27 July 2025 Sunday!

[KathyB]

I am sitting in my office waiting for the temperature outside to drop below 90° so the dog and I can at least pretend to have a semi-comfortable walk.

This has been a nothing sort of weekend, which is perfectly OK with me. I have a new client who is supposed to get me the materials for a magazine, and whenever it all comes, it's going to mean a lot of work in a short time.

I'm trying to decide if I want to see Phamaly's production of Pippin. They always do such a good job with their shows, but my theatre budget for the upcoming year is stretched way out—in addition to my season tickets at the Denver Center, there are four shows I want to see at Vintage Theatre (including Merrily in September) and one I want to see at the Arvada Center (Come From Away in April). I guess the good news is that yesterday I got the season brochure from the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and there's nothing in their season I'm wild about.

It has dropped one degree, to 94°. 

[scenicdesign71]

Apropos of nothing, I was catching up on Sunday's (7/27) episode of The Gilded Age this evening, and it was preceded by this teaser for the new prequel series It: Welcome To Derry.

I was amused by its use of selected lyrics from The Music Man, beginning with a glimpse of the Robert Preston/Shirley Jones film version being shown in a 1962 movie theater: "Ya Got Trouble," carefully shorn of all its droll specifics and juiced with a bit of reverb, gains an extra layer of irony that flips Preston's admonitory menace back around to sounding, unironically, well... troubling:

There's also a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of what appears to be a "goo room," which is what we called a similar set in the horror series I worked on last summer (and which, like Welcome To Derry, should be premiering this fall, date TBA).  Like this one, ours was a smallish and enclosed set*, heavily distressed and awash in many gallons of artfully prepared slime, bones and other "organic" debris in which an actor had to slip, slide and roll around — repeatedly for hours, of course, to get all the necessary shots.  (And it's a good thing my boss spearheaded that project a couple of weeks in advance, as it ended up taking us that long to develop and refine the recipes for a dozen different varieties (by color, texture, viscosity and transparency) of non-toxic "goo," each as foul-looking as the next).

Who knows; while it's not my usual jam, I might give It: Welcome To Derry a look in October.


* I suspect that, by genre convention, "goo rooms" tend to be places where a character finds themself trapped just as they discover the room's horrific contents.  And by their nature, they have to be built to be leak-proof — even if and when walls are removed to accommodate camera angles in what is often meant, for dramatic effect, to be a relatively tight space.