While wandering in Tucson, I found a railroad museum. Inside I found this photo of a sleeper car from the 1940s:
I immediately recognized this scene as a typical day on our bus, at approximately 7:30AM on a load-in day, as everyone rolls out of their bunks and puts their shoes on. It would be pretty cool if we had a crew train instead!
April 5, 2009
Phoenix & Tucson
In all the chaos surrounding my computer breaking, I haven’t gotten a chance to say much about Phoenix and Tucson. This is sort of the low-stress portion of the tour. We have back-to-back sitdowns of one week each in these two cities, which are less than two hours apart from each other. Both venues are run by Arizona Theatre Company, which is obviously a high-class professional company, as opposed to, say, a community college. We have had great experiences at community colleges as well, but it has been very comfortable to be in two venues run to such a high level of professionalism. In fact, I suppose technically you could say they are more professional than us. During these two weeks, all the Equity members are bumping up to the LORT B salary, because that’s the level at which ATC operates. And that, I declare, is very cool. We are now in Tucson, and two performances away from our week’s vacation. Here’s our theatre:
Even more so than Phoenix, we have been having a great time here. Probably the biggest reason is that our hotel is truly walking distance to the venue, which frees cast and crew from being tied down by the schedule of bus or van calls (we don’t actually have our buses here, just two 15-passenger vans). Unlike Minneapolis, where we were walking distance to the Guthrie and said walk would make your skin bleed and your nose hairs freeze together, this walk is warm and breezy and incredibly pleasant. We are also in the downtown area with lots of great food.
Spending a whole week in each city has given us the opportunity to explore what there is to do in town and outside town. Some of the activities have included hiking, a dude ranch belonging to relatives of one of our actors, the Titan Missile Museum, and spring training baseball games. Throughout the tour I have pretty much laid back and gone wherever I was taken when it comes to recreation. The Titan Missile Museum was my first foray into taking over as cruise director for a day, and planning and arranging our activity. Five of us went, and all agreed it was really cool.
