OK, so it has been noted that the blog kind of went into hibernation mode there for a little while. I can honestly say that it was for good reason.
For starters, I'm the president of the board of a community theater. It's actually "theatre." I'm not entirely sure why the people that started the thing 20-some years ago went with that, but they did. It's also the board of "governors," as opposed to "directors." Again, not entirely sure why...although, I guess with all of that we probably really should all be speaking with Madonna-like fake British accents.
In any case, back in November the theater was approached about possibly buying an out of use church building. So, we quietly went about trying to find larger donors that might help make that happen and originally we were to try to have it done in the spring. However, at the end of January, the church that still owned the building told us that they had another buyer come forward and that they would give the group 30 days to come up with the money, otherwise they would have to accept the offer of the other prospective buyer.
Want to know what it's like to try to help organize people into raising $50,000 in 30 days? Apparently, it's not impossible because we managed to do it. But, man, did I spend a lot of time talking to people...including the press, which I think is always odd for a writer. You're being interviewed by someone that's going to write about you...you kind of feel like you should interview the person back and write about them, just to make things even.
Plus, the average age of the other board members is somewhere north of 70...and that's with adding in the one 27-year-old. On the plus side, many of them are retired so they've got time to do things like run down to a court house to get paperwork or call on prospective donors. On the other hand, there's are other issues that come into play...like hoping they won't fall while trying to enter said courthouse and end up with broken bones.
Thanks to a lot of effort by a lot of people -- both the people that were already involved with the community theater and others in the local community that just stepped in to help -- we actually did close on the new building a week ago.
So, now I'm obstinantly overseeing a group that now needs to renovate a building into a theater, raise the money to do that, decide on the building plans for doing that, figure out the ADA (American Disabilities Act) requirements for it, and come up with a way to generate enough funds to do things like pay for the utilities on the building. I get paid to manage one business, and now my volunteer job just turned into managing another one.
Oh, and I'm supposed to direct the season's first play...a task that I'm desperately hoping to pass off to a local college student so that I might have the chance to, you know, sit down every once and a while.
The second thing is that, while this was going on, I was also covering the Indiana high school girls basketball tournament as part of my sports writing gig. While normally that keeps me busy for about 2-2 1/2 weeks, this year one of the local team's made it to the state finals...which means that I spent a whole lot of the last month writing about girls basketball.
The good thing is that, I played basketball, I like basketball, so I don't really mind writing about it. And, I've kind of become the newspaper's de facto girls basketball person, so after five years of covering the local sports scene, I actually sometimes know what I'm talking about.
And, I get to find out what some of the newer music is. If I wasn't hanging out in gyms with blaring sound systems, I probably wouldn't know songs like DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win" and Taio Cruz's "Dynamite." My 5-year-old son, Casey, would, but then he's cooler than me (more on how pathetic it is to have a 5-year-old that's cooler than you are in a later post). I did find it interesting the team earlier this season that warmed up to Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" in its entirety the first week that it was released. Let's just say that it's not really chock full of future jazz band standards.
Speaking of...I can't honestly say that when I was a lad that I was really envisioning the day that Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC would become staples of the pep bands (and, thanks to the movie "Megamind" my sons now also walk around singing "Crazy Train" and "Highway to Hell"...although they'll usually change the latter to either 'heck' or 'heaven' if asked...after a 10 minute conversation where Marty argues that he doesn't understand why 'hell' is a bad word).
Likewise, I didn't see "Don't Stop Believing" having a 30 year run as a standard. I'm also still trying to figure out where along the line Bruce Channel's "Hey Baby" became a call-and-response high school band number. I'm assuming that it was sometime after "Dirty Dancing" since that's the only way that most people know that song...but it must have been sometime when I was in California and not really going anywhere near most high school events (with the exception of going to see LeBron James play...but even that was at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion). I do like the one that some of the high school bands now do with Bon Jovi's "Living On a Prayer"...where they stop playing and the student section sings the refrain acapella. Anyone who's ever spent time in a karaoke bar knows how much fun it is to have a crowd of people wailing, "Whooah, we're halfway there...Whoo-ah!, living on a prayer..."
These are the kinds of things that I wonder to keep my mind off of the fact that all of the parents of the current high schoolers are very much my peers. And, the fact that in the not too distant future, a lot of them will be younger than me...despite the fact that I'm still six years removed from my own oldest kid hitting high school.
The downside to covering high school girls basketball in Indiana is...well, that seems like it should be kind of self-explanatory. During the tournament's second or third weekend, I was among my press row brethren when one of them mentioned that we were lucky to be there because we could have the misfortune of being in Los Angeles, sitting in a luxury box, watching the NBA All-Star game. I was dumb enough to point out that the last time that the NBA All-Star game was in L.A., I actually was in a luxury box watching the Rookies vs. Sophomores game that featured LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony, et al.
A friend and colleague from the South Bend Tribune looked at me after I relayed that information. "And, now you're here with us," he said. "The Lord, Jesus Christ, does not like you."
Words to live by.
If someone ever writes a theme song for "My Life As a Sitcom," that's what I hope that it will be called.
No comments:
Post a Comment