Work

Here in Jackson, I spend my evenings, from 4:30 until 10pm at the Pink Garter Theater; but my mornings are spent at the Wildflower Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast. You can check it out by visiting http://www.jacksonholewildflower.com/. I work at this Inn as a Housekeeper where I keep the five guest bedrooms and main home clean! I'm usually there Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and I work for about four hours each of these days. It wears me out! From the moment I get there I start the laundry and it doesn't stop until I leave. Then I work my way through the five bedrooms making the beds, cleaning the bathrooms and dusting. Each room has a private deck and so I keep it swept and the chairs wiped off. Funny, I know, but my favorite jobs of the day are the unloading the dishwashwer (because its the last thing I do), changing the water in the flower vases and ironing the napkins! I hate cleaning the showers. Mostly because they are so awkwardly shaped. I like to meet the guests who stay in the rooms and I really enjoy my co-worker, Margaret and my boss, Sherrie. Both teach me a ton about getting the job done. Now, when I clean my own bathroom (which incidentally doesn't happen very often) I clean it the way they taught me. I don't think I would know how to do it any other way. I worked at this Inn last summer, too!

While I'm at it, the Pink Garter Theater can be found at http://www.pinkgartertheatre.com/. When Scott and I get to the theater around 4:30pm we prepare to put on our small hoedown down in the Pink Garter Plaza. We drag the xylophone from upstairs down two flights of stairs, gather up the garbage cans and other percussion instruments we made and take them downstairs. About five people play with us. At 5pm we start. We only do one song, but we do it three times with ten minute breaks in between. The song is called "Can-tata." Scotty learned it last semester in school and we adapted it for the xylophone. I play the xylophone, but I'm not very good. In fact, Scotty is the only one who can actually play the dang thing, but someone has to play the make-shift drumset we made out of a wash-basin, milk jug and plastic bucket. We did this because we didn't want to have to drag the entire drumset downstairs and Randy and Mysti (our bosses) originally wanted a authentic hoedown, but it's kind of turned into a percussion thing. Figures. We only have me, and Scott who is a percussionist. No banjo or fiddler. Anyway, after the hoedown we usually drag everything back upstairs and rehearse for awhile. Right now, Scotty is writing another song for the hoedown and so we work on that or other stuff that we have to lift because we don't have any music. At about 7pm our stage manager kicks us off the stage and they open the house. We start the show at about 7:15pm and don't finish playing until about 10pm. If it's "Oklahoma" I call the show, meaning I'm in charge of starting the songs and deciding tempos. It wears me out. "Oklahoma" is a huge show. If the show is "Sheriff" I get a knot in my neck from turning around constantly to get counted in by Scott. He calls that show. It's good to trade off. I'm stressed a little if it's "Oklahoma" and Scotty is stressed a little if it's "Sheriff." We take off as soon as the people leave the theater. Both Scott and I have improved a ton over this summer. A lot of the songs we play during Pre-Show and Variety Show are songs that we had to lift, which means we just listened to it over and over and over again and picked out the chords. To me, that's pretty amazing because I struggle in that area of music. I'm a really great sight-reader, but if there's no music I couldn't play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. So the summer has stretched both Scott and I. We brought the xylophone from Hawaii, it belongs to BYU Hawaii, so that Scott could work on his keyboard skills as a percussionist. It's been awesome. He's learned some cool solos and even plays along with a Southern Gospel song we do from "O Brother Where Art Thou." He's really improved!! On "Singin In the Rain" nights we just sit in the Box Office and sell tickets and Scotty sells concessions until intermission is over and then we go home. Those are our favorite nights!

I am being forced to write about my job. No jokes, Adrienne is holding a gun to my head right now. Well, I have been learning about drums and drum equipment and learning how to buy and sell. I try to buy things locally and then sell mostly on ebay. I've been getting better at taking pictures to try to lure the buyers in, and people on ebay are stealing my tricks! I use our hot pink blanket as a backdrop on everything I can and shine 'em up!