Up To Speed

For all of you who are wondering what's happening in my life, I should bring you up to speed a little bit. I have returned to teaching drums to my pupils for another year. It appears that my students are motivated and excited about their music this fall, which should be conducive to some very enjoyable lessons. I am looking forward to seeing what they will accomplish this year.

In addition to my full-time job, and my part-time teaching, I have been involved in the local production of Grease. It has been a number of months since I have discussed the subject, but for the most part, not a lot had been going on at the time. I had received the music score for Grease at the beginning of summer, and spent my weekends learning the tracks. I put all the songs on my iPod, and bashed away at the songs. With 45 minutes of skip-protection, the iPod is the ultimate practice companion. I never have any shortage of songs to jam to on that little gadget.

Nearing the end of August, a party was thrown by the theater production company, where I had the opportunity to meet the cast and crew for Grease. It was rather casual, but entertaining to meet all these fledging actors and singers. I also managed to see a few people I hadn't since my last play I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road. It was a great reunion and a good way to start the long drawn-out process of putting a play together.

Music rehearsals for Grease began shortly after Labour Day. So far, we are only having rehearsals once a week, but that is about to change. From now on until the end of October, I will be having rehearsals three days a week. So far the practices have been going smoothly, and it seems that everybody has been doing their homework. The musicians are all kind, and are excellent players. This band is going to smoke. I can't wait to hear the cast sing to our bands' music.

Sorry people, I don't have much information about tickets. There has been a lot of buzz generated already, and there is two months to go until debut. This play is going to sell-out. I wish we had a bigger venue -- like the Esplanade, which won't be completed until 2005.

On a completely unrelated tangent. I have been thinking about my old Tour Journals from 1999. I sure wish I knew about blogging back then. It would have made my efforts of sending mass emails and setting up webpages so much easier. I have decided I am going to revive the ZanZee Summer Tour 1999 Journals using the Blogger format. I might have to wait until Grease is finished before I can begin, but I suspect if I can recover my old webpage -- it is saved on my derelict laptop, that it won't take much effort to post all that information again.

I think I said I was going edit and censor some aspects of the original Tour Journal. I imagine it will mostly be for brevity reasons -- and to protect the identity of a few people. Dave, Arleen and I will still have the same identities, of course. I will place a hotlink to the Tour Journal from this page, as well as my homepage, in which there is very little there anyway.

I have been watching my traffic lately; it seems that it is increasing. I have been monitoring the site statistics and it appears that I am getting some strays pass on through. Drop me a line; I don't bite -- hard.