hazelchaz | Load up on guns, bring your friends, it's fun to lose and to pretend

Pictures from a Lux Radio Theater barbecue are up. Click on

library_lynn to see them.

In September, Lux Radio Theater started ramping up for "A Spaceman's Home Companion." My job was to be a P.A., which mostly meant I was supposed to sit in a corner reading a book and wait around in case I was needed for a minor errand. This also meant that

colleency could assign me a project and I'd go out and try to get it done. (That's how I wound up in charge of the ice cream part of the Ice Cream Social for Loscon this year, in fact; technically I was working for

colleency and she and the rest of Lux were in charge of the overall Friday night event.)

So in mid-September, they had a barbecue over at the house, to bring together the people who'd be working in or on the show. There's two ways to look at "who is Lux Theater" -- the strict definition would be,

colleency, Shawn, and Michael. But the broader sense everyone who works on the shows -- and even for a low-tech project like another radio show, that can include a number of "usual suspects." To get them all together in one place is quite a project, so making a low-key party out of the affair can work really well.

The barbecue was nice, mostly it was a chance to tell everyone what the show was going to be like. It was a spoof of "Prairie Home Companion" and mostly was a number of independent bits strung together. The show starts with a parody of "Car Talk", for example, and the two guys doing that could rehearse independently of the rest of the show. There were a few segments that needed sound effects, so the foley crew had rehearse a lot, especially the "Shat Noir, Private Eye" segment. The seven members of the Hopeful Jedi Gospel Quartet had a lot of singing to rehearse, but they could do that apart the rest of the practice sessions. And so forth.

Two months later, we were back at the house for a full rehearsal. I'd been asked to find music stands, and dug up a motley assortment of borrowed music stands, from which they picked four or five that would work. In the picture here, they're rehearsing "Car Talk". Callers included Luke Skywalker, KITT the talking Knight Rider car, a professor who was Lost in Space, Chewbacca in the middle of a space battle, and a Doctor who'd lost the keys to his TARDIS. We finally found out why Luke wanted to go into town for power converters: because the guys on the radio told him he needed them to fix the busted-up sky hopper. Now we know.

There was a complete skit based on Firefly - "Lives of the Space Cowboys." Favorite line: (SFX of something hitting something metallic) "That's the coffee pot, Lefty."

More later...