I’ve still got a ways to go on the rest of the vacation pictures, but I finished the set for P and H’s wedding this morning. I’ll fill in the rest of the vacation as soon as I can (we’re in the midst of moving uproar at the moment, with boxes all over the apartment as we wait for the apartment we’re moving into to get its finishing touches).
Michael Hanscom
Boy and Turtle (Black Sand Beach)
I’m starting to work on my pictures from the trip, but as the first priority is going to be the wedding shots, it’ll be a bit before I get everything up, and before I get my vacation recap posts written.
In the meantime, Prairie’s posted all of her photos (here’s one of me and a flippered friend), and has put up a few posts about the trip on her weblog!
Welcome Home…Now Start Packing
We’re home. Generally speaking, this is a good thing: the wedding was wonderful, the experience at the resort was good (though not really our style, as we ended up deciding), the camping was incredible, and even traveling home was surprisingly pleasant (and I’ll get to all of those in more detail in due course). The actual arrival home has been one of the most traumatic we’ve yet experienced, however.
While we’d done a pretty good job of staying close to Seattle time during our camping, going to bed as soon as it got dark around 7:30 PM and getting up at first light around 6 AM (both times local to Hawaii, 10:30 PM and 9 AM respectively Seattle time), our flight home left Kona at just after 9 PM (local, midnight Seattle) and arrived in Seattle at about 5:30 AM (Seattle). Neither of us sleep well on airplanes, so by the time we landed, we were running on about twenty-one hours without sleep. By the time we collected our luggage, caught a shuttle to the parking service’s lot, picked up the car, and then fought our way through the construction on I-5, we didn’t get home and into bed until right around 8 AM, at about twenty-four hours straight without sleep.
Three hours later, the banging of construction in the apartment next door woke me up. Prairie had earplugs in, so she made it for another hour, but then she was up, too. And here’s where the real fun begins…
Aloha!
Well, all worries aside, we made it! Right now, I’m sitting in our room on the sixth floor of the Hilton Waikoloa Village‘s Lagoon Tower, looking out over Waiulua Bay. Stepping out onto the deck, I can look nearly directly down into the Dolphin Quest pool, where people (with a whole lot more expendable money than we have) are swimming with dolphins. Not long ago, I was snorkeling along through the resort’s lagoon, surrounded by schools of fish, diving down to get a closer look at eels, pufferfish, and parrot fish, and sidling on up to pat a sea turtle’s shell as it nosed through the spray of a waterfall.
We may never stay someplace this ritzy again, but boy is it a treat to be doing it now!
More Fun with Flossie
In a couple hours, Prairie and I will be heading for the airport. Our flight leaves this afternoon, stops over in Maui, then lands in Kona this evening. At least, that’s the theory….
Meanwhile: Flossie continues to head for the Big Island, which is on hurricane watch, tropical storm warning, and flash flood watch, has closed its public schools, and is officially under a state of emergency. Oh, and there was an earthquake this morning, too.
I dunno who did what to piss off the Man upstairs, but this vacation is looking to be mighty interesting. Right now, we’re figuring that if our plane leaves Seattle, then there’s a good chance we may end up stuck in Maui overnight. The wedding isn’t ’till tomorrow evening, so as long as the storm passes and the winds die down, we should still make it in time for that.
We’re definitely keeping our fingers crossed, though. What wonderful timing. Yikes!
Dance Off 2007
About a week and a half ago, six teams of people with dance in their souls — if not their soles — gathered together for a battle royale at Dance Off 2007.
If you were there, you know the pure awesomeness of the spectacle. If you weren’t there (foolish mortal), then at least I can offer this photographic record of the event.
Truly, such fleetfooted feats (feets?) shall never grace a stage again.
Until next year, of course. ;)
Flossie
Would everyone on Hawaii please do us a favor? Go outside, face south, and blow as hard as you can.
See, Prairie and I have tickets to fly out of Seattle on Tuesday to be in Hawaii for Prairie’s sister Hope’s wedding on Wednesday, then go camping until we come back to Seattle next Sunday.
Unfortunately, Hurricane Flossie apparently also has plans to be Hawaii on Tuesday. Oh, sure, the news reports say that it will “only” be a tropical storm by then, but that still could mean 45+ mile per hour winds — not terribly conducive to either beach weddings or campgrounds. Heck, depending on just when Flossie shows up, there’s a possibility that our flight in might be cancelled or delayed. At this point, it’s pretty hard to tell.
So — if you all wouldn’t mind, could you all try to blow Flossie a bit further south? We’d really appreciate it. Thanks!
Best Voicemail Ever
This voicemail came in yesterday evening. I had to share.
Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein
A small town sits at the base of a craggy mountain. on which a narrow, craggy road winds its way up to the forbidding castle at the top, eerily illuminated by a full moon. The house lights go down, and the title card appears over the scene: Young Frankenstein!
Last night, Prairie and I were privileged enough to be in the audience for the premiere performance of Mel Brooks‘ new musical adaptation of his classic comedy Young Frankenstein at the Paramount Theatre here in Seattle. The show itself was excellent — a wonderfully deft translation of the film to the stage, with all the old gags you remember from the film (“Wasn’t your hump on the other side?” “What hump?”), new gags for the stage, and a full selection of hilarious song and dance numbers.
Roger Bart, who Prairie and I knew mainly as George on Desperate Housewives and as Carmen Ghia in The Producers, very ably takes on the Gene Wilder role of Frederick Frankenstein (“Frahnk-en-steen!”), finding the manic edge that keeps Frederick balanced between lunacy and good-hearted confusion as he confronts his family’s famous history. Christopher Fitzgerald at times seems to channel Marty Feldman as Igor (“Eye-gor.”), Megan Mullally (of TV’s Will and Grace) minces marvelously as Elizabeth, and Sutton Foster‘s Inga, Andrea Martin‘s Frau Blücher, and (of course) Shuler Hensley‘s monster are all wonderful.
I’m really looking forward to a cast album being released down the line. We’re not completely settled on a favorite number yet — Prairie is leaning towards either “Please Don’t Touch Me” or “Transylvania Mania”, while I go between “Please Don’t Touch Me” and “He Vas my Boyfriend” for original music, though the all-out spectacle of “Puttin’ On the Ritz” is a close contender — but as “Please Don’t Touch Me” is on both of our immediate lists, it appears to be the lead contender at the moment.
Another big reason for wanting a cast album, though, is simply that as much as we enjoyed all the musical numbers in the production, we both ended up humming “Puttin’ On the Ritz” to ourselves as we went home, because it was the one song that we’d heard before, so it was the one that was easiest for our brains to latch onto. I suppose it’s a slight risk with this particular production, of course. They couldn’t exactly drop the “Puttin’ On the Ritz” scene, but it’s almost a shame that its familiarity sends us out humming that instead of any of the other wonderful songs we heard.
However, if that’s the closest I can come to a downside to the night, I’d say we’re doing pretty well. There were a few slight technical glitches here and there, though nothing terribly big (a few microphone pops in the first musical number, a bit of scenery that didn’t quite slide all the way into place during a scene change, a dropped hat), and these are the kinds of little kinks that are likely to get worked out over the next few weeks before the show makes its move to New York to open on Broadway.
Overall: an excellent show, and we got to see it first (nyeah-nyeah)!
Other Views (added as I find them):
Bub’s Studio gives a more detailed and critical review. I can see his points, and do agree with some of them (Act I runs long and could use some trimming, and Elizabeth’s phone call bit in the lab, while amusing, feels a bit oddly out of place, as if it exists only to remind us that she exists). I don’t agree with all of his criticisms, however, and he seems to have come out of it far less impressed overall than I was.
mickeysacks, who’s apparently part of the production team, saw the final dress rehearsal and calls it “fantastic fun.” Oooh — and she’s posted a few backstage pictures as she worked on the production, including one of her and Mel Brooks. I’m jealous!
I’m going to avoid the viaduct…
Reprinted in full from the Slog because it freaked me out: You think the Minnesota bridge was bad?
So you know how all those news stories about the Minneapolis bridge collapse have highlighted the fact that the bridge received a ranking of just 50 percent on a federal scale of 1 to 100, making it “structurally deficient”?
The central portion of the Alaskan Way Viaduct was ranked on the same scale. Its score: Nine percent. And if that doesn’t make you want to stay away from the viaduct until they tear the damn thing down, perhaps knowing that the National Bridge Inventory (which provided the Minnesota number) considers it “basically intolerable requiring high priority of corrective action,” will. (Fun bonus fact: The 520 bridge across Lake Washington received a rating of 44.8 percent, just meeting the “minimum tolerable limit to be left in place as is.”)
Gah. Freaky. I didn’t like the viaduct before all this stuff. I’m even less fond of it now. Just tear the fool thing down (and don’t rebuild it, and don’t dig some stupid tunnel…as long as we’re going to have to move to surface streets eventually no matter what happens to the viaduct, we might as well just stick with that option and do it right).