Saturday Edition

PURPLE PERFECTION: Look at this lovely we spied our our morning loop. Its petals are paper thin. I'm not sure what kind of flower it is, but if I had to guess, which I do, I would guess poppy because of the petals. Someone out there please correct me!

FRIDAY REWIND: As previously mentioned, the kids took place in a virtual "Fridays at the 5th" this past Friday, as a substitute for meeting their peers in person and getting to watch a show.

Here's what Annabelle had to say about the session. ...

This week, 5^th Avenue Theatre’s usual “Fridays at the 5^th” monthly meetup had to be cancelled due to the Coronavirus outbreak and quarantine. As a solution to this, they decided to put together a webinar panel on the Zoom platform, allowing attendees to log in and talk with the instructors over text while they used a webcam. The topic of this meetup was comedic timing and how comic relief characters are structured not just on verbal jokes, but also body language and acting. The panelists discussed how important it is to test the jokes in front of an audience, and how sometimes last minute script changes are required due to certain ones just not landing. Your entire character may even be totally redone if it isn’t funny enough. It’s also imperative that you keep grounded, and make sure that you don’t do something your character wouldn’t do; there’s a certain point where constant jokes and slapstick go from “funny” to “annoying.” 

And following is CJ's take on it. 

On a Friday near the end of each month, The 5th Avenue Theatre hosts a Fridays at the 5th event, where students learn about a play being hosted by the theater that night, and learn a (very) limited selection of skits from the night's act. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The 5th Avenue Theatre postponed Fridays at the 5th events for the foreseeable future. 

To compensate for the lack of physical meetups, the theater is opting to do meetings on Zoom every Friday, at 4 P.M. Zoom is a client enabling conference video calls. In the first Zoom meeting, the instructors of the class opted to tell about about the role of "comic relief" in a story, even in mostly somber and serious acts. Unfortunately, since a large amount of the one-hour session was spent talking about setting up the new schedule and discussing technical issues, I don't feel like I learned very much about theater. If nothing else, we got to see clips from plays we had never seen before, and were told about the significance of them providing comic relief.

There were over 100 students in the online meeting, which is more than we usually had in the in-person meetings. I suppose I look forward to further Fridays at the 5th events, and hope there aren't as many technical issues in the future.

PROPORTIONAL: Yesterday, the kids participated in another drawing tutorial from J J K. The topic of the lesson was proportions. 

I wish I could have been in the room while they were drawing these so I had some basis for comparison.

I really appreciate that CJ is so willing to engage in these classes. He doesn't consider himself artistic, but the best way to get better is by practicing! 

Here's the video if you're interested in playing along!

SPECIAL DELIVERY: Since I've been basement bound, my meal preparation has mostly been orchestrating from afar. today I directed ribs and potatoes. Both were cooked in the Instant Pot. (What did we do before we had our pressure cooker?) Oh, and barbecue sauce for the ribs. Annabelle handled the potatoes and sauce. Christian cooked the ribs. CJ emptied the dishwasher. :)

OMG, dinner (delivered to the basement) was so delicious!!!

(That's sour cream in the shot glass, in case you were wondering.)