Let's see, I don't know if I've ever mentioned my "plan" here or not. I've always had this idea that it would be totally cool to run a theatre/restaurant/community centre. The idea is that the food venture would pay for the art in the other two. This was always firmly in pipe dream territory, but it was a nice idea.
I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned wanting to buy my grandparents' house back in my hometown. Again, a nice thought, but not exactly probable because of the fact that, being theatre people, we kinda have to go wherever the job is.
Imagine my surprise, then, that my home town is opening a theatre/restaurant/pub/community education centre. It's slated to open spring 2009, and it's pretty much just what I'd dreamed up, with a liquor license and minus the community garden and much classier than I'd ever considered. They're going to run a 5 star locally grown organic restaurant, with a pub beneath it and in the back is a black box theater with classrooms above it.
They're going to offer classes in, well, everything. If they get enough people interested in having a class on something, they'll bring in an expert and offer classes. They're going to teach Shakespeare to elementary school kids and adults, they're going to have wine classes, they're going to introduce anyone to anything, and then they're going to create art.
It's, it's really freakin amazing everything they propose to do. The website has their full business model and after seven or eight, "This is so awesome! This is what I want to do!" I e-mailed them and was like, hey, this is who me and The Boy are, we're thinking of moving back to the area, do you have anything that we could do? This would be beyond awesome, this is like, exactly what I've been wanting to do with my life, is work for a place like this.
TB is checking out the site for himself at the moment, I dunno what he thinks. He's got this incredibly narrow viewpoint that all he wants to do is teach Stagecraft at a small theatre someplace and build shows. He doesn't want to design, he doesn't want to do community theatre (because he thinks that community theatre doesn't involve teaching)... I think he's being needlessly picky in a field where diversity is not only appreciated but practically required.
Anyway, I don't expect that anything is going to come from this. They'll probably e-mail me back that, yeah, they've already hired all their friends, but we could certainly make a donation, but still... Something about the timing on this feels not quite like predestination, but holistic and karmic.