So, as I had mentioned not too long ago, Liam is essentially the musical director or the piano player for this radio play happening in a nearby theater.

And I went with him to his first rehearsal, and it was tough.

Your Daily Lex It didn’t have to be as tough as it was.

And the good news is we made it work.

He actually did a phenomenal job.

But it was tough because the score is unhelpful.

The score had almost none of the cues.

So we only had a digital copy of the score, you know, just some scanned images they had sent our way.

And when we got there for that first rehearsal, Liam got the paper score and also the paper script.

And so I’m looking through the script and seeing, oh, here’s where it’s cuing the music, which he had no way to know what it was.

So that first night, I’m reading along in the script as they’re going and telling him, okay, you’re going to start in three, in two, now, or you’re going to start when they finish this.

And if there were short bits of downtime, because there was no music in a scene, I’ll just start writing in the score, the line that he has to listen for when he’ll start playing.

When we came home, we did some more work of making sure that every single cue was written in for him.

But it’s hard work, I would think, to sit at the piano and be listening to all the dialogue and make sure you don’t miss the sentence or whatever that you’re listening for, because he can’t write the whole script in there in the score.

So you really have to hear the sentence that you’ve written down.

If they said it wrong, or they don’t say it, then you don’t know to start playing.

It’s tricky.

So in any larger production, they would have somebody who was probably cuing him, just given the way this show works, who would tell him, okay, now, for these different musical cues, but he’s got to do it all on his own.

I’ll be there with him for the first half.

There’s four shows, so I’ll be there with him for two of the shows, and I can sit with him if he wants me to, and not if he doesn’t, just to help him with those cues.

But he’s going to have to do it on his own for the other two shows, because I’ll be out of town, in Richmond, visiting Casey and doing other things.

But so, like I said, the first rehearsal, I was there the whole time.

The second rehearsal, which was yesterday, I had my own rehearsal for a band first, and then joined them.

And when I joined them, they were really just finishing up.

And so I asked them, how did it go?

And they said, yeah, it was good, because of all the stuff we’d written down and the prep we’d done the day before.

It was like, I only missed one, and it was fine.

And so then when we were all done, we ran some songs with them, because there’s a couple songs that the cast sings, even though it’s not really a musical.

And I was saying to him when everything was finished, so do you think you should rehearse again in the next week or so on your own, before your next rehearsal, because he’s got a week plus off from rehearsal?

He’s like, no, probably not.

It’s not very hard, and since it’s all instrumental, anything that is hard, I can just skip, and it doesn’t even matter.

And I was like, well, what a great attitude.

So he was actually quite cool and thoughtful about it, but it’s interesting to have him work on developing that skill set, because I think that he could be a musical director for a lot of shows.

The part that he has no experience in is teaching vocals, and so I was kind of using him as the instrument and me as the teacher to help the cast learn these two or three songs they have to do, because he was just like, let me play it through from beginning to end.

Let me play it through from beginning to end.

I’m like, hey, why don’t we just play this section a couple times so people can get it?

And now let’s show them how they get from that section to the next section, versus just playing stuff that I think is basic for somebody who’s got the experience to it.

But he doesn’t have that experience yet.

He’s developing it.

So pretty fun.

And he really, like I said, he really did an impressively good job.

Now it’s Thursday, November 21st.

That means it’s one week from American Thanksgiving, and I don’t know, some other special thing that also happens every year on November 28th is my birthday.

I think I fall in between, meaning there are some people who get way too excited about their birthday, and some people who are like, no, my birthday is meaningless.

Don’t celebrate it at all.

I’m in the middle.

Listen, it’s an achievement to live a year.

Have you seen this world?

So I don’t know.

I don’t think that people have to go out of their way, but I think birthdays are nice and should be celebrated.

So now you know.

Get ready to celebrate me on Thanksgiving.

I would like you to have a feast in my honor.

Thank you so much.

That’s all I got.

We’ll talk again sometime soon.

Lex! Lex!