Props!

Now that I am officially done with the sleep training, (Hallellujah!) I will be going back to posting in a more normal fashion. Unfortunately don't have much to say on the writing front at the moment. Really, if I posted how all that was coming along you'd be getting updates along the lines of: Today I changed the word "the" to "that". The passage reads SO much better now! Is this really what you want to be reading? Thought not. So today I will be writing on something else I enjoy doing... PROPS!

I have been a regular fixture with Angelwalk Theatre as a props manager since the first show. The only shows I didn't do were due to the fact that I was pregnant with my triplets. (A solid excue if I do say so myself.) Now I am back with a vengeance doing the props for I Love You Because. I am having a lot of fun with it too. Now what does a props manager do? Well, my job is to get all the things that are in the script that the actors use on stage, and that the director adds to the scene to make it better/more realistic/make more sense. Sometimes it's just a matter of buying the stuff, other times it's a little bit more complicated.

Easy things are things like this:

This is clearly a mug. I was asked to find mugs to be used in a coffee shop. The dollar store is my friend. Now, we are not using this particular mug, because it was decided that mugs with no writing would be better.

There were some things I thought would be easy but ended up less so. Case in point: I was asked to procure a My Little Pony abacus. I would tell you why, but Spoilers! I figured that I could go to Toys R Us, or Ebay, or Amazon.com and find one easily. No such luck. Why? Well apparently Hasbro, in all their insane merchandising made My Little Pony lunchboxes, toys, bedsheets, toothbrushes, etc. but no abacus! Silly Hasbro. So, I bought a plain abacus and did this:

For the record, the other side has a yellow pony.

Other things I needed to build were a Brooklyn Lager beer bottle and a bottle of tourqoise liquor. The beer was simple, take a bottle of Alexander Keiths, scrub off the label and make a new one with paper, sharpies and double sided tape. The liquor is simply water and food colouring.

And there you have it! A brief look into the world of a props manager. Now we need to finish loading everything into the theatre and hope nothing breaks. (It won't. We're really careful. Usually.)

I Love You Because runs at The Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts from March 28, through April 15. It's an awesomely funny romantic comedy loosely based on Jane Austen's PClick here for tickets and see my hard work on stage! (Oh and the actors are awesome too!)