Monmouth, IL - Well, it's official - I can now boast that I have played Opryland. Well, at least in the Opryland Convention Center. It's not exactly downtown Nashville, but 'twill serve. It was a hectic 48 hours, to be sure, but the 30 minutes we got to play were a lot of fun.We got to the gig in Fairmont, MN, and it was pretty good. The Opera House there was a nice little venue, your usual typical renovated opera house. The manager/TD, Rick, was friendly and helpful. He gave us a brief history of the place while we had a catered lunch (the food was SO midwestern!). The place apparently was slated for demolition and was saved with, I think, 10 hours to spare. It's a good renovation but not quite as complete as the Fredonia Opera House. One interesting feature, though, was the fact that the whole basement office/reception area had been dug out by hand by volunteers. Only a tunnel had existed before. That's dedication. The show itself - Planet - was met with enthusiasm by normally staid Minnesotans. There were an unusual collection of "buckle bunnies" in the audience (women who wear large rodeo buckles on their jean belts), and I hadn't thought that southern MN was cowboy country. There were some guys having a hard time sitting, but mostly it was a good-time audience. Rick actually arranged for a collection of women to rush the stage when Greg sang "Young Girl," and that was a funny sight to see all these kids
and middle-aged midwestern housewives rush the stage. Greg said later it was probably the closest to being a Beatle that he's ever going to come. I was disappointed that the stay was so short for me, because the town of Fairmont is apparently bordered by four or five small lakes, and I would have liked to take a tour of the town. The downtown area looked immaculate, a postcard of a midwestern farm town. There were fish houses out on the nearest lake I saw, right out of Garrison Keilor. Some of the company had never seen ice fishing houses nor pickups on a lake, so it was pretty new and astounding to them to think that a lake could freeze so hard you could drive a truck onto it.The reason that I did not get to see any of Fairmont was because the next day the Oatcakes had to fly to Nashville for our American Bus Association breakfast gig sponsored by the Virginia Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Oatcakes (the name taken from my character Hugh Oatcake, a member of the watch in Much Ado) consist of myself, Greg, Alyssa, Jessica and Chris, and our assignment was to play about 30 minutes of the music from Planet for this convention. The Virginia CVB apparently had called up the ASC and asked about providing some entertainment for their breakfast, and so Bill Gordon and the crew back at Staunton gat the five of us to do this gig. It meant essentially giving up our day off in Fairmont to make the trip and then re-join the group here in Monmouth IL at Monmouth College. So we got up at 6AM Sunday morning and took two plane rides to get to Nashville. We arrived about 3 PM or so, met our contact Barbara from the VCVB, and hauled our stuff over to the Opryland complex.
This complex was something else. It is a HUGE hotel and convention center, and I mean huge! We only got to see a small part of it, the Presidential Ballroom area. It all stands on land which was once an amusement park called Opryland, but is now mostly this convention center and a large shopping complex. The location we played in was huge, seating about 800 people. But they had it all going: two large video screens, a complete sound system, three wide-screen teleprompters, and all sorts of vari-lighting. We locked our stuff up there and then went out to dinner at the Applebee's in our own hotel, right across the street. We met a great shuttle driver who turned us on to a new line of busses he was developing for tours such as ours, as well as his daughter, Tenessee Amber, who's a bluegrass entertainer. I did manage to squeeze in the Superbowl, most of the first half in the restaurant, and the second half up in my room. But I was beat, so I turned the game off with three minutes left and went to sleep. Wakeup time was 5AM next morning, and all the travel can wear you out. (PS - although I have positive feelings for Pittsburgh, I think Seattle was robbed blind in the game. The refs were simply too present in that game.)
So up at 5AM, meet in the lobby at 5:30, and over to Opryland for a 6AM soundcheck. Of course normally we don't play with amplification, but in this case we needed it. The sound guys were a little mystified that we needed so little, nothing but mikes for voices and instruments.
During our soundcheck, while I was drumming, one of the brushes for the snare drum exploded, and of all the things we brought (including a backup guitar), we did not bring an extra brush. So we had to improvise and taped up the tip of a drumstick to mute it a little against the other brush. The broken brush threw Alyssa into a small mini-panic, but once we finally got onstage she recovered and drummed well in her percussion tunes. We finished the soundcheck by 7:45, had breakfast, got into costume, and went out at 8:15 AM to play through our set. It was very weird to be playing with a light show behind us, spotlights on us when we soloed, and then catching us up on the big screens out of the corners of our eyes. I had my guitar too close to the mike at one point and garnered some serious feedback, but overall the gig went very well. I was most surprised by the fact that people were actually paying attention to us. I had expected that we would be providing some background entertainment while everyone else was schmoozing and networking, but I was quite wrong. They listened to us, which added a bit of pressure to be as good as we could. I think in the end I heard it reported that we were a success because often at these things people walk out after they've finished eating, but almost no one left while we played. 
Everyone connected with the VA CVB seemed most pleased. Then we packed up our stuff, got our ride to the airport at 9:15 AM, and spent the rest of the day traveling to Monmouth IL, where we arrived at 5 PM about 7 minutes ahead of the rest of the company. I went over to the local Country Mart, grabbed a Healthy Choice meal, some chocolate milk and sweet crunch peanuts and a yogurt, and headed off to my room for an exciting evening of food and TV. I did get to see on HBO the movie I, Robot, but couldn't bring myself to watch The Upside of Anger, so I settled for three episodes of M*A*S*H on Hallmark and then sleep.Monmouth is another typical midwestern town, about 45 minutes south of the Quad City area in southwestern Illinois. The college is a small Presbyterian college of about 1800 students, but many new buildings. I've mostly spent my free time during the day catching up on email, doing some internet window shopping, and getting back to some exercise routine. I did my laundry this morning and now I'm sitting in a nice coffee shop located in the library. The show last night was Planet with Much Ado tonight. We had a small but appreciative audience. Apparently theatre students at this college cannot get out of class to go see theatre, once again demonstrating the small-mindedness of much theatre thinking. But we did have some theatre students in the house last night, and they invited the company downtown for a drink. I went as designated driver. Fortunately (from my perspective) the closing time in this county is midnight, so we got back relatively early. I kicked Tyler's ass in pool, but then subsequently got my ass kicked by Daniel, who so far appears to be the troupe's best pool player. He made one shot on the 8-ball which actually amazed me. He had called the shot originally, but scratched in executing it first, and technically lost the game, but I had him set up the shot again because I did not believe it was a shot he could make. Damned if he didn't sink it! So I laughed, bowed in homage, and offered to fill his water bottle for a week.
I did get to see a bit of downtown in passing, and there appears to be a small traffic circle in the middle of town with a monument to something or other. I also found out that Monmouth is the birthplace of Wyatt Erp, and had I some access to transportation I would have gone down to visit his birthplace, but I have to walk everywhere and there was too much to get done. I did want to walk downtown, but once again the day seems to have gotten away from me in ways that often I can't account for. Even now I am rushing to get this written so I can get outside and take some photos of the campus while it's still daylight. Although call is still 90 minutes away I have to eat dinner, take those photos and get to the theatre. If the hotel we were staying in had internet service I wouldn't be rushing so much, but I can't even get dial-up service because I have no local access number for NetZero. So doesn't that seem like a cue to finish this off? -TWL
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