Any questions?

As promised, here is the video of Emily and Sebastian testing out the new water slide in Grandma’s backyard. Their bottoms were bright red after 20 minutes of this.

Jan thought it would be a good idea to put the slide in Grandma’s backyard next to the paddling pool.

She was right.

Video to follow.

Just got back from a lovely weekend with Jan. We left the kids with Grandma and Grandad up in Cambridgeshire and legged it down to West London to attend the wedding ceremony of one of her friends from university whom she saw just a few months ago but hadn’t seen for YEARS before that.

Jan was excited because she was to be reunited with some very good friends whom she hadn’t seen for… a long time! One person estimated it had been 20 years but everyone promptly beat them to a pulp upon mentioning such an outlandish and offensive number. I was excited because I had never attended a gay wedding before.

Not so exciting was the three hour drive down to West London. Three hours in and of itself isn’t so bad but I have been doing nothing but driving since we got here. Hurray for the Mercedes Benz rental car! And not having the trusty rusty GPS in my phone for fear of outlandish and offensive roaming charges only added to the stress. Hurray for pre-cached Google maps!

We arrived safely at our surprisingly modern hotel in Teddington and, after a short walk around town, put on our glad rags and made our way up to the famous Turk’s Head Pub in Twickenham. Jan immediately crashed face-first into a blast from the past as she gleefully reminisced with four friends she hadn’t seen since they were at school together. I just sat back and enjoyed hearing them wax poetic about where life had lead each of them, roasting absent friends, and laughing about theatre productions of days gone by.

The high point of the evening for me was listening to the sterling lineup of speeches offered by a handful of the boys’ very close friends. I was impressed with each speaker’s well-written words and dry delivery. Each speech was better than the last and I was tearing with laughter by the end. The second the speeches ended, the DJ kicked the night into high gear, offering the most fabulous and camp playlist. Jan boogied to about 50% of the songs on offer, taking advantage of the rest of the time to catch up with her school friends. I danced to a measly 10%, choosing instead to engage in witty banter with some of the fascinating and increasingly drunk guests. I cut myself off after four glasses of cava as I was the night’s designated driver.

When the night came to a close, I stuffed as many drunken Englishmen into the back of the Benz as I could and followed their indecipherable directions all around West London. The drop offs went surprisingly well and it was only when Jan and I were finally on our way back to our hotel that we got really lost. And the night-roaming locals in some of these dodgy little towns were not helping matters. But we finally made it home. And we slept. And no kids woke us up all night long.

Before heading back home today, Jan took me on a little tour of her old stomping grounds. We visited what used to be her university campus (before it was sold off and transformed into a series of upper-class townhouses), her old dorms, her off-campus apartment, and a few pubs she used to frequent when she was supposed to be learning. There are some beautiful gardens along the Thames that make the neighborhood seem like a very nice place to pass one’s formative years. It was truly lovely strolling down memory lane with my 22 year-old wife.

It looks like I stopped regularly blogging about three months ago. Damn. That was about the time that The Foreigner kicked into high gear and everything else in my life just stopped. Every time I produce a play it manages to monopolize 88% of my free time, I stop blogging, we perform the show, it is amazing, then I come here to apologize for the lack of blog activity. But we closed The Foreigner a little over a month ago and I haven’t even been back to apologize. What’s that all about? I’ve given this some thought and here are the top 10 things I can blame for not blogging as much as I would have liked in the past month:

10. As the kids grow up, they’re demanding more and more of our time.
9. I’m overwhelmed by the thousands of topics I’d like to blog about and don’t know where to begin.
8. I’ve been making an extra effort recently to be more social. I never go out anymore!
7. I’m trying to dig myself out of a one-year photo-uploading backlog.
6. Facebook.
5. Guitar Hero.
4. We’re plowing through all the TV series we had been meaning to watch. 30 Rock, Archer, Boardwalk Empire, Dollhouse, Game of Thrones, Modern Family: check!
3. I’m addicted to mobile gaming.
2. I was so excited that I had sold my original musical to a big-time Broadway producer that I ran out to the street and got hit by a taxi. I woke up in a hospital with total amnesia, but I knew I wasn’t Mr. Enrico Tortellini of Passaic, New Jersey.
1. I’m a lazy s.o.b.

The 50 families of Emily’s grade at school try to get together once a month to celebrate all of the birthdays from that month. We usually plan a little party after school in one of the parks in the neighborhood and everyone chips in for snacks and gifts for the kids celebrating. The June birthday party was celebrated last week and just so happened to coincide with their last day of school, bringing the festiveness of the event to a special high.

Congratulations on graduating P4, Emily. Next year: P5!

I took some pictures at the party. Wanna see a bunch of photos of kids you probably don’t know? Here ya go!

I just noticed that I had uploaded a couple of videos last month but never got around to posting them here. Sorry ’bout that.

In the first one, Emily explains in great detail how she has made a birthday cake for mummy (a few weeks after mummy’s birthday).

In the second video, Sebastian really likes it when his little friend, Spider, goes down the slide again and again and again. And again.

Dear friends,

Barcelona’s Jocular Theatre is back with its latest hilarious production, “The Foreigner”. You remember Jocular, don’t you? The same irreverent English-language group that brought you such corkers as “Lend Me A Tenor”, “Fuddy Meers”, and “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe”? Anyway, this season’s offering promises to be just as much fun and just as sharp.

What does a shy Englishman in search of rest do when he visits a fishing lodge in Georgia? In Larry Shue’s hilarious farce, Charlie Baker, a proof reader by day and a boring husband by night, adopts the persona of a foreigner who doesn’t understand English. When others begin to speak freely around him, he not only becomes privy to secrets both dangerous and frivolous, he also discovers an adventurous extrovert within himself.

Saturday, 21 May at 21:00
Sunday, 22 May at 19:00
Saturday, 28 May at 21:00
Sunday, 29 May at 19:00

at the Fundació Cultural Hostafrancs
c/ Torre d’en Damians 6, 08014 BCN
Metro: L1 Hostafrancs
map

Tickets are 12 euros and can be purchased on the night of the show at the theatre.

Check us out on the Web:
www.joculartheatre.com

Feel free to forward this info to anyone you think may appreciate an uproarious night of comedic theatre in English.

Hope to see you there,

Joshua Zamrycki
Director, Jocular Theatre

It’s been too long since I’ve posting anything here so let’s do something about that, shall we?

As you may or may not know, we’re getting ready to present a new play. It’s really funny. You should come see it. I’ll post a press release right after this. But my point is that preparing a play (as both Director and Producer) can be pretty time consuming. All encompassing, some might say. Too much for a father of two, other may volunteer. A masochistic and ultimately fatal exercise, many agree. Well, you’d all be right. But somebody’s gotta keep the arts alive, right? Am I right???

One of the most daunting challenges in mounting a project of this magnitude is organizing the schedules of the many people involved. I can’t afford to pay anybody so I certainly can’t ask them to skip work just to prance around doing funny voices with me. So I’m left juggling everyone’s “free time” and trying to get everyone in the same place at the same time for an extended rehearsal process with suffering too many mutinies.

An organizational nightmare for most. But I’m a math guy. I make most of my daily decisions by creating spreadsheets. Producing a play is no different. I’ve got separate spreadsheets for casting options, contact lists, prop lists, actor availability, scene breakdowns, lighting cues, expenses, even poster distribution points! Spreadsheets just make life that much easier to navigate. Here, have a look at what I had to create in order to work out a feasible rehearsal schedule:

Click for fullscreen spreadsheet goodness

You see what I did there? It all makes perfect sense to me. I wonder how much of it is understandable to the uninitiated. Let’s see if any of you can figure out what each column, color, grouping, or symbol actually means in my twisted little spreadsheet-fed mind…

Dear Jan,

It’s been more than three days since you went to England, leaving me alone with the two kids. My god, has it only been three days? It feels like an eternity.

I just wanted to let you know how we are and what we’ve been up to. I know that you may have been a bit freaked out when you called and I rushed you off the phone because of “the blood.” That was just Sebastian’s lower lip. He crashed the scooter in the long hallway. He’s fine.

Emily’s last day of school for this trimester was Friday. I got to the playground just on time to pick her up. But she wasn’t there. In fact, her entire class wasn’t there. I spent a little while searching around, pretending that I was a responsible parent, before I finally asked someone and they told me that they were upstairs in their classroom waiting for the parents. Ah! So Sebastian and I raced upstairs and picked up Emily and the metric ton of artwork/classwork she had created this past trimester. There is an amazing study on the life and work of Joan Miró that you must see when you get home on Tuesday.

Saturday was pretty crazy. After a morning of dance performances and coloring in the living room, we went out for lunch at Fresco with Cata et al. before I snuck off to rehearsal for a few hours and they all spent the afternoon at the zoo. I met them later that evening at Cata’s house where the kids ate chicken and rice and I had to stop Sebastian from kicking the cat. We got home very late and the kids crashed without issue. I watched the second half of the Barça/Madrid match and fell asleep on the couch with a slice of pizza on my lap.

Sunday was pretty tiring. After a morning of science experiments and teaching stuffed animals how to read in the living room, we went up to Parc Güell with Cata et al. before trekking all the way back down to Gracia and dining on the outdoor terrace outside the Mexican restaurant next to Verdi Park. Emily discovered her love for guacamole and I rekindled mine for margaritas. We then went back to Cata’s house where the kids ate chicken and rich and I had to stop Sebastian from kicking the dog. We got home very late and Sebastian was a nightmare to put to bed.

Tomorrow, the plan is to bring the kids with me to a sound studio where I have to record some voices for a movie trailer in the morning, and then maybe spend the afternoon in the pool at the gym.

The bathroom still smells of cologne.

Oh yeah, and happy birthday!