I like to start Saturday with a powerwalk, but it’s raining… so instead spent a leisurely time reading Teh Internet. Ended up rereading blog posts from seventeen years ago, covering my last trip to the festival for Ruddigore.

I’d forgotten that it was a pretty weird time in our life. C’s company had announced that they were moving operations from Jersey City to North Carolina – and everyone was offered the choice of a transfer package or buyout package. We didn’t rule out the possibility of moving to North Carolina outfight (and in the alternate timeline where we took it, we would have ended up essentially in the same area where my dad and brother now live), but the financial offer wasn’t good enough, so C took the buyout instead. In the meantime, there was a varicose vein operation he wanted to have done and decided to do that before he lost his health insurance.

So June and July were about that – plus a weekend trip to Bermuda which was fun, but not the easiest or best trip we’ve ever taken. And I had a business trip to St. Paul almost immediately afterward. And C’s mother had a stroke and went into a nursing home. And C had his operation, which was successful, but left him with ouchy legs and camped out on the sofa for the foreseeable future.

If he’d needed more help during his recovery, I could have cancelled the Buxton trip without too much damage, but he was actually doing OK on his own. However, the two weeks I was gone, NYC was in a massive heatwave. So I’m in breezy blowy Buxton and he’s poaching in our apartment, healing from surgery. Mild (just mild) guilt.

The festival trip was fun, for the most part. It was my second trip, and the first time was my first time and I had a huge role and it was all kind of terrifying. This time, I was a chorister and didn’t have nearly the weight on my shoulders and could take the time to, for instance, walk in the beautiful park, something I had never managed to do in 2003. And Ruddigore (in this production, Ruddygore, since we were doing the first-night version), is a blast to do, and I had a ton of friends in the cast.

Carol, Vikki, Wendy and Rachel K and I had a ‘mini-cabaret’ that we’d rehearsed and prepared, of all ‘summer music’ (including “It’s Summertime”, which we just repeated this summer) – but I’d forgotten that we gave the cabaret immediately after “The Japanese Mikado”, one of the most iconic productions ever given at the festival. A Mikado actually given in Japanese, with no subtitles – the audience was on tenterhooks, thinking “this could be fantastic, or a total disaster”. As it turned out, it was fantastic – and very funny, and absolutely beautiful to look at. Anyway, the cabaret wasn’t great, mostly because of stage setup in the club, but we did fine.

I also saw a bunch of shows that year, and did Florian for a festival club scratch “Ida”, and was supposed to do a Grosvenor later, but got a cold (like half our cast) and passed that off to Jonathan I. Our Ruddygore had some ups and downs – there was a lot of tension we had with a sister company that shared some actors – but was mostly a really great show.

Travelling home was, um, an adventure. Vikki and I had agreed to share a taxi from Buxton to the Manchester airport. My clock radio woke me up with the news that an air-travel-related terrorist plot had been discovered. Aw, crap. So we headed off to the airport having no idea whether planes would even be flying. As it turned out, they were, but the delays and extra security were enormous. Everyone got patted down, and I think our flight took off three hours late because they had to check everyone and get the countries of origin to sign off on us. We were not allowed to bring anything on the plane (like my backpack, with all of its books and sudoku and stuff). I did managed to smuggle a pen, and that got shared around my neighbors as we all did the crossword in the in-flight magazine, for lack of anything else to do. They were nice enough to show us movies for free which probably wouldn’t have been shown otherwise. But we made it home. (By this time, C had healed enough to go back to the office, and he was totally surprised to find me there when he came home – he’d assumed I’d be trapped.)

---

And then we headed into fall – Mr. Man’s mom passed away, not unexpectedly. C did temp IT work for a year or so until he got a new job. I simultaneously joined the Blue Hill Troupe and got cast in St. Bart’s A Little Night Music. And on we went.