Some days you catch the Mr. Whippy van.

Some days you are in the Mr. Whippy van.

Last night, they saw the show, and hung around the stage door to get some signatures. Fun photos!

Unfortunately, Follies will have closed by the time Nico and I get to NY next year, but there’ll be plenty of other things for us to catch.

It turns out the biggest culprit was my Apple Mail folder, bloating out at over 11GB. I only sync two gmail accounts with Mail, my personal and Repertwa accounts, and they don’t exceed 4GB of Gmail usage together.

I discovered that the All Mail folder causes Apple Mail to download another copy of every message in my inbox, causing unnecessary disk space usage. After digging around for an answer, the solution is quite simple:

1. In Gmail (webmail), go to Mail Settings, and the “Labels” tab.
2. Under “System Labels”, find the All Mail label and uncheck “Show in IMAP.”
3. In Apple Mail, select your Gmail account under Mailbox menu > Synchronise.

The caveat here is that if you have any mail in your “All Mail” folder that you haven’t labeled somehow else (ie. it’s not in your inbox, sent mail or with another label), you’ll not get access to it in Apple Mail. That works just fine for me, since I leave mail in my inbox until I it’s irrelevant, and then move it to All Mail. You also set up a “Keep” label/folder, and move your useful mail from the inbox to “Keep”. The benefit is that Apple Mail will only keep one version of it (in “Keep”), and won’t include duplicate copies of the sent and inboxes.

It took a while to get my Apple Mail in line with the changes, but after a few minutes, my mail folder had dropped to just 4 gigs.

This weekend kicked off with a bit of a cooking session as I made some potato and leek soup, and tried a Chocolate Orange cake recipe from Iron Chef Shellie, a local Melbourne food blogger. I’d been craving a jaffa-flavoured cake like the ones I used to get from a bakery in Balgownie, Wollongong. This one wasn’t quite like those I were trying to reproduce, but it was delicious and I’ll definitely make it again in the future. I was pretty happy with my cooking, particularly after some recent bad experiences in the kitchen.

Whilst browsing Iron Chef Shellie’s blog, I came across a review of Dahon Tea Lounge, a South Melbourne-based Filipino restaurant. Nico often laments the fact that you can’t buy Filipino food around, so we decided to head down there on Saturday for lunch.

Dahon focuses more on teas (ice and hot) and lunch repertoire rather than more elaborate Filipino foods. I had a crumbed chicken baguette (unlike Nico, I’d had breakfast and wasn’t as hungry), Nico had Java rice with Chicken Inasal and we shared Pancit Bihon (Filipino noodles). We also sampled the ice teas. Everything was delicious and I think we’ll be back soon so I can try the various pork dishes they serve.

Nico and I had decided to have a night in at the movies on Saturday, even going to the extent of making homemade (and somewhat dodgy) choc tops and popcorn. After all the food of Saturday (including a reprise of the potato and leek soup for dinner), I could barely stomach it all, so our freezer is still full of choc tops.

We watched the classic 9 to 5, then an episode of The West Wing before I crashed out at around 1am.

Dennis

The gentle gentleman. Dennis joined the theatre group shortly after I did and it’s hard to remember a show without Dennis in the chorus, backstage or out the front in his usher blacks. He was our chief carpenter, achieving incredible things on non-existent budgets (including a rain curtain for Little Shop of Horrors). Eternally overcommitted, Dennis would be learning his lines, building sets and generally spending every waking minute at the theatre. He’d often find himself emotional come opening night, so proud of his set, the show and the group.

He’d often say that we (the young ones) were so lucky, having this outlet and community as young adults, but he never missed out. He was always one of the boys backstage and got his fair share of the spotlight out front. He masterfully played drunk, and could be relied upon to brings tears of laughter to my face whenever he’d do a bit of character schtick.

We loved swapping stories, usually toilet-related. Once, while we were onstage (behind the curtain) awaiting the start of the show, he told a long and involved story about the time he went for a jog through the suburbs when he was struck with an impending urgency. With each inaccessible toilet he told, he demonstrated his newly frustrated run. Whilst trying to be silent, the whole cast was in hysterics and the curtain opened to a cast all very red in the face.

Ultimately, and most importantly, he will be remembered as the kind, generous man he was. On several occasions he’d put his hand on my shoulder and say “If you need something, get on the phone to Patto.” He had no limit of time for anyone, and we had no limit of time for Dennis.

Next time I step into that theatre I will miss his friendly face and our cheerful chat. It will be a different place without him.

Kevin

I met Kevin simultaneously in 2004 through his community radio show, ‘ShowBiz!‘ and when I was playing in the band for Nunsense 2: The Second Coming which he was directing. He came over during our sitzprobe and said “He makes all those sounds with that keyboard!” I played in the band for his production of 70, Girls, 70 and he eventually asked me to musically direct You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown for him. From there I working with him again on Nuncrackers, and occasionally collaborated with him on his radio show.

Kevin’s passion was the art of musical theatre. A lifelong theatre goer, there was little he didn’t know about any show. We had countless wonderful conversations where we’d share information and he’d tell me stories about productions he’d seen. He taught me a great deal about theatre history, and loved to share his favourite shows.

Our collaborations were always fun. The shows we worked on together were small cast shows, and we always had a terrifically fun environment. He was the perfect director for these shows. He loved watching performers perform, and had a special skill of moulding the whole show into a unified piece.

He loved to share his knowledge with his radio audience whom were very faithful to him. On the occasions that I filled in for him in his absence, the radio listeners always called to ask where ‘Kevin’ was and if he would be back for the following week. We presented a few shows together, including one in which we discussed and played, track by track, Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns. He always invited me for his annual christmas episode, in which we discussed the year’s theatre and played silly christmas related tracks.

The amateur musical theatre scene can be a bitchy, scary place, but everyone loved working with Kevin, and had great respect from his peers. Theatre was everything to Kevin (that was clear whenever his face lit up in rehearsals), and he fed that passion into others. It was after the final performance of his latest production, Dames at Sea, that he passed away. It’s tremendously sad, but somehow fitting that Kevin took his final bow along with his cast and crew.

Here’s to two lives made all the better by theatre, and to the theatre they both gave us.

… and some bad.

Since last writing, around thirty days ago (a period which is less than 3/1000ths of my life thus far, and when you put it like that I don’t feel so bad) I’ve been to catch a few shows. The last two-thirds of the Jerry Herman triptych were enjoyable, particularly Dear World which featured a very ill but still magical Diedre Rubenstein (probably not known to her fans for playing “Crazy” Svetlanka, Russian lover of Lou from Neighbours). I had missed the first show, Milk and Honey because I was busy passing out in the hospital foyer. The final show in the set was Hello, Dolly which suffers the misfortune of being concerned with Small Town America™ which is just one of those alarm bells for me and means I’ll probably spend a lot of time looking at my shoes when they’re talking on stage.

Last weekend Phillip and I took to the streets of Melbourne and took advantage of Melbourne Open House, a situation where otherwise private areas of city buildings are made public for people to explore. This meant I spent most of the morning posing in embarrassing ways while Phillip kept saying “No, I’ll do it again, the light/focus wasn’t right.”

Most recently, with Jess as our house guest, we took to the Regent Theatre to view Love Never Dies again. Just proving that I wasn’t having a bad night when we first saw it, I was still enraged by the show’s all-too-obvious flaws and PERHAPS SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE NOTICED THAT WE DON’T PUT THREE DUETS BETWEEN THE SAME TWO CHARACTERS IN A ROW BECAUSE THAT’S SIMPLY NOT A GOOD IDEA AND OH GOD I’M BORED AND NO ROTATING THE SET DOES NOT MAKE THIS SONG DIFFERENT TO THE LAST ONE. In truth I spent most of this viewing listening to Ben Lewis as The Phantom and studying his character voice in the off chance that I am ever offered an audition for The Phantom/Batman/Will Arnett.

Paul Duffus (Deputy Commissioner of Taxation To The Stars) helped me pay my medical expenses (personally, I think if they’re going to do crazy crap to me while I’m asleep they should be paying me), which sorted me out to book flights to New York and Los Angeles with Nico early next year. This means the zipper on my bumbag which holds my wallet will need to be locked even more tightly than usual so that I can be reckless and break all sorts of personal rules when traveling*.

Other than this it’s back to work (for which I set up a small site), and hoping to have some time to pay my blog some more attention.

* I’m expecting to break my “Don’t eat anything bigger than your head” rules quite a few times.