I swear, that man has pepped up so the last few days, I wonder if there is still hope. First of all he took the bus out to Best Buy a long ways away and bought a new battery for the camcorder that cost him $80! I have begged him to buy one for months if not years. He said it was my Christmas for which I was very happy. He bought a small recorder for his Christmas. Today, nothing but do we made two more karaoke videos and this time Doc put more into his singing instead of just kind of laying back and sneering. He even dictated another entry for me to add to the videos for his blog, Rich n Doc Emde. I am telling you, people, if you can get guys without hope like Doc creating it is the best medicine there is.
This was what was so great about Playwright's Workshop Theater. Playwrights were writing plays and getting a full production run of three weeks in a live theater format. If they never got a play on Broadway they got one in Phoenix to remember. Critics reviewed their plays. Sometimes they got advance publicity. They got to help pick out actors. Opening night was so exciting.
Raymond went on doing his plays in other small theaters around town when he left the company he had formed after 12 years, due to conflict of interest with his business partner. Other playwrights did, too. One, Terry Earp, even formed a company and did many of her plays in a space she called On The Spot Theater.
Raymond started teaching theater at Metropolitan Arts Institute, a high school charter school, and mentored a whole new generation of young playwrights for ten years. Best Ten Minute plays of the year was a production to look forward to when students, wrote, directed, and acted in their own plays. Raymond wrote plays especially for teens, one of which Anchorage Press has published called, "Charley Foster," about high school students reacting to a death in their midst, possibly caused by one of their own. The last big production he did there which kind of worn him down to a nub was a musical version of "Dreaming in Color". He cast about every kid in theater in that play with double casting, and I thought one cast was as good as the other.
I am so glad he's back and unemployed because he's got a chance to do other things before he gets cranked up again, like talk about plays of Christmas pasts on camera. He's staging an event of singing and performing featuring some of his Metro Art students this Thursday in the outside pavilion at the Paisley Violin. Saturday he's starting a new playwrights workshop there, and well when Raymond starts cookin' you don't know what will happen next, maybe a production in Phoenix of his one man show "Bohemian Cowboy" just down the road in a theater space he's scouting! Whew, I am just trying to catch my breath.
3 comments:
I'm home. Mine is white again.
Great to see you singing, laughing, talking and having fun
I was able to listen to the singing this morning and I enjoyed it. At the care center, Sharlee was trying to get the residents to sing Rudolph (she was talking about Burl Ives). She said she was bad and when they finished, our young resident said, "You ARE bad." An old one said, "Yes, but she tries very hard." Everyone laughed. I thought of you Gerry...she is worse than you. And has no performance technique (which saves you)..but her heart is in the right place. I'm afraid there are many more of us bad ones, than good. Doc has a voice.
I'm jealous.
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