Day 2 -- Tuesday January 27 Today was better. And worse. And just plain unusual, I guess. I reported to work at 11am and we reached a scene of mine within the hour. It was one that we did not get to yesterday. (Actually, I thought they had done it yesterday without me since I didn't have any lines in it, but no, they just hadn't done it.) It is the introduction of my character to the kids and the audience. The scene was tweaked a bit so that I ended up with a line and a couple of jokes with Martin Mull. We showed the new stuff to the producers later in the day. We'll see if any of it makes it into the episode.

Speaking of producers, let's not forget that the deadline for the network run-through is firm and approaching. At 3:30pm the head honchos (and honchas) will be down at the set looking to see some prime-time quality entertainment. We must be ready.

I broke for lunch and we returned to the gym for the big band scenes later in the afternoon. With the clock ticking we first went over the scenes we blocked yesterday. More lip-syncing and choreography but certainly a lot tighter than yesterday. We pushed our way through them with 3:30pm rapidly approaching.

And next? Well, I'm not sure what happened. I don't mean to make light of it by writing about it here, but something happened that made one of the regulars very upset. She disappeared from the set for a few minutes and when she returned, her eyes were red and puffy and she was not at all into what we were trying to accomplish. So we blocked the remaining two or three scenes, including the only one in which I have any sort of dialogue, with a sad, distracted scene partner just reading her lines and drifting through the blocking. And so, by network run-through time, one could argue that I had rehearsed my only real scene just barely more than zero times.

Oh, and remember how I mentioned that the producers don't get to see the work in progress so they can evaluate it and then make cuts? Well, they make the cuts anyway. I lost a chunk of stuff at the end of the episode. So my last scene has turned into my last line.

As far as the run-through goes, everything went quite smoothly. I guess my fears were unwarranted. I suppose if you do a show like this every week for enough weeks, you come to expect certain levels of polish as the days pass and from the general feeling today, they must be on track this week with their expected progress. So I will continue to keep my mouth shut and play along. Tomorrow we start taping. I have only the introduction scene to shoot. All of the gym scenes will be shot on Thursday and I am scheduled to be off Friday.

Go on to Day 3

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