Ames Center for the Arts
Saturday & Sunday, November 13-14, 2021
Our first stop of the Rudolph 2021 tour was Burnsville, MN, a nice suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul (the Twin Cities).
We arrived two days before our first shows, in order for both the cast and crew to have some extra time to set up and rehearse in the theater. Out of the 20 cast members, 9 are new, the rest have previously done the show at some point, somewhere. Out of the 12 crew members, 8 are new. That atop our short tech rehearsal period in Downey, CA prior to the start of the tour have led to some real technical challenges.
Prior to our scheduled rehearsal at the theater, I did what I like to do--which is go visit a capitol building. To date; I have visited 13 state capitol buildings: Austin (Texas), Charleston (West Virginia), Nashville (Tennessee), Cheyenne (Wyoming), Richmond (Virginia), Columbus (Ohio), Columbia (South Carolina), Indianapolis (Indiana), Jackson (Mississippi), Concord (New Hampshire), Albany (New York), Madison (Wisconsin), and Boston (Massachusetts). I've seen the outside of the Capitol buildings in Hartford (Connecticut), Des Moines (Iowa), Denver (Colorado), Sacramento (California), Oklahoma City (Oklahoma), Providence (Rhode Island), and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania).
The capitol building in St. Paul is beautiful, as so many are. In 2008, they spent $310 million for renovations. Here are some of my favorite pictures--
Cool, right!? That ball that dangles from the center of the dome measures 6 feet wide by 6.5 feet tall; it's made up of crystals, and there are bulbs in the center of it; they only turn it on for special occasions, such as Minnesota's Statehood Day, the first session of the Congress, or if someone important has passed away and are lying in state at the capitol.
The state flower of Minnesota is...and I'm not making this up...the Showy Lady's Slipper. Yes, you read that correctly. Go look it up if you don't believe me. The reason I now know that is because there are gold flowers in the etchings at the top of the beautiful pillars in the capitol, and I assumed they represented something important, and I was correct. Go back up and look at the beautiful and detailed pictures of the gold work, and look for the flower--you'll see that's a Showy Lady's Slipper. Very interesting!
The theater where we did our shows (three on Saturday, Nov 13, and one on Sunday the 14th) was spacious and modern. The Ames Center is also home to the Dakota Valley Symphony & Chorus as well as the Twin Cities Ballet of Minnesota.
Here are some photos--
The peace sign you see above is me. The seating was like a movie theater or baseball stadium--meaning anyone walking to their seats around the middle of the theater would interfere with the projector. No problem once the audience is seated, but I'm sure it was fun for some people to see their big heads on the scrim at the front of the stage (the scrim is the white cloth curtain that you see in that picture; it's a neat piece of theatrical equipment wherein you can project something onto the front of it and anything behind it would be invisible, but if you shine a light behind it, you can see right through it; not all theaters use a scrim, this is ours that we travel with to each venue, we use it frequently throughout our show, it goes up and down).
It started snowing before our second show on Saturday (you can see some snowflakes in the picture I took outside after our second show), but didn't really stick for very long. The cold is intense but oddly refreshing! At least for now. :)
We had the one single show on Sunday afternoon, which allowed for some unusual free time afterward! A group of us went to the nearby Mall of America...which was outrageous.
There is an indoor amusement park in the middle of the mall, if that gives you any indication of its overall size. Of course, there is a Mall of America app for your smartphone; which I downloaded and used to find the places to go and how to get there. We only had 2.5 hours before the mall closed, so we made good use of the time. Grabbed a quick snack at Wetzel's Pretzels and bought some tickets to ride some of the rides. Look up Spongebob Squarepants Rock Bottom Plunge for what the heck that was. It didn't last long, but it was really fun and fast! The only other one I rode was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shell Shock. Also cool. In a mall!
I'm writing this from my second hotel room, I was (kindly) moved because the AC unit in my room wouldn't shut off...but also it wouldn't blow warm air...so the room was pretty cold. I like it cooler than hot, but it was getting to be too much. Now I can actually sit at the desk and type this out without having to block the air unit so it doesn't blow directly onto me.
Tomorrow is Monday, Nov 15 and we will leave in the morning for Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's about a 5 hour trip and we'll stop for lunch somewhere. We don't have a show tomorrow so it'll be a travel and rest day, which is great.
More to come! Thanks for reading!
1 comment:
Lots of work!
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