How I ended up stage-managing a 4th of July celebration for an entire city, I’m still not altogether sure. There’s a lot about the last few weeks that I’m still processing.
It started when Nikki was hired to help produce it. I know that much.
But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. Let me backtrack a few steps…
Tonight I’ll be at Monarch Academy, along with Nikki, our colleagues there, and their students and families, to celebrate the end of another school year.
Being part of the Monarch family – and it really is a family, by choice and emotion if not by genetics – has been an experience I’m still trying to put into words. As a writer and as a human being, you always live with a certain hope that what you do, what you say, can make a positive difference. But you don’t always get to see it happen right in front of you.
It’s a gift, a blessing, that in the last year, I have.
… well, that was a little longer than I’d expected. I’m sorry about that.
I guess it’s one of the hazards of trying to balance my writing with writing about my writing. I get so busy doing what I do that I find myself forgetting to write about what I do.
There’s been a lot of doing. And I haven’t been alone. Continue reading
As I write this, I’ve just e-mailed Chadd and Nikki with the first draft of our play. Continue reading
Friday, 8:43pm…
I’m at my desk, notes in hand, going over my shot list, making sure I have everything I need – or at least a way to find it – for tomorrow.
Continue reading
I know it’s been a bit of a while since I last wrote. I hadn’t meant to be away from the blog for so long.
But the silver lining of that long delay is that I have a lot more to write about… Continue reading
I’d like to think it’s a mark of success for The San Antonio Stage Script Study Group that so many of our meetings leave me thinking of things I wish I’d thought to say in the moment.
And it’s safe to say that the ideas inspired by our most recent meeting are very me. Continue reading
When Nikki signed on to host a show on #goodjobtexas, I had a feeling there would be much more to #youngandfresh once we really got into it. One of Nikki’s gifts is the ability to look past the present moment of a project and see its future potential.
And there’s a LOT of potential in this one. Continue reading
Since the end of PDP‘s last regular acting classes, we’ve had a lot of people asking when Nikki would be teaching again. And while it may be a cliché to say their interest was overwhelming, we really were overwhelmed to find out how much those classes really meant to people. So we looked for the kind of “limited-engagement events” I’d mentioned in that post.
The first of those events came in the summer, as Nikki led a summer acting camp at The Rose Theatre Company. And parents and kids alike responded really well to Movie Magic. So when the opportunity for another workshop… well, arose, it made great sense to return to the theater. Continue reading
Were I to put a lesson to the production of Magnolia, it would have to be that patience, persistence, and preparation ultimately pay off. (Were I to put a lesson to my blogging, it might be that I rely a little too heavily on alliteration – but that’s a post for another day…)
Over six weeks, we’d had to make occasional adjustments for locations, actor availability, and especially the weather. We’d faced drought one week, deluge the next. But Nikki and Chadd had brought a great team together, so we were able to keep moving forward, knowing that as long as we kept doing our work, it would still come together.
And in our last weekend of principal photography, it really did come together. Continue reading
Lee Hurtado, Writer 