DIRTY ROTTEN CASPER, WY

"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"...on tour...

It's one of those days. Because our show finished so early in Pueblo, the bus call can legally be 7:30 a.m. without infringing on our mandatory 11 hour rest period. So, we stumble aboard.

It isn't long before we're waving at the shit-box hotel we stayed in when we played Colorado Springs. Then, shortly after that, we encounter a snow storm and morning traffic that is moving at a crawl in.....guess where....our favourite city to drive through.... DENVER!!!! The slow-down puts us at least an hour behind schedule, and Lady D probably won't be able to make it up because the roads the rest of the way are either icy or being hammered by 50 mph winds, making the ride a little wild. (No puking though)

Wyoming is beautiful in a stark, empty sort of way, at least for the first hour or so. The snow capped bluffs and blowing ice crystals make it seem quite desolate though. At any point in our journey today, it is very easy to spontaneously point and shout, "Look! Absolutely nothing !"

I would like, at this point, to ask for your help. I'd like you all to assist me in finding the fucking idiot that looked at an arena on day and thought, "You know, if we just curtain off one end, we could do theatre in here...kind of like a rock concert in reverse." If I ever find the lame-brain that came up with this idea, I will shackle them to the most painfully uncomfortable device ever invented, the airplane economy class seat, and force them, a la "Clockwork Orange", to watch a tape loop of Oprah apologizing for being fat for the rest of their miserable, useless life.

Doing theatre in an arena is like doing a rock concert in a dollhouse, like teaching The Hula Dance in The Antarctica, like wearing a mink coat to a P.E.T.A convention......wrong fucking venue. Once again, we have to cut so much of the show that it occurs to me that we used to be the cast of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" but now we're just a bunch of people trying to tell a story that seems to be set nowhere in particular.

Of the many, beautiful backdrops that set the scenes for the show, we only have one available to us, along with our crystal curtain and another utility curtain that serves as the main curtain for the show. Except, wait! They don't drop gracefully to the stage because there is no fly system. They track on from the wings like living room drapes. The scene changes in this show can be loud on a real stage simply because everything is on wheels. On a temporary, hollow, plastic stage, held together with duct tape, the changes are deafening. In an apron scene with Brian, I am forced to stop talking because I can't hear myself. I look heavenward and through up my arms in a "What the fuck" gesture. Brian responds by yelling his line to me. We are, at the very least, entertaining ourselves.

The whole situation really comes into focus for me as I'm chatting with Duff in the boys dressing room (or, more truthfully, the curtained-off area behind stage left). I realize that he is leaning against one of our semi trailers. The just backed them right into the building and unloaded directly onto the stage. We are in an arena. And, yes, we did get our usual standing ovation from the audience at the end.