Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas 2008. It was a little quieter Christmas in the Koenig household this year. Preparation was a little off because I was out of town until 2 weeks before Christmas and then when I got back a series of strange events allowed the holiday to just sneak up on us.


One of the strange things that happened is that I had to rehearse understudies for 2 of 4 roles in my show and put them on for preview... fun! Then, on the last good shopping day before Christmas we got 18" of snow. The bad news, no shopping, the good news, a good old fashioned snow day. We goofed around taking a family picture, dug a path for the mailman, hiked in the street a couple blocks to meet some friends for lunch at a pub in slogging distance! And eventually dug the car out so that I could go to the theatre to do my show.

So, to catch up, we got everything taken care of for the holidays - the puppies enjoyed their reindeer squeeky toys, each of them got a little something baseball related and we had a wonderful Christmas eve doing some traditional cooking together. We made rosettes, which led to a happy accident in the discovery of an apple fritter recipe. Pete baked pumpkin and apple pies, and created some home-made braided dog biscuits. I made cookie dough for later baking and now, thanks to my Dad, we had my mother's ribs for dinner. They were just as wonderful as I remember.

Christmas day we spent at my sister's house and got to share little baby Gavin's first Christmas. Dinner was tasty and we had a very nice relaxed day. In a couple of weeks Pete's parents will be driving up to Milwaukee for a continued Christmas celebration. Merry Christmas!!

Big News! A New Baby!

At 7:50a this morning Pete and I have a new baby nephew. Gavin Henry Johnson was born in Madison after almost 24 hours of labor (yuck!). He is (of course) adorable! I am actually doing Guys On Ice here in Madison on the weekends so his timing was perfect, I got here Thursday night and he got here Friday morning!

Mama is exhausted and proud papa can't take his eyes off the baby! The grandparents are all here in force marveling at Gavin's 'Long' fingers and his 'big' feet! They looked pretty tiny to me!

So we're excited, although this in #21 for Pete and I, this is the only baby that I've ever gotten to visit this new! When I met him, little Gavin was less than 90 minutes old! I hope that with all the visitors this weekend Dan and Christina get a little chance to rest! It was hard work and a long night for all three in the Johnson family. But they sure are a beautiful family!

New Show

So after a lovely eight week run Isn't It Romantic is closed. I'm going to miss my friends but I'm sure we'll work together again soon!

So I've moved across the street to the Children's theatre and am stage managing the last two weeks of a production of Charlotte's Web. It's a lovely production with a beautiful set and a great group of adult and young performers. I've inherited a pig with a bad knee, but other than that, things have started off very well and I'm looking forward to spending the next two weeks in the barnyard. I'll post pictures as I have them.






Hey look! I found some! Here are pictures of one of our little pigs with the goose and goslings and also with Tempelton the Rat. These actors do a fantastic job of making you believe they are animals. It's lots of fun! Also, check out the first stage blog - the address is on your right...

Gallery Night

Things have been fine in Milwaukee - Not much going on, so not much to report! My show is STILL running even though on Pete's side of the Rep they have opened 2 more shows and closed them and are in tech for a third and finishing building a fourth! We just keep cranking them out!!

The pictures here are Pete's pictures that were featured in a Gallery exhibit at the Broadway Theatre Center in Milwaukee in their 'Artists behind the Art' series. I'm so proud of him and his pictures are beautiful.





In other news, Our puppies graduated from their Manners class - they were very good in class and I was particularly proud of Mojo, now we just have to get what they learned to translate to every day life!

Pete's parents were here with Mary Jo's Mother in Law, Jane for the weekend. We had a great time, they got to see some Milwaukee theatre and we ate a lot of food with a lot of good conversations. It was a great weekend. My family will be up this weekend to celebrate all of our fall birthdays so the house cleaning never ends!

But that's really it - not much going on!

Isn't It Romantic

I actually think it is a little bit romantic! My show opened Saturday night - another world premier, my second this year!! A lovely song-book musical of the music of the Gershwins, Rogers & Hart and Jerome Kern. The script is fairly thin, but the music is fantastic and Jimi Ray Malaray (singer) is a delight to watch. So this is where I'll be for the next 2 months - as the song says "Nice Work If You Can Get It"!

OK, so not quite over!

So just because we're both working doesn't mean we have to keep having fun! The day before we went into rehearsal the Milwaukee Rep had a Brewers outing - it was a blast - there were almost 60 people that came to the game and most of them joined us at a pre-game tail gate. It was quite an event!

At the end o fmy first week of rehearsal, The Rep had their company picnic. The picnic always consists of the annual kick-ball game, Interns vs. Staff. This year Pete convinced them to mix it up a little and they chose teams by counting off. Pete was on the winning team (the twos!) and even got a war wound from a particularly dramatic slide into second base!


As our last trip of the summer we had a mini-vacation to the Quad Cities to see a River Bandit's game. Prior to this summer they were known as the Swing of the Quad Cities but changed their name. It was their last game of the season and we had great seats - front row behind home plate. One of the fun things about the River Bandit's park is that they take the whole Field of Dreams thing seriously (Is this heaven? No it's Iowa) to the extent that they have a corn field at the left field foul pole and the players enter the field out of the corn. It was fun! Unfortuantly the River Bandits lost to the T-Rats, but we got to see the T-Rats pitcher throw an almost perfect game. He was one little in-field bloop from a no-hitter and besides that bloop, he threw a perfect game. We had a great day and it was a lovely little get-away trip before I went into tech.

summer wrap up

Once Pete went back to work, our summer activities were confined to the weekends! We spent a weekend in the Fox Valley with Kelley, Marty, Kalin and friends, then a night with Anita, Jeff and Ashley then capped off with a T-Rats Tailgate and game with Dad followed by dinner with Dad and Gram. It was a busy weekend - too busy obviously to take and pictures!!

The next week we entertained all of the Mullers and then the Abrahams, it's always great to see them and the kids are getting soooo big! Now it was time for me to go back to work -

My show is a nice one-person show called Isn't It Romantic, and I think it will be!




The last weekend before rehearsal started, we had a graduation lunch for our niece Ashley who is now off to school at St. Norberts. Jeff worked his voodoo with the Ribs - yumm - and it was fun to get the whole family together. Even the gimpersons! Like father like son!

On Friday before the party we weent to Irish Fest to see one of our favorite bands, Gaelic Storm. We had such a good time, we went back on Sunday!

And that's it - back to work!!

Still a little behind on the summer

Still catching up on the rest of our summer vacation...
The weekend after Pete went back to work we were able to participate in the wedding of our friend, David Mauer. David was my assistant at New American Theatre for a few years and Pete's good hockey buddy. It was a pretty wedding.










The next weekend we were keeping up with our now tradition of trying to see a Cardinals game for our anniversary. We went down to St. Louis, and finally got to see a winner! We also got to spend time with family at our niece Emily's birthday party and a Sunday Brunch that included The WHOLE family and ALL kids!










Our last camping trip of the summer we were back to Token Creek County Park in Madison, this was where Puja had her first camping trip a few years ago. It's a small camp-ground, but it's very close to the Mallards park and there's an off-leash dog excercize area in the park. We got a chance to try out our new tent (third tent of the summer) I think we finally got a winner and it comes in our favorite color!!

We had some beautiful sunsets, a pretty fun Mallards game (even though they lost in extra innings) and the puppies got a good run in the park. We love our new tent and are only sad that we only got to use it once this summer!

The last of our short 2 weeks!

Off to glamorous South Bend Indiana


So off to the South Bend Silverhawks. Pete found us a State Park and we were on our way. The park is beautiful and a bit of a maze! We had to replace our tent when we left Toledo because we blew out the zipper on the door. It's too bad, it was a great tent and we still could have used it if we wanted to climb in and out of the window, but we decided to give ourselves an early anniversary present! We struggled with the shape of the tent, but we love the screen porch element of the new tent.

The park was very nice. There was a beach and we saw a whole family of racoons! It was pretty funny. They scattered when they saw us and the babies were stranded until mom came and herded them all back into the brush. The beach was separated into regular and dog sections so we were able to take the pups down to splash around a little. The game was a pretty good time, the park is a little bit of a cinder-block, but the game was fun.







The final leg of our vacation - 4th of July camping at outside Beloit with Mom, Dad, Dominic, Brenden and Madi. It was an adventure!

We had a blast at the beach, but the mosquitoes in the campground were horrible. We all went to a Snappers game on the 4th but I got a call during the bottom of the 7th to let us know that our dogs had broken out of the tent and were running around the campground. So Dad and I had to drive back and coral them. At least we saw the fireworks from the highway on the way back. Thank goodness we were headed home for a little vacation break, we discovered that our new tent was a piece of crap and our grill broke!

But, just because Pete is going back to work doesn't mean the summer vacation ends! It's just limited to the weekends for a bit!