I was again not able to go to St. Joseph’s. Ben went and continued the reading of the script with the kids. He said that the kids had a hard time getting through the script in a timely manner so we are going to have to cut more of the script.

I was not able to go to St. Joseph’s this week but Ben went and basically just went over the script with the kids and tried to assign more definite roles but it’s hard because we do not know who is definitely participating or not yet.

Today we found out that we will only have three OSHER participants at the show due to family emergencies and illness. With that in mind we divided up the lines as best we could and are going to ask one of the professors, or another students, at the performance to step in as Hippolyta. We had fun putting on costumes and deciding what “sharp” object in the prop box Pyramus should use to boach his boiling bloody breast. One of the OSHER participants has gotten super into it and has memorized at least two of her longer lines in order to better get into character, quite impressive.  She always has ideas on how to make our scene better, including getting on us about our lack of acting when we don’t have lines… It seems at though everyone is getting more comfortable with their lines and is having fun, which is what we like to see!

An idea that was thrown out today was that maybe all of the kids could come on stage right before Puck says his final line, that way everyone is already on stage to bow and be applauded at the end of the performance.  What are people’s thoughts on this? Good idea? Too complicated?

That day was the second time we visited the site. We as a group came up with a list of rules about respecting one another, not talking while others are talking, and a no phone policy since that was a frequent problem during our last visit. We introduced these rules to the group then we listed characters that are in Act 3. We did a brief list of what people would like to be which characters. After this we went outside and played a game called Grandma’s keys. The kids seemed to really enjoy it wanted to continue playing even though it was to leave. We are still trying to see how many kids we will actually have participating.