna salad sandwich.
My favorites were the octopus because of the unique flavor and big tender tentacle chunks, and the crawfish because it was sweet but also tangy (the sauce on that one was incredible). The sauces, by the way, are a sort of thin aioli made by mixing mayonnaise with misc complementary flavors and colorings.
With food like that, I'd even brave the nighttime club vibes to come here again!
Luckily this was a pretty light meal (I didn't eat all of the potato balls) so I didn't feel overful.
I went for a little walk to a nearby Burlington for no reason other than it was 1.5 miles away, which would give me a 3-mile walk round trip on a nice sunny day. There were a few inland canals on the route, and I saw turtles and fish and even some iguana, but no manatees or alligators. Found nothing of interest at Burlington, but hadn't expected to.
Walked back and checked the Manatee Lagoon live cam to see if it was worth a drive out there to see manatees. No luck, so gave up on that idea. So it was a normal afternoon of chill until showtime.
We DID in fact get a sheet of notes for review.
This is the first time since I joined Tootsie, after 360-some shows, that we've ever gotten printed notes.
I was glad to get them, too. Being able to tweak your performance to be better, and to be in agreement with your musical peers, is super important (and also gives you a project and reason to be more involved in a show you've performed 360-some times!)
The show went well I think, but I was tired and developed a BRUTAL migraine so did not play my best :(
Some days are like that, but I was unhappy with myself for not taking a painkiller earlier so my performance wouldn't suffer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday was a busy day, two shows and a visit with some step-family between shows.
I made sure to pack everything I'd need to bring to the theatre since I wouldn't be coming back to the hotel before the last show.
The matinee was delayed because there was a car fire on the interstate causing a traffic backup (sheesh!), but once we got rolling it went as usual. Oh, wait, the fire alarm went off during intermission. We found out later that it was because the theatre next to ours was using foggers and left some door open that should have been closed.
After the show I met my step-aunt outside, she was there with a good friend.
They drove me to Howley's Restaurant, which was a really cool vintage diner-like place along South Dixie Hwy.
Everything from the tables to the rotating pie display to the rounded chrome hand dryers in the bathroom screamed "1950s".
My aunt had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich; her friend had a classic reuben that looked amazing.
I had a "TV dinner" featuring beef brisket.
What a cute presentation!
I think of "brisket" as a smoked or BBQ thing, but this was pretty much chunks of chuck.
Not complaining, it was quite good. Classic comfort food.
We also had "Southern spring rolls" for an appetizer, they were egg rolls filled with brisket and "cream cheese collards" served with a tangy honey mustard dip. Super bad for you but super delicious. It was worth being over my calories for the day to enjoy them :)
In all honestly, I don't know my step-aunt very well. The conversation mostly focused on either aspects of my work, or step-family drama, or her ailments. Which was fine, we only had a short time anyway.
Back at the theatre we hugged and parted ways, and then I checked my texts and discovered that our keyboardist (Sam) had tested positive for covid. What drove him to get tested I'm not sure, because he says he felt fine, but anyway there it was.
Poor Josh (MD) had to play both books AND conduct the show.
We've done this before so it went as good as it could go, however it's a lot of work for Josh to have to take on.
Soto (our other MD) had just gotten back to his home in New York, but he'll be flying back down to join us in Sarasota and cover that keyboard book while Sam is quarantined in West Palm.
On top of that, our reed 2 had food poisoning :(
Never a dull moment!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, I was grateful that we only have one show this afternoon AND that we will be busing to Sarasota (means we don't have to weigh our luggage).
We carpooled to the theater and had our last show, again with Josh playing both books.
It was a fairly good audience and the show went smoothly.
I had some low-key anxiety because it freaks me out when my coworkers are not feeling well.
Consider that my parents both died of awful diseases--and my friend Slick who was a trumpet player on the circus died of cancer and stood next to me in pain for a year and a half prior to his death while I hyperventilated and panicked every single day because there was nothing I could do to help him--and I think it's understandable that my fight-or-flight kicks in when people suddenly disappear due to covid, or are sitting next to me playing with a stomach bug. I just have a hard time with it, sometimes.
Anyway, ultimately everyone is fine and the show was fine.
We packed up, I refilled the rental car's tank, had a weird dinner of random leftover food items in my room, and watched an episode of The Last Of Us instead of the Super Bowl because I despise how our society values sports over STEM so I will be one less set of eyes riveted to what steriod-saturated meatheads and their beer-soaked fandom are doing.
Tomorrow we have a four hour bus ride to Sarasota, and it's a "load and go" so we'll have a show a few hours after we arrive.
-----------------------------------------------------------
