•The Detroit Free Press listed the co-production of It Came From Mars by Joseph Zettelmaier, which I directed at The Williamston Theatre and Performance Network Theatre, as one of the top Michigan stage productions in 2010! Director Tony Caselli and his hilarious ensemble played brilliantly with classic screwball-comedy types in this Performance Network-Williamston Theatre coproduction. See the article here! What a nice thing to be mentioned – thank you John Monaghan, we’re honored! 🙂

•In other exciting It Came From Mars news, playwright Joe Zettelmaier has been nominated for a national award for the script! Joe is nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg New Play Award! A wonderful honor, this is actually his 3rd nomination! I’m pleased that I got to work with him on it, and I’m looking forward to this summer when we will do the World Premiere of another of his scripts, And The Creek Don’t Rise, at the Williamston Theatre!

•A week from today we start rehearsals on Oedipus. I can’t wait! This big ol’ Greek tragedy is going to be a challenge, but I’m very excited to work on it with the wonderful cast and production team that we’ve put together! Adapting the script with Annie Martin has been a great process, and I think it’s going to be a moving, theatrical, engaging piece of theatre!

•Last night was a neat event. The First Annual “Theatre Industry Post-Christmas Party/Equity Fights Aids Fundraiser” – a whole bunch of the theatre professionals got together and chatted, drank, ate, exchanged silly white-elephant gifts, and generally had fun – all while raising some money for a good cause. I hope it becomes a regular tradition, it’s nice to see folks from theatres that I rarely get to hang out with all relaxing and chatting about theatre and non-theatre stuff!

•The last week, because of the holidays, has been much more family time than work time. Starting tomorrow that balance begins to shift back the other way a bit, as I start gearing up for all the stuff in the next week (our New Year’s Eve Open House, production meetings for Oedipus, rehearsals starting, selecting next season’s lineup, etc…). It’s been so nice to get so much family time! I’m glad we get to squeeze in a few more days before the kids go back to school and my rehearsals start!

•Quick things I learned in the past week: The King’s Speech is a better movie than Tron: Legacy…… the spinning battling tops called BeyBlades that my son has been begging for really are fun to play with and I’m glad he got them for Christmas…… giving your daughter her first cell phone is a nerve-wracking thing but having the parental tracking feature helps calm the nerves…… you really can get sick of Christmas Ham in only 2 days…… the new MacMini is a wonderful upgrade from our 2003 iMac that died a couple of weeks ago!

Happy Christmas Eve everybody!! I LOVE this day!

Christmas Eve Dinner is a big event in our family.

On my side of the family a tradition has existed for, oh, 25 years at least, that makes it an exciting dinner:

We take turns hosting dinner at one of our houses – (in the last 12 years or so that’s included Jeanne and I, my Mom and Dad, my brother Dominic and his wife Alesha, and my Sister Gina and her husband Bill). In addition, we often wind up with extra friends or family being invited, which is always a nice addition! Whoever hosts is responsible for making dinner – and the fun part is that dinner is always from a different culture, or country, or ethnicity, or part of the world – some kind of cuisine/family of recipes/foods that we wouldn’t normally eat. Also fun: no one attending can know what it is beforehand – it’s a surprise to everyone who shows up. (So usually for weeks ahead of time, the rest of the family will be trying to find out what it’s going to be!) Some recent favorites have been Moroccan, Senegalese, Arabic, Ukrainian, and Native American.

This tradition is a ton of fun, and is always followed up by a big gift exchange where the kids all get presents, and the adults give a present to the one other adult in the group who they’re buying for that year. The dinner usually winds up having a few dishes that people just LOVE, and a couple that we don’t! (We still tell horror stories about the Tortilla Torte –Good God it was so awful– or the Rutebaga Casserole from years past!) It’s a fun experiment every year, and one that we’ve all grown to anticipate nearly as much as Christmas Day itself.

Since dinner is a surprise, the blog post all about this year’s culinary experiments will have to wait until tomorrow – but everyone be sure to go sleep early! Santa won’t come if you’re awake!!

Happy Holidays, everyone. Peace and joy and love!

*Portions of this were reprinted from an earlier entry!