Siege - Days 31, 32, 33, and 34

Boy

This thing just keeps on going, doesn't it?  It's the Energizer Bunny of Home Alone(ish) Pandemics.

So what's been going on here at Studio Seclusion?  

Continuing work on the second edition of my Alice set design book.  My momentum is increasing...  Several new illustrations, including this one, for a section talking about theater soft goods like this cut-drop:

(I like that I managed to work into that sketch both Tenniel's famous image of Alice pulling back a curtain AND his rose-painting card.  (Five of Spades was always literally painting scenery - roses - so he was always a scenic painter.)

Currently hacking at a study model of a beach house.  Still doing worksheets of various Social Security filing strategies.  Still cooking, eating, watching tomatoes grow.  Watching - Friday Night - Kitchen Dog Theater's online production of 62 coronavirus 1-minute plays.  Very interesting.  The plays varied, some sad or angry, many worried, some funny.  Most striking to me were the plays about the late mother's recipe... what soup did it use?  Never thought someone saying "Cream of Celery Soup" would tear me up.  The one played by two roaches (played with glee by two of KD's best actors) was very funny.  Most memorable line of the night was, "I never thought the apocalypse would be so domesticated."

Me neither.

We did have one out-of-house experience, a trip to officially observe a fire station under construction (gloves, masks, hard hats) and a trip to the fancy grocery store (where the hard hat might have been a comfort - shopping is so weird now).  At the construction site there were huge bilingual signs commanding you to have your temperature taken and to wear masks etc. - plus a clever hand-washing station - but only a few of the sparse Saturday work crew seemed to be bothering with all that.  At the fancy grocery store the metered line for entry was a block long, masks were mandatory, and grocery staff saw to it that rules were followed.  We bought a bag of mussels, so dinner was those mussels with a yellow curry sauce and good bread and possibly the perfect wine.  Very tasty.

On the reading front, I just got a copy through the mail of Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write.  Just started dipping into them, but so far it's both thoughtful and funny.  I got to design a couple of her plays:  In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) and Stage Kiss.  Both turned out well, but Vibrator is the one I'm most happy with.

In the Other Room (or the Vibrator Play) at Kitchen Dog Theater

Here's a close up of the inglenook area:

In the Other Room... I sure do like details...

I like detail.  On the how-to side, those bricks were all carved by hand (by me) with a flexible snap-blade knife into sheets of stiff, fine-grained foam (not that expanded polystyrene beer cooler stuff). 

On into the week ahead...