Progress!

We started cleaning up the back yard yesterday.

I bought a box of forty extra-stout garbage bags, and four of us stuffed them with junk that should have been disposed of long ago.

Now there are forty bags sitting at the curb for the garbage pickup, and a small dent made in the mess.

Treasures were found, though...some of Addy's barrels...Jim's high school class ring, and the original mouse from the theater.

Perhaps I should explain the mouse.

Ponsa ponsa time, back when there were very few theaters in Austin, the Austin papers used to send critics out here to the hinterlands to review our plays. Usually the compliments they paid us were backhanded, to say the least. Things like, "standard community theater fare," or, "for a small town theater, they do quite well." Once, a set was described at "cheesy."

From then on, there has been a mouse on every set. Sometimes it's hidden, but it's always there. In the drawer of a desk...lurking in a baseboard...behind a vase on a mantel. This, pictured above, is the first mouse we had. At some point, it was discovered to be missing (now we know why), and another was procured, and another...the director of the current show passes it on to the director of the next, and so on.

We have gone through several mice over the years...there is one in my purse right now, to be placed on stage at the appropriate time.

"Waiting for Godot" will have two.