congratulations go out to my mom, who graduated from college today, completing a degree she started when she was 17. she put many of her plans on hold in order to put my dad through law school, to raise three children, to care for her mother-in-law, to pay for her kids' college educations, and i am so pleased for her that she's finally had time to devote herself to this accomplishment. some parents spin their wheels when the last child leave home, churning reluctantly toward retirement; my mother reinvented herself as a student, a thinker, a friend and peer in her academic community. she graduated today with Honors (her straight-A GPA puts all her kids to shame) and as English student of the year. we all hope/pretend our moms don't read our blogs, but if you are reading this, then know that i'm very, very proud of you.

we have reached burn-out for the theatre season, which fortunately ends in another 3 weeks because i no longer have any drive to work at all. serious props go to andy, who went on for the lead in Anarchist last weekend with about 24 hours' notice when joe tore a ligament in his foot. it probably took a year off his live in nervous anticipation, but he kicked some serious ass. our apartment still hasn't recovered from the 72-hours of continuous rehearsal/performance; dirty laundry is draped every-which-where, the dining room furniture is still arranged as a model of the set, there are no groceries or clean dishes. this is what happens when we work on the same show, kids.

i also had the good fortune to see andy play aguecheek in twelth night, and romeo in r&j this past week with his educational shakespeare troupe. these roles cause him considerably less duress since he's been playing them for 9 months now, and he's excellent in both. about 10 minutes into r&j on tuesday morning, the dimmers (things that make the stage lights go bright and dark) started overheating, causing an unpleasant phenomenon where the lights blink off, and back on and back off with christmas-tree regularity. naturally, 300 high school students were compelled to scream "the lights are off!" every time this happened until i climbed over some kids, went up to the booth where i found their stage manager fretting and repeating "it's not my fault i don't know." nice guy, but not a stage manager. fortunately, he was quite amenable to letting me take over. i won't bore you all with all the techno-babble, so the succinct version is that we couldn't cool the overheating equipment sufficiently, and the theatre has no overhead work lights, so we had to stop the show, turn off the malfunctioning equipment entirely, and set up some portable halogens on tripods i found in the loft. the remaining 2/3 of the show was lovely under the stark glow of halogen foot lights - ghostly and timeless.