Moving Forward With Great Speed!

I landed yet another job! I am now an associate director for a non-profit cultural organization. It's a grandiose title for administrative assistant. So it's everything I've been doing for my friend, but now it has an official title and a paycheck. (Yay, paychecks!) It'll be a lot of fun and I'm excited.

Yesterday, we had a fund-raising kick-off for my show and the responses were great! We had some major players in the cultural charity scene and in the community there including the Consulate General from Japan and the Vice-Chair for the DNC who was there as a favor to my producer. I had 2 guys do a staged reading of one of the scenes in the play. The reading went very well (I think the audience was hooked) and then the congressman spoke. Originally, my producer asked if he could just speak briefly on his family's experiences in the Japanese-American internment camps. I was sitting there listening to him and he starts off talking a bit about the play. I figured he would comment a bit on the show based on my description and the scene we performed and then launch into the camps. He just kept talking about the show and as he was talking, I was thinking, "he's talking like he's seen the show. Wait! He HAS seen the show!". One of the playwrights used to live in his district and the congressman saw the show about 5 years ago and was deeply moved and impressed with the story. He kept commenting on what an impressive story it was, how this was a story that needed to be told and the people there needed to fully support this production because it would make such an impact on the Asian/Pacific-American and Jewish-American communities here. It was the best endorsement we could have asked for and we had no idea he was even going to fully endorse the play like he did! We didn't even know he had seen the show before!

After the meeting, my producer and I met back at the office to celebrate and then met with the congressman's staffer who accompanied him and continued celebrating. The congressman called later and invited all of us up to his suite to hang out with him. He is such a laid-back, personable, down-to-earth guy - he was just cool! We finally called it a night 4 bottles of wine later. Definately a productive day!