The Wiz report for Saturday

As I said at the end of my last post, I gave Darwin the category of "tv jingles" for his song. The first jingle that popped into my head was the one for "Dr. Pepper". So we're getting ready to start the show and Jay and I are discussing the category. I suggest (rather insistently) that he do the jingle from his favorite soft drink (thinking Dr.Pepper) and he starts to sing "I'd like to teach the world to sing..." Obviously we're not on the same page here. So we get to that moment in the show and I cannot for the life of me figure it out. Victor (Joe's substitute on the light board) pops up and says "the Oscar Mayer Weiner song". Well here's the thing - Victor doesn't really know the game, and hasn't seen the show, and he gets it. For years I've been trying to win this game, and Victor lives up to his name. Alright monkey, this means war.

I'd like to add a little story to Jay's post on Abernathy and the Struve clan. In the story that Jay tells about his first time onstage when he was 5 years old, there used to be a line about Arno Struve. The line was "I hear somebody on stage say 'Let's ride!' I knew that voice. That was Arno Struve. He owned the local hardware store, I'd known him all my life." Unbeknownst to Jay, Murphy, and Paul, I called a stand by cue on the name "Arno Struve". It set a whole series of cues into motion. I had done those cues over a hundred times at the Atlantic. Now time passes and we're doing technical rehearsals in Cambridge. We're getting into that story and I'm late in calling all of those cues. Somehow, despite having done it many times before, I have completley messed the whole thing up. So we stop and someone asks what the problem is and I respond "well I'm waiting for Arno Struve" (meaning I'm waiting on Jay to say the name). Well, unbeknownst to me, the Arno Struve lines were cut from the show and no one told me. Even though I don't know the Strvue clan and even though I've never been to Texas, Arno has a place in my heart. I still think about him every night when I do those cues. What I envision his "let's ride" to be is the perfect cue for all those kids to ride their stick horses across the stage.

Until the next one,
Wiz