Dear Diary,

Tonight was the kickoff to the New York Musical Theatre Festival! The NYMF Gala at last! Jamibeth, Seth, Kendra and Ray Zilberberg (our new invaluable production assistant) met ouside Dodgers Stages before 8:00pm to pick up our tickets. Michael Rubinoff was supposed to join us but was busy running around the city driving a truck, taking care of set issues!

The first part of the evening was a performance of The Great American Trailer Park Musical.

This was one of the shows that I had seen last year at NYMF, and has been subsequently picked up for an Off-Broadway run. It was very cool to see a more elaborate production of a show I had seen at the Festival!

I also enjoyed seeing Marya Grandy again, who was part of the original NYMF cast, and who plays Linoleum ('cuz her mother gave birth to her on the kitchen floor). I remember taking notice of how great she was last year -- her voice is amazing and she is wildy funny.

Of course our director, Jamibeth Margolis (who knows everyone in New York!), knew Marya and introduced us after the show. Interesting bit of trivia -- she is the daughter of Fred Grandy, who played Gopher on The Love Boat (and of course he was a four-term congressman). Needless to say, I found that way cool!

After the show we went downstairs to the reception where we drank margaritas and ate chicken fingers and schmoozed!

I met up with Rob Asselstine whose show Frankenstein Do You Dream had been in the Festival last year, and who runs the ACLCL in Toronto. He has been very supportive profiling Plane Crazy in all his newsletters so it was great to finally thank him in person.

I also got to meet up with David, whom I had worked for last year as a volunteer at the Festival! It was great to catch up and he promised me he'd catch the show. It was a great opportunity to thank everyone at NYMF personally, for giving us the extra shows and supporting us so well. In addition, today was the venue load-in for The Beckett, so I also heard good reports from NYMF that the Plane Crazy staff was more than pulling its weight!

Tomorrow -- back to rehearsal and countdown to opening night!

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