Our journey to the land of sunshine and wizards

Most important:
The cute little kid quote of the week goes to a four-year-old who, in the middle of one of our performances, turned to her teacher and asked, "Are they human?"

Second most important:
Our theater company has a Halloween costume contest, pitting all the different tours they send out against one another. This is our entry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI6cLzdl4qo

Everything else:
I was kind of sad to leave Michigan but Indiana was fun, with another big old theater (where awesome Equity stagehands loaded in our set for us) and a casino! Almost immediately, I won $1.75, gambled away 75 of those cents, and then quit for the night with my dollar's worth of winnings. Stacie and I spent the next hour watching Jeremy gamble away $20, 10 cents at a time, on the slots. It was hypnotic.

Next stop was Watertown for four days, where nothing of interest happened except laundry and a trip to a nearly empty gay bar. And then we drove. And drove. And drove. Three days of sitting in a big white van, hurtling down highways, caused us to get creative. We decided to decorate for Halloween with the supplies Liz had bought, and stretched fake green cobwebs all across the back of the van. We tangled mini plastic rats and multicolored skeletons all throughout the green fluff. Endless driving had turned us ruthless. We twined cobwebs around the skeletons' necks and hung them, relieving our boredom by watching them bounce up and down as we drove.

But then, the nicest thing happened! On our second day of driving, my dad called and suggested that we take a minor detour to my house in DC for dinner. So we pulled off the highway, and I got to see my family! It was the first home-cooked meal we'd all had in a while, and it was a really good one. My dad even baked brownies for us, and we demolished the entire pan. Being in the midst of a month of hotel-hopping, it was weird and lovely at the same time to be in an actual home. I wished that I could have spent more time with my dad and brother, but we had to move on to our Virginia hotel for the night after a much too short visit.

And now we're in Florida! Hallelujah! It is warm and beautiful. Our meals have been really delightful here, fresh and exciting and not too expensive, a very nice change from the endless diners we were doing towards the beginning of this trip. In St. Petersburg, we ate in this restaurant called The Garden and actually sat out in a garden, in the shade of palm trees and with little lizards running around. It was awesome.

We've had two performances here so far, our first one in West Palm Beach at this absolutely incredible theater. It sat 2,200 people, and we had at least 1,800 kids come to watch us at a single performance. That is so many children. It felt a little like we were the High School Musical stars or Justin Bieber or something whenever they all clapped and cheered at the same time. Seriously, it was deafening. But the weird thing that happened was that they kept clapping at really inappropriate times. Around the midpoint of the show, I clap to the beat during a certain upbeat song. Sometimes kids in the audience will clap along with me, which is exciting and cute. But the kids in this particular audience seemed to think that, because they clapped during this one song, they should clap along during all the rest of the songs in the show. The problem is that most of the songs in the second half are kind of sad or pensive. So there I was, ten minutes later, singing this really intense song about how everyone in my life leaves me and I just want someone to stay, with 1800 children loudly clapping along. It was really distracting. I kept thinking that maybe if I just looked sadder and sadder, they would shut up. But no. They clapped along until the end of the show. After the performance, we stood by the theater exits to say goodbye to everyone leaving, and I must have high-fived about 1,000 children in half an hour. My hand was sore.

Our other performance took place at a prep school in St. Petersburg, and there were a few exciting things about this performance:
1. The sound was awful, and started making really loud feedback noises all the time.
2. A gumball gets thrown around a few times throughout the course of the show. During this performance, Jeremy almost smacked Stacie in the face with it. And then I threw it way too wildly and it went into the audience. Jeremy hurtled off the stage and grabbed it, but we were laughing too hard to really get out the words to the song we were singing at the time. At the end of the show, we had a Q&A, and one of the first questions we got was, "When the ball went off the stage, was that supposed to happen?"
No, random child, it was not.
3. I morphed into a five year old and accidentally called Liz "Mommy" instead of "Mom."

And the last really awesome Florida thing, at least for now? WE WENT TO HARRY POTTER WORLD AND I DRANK BUTTERBEER AND FLEW AROUND INSIDE HOGWARTS. AHHHHH.
Okay, Universal Studios has more than Harry Potter. We also went on this really strange E.T. ride, where half of it actually corresponds to what happens in the movie and then the other half takes you on this crazy, hallucinogenic ride to E.T.'s home planet where there are a lot of mushrooms and flower aliens. I don't really understand why they designed it like that.