To compensate for the aforementioned (and frankly inexplicable) lack operatic income, I’ve been playing with some local funk and blues groups which were quite well paid but I found myself repeatedly self-destructing. (More on that in a separate rant.) So I’ve been begging, borrowing, stealing work for various local pit bands—community theatre, dinner theatre, etc. Since my various maladies, I sure ain’t the picker I once was, but thank goodness there are still gigs where reading is a pre-requisite; and thank goodness all the jokes about guitarists and sheet music ring truer than ever. It’s a living.

And it’s given me a chance to watch all the low budget ways that you can stage various gags. I kept getting hung up on ‘impossibilities’. There are so many events in any staged production which defy believability if you think about it too much. But it seems that I have to constantly remind myself the very thing I love about the theatre: people want to suspend disbelief. I don’t have to worry so […]