always an aggie

Here at Utah State it's Homecoming week, filled with traditions, and football, and excitement ... and street painting.

Aggie Bull-evard goes right through the middle of campus and each year it gets painted by the different clubs and organizations. Every club gets a 10x10 space to paint their logo and/or incorporate the Homecoming theme - which this year is "Celebrate! Once an Aggie, always an Aggie." The street painting is a contest so there's only a two hour time limit to paint. The winners are for best overall, best incorporated theme, best artistic, and best greek.

My husband reserved a spot for the Theatre Student Association and was in charge of the design. He spent a good amount of time on it last week. After bouncing ideas off of me and other students, he finalized his idea. So Saturday, we were out and about buying supplies. We stopped at Home Depot for paint and such and Wal-Mart for cardboard. My husband decided to make a cut-out of the design beforehand to save on time ... which ended up working really well ... except for it filled up our entire living room and lasted most of our Saturday.

Once we had the cardboard laid out, my husband measured and traced and cut. And I helped, of course. We spent quite few hours on it. To make the time pass, we watched the Utah State v. Colorado State football game ... which they won ... go Aggies!

The painting was going on Monday night. Also going on Monday night was Legally Blonde rehearsal, which takes a good hand full of the departments students. My husband tried to recruit people to come help paint via emails and texts, but no real commitment came from it ... except for mine. It was just going to be me and the street. I was nervous to take on the challenge, I'll admit. We got there just before 6pm to get settled in. And to my great surprise, a theatre student showed up. She is in Legally Blonde but said she'd help for ten minutes or so before rehearsal. So it was the three of us tracing the design in chalk on the street.

Once rehearsal time came along, our friend left. My husband called the director and asked if he could stay since I was the only one there. Thankfully, the director let him stay for an extra hour. Huge relief off of my shoulders. As we were painting, we found that we had to use lots of paint to fill the gaps, and paint does not dry quickly on the street when there's clumps of it. But it started looking really cool. People would pass by and say, "Oh, I get it. Theatre masks in the 'U'. That's cool."

Shortly after we started painting, we had two more students show up to help us. Awesome! It made the job go much more quickly. The four of us had some difficulty painting on top of wet paint, which we had to do because of the time limit, but we got the job done. It was a lot of fun.

The design is a clock with an 'A' in place of the numbers. It represents always being an Aggie. The finished product turned out great and we were pretty proud of it. Sadly, we didn't win anything.

Overall, the street painting was stressful and fun ... two things my husband and I seem to be pretty skillful at. :)

a hidden talent

Guess what everyone? I've written a play. A full, over an hour, one act play.

My husband's theatre-ness is finally rubbing off on me.

This wasn't out of the blue ... well, kind of. The Theatre Student Association (TSA) has a Halloween show every year as a fundraiser for the club. In the past they have done skits or student written shows with a Halloween theme. My husband, who's the president of the club, came home one night last week and was telling me that no one had shown interest in doing the show yet.

The next day, I was bored. So I put my fingers to the keyboard and started typing. All I knew was that it had to be a murder mystery of sorts and include dancing pumpkins, (it's a tradition thing.) And from there I couldn't stop. My mind just kept turning. After about two hours or so, I had seven characters, a location, a basic plot, and sixteen pages of script.

The next day ... fourteen more pages. I was so excited and hyped up that I just kept working on it. I would show pieces of it to my husband and he would get excited too. We would talk about the plot as it got more and more complicated. I would spend hours writing and re-writing as my husband was at rehearsal. I had another student look at it and give me pointers. I told my family about it and they all thought it was an interesting idea. I even had to cut a character out because my plot was getting too complicated. I kept working and typing and after about six days I had a finished play.

Before I finished it though, I had to submit it to TSA for consideration. And when I submitted it, I was the only play that had been submitted. But then I found out that a comedy group had asked TSA if they could perform for the Halloween show with a series of skits. And then the next day, another murder mystery show had been submitted that was shorter than mine and completed. I had competition.

My husband called me one night from rehearsal and said that the verdict was in ... the TSA presidency was going with both of the other shows. Even though I was a little heartbroken, I could understand why. The other shows were cheaper to produce, thus giving them more profit. Plus, the other shows would be easier to do in such a short amount of time. But still, it was hard to motivate myself to finish the show after that because I had written it specifically for Halloween. But I did; I finished it, and I am now in the process of perfecting it.

I'm going to resubmit my play in the spring and hopefully see it come to life on stage. In the meantime, I'm going to try my hand at writing another play, one without so many limits.

Who knows? Maybe I have a hidden theatre talent.

rehearsal schedule drama

Wonderful news everyone! My husband was cast as Emmett Forest in Legally Blonde the Musical!

Thank you, thank you.....yes, we are both extremely excited! We sang to the songs all the way to St. George and back in preparation for the audition. Not only was this the part he wanted, but it will be a good challenge for him. And as this is his last year at Utah State, this will also be his last performance for the school's main stage shows. What a great part to end on!

But wait....there's more news. There have been some changes made to the rehearsal schedule. My husband will now be rehearsing three and a half hours a day instead of three and six days a week instead of five.....Yea!

I hope at this point you are sensing the sarcasm in that last bit, because it really doesn't make me jump for joy. So they need the extra practice time. No big deal right? It'll all be over in two and a half months. I can handle that....I think.

I don't mean to make this a sob story but I just wanted to share some things that I go through as a theatre wife. I grew up in a home where we always sat down as a family to eat dinner. It was important to my parents and became important to me. So I struggle with the idea that my husband isn't home for dinner. Eat earlier, you say? Well we would if I wasn't working and he didn't have other responsibilities. Before rehearsals ended at 10pm, we would eat dinner when he got home around 9:30pm. Not too bad I guess. But eat dinner after 10pm? Crazy I say! My husband told me that he would not be offended if I ate dinner without him. Sad thought! Who wants to eat a lovely cooked meal all by themselves six nights a week? Not me.

And what happened to the deal that the theatre department has him during the week and I get him on the weekends? Who broke that deal, huh? I sure didn't. The weekends were for me and him to regroup and spend some quality time together. But no, you decided to take a part of my weekends away too. And what about our family that lives an hour and a half away that we usually drive down to see once a month? What about them? They won't be seeing him any time soon.

But it's only for two and a half months. It'll go by quickly. And for that time, I'll put on a happy face and be supportive. We'll have late night dinners and make the most of our weekends. Honestly, I am excited for him and I am willing to support him in this. It just stinks knowing that he's gone just a little bit longer and a little bit more than usual. However, it'll all be worth it when I see him up on that stage, acting and singing his heart out. He is great to watch on stage! Until he kisses the girl....

But for another time, another blog.

Oh the life of a theatre wife. :)

s'more-less

My husband and I decided to have one last vacation before school started. One of the many adventures of our two week vacation was to camp for a night in Zion's National Park. We were staying with my husband's grandparents for the week but took one night to camp in the great out doors.

We got to our site kinda late and decided to make s'mores and call it a night. But as we were setting up, my husband called out, "Honey, where are the marshmallows?" Pretty sure I had seen them as I was packing, I claimed that they were in our bag. However, as we continued to search all our stuff, no marshmallows turned up. So it was either stay put s'more-less or head back to the house to get them.

Seriously, who ever wants to be s'more-less?

We didn't bring our car into the park so we had to brainstorm on how to get back to his grandparents. I knew there was a shuttle that went into town that passed by his grandparent's house. We headed over to the Visitor's Center in hopes that it wasn't too late to catch one. We got to a shuttle station and asked the driver if he went into town. He kindly redirected us to the other shuttle station....the one that went into town and not up the canyon. So as it was getting darker, we headed to the other station.

Once we got to the station, we waited for the next available shuttle with a few other folks. It arrived and we asked how late the shuttles ran and if we would be able to get back into the park. The shuttle driver assured us that we would be fine....if we hurried. Determined to get our s'mores, we climbed aboard and enjoyed our ride through town.

The shuttle arrived at it's farthest destination. We described the house to the driver only to hear the words, "Oh the West's!" She not only knew them, but was kind enough to drop us off in front of their driveway. We thanked her and ran inside. And of course, once we were inside, there were the marshmallows, sitting on the bed, where I had left them, as I was packing.

Relieved to find them, we grabbed the marshmallows, headed out the door, and giggled all the way back to the shuttle stop where we waited patiently with a bat for the shuttle to pick us up....It almost missed us. The street light decided to go out leaving us in darkness. Thankfully we were seen last minute. We hopped on and enjoyed the ride back into the park.

Walking back to our campsite, we talked of yummy s'mores and how this tiny, fun adventure would all be worth it. We weren't allowed to have fires so we were using our camper stove to roast our 'mallows. We started setting up our camper stove and the ingredients. It was only then that I heard the devastating words:

"Honey, where is the propane tank?"

I gave up. Even though I searched the tent for at least five minutes, I just knew it was back at the house, sitting on the bed, where I had left it, as I was packing. I felt like I had failed; we were going to be s'more-less. And the shuttles would be done in less than a half hour....not enough time to run back again. My husband did the best he could to cheer me up with words but nothing worked. Finally, he sat me down, put a marshmallow on a stick, lit a match on his zipper (which I didn't even know was possible), and toasted it. Catching on and smiling a little, I pulled out the grahams and chocolate. We each had one and enjoyed our s'mores under the starlit night.

S'more-less no more.