House becomes a home?

We've gotten some of the worst of it done, if you don't look in the baby's room. (Thank God the baby isn't here yet, there'd be no room to put her. Him. PC pronouns for imminent but not extant people are even more troubling than those for just plain people.)

And trying to get a house set up and get up to speed on the progress of the Des Moines Social Club is hard. We're meeting lots of people and taking meetings, good stuff I think, but there are no salaries. We're looking for sponsors for a big Halloween event (and trying to plan it at the same time) but the seeds have yet to blossom into fruit. And we are adjusting to a very different life here--the hardest part isn't the culture shock but the uncertainty. Julie and I had both worn pretty comfortable grooves in New York. We were good at what we did and knew what was going on. In part, I think, that was the problem--we were both ready (we thought) for some big changes, but the financial uncertainty of getting a massive arts center off the ground in a town we've been in for 10 days is, well...stressful would be fair, I think. Inadequate but fair.

There's a chance I could get to play Tom Joad in Colorado. Josh Robinson texted me about the opportunity (the previous Tom had to drop out because of a family emergency) and I video'd an audition in iMovie and posted it on Youtube for the director (a friend of Josh's) and the artistic director, for whom I played Aguecheek in 12th Night in the Shenandoah Shakespeare. Tiny little world. I haven't heard, but it would start at the beginning of September, which would be okay by us. Naturally, once you want one of these things it goes another direction, but hey...we'll figure it out.

Send good thoughts.

Love,
M

Des Moines, Ahoy!

It's been a remarkable summer.

Julie and I were married on June 13th. (view some pictures here.)

My cousin Rob married Sarah in Maine on July 13th, and I officiated. There are some photos on Facebook here but I don't know if you can see them if you're not Sarah's friend.

Then the following weekend, July 19th, Andy and Elizabeth got married in South Dakota. I'm sure somebody's got photos somewhere.

Then Julie and I moved to Des Moines. Which brings us up to today.

Well not really. There was two weeks of packing, a quick trip by yours truly to Sleepaway Aikido Camp, and then 14 wonderful people helped us load all our stuff into a truck. A reeeeeeeally big truck. Which I then drove 3 days across half the country while Julie fed me coffee and zucchini bread. (Thanks, Suzanne and Beth & Jeff!)

We stayed in Jenkintown with Julie's childhood friend Heather, in Pittsburgh (Mt. Lebanon, actually) with my cousin Beth and her husband Jeff (who made this panko-crusted fried vegetable feast that I'm still trying to burn off) and then in a hotel outside of South Bend.

The Indiana Sand Dunes are beautiful, and make it a little easier for me to be so damn far from an ocean. I'm a coastal boy, really. Except for college I've always lived within hours of the ocean. So to see Lake Michigan receding into the distance, with the ghostly outline of Chicago rising out of the water, made me feel like I could get my inspirational-massive-body-of-water fix.

Today we unload. This weekend is a Keokuk Celebration of Marriage (Chuck and Carole Betts' 40th Anniversary party, combined with a Matt and Julie Wedding Celebration in Iowa party, at Julie's parents' house).

We ate at Raccoon River Brewing Company last night, where I'd been before, and where the ribs are quite acceptable. I have no new impressions of Des Moines, except that driving down Ingersoll near our new aparment looked good enough to live. For a while.

More later. Greetings to any and all who read this.

M

Swansong

So this will be my final show in New York, and that, when I pause to reflect, is an occasion for sadness. Also, this weekend, will be the final show for Witches In Bikinis, the project that Julie has been dancing in (and dance captaining) for the last three years. There's a lot of bittersweetness in Brooklyn right now. I always feel that things are taking off right when I try to go do something else, but I need to make a massive change. I have not, by my own standards, been successful as an actor in New York. Now is the time to make a crater in Des Moines. (That sounds kind of awful, but I was trying to find something more powerful than "have an impact". Suggestions?)

Alles ruhe im Ost

Not too much to report. An interesting email exchange from/with the folks at the United Way and Zack--I'm trying to follow but I'm a little confused. I think it means they might be interested in partnering with us on education programs.

My immediate need is to keep on top of all the crapola I need to be doing this week, which is significant. Then I also need to be thinking about the plays we'll be doing in Des Moines. I think STCDM needs to plan and announce its first season as soon as possible after we get the building, which Zack hopes will be by June 1. Who knows if that is actually correct; we're all working on best estimates here.

M

One giant step for a Julie

So Julie put in her resignation at BAX today. She's been there for I think 7 years. This is a huge step for us, and for BAX as they negotiate an enormous change. Julie has been an all-purpose solver for them, and an enormous piece of their institutional memory.

Whoa. Bigness.

Big News, No Whammies

Remember that resolution to blog more?

Yeah, me neither.

Although it's relatively unannounced (like, say, to the people at our respective jobs) I feel safe telling my non-existent readership (Hi Zack!) that Julie and I are moving to Des Moines.

Needless to say this momentous news has been brewing for a while. Zack Mannheimer has moved to Des Moines to start the Des Moines Social Club, a full-service arts center that will contain a restaurant and classrooms and a thoroughly flexible blackbox theater. You can take a look at the architectural drawings or the business plan via the magic of the interwebs. Julie will be the managing director and I will be the Education Director and co-Artistic Director, with Zack, of the Subjective Theatre Company Des Moines.

It's an amazing opportunity for us in a lot of ways. I've been wanting for over a year now to make the transition to directing, and haven't really gotten there in NYC. Julie's family will be three hours away rather than 15. We want to start a family soon (after the wedding, I suppose) and parts of that will be easier to do in Des Moines. So it's exciting and scaring the crap out of me at the same time.

I've re-named this blog because I'm going to use it to track our experiences as we do this. It's something we've never tried to do before, this wholesale creation of a cultural institution, although we both have experience in the field. And holy cow I'm moving to the prairie, which I never thought I'd do in a million years.

Life is delightfully odd.

M

One down, several to go.

So the main project for this year was to not buy any more books but to read the ones already in my possession. Now, the fact that I bought a book the other day should in no way be construed to mean that I'm abandoning that resolution already. Nor should the fact that this is the first post of the new year be construed to mean that I'm giving up on my resolution to blog more. Rather, the boo should be seen as a gift for Zack, and my tardiness be seen as...well sheer laziness.

The first set of books I read was Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which Julie's parents gave me for Christmas. It was excellent, and I was disappointed to read that the film might not live up to the very high caliber of the novel. Expect more compromises in the later, far more polemical stories.

And the fact that I have to buy Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God today...that's to help a tutoring student. Really. Truly.