Just A Peck 0063 // Atelier, A Chorus Line, A Birthday

Just A Peck

Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I’m glad you’re here!

JOURNAL

On Tuesday, I started my Foundations class at GLAFA. I was one of the few new people in the group, so I worked on the absolute basics (stepping back from my easel, measuring an angle, triangulating a point, and then stepping forward to make that line) while my neighbors worked on far more sophisticated projects all around me. Look! It’s beginning to resemble an ear!

My easel with a few tentative pencil lines on white paper, next to a classmate painting a beautifully rendered plaster cast bust
A drawing board on my easel with a printed reference diagram of an ear taped beside my faint pencil block-in of the same ear

The lifetime bumper-to-bumper warranty on the Prius survived another test! We got it back earlier than we anticipated and it’s running great. Can we actually get this thing to 350k miles? 400k? Half a million?!

Our black Prius back home, parked in the driveway in front of the garage

On Friday, we saw A Chorus Line at the Playhouse. Kudos to everyone involved! The opening number was especially electric. Kaylee came down from the booth before the show to get a photo with us at the step-and-repeat in the lobby.

Holding up the Duluth Playhouse program for A Chorus Line in front of the blue-lit NorShor stage before the show
Justin, Kaylee, and Jody posing inside a gold picture frame in front of a gold sequin backdrop, with Justin and Jody holding up sparkly top hats

On Saturday, we gathered at my parents' house to celebrate my mom’s birthday. We helped with a few chores, but mostly chatted and shared stories. It was a nice afternoon — the earliest bite of autumn temps in the air, the leaves beginning to turn, wild turkeys and deer everywhere.

My mom smiling at the kitchen table behind a pan of frosted birthday cake with candles
A family selfie outside my parents' house, with my mom and dad seated beside a big pot of yellow mums and the rest of us gathered around them

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

Hope poster
Hope (2026). The first hour of this movie is astonishing. The second hour gets less and less awesome as it goes along. The final twenty minutes are pretty unintelligible.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK

Finished:

The cover of I Remember You: A Ghost Story by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, with a silhouetted figure approaching a lonely house under a glowing blue sky
I Remember You, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (audiobook). An Icelandic ghost story with freezing, black water; deserted islands; ruined buildings; mysteriously appearing crosses; and creepy, murderous ghost children. Entertaining enough to pass the time while I ran errands. Several orders of magnitude better than the last "spooky" audiobook I listened to.
Holding up a well-worn paperback copy of A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. I reread this in preparation for The Candy House and good golly, what a brilliant book. A Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of interconnected stories, each with a completely distinct voice (one is famously a PowerPoint presentation). Egan's ability to capture the specific voices of her characters while still popping off sentence-level acrobatics is so inspiring.

Finished Plays:

In Progress:

BOOKS I PURCHASED

MEMORIES

Five Years Ago:

After an 18-month Covid hiatus, Spamalot finally opened — the first Playhouse production after everything went dark. We were testing multiple times per week, rehearsing masked, and the cast and crew were contracting Covid and dropping out of rehearsals constantly. It was absolutely the most stressful production of my life, and I’m still astonished that we managed to pull it off. But what a joyful triumph that we were able to successfully do so under such terrible circumstances.

The Spamalot cast mid-number on the NorShor stage, arms flung wide in front of glowing Welcome to Fabulous Camelot and Knights of the Round Table signs and a giant roulette wheel
Justin, masked, throwing up rock horns under the glowing NorShor Theatre marquee reading Spamalot, Sept 17 - Oct 3
A masked selfie in the NorShor house with three members of the Spamalot team behind me, arms raised in celebration
The Spamalot cast and crew crowded together backstage in the green room, some in costume and some in masks, all grinning
The Spamalot company dressed up and laughing on the NorShor lobby staircase on opening night, with Candy joining the group photo
Jody and Justin in masks, taking a selfie in the NorShor Theatre on opening night of Spamalot
The Spamalot 2021 company t-shirt design, with hand-lettered text reading We are not yet dead, we can dance and we can sing

WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT

Today we’re heading to the Renaissance Festival to celebrate Alex’s birthday. We’ve got our costumes ready (kind of) and we’re looking forward to some mead and jousting!

The Minnesota Renaissance Festival logo, a white unicorn on a red shield wrapped in banners

American Son opens this week at Zeitgeist. Get your tickets!

The Zeitgeist poster for American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown, directed by Dennis F. Johnson, September 24 through October 3, with a red halftone traffic light on a blue background

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

RIP to Annie Dillard. In her honor, here is a passage from The Writing Life:

"Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know. The page, the page, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly; which you cover woodenly, ruining it; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut: that page will teach you to write."

— Annie Dillard

That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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