A gorgeous day!

So it's 70 degrees and I'm sitting on the front porch being blown away by Dickens, and just enjoying things. I ran Old Hickory this morning and had some revelations for myself, that I'll have to share with Wallace tonight. I rehearsed in the kitchen to be as far away from phones as possible and I noticed how much stuff I had to move out of the way on the kitchen table .. . and it hit me . . . we had been thinking that this was taking place on the porch, which I think was my idea, and then we ran with it . . . which sort of leaves a dearth of physical life . . . when I started moving stuff around I thought, aha! Jimmy having a cluttered table would speak volumes about him, and even more so the stuff that is cluttering it! I'll have to run this one by W at rehearsal and see what he thinks . . . but it was an eyeopener for me.

I also got an email the other day that I got a chuckle and a warning out of . . . I hueard from Norman Marshall (portrayer of John Brown and all round radical . . .he's also the one that took Where the Rain Never Falls under his wing and got it on WBAI, for which I am eternally grateful); Norman asked if I was dealing with Jackson's racism and the fact that he bragged about exterminating American Indians or was he gonna have to fight me about that? It took me aback for a moment until I remembered that Andrew Jackson's nickname was Old Hickory . . . I told him not to fear, my OH is a knife! The warning is that I hope people don't assume the same thing; though if you see the promo stuff it should be very clear that this ain't a play about any dead presidents!

The run this morning went well, but I still make annoying mistakes with the text from time to time . . . nothing that anybody in the audience would notice, and sometimes I don't either. I left out something this morning though, and while I didn't notice it right off, later in the play I knew I had left something out and that got me starting on that train of thought which sort of got me unsteady with the lines for a moment. . . it's funny how many rails your brain can work on at the same time . . . because while that pesky thought of the missing line didn't go away, the play proceeded just fine.

I absolutely want to do the reading Tuesday without book. It's a good test, and that's one of the reasons for doing the reading in the first place.

Should be fun in any event. I put off a trip to WV this weekend in part because I want to have the time to really work this thing . . . I think it'll be time well spent.