Garot-Up: Have I mentioned it's Alaska's 50th anniversary year?

In case you're not in Alaska, you might not know this, but back in 1959, Alaska became a state. During the past year, organization and people all across the state have been working hard to celebrate that fact. I've been involved in a handful of projects that had statehood celebration at their core. I played in a symphony concert centered on statehood. I've eaten cake provided by the statehood committee. I have a statehood pin. And now I've finished my work in connection with a statehood play. I'm thinking my statehood celebration has reached its zenith and life can go back to regular old non-statehood life.

In the spring, I was involved as stage manager for the play 8 Stars of Gold, a play about statehood and written by my friend Ryan Conarro (along with Anchorage writer Maia Nolan). If you're my mom or one of the 5 people who regularly check up me via by blog, you've read about other theatre I've been involved in. It (that theatre) seems to follow a theme in that all the productions I've done have been staring or directed or produced by two friends, Ryan and Flor. I couldn's say no to 8 Stars as it involved them both.

The cast minus George - a great bunch of people:

(photo by Michael Penn, Juneau Empire)

Read more about the play here:
A review of 8 Stars
An article about 8 Stars

In any case, someone decided we should take 8 Stars of Gold to the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska.

You might remember Valdez more for oil, rather than theatre.

http://www.adn.com/evos/photos/evos29l.jpg

(image from the Anchorage Daily News)

I tried to find the oil, terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. This is as much pipeline as I saw:

And this pipline ends up somewhere here:

"Here" being the place where the pipeline ends and oil tankers line up to fill up before traveling south.

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Evidently, the theatre conference has been going on for umpteen years and has attracted some important theatre types to the Last Frontier. This year, some of our play's stars were agog by the likes of that guy who plays some secret agent man in 24 (Glenn Morshower) and another guy you'd recognize by face but maybe not by name (Frank Collison).

I'll admit, I did get a little excited about our show being there.

Here's our play on the schedule for Monday night:

Another fun thing about being there was putting on a show in a "real" theatre - not a high school auditorium, not an old Territorial Hall... Here's Meaghan, lighting designer, in our spacious booth (notice the lack of scary wires hanging around her head):

Here's a view of the set -- which was shipped up to Anchorage, driven by U-Haul, and lovingly reassembled in Valdez. We spent Monday making adjustments to the new space - new light cues, new blocking, but it fit. From this distance, the amount of stuff we hauled from Juneau isn't done justice.

After disposing of 5 old state surplus desks, an ensemble of chairs and filing cabintes, and reycling a number of prop boxes, what we took back home was whittled down to this: