I encountered this while gassing up en route to my show in St. Cloud. In addition to intrusive, hyper-vivid ads for all the shit I can buy at the gas station, there are also clips and bumpers from NBC television programming.

Progress!

The National Theatre for Children’s Mad About Money TV Special will air on some North Dakota CBS affiliates this Fall! This airing of the TV show, which we taped in Seattle last November, will coincide with a live Mad About Money tour in North Dakota. Incidentally, that’s the tour which Mike Rylander and I did last year. Speaking of Mike, he was tapped to record new host segments for the TV Special. You can read more about the Mad About Money TV Special here: http://www.nationaltheatre.com/ntccom/news/news.asp

While my involvement with Killer Joe has prevented me from touring Mad About Money with NTC again this Fall, I am currently in the midst of rehearsal for a one-day Mad About Money “special.” Next Friday, NTC staffer Nate Metcalf (pictured above) and I will take the live show to Omaha, Nebraska, to pitch it to potential clients down there. The hardest part will be not laughing at each other.

He and I previously performed another “special” here in Minnesota, test-driving a new financial literacy show entitled Crazy About Credit, which is NTC’s first show aimed at high schoolers. One of the highlights of that show was Nate unapologetically exposing his midriff.

You can see a Crazy About Credit promo video of Nate’s and my performance here: http://www.nationaltheatre.com/ntccom/videos/crazycredit/crazyvid.swf

Let’s come up with names for more NTC financial literacy shows!

• Deranged About Debt!
• Obsessive About Options!
• Borderline About Bonds!
• Sociopathic About Savings!
• Schizophrenic About Schedule C’s!
• Compulsive About Cumulative Auction Market Preferred Stocks!

Now you try!

During 2008′s fall orientation tour, we packed in 14 shows in 11 days. The other GTC troupe on the road right now, led by Michael, is doing the same number of shows, but over the course of a couple of weeks.

Now that I’m back in Minneapolis, I’m going back to the day job, rehearsals for a one-day NTC gig, and rehearsals for Killer Joe. I’ll get some sleep some time in October, I think.

After our final show in Ames, we took another dining recommendation from Jen Scott and ate lunch at Cafe Beaudelaire, which was another excellent pick. Then, on to the University of Dubuque for an evening show.

That’s it, really. Nothing eventful. Although, Jen Rand unknowingly jumped an extremely significant portion of one of our scenes at the Dubuque show, which made for an interesting talkback session.

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The next morning, we left stupid early so we could make it to our 10:00 AM show at Monmouth College, which happens to be my roommate’s alma mater. Our contact Karen actually knew him and told me that he was an orientation leader. And hooray, Monmouth provided us with boxed lunches!

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Driving back to Minneapolis after the Monmouth show, we made two major navigational errors that probably cost us about an hour total, but oh, well. Our tour still had two more days left, but the remainder of our shows would be close enough that we would sleep in our own damn beds.

“Hey, dudes and dudettes! Allow me to introduce myself! I’m Wayne Wingate, but my friends call me Waynetown! I work at the Blockbuster over on Industry Drive, and in my spare time, I like to listen to Pink Floyd, watch the Road Trip movies, and show ladies a good time.”

Damian, backstage at ISU, about to go on as Al in the first scene of the diversity show “Strange Like Me.”

We did a morning show in Indianapolis. Then we drove to Canton, Missouri, just in time to do an evening show there. Then we drove to Ames, Iowa, where we hoped we’d get to bed by 2:00 AM, and we had a 9:00 AM show the next morning. Whew.

Thankfully, we had two nights in Ames, so we had a break from driving for a bit. After two morning shows, we had the rest of Friday afternoon and evening to ourselves. Iowa State put us up in their Memorial Union, which is also where we performed. Downstairs, there was a bowling alley, which Chris and I decided to make use of.

That night, on my friend Jen Scott’s recommendation, we ate at Great Plains Sauce & Dough, where we ate some kickass pizza. The three of us then congregated in Jen Rand’s room (which was comically more luxurious than the room Damian and I were sharing) to play Fluxx. Chris introduced us to a similar card game called “We Didn’t Play Test This at All,” which was fun. Afterwards, only Damian was feeling awake enough to head downstairs to dance at the ISU new student shindig.

Next: Dubuque!

I’ll conduct a blog experiment, or…a blogsperiment, if you will.

Actually, forget I said that. That was shit.

Anyway, my experiment is to Twitter from the road, then dump each day’s Twitter posts on the ol’ blog here. So here you go — you can experience our GTC tour in realtime. If you have a Twitter account (it’s free!), you can follow me! My profile is here: http://twitter.com/cwethern

Damian [actor who lives in southern MN on the way to Iowa], that means that we will meet you at the Gas station on the Southeast corner of the intersection of I-35 and CR-46 at 8:30 AM.

My reply:

This is how they do it for Sir Ian McKellan, right?

The first (short) chunk of our Fall orientation tour is done, and I’m back in Minneapolis for a day. Tomorrow, we fly to Indianapolis to continue the adventure.

The new guy Chris moderated his first two shows with Michael supervising (which meant five of us were crammed into the car for these long trips, which proves how glamorous our profession is). On Saturday, we did a diversity show at Iowa Western Community College, and Sunday was an abridged version of our sex show at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.

After Saturday’s show in Council Bluffs, Iowa, we crossed the border into Omaha for dinner at Upstream Brewing, which is where we ate last year. I spent almost two days’ per diem on dinner, but holy crap, was it amazing. What, am I supposed to go to Omaha and not order steak? I had a 10 oz. filet, medium rare, with goat cheese, gnocchi, and broccolini. I’d drive back there for another.

The next day, it finally hit me that we’d be in Kansas City, MO, which is home to an old college friend Misty, who now works for Kansas City Rep. I got in touch with her to see if she wanted to meet up, but she was on her way back from Colorado and wasn’t getting back until 11 that night. Sadly, we had to get up early the next morning for an all-day drive, so Misty and I missed each other. Bummer.

One cool thing: The alarm clocks in our Kansas City hotel rooms were iPod docks! I will unashamedly admit that I plugged in my iPod and set the alarm to wake me with Huey Lewis & The News’ “Back in Time,” recreating the end of Back to the Future.

Tomorrow, we set out for the long haul without Michael. I’ll be tour-managing, Chris’ll be moderating, and we hopefully won’t burn anything down.