International Mystery Writers Festival

The festival is finally open, we spent more time in tech than the number of performances we have! It seems a little disjointed now that we are no longer all at one hotel, but things are going very well. Almost everyone in my cast (The Final Toast) went to the opening ceremonies and then the opening performance of Chimneys. PIctured above are my playwright Stuart Kaminsky and my director Mark Bellamy. Following the performance we all relaxed at a local bar, Bacchus and our own Bing Putney (now a local favorite) took the stage!

Friday my play opened to a sold out house and a very good response. Since then, we have been enjoying many of the other plays that the festival has to offer, a lot of live radio performances and workshops. One of our favorite activities have been the Writers Reels at the end of each festival night, a Q & A with different 'celebrities' as we view movie clips of their work an a huge movie screen on the river front. We saw Josh Hutchinson (Upcoming Journey to the Center of the Earth, and in the past, Zathura and Bridge to Terrabithia etc) And I am pictured here with Rene Balcer, head writer for Law and Order and Creator of L & O Criminal Intent. We also met one of the writers of Monk who is a riot, as you can imagine. He was honored at the curtain speech for one of my performances and we practically had to wrestle the mic away from him to get the show started. Last night we stopped in to support Stuart (Kaminsky)'s Reel, but instead of clips, they showed his entire movie, Once upon a time in America, and we just couldn't sit through an almost 3 hour movie that started at 9;30! Tonight, Rupert Holmes (writer of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but more well know; The Pina Colada Song) He is showing a series of clips of all the movies where that song is used. It should be fun!

We are actually finding time for baseball, and I'll blog later today or tomorrow about the two minor league baseball games we have taken in, but right now I'm off to a workshop on Mysteries in the era of Agatha Christie etc.