Happy Holidays :)

Okay. I just had to get this out of the way.

As I stated, every year the San Diego Ballet takes it's production of the Nutcracker to other cities spreading all of that wintery goodness. And for us Southern Californians, its nice to see some snow. One of our more regular destinations is Colorado Springs. We fly there on Thanksgiving and then perform the next 3 days with the Colorado Springs Philharmonic and the children of the city. Yes, you read correctly, we fly on Thanksgiving. So often our Thansgiving dinner is spent among our "company" family rather than our "non company family."

I won't get into old tour memories like...

-buses with heat that would either work in the front or the back, but not both or...
-dogsledding on the Continental Divide with an Iranian Princess or...
-finally succeeding on getting to Little Bighorn, after we had passed it and it being closed for three years in a row or...
-rediscovering the importance the art of taxidermy has in various parts of the west (I have a Jackalope head to prove it) or...
-the greatest Thanksgiving in history in Yosemite with my French lighting designer, his wife (my ballet mistrees and already mentioned Iranian princess) their two young sons, my schnauzer, a rented car, more snow than you can imagine, amd a serendipitous Holiday in that appeared out of nowhere with a complete Thansgiving feast complete with Escargots.

No, I'll just mention that the above photo was taken on the last day of our Colorado Springs performances. We only had a matinee that day, so the company had the evening to themselves. For the most part, everyone broke up into their own little groups. I know that this group photo is from that evening because I have an ice cream cup in my hand. I had gone to see "For Your Consideration" at an art house close to the hotel and then had some ice cream at a very fun ice cream shop next door. When I got back to the hotel at 9-ish, I found this particular group of dancers returning from revelry.

Rather than being the end of the evening, this ended up being the beginning of the evening for this particular group of SDB-ers. Many adventures later (at around 3:30) when I made sure that they had all made it back safely to their perspective rooms, it was then safe for this little artistic director to tuck himself in and go to sleep. Because I knew I would have to wake up bright and early and make sure that everyone was on the bus, conscious or not.

That should wrap up all the loose ends and allow me to at least start blogging about Sonnets.