Almost Iris Time - and Audition Re-cap

[Can't identify the nice white flowers, but I do note the Irises are almost ready to bloom - up front in the picture.]

The auditions were a hoot - for me at least. The Dude said that he better get in because he had never been more nervous in his life, and had to call on all his courage to do the singing part of the try-out.

It was a three-part affair - the first involved about 10 of us (3 adults, the rest kids) being sent into the school lunchroom to "learn" the Shipoopi dance. The dance person gives a quick group lesson and you are off - without the music. Prior to the audition, I was worried about the singing - but I should have given some more thought to the dance. Hard enough to get the steps rights if I was doing it alone, but we did it all together in two lines. Not the high point of my audition.

Next we did the singing portion. This was done in a smaller group, with the Dude and I paired with our friends - mother/daughter combo. The mother (Julie) is our kids' piano teacher and someone we see all the time so the comfort level with this was a little higher than for the dance portion - at least for me. I sang, This Land is Your Land - not bad, kind of fun as we were in the school theater so my voice carried quite well. Had sort of an out-of-body experience - with my voice sounding like someone elses - it really projected in that space.

Finally, our smaller group was given a script and about 5 minutes to rehearse a page of dialog. I was paired with Julie in the scene with Marian (Julie) and Charlie Cowell the anvil salesman (me). If you are familiar with the production, this guy is a real sleazy character and keeps leering at Marian and calling her "girly-girl". Quite an interesting dialog to enact with your kids' piano teacher - I believe the Dude said that he couldn't actually watch all of it!

The Dude got to read some lines from Winthrop (the Ronnie Howard character if you are familiar with the movie version). He nailed the lisp!