Tour so far...

October 4th:

Day one of our five week journey of driving around in a big white van and (hopefully) delighting and teaching children all over the Midwest and East Coast! I'm currently touring around with a children's theater company, playing Amber in their adaptation of the kid's book, "Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon." It's about a little girl whose best friend is moving away and how she learns to accept that. It involves a ball made of chewing gum, dead worms, and swordfights with chopsticks. I put my hair in pigtails and wear a huge, neon green shirt with khaki cargo pants. It's a pretty awesome play, and lots of fun to do. Three other actors (Liz, Jeremy and Stacie), the stage manager (Katie), and I will be spending a lot of time together from now until December 10th, when the tour is totally over. On November 6th, we get to go back to New York for a few days before heading back out on a more sporadic basis. But until then, there's no home, just lots of hotel rooms and diners.
We gave the tour a sort of “test run” last week, going to upstate New York for about three days and doing four shows before returning home for the weekend. Highlights from that trip included almost running out of gas in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain with no cell phone service, drinking from natural springs, and performing for a bunch of kids who were way too young to understand the show and proceeded to have conversations with each other during the more serious parts of the play.
But it didn't really feel like we were in it for the long haul until the 4th, when we all tossed our heavy suitcases into the back of the van and set off for Old Forge, NY, ready to follow the directions of our trusty Tom-Tom GPS.
Except Tom-Tom is awful. We must have driven about 45 miles out of our way before Katie (our primary driver) noticed that the mileage we'd gone according to Tom-Tom hadn't budged. Adding to our stress at that particular moment, the woman who coordinates all the tour stuff called to tell us that, since a performance in Iowa had been canceled, we'd be heading back to the city for the weekend. Normally, I'd be super-excited about getting more time in my apartment with my roommates and such, but I had just sublet my apartment (as had a few of the other people on the tour.) We'd also packed huge suitcases that we weren't looking forward to lugging around the city any more than we had to, and had all mentally prepared ourselves for five weeks on the road, saying our big goodbyes already. So we had a few moments of unhappiness and weird, unmoored emotions until it turned out that we weren't going home after all. Now, it turns out, we'll be spending three days off in the hopping Mt. Vernon, IL, where one of the major employers listed on the city's website is Walgreens. But actually, it has a big movie theater. That's all I need. And I'm pretty excited to explore/sleep.
With all the stressful stuff squared away, we made it to the Adirondack Lodge by nightime, played some pool volleyball (we're all pretty sporty people, being actors and such), and set out in search of dinner. I wasn't hopeful, as our meals on the first leg of our tour had mainly come from places like IHop and Taco Bell. Liz found this place called Sister's Bistro, which looked promising, and we decided to check it out.
All of my food snobby assumptions about the quality of meals in this tiny town were blown away. I don't know if I can adequately describe how awesome this restaurant was, but I'm going to talk about it forever anyway. First of all, the restaurant itself was beautiful, located in an old house with a winding staircase. We ended up sitting at the bar with the friendly, full-bearded bartender. For an appetizer, Liz and I split something called "The Gourd," which consisted of radiccio bowl filled with cubes of pumpkin and feta cheese, flavored with vanilla. Then I had cider-roasted salmon with figs and mixed greens, and Baked Alaska for dessert. We all shared with each other, and nobody got a meal that was anything less than delicious. 90% of their ingredients are locally grown, the service is incredibly friendly, and the story behind the restaurant is really sweet: Two sisters lived far apart, one in Old Forge and the other in Michigan. When the Michigan sister came to visit, they realized that they missed each other way too much. She decided to close the distance gap by moving to Old Forge but needed something to do, so together they opened this restaurant.
Whew. I promise that I won't normally spend that much time describing my meals in detail. But I feel like that may be the best I eat on this trip, so I wanted to memorialize it.

October 5th:

We got up at 6 am, because the theater company's policy is that cast members need to be at any given theater/school two hours before a performance to have enough time to load in and set up the set, get into costumes, etc... while allowing a grace period in case of traffic or other unforseen circumstances. Our performance was at 9:45 at a school roughly 45 minutes away from the hotel. It's no fun getting up when it's still dark outside. We got to the theater, loaded everything in, and then decided to go get breakfast quickly in the time we had left before all the elementary school kids came in.
But while backing out of the school's parking lot, we suddenly heard this horrible scraping noise coming from the back of the van. Turns out that we had just banged into the school's greenhouse, tearing off a big old chunk of plastic from the side. After a moment of hesitation, we decided to just continue on our way to get breakfast and deal with it when we got back. But when we got back, the school doors were locked. Ultimately, we got back in and had less than 20 minutes to get into costume and make-up. The show itself was a bit of a disaster in parts. Our music is prerecorded, and somehow we got off at one point. I broke the chewing gum ball by throwing it way too wildly for Jeremy to catch it (I'm telling you, my sports skills are just fantastic!) and again, it seemed like a lot of the kids were too young to get the play. But somehow we got through it without too much damage.Then we somehow had to drive back to Old Forge (40 minutes away in the best circumstances) and load in for a 12:50 show. Keep in mind that we finished our first show at around 10:50 and weren’t able to finish loading everything into the van until about 11:20. Then, we had to wait for the maintenance man to come around and talk to Katie about the greenhouse.
Him: Wow. You took a big chunk out of that.
Us: We’re so sorry.
Him: How does that happen? Were you looking?
Us: We’re sorry.
Him: You know, you have mirrors on your van.
Us: We know. WE'RE SORRY. WE NEED TO GO.

Anyways, once he’d finally stopped repeating the obvious, we sped off to our next destination, reaching the school at around 12:15. Our performance was in school's gymnasium, so we set up makeshift wings with gym mats and storage boxes. But I actually really liked performing in the gym, because unlike in the theaters we'd been at previously, you could actually see the children's faces. I get to talk to the audience a lot, so I basically got to spend a fair of time looking out at adorable little children only a couple of feet away, smiling at me.We had a Q&A session afterward, with one little boy who raised his hand just because he wanted to wave to us.
We ate lunch at 3:30 (first real meal of the day!) at a diner, then drove to Watertown, NY. Our bartender at Sister's Bistro warned us that Watertown was a big gang activity place. But it seemed pretty nice, so we settled into our Econo Lodge and fell asleep almost immediately.

October 6th:

Another two show and two location day. This time, we were in school gyms for both performances. More opportunities to interact with super-cute kids! We had another Q&A after our morning performance. When we asked if anyone had questions, about half of the kids raised their hands eagerly. A few of them had actual questions (i.e. "Were the worms real?" "Was that really chewing gum?") but a far bigger number didn't really seem to know the definition of "question." Instead, they said things like, "I liked the play." So I'm not complaining.
My personal favorite was one little boy who had been vigorously raising his hand in the air the whole time. When we finally called on him, he said "Um... I read books."
After that, we had to load out of the gym while a bunch of the kids were having class, and they kept running up to us and giving us hugs and waving and doing similarly adorable things. On the way to our second performance (also in a gym), we tried to rescue a homeless kitten on the side of the road. Ultimately, we didn't know what to do with it so we knocked on a random door and gave it to the man who answered.

Okay, there's much more to say about the past few days, but if I don't get this posted now, I don't think I ever will.