Stratford, Prince Edward Island
It's kind of weird how things come together. First off, I pretty well finished that new replacement song I was talking about before - all except for 2 lines I want to re-examine. Didn't have a title for it forever, and suddenly it came to me - Character Analysis. It's almost out of place among the other titles, but since in the song the characters are chatting about Maud it creates this trippy double meaning, and I love those. But it was a hard labour - I spent the whole weekend trying to write it!

Conversely, we changed the opening of Act II - more to the point, we pushed it forward by 2 years. Fine, except it made half of the lyrics in Mistress of the Manse obsolete. And, after a previous attempt at fixing it that didn't work, I was really dreading tackling it again. But today I decided to take a whack at it, and it didn't end up being nearly so hard! Of course, I didn't have to rewrite the whole thing - just certain sections. I think we now have something that works. I'll know tomorrow - I usually have to let lyrics sit overnight and come back to them to make sure. That, and Leo gets back from L.A. tomorrow, so they will also require approval by his eyes!

Mistress of the Manse, though, is kind of the set-up for how Maud felt she had to put her duties as a minister's wife above her writing. And here I am today, trying to write new lyrics in between finally getting to multiple chores that have sat undone for too long. Just sort of got into what I call my "Donna Reed Syndrome", and when that comes, I have to clean, because once it passes I don't feel like it anymore. So I'd work on a line, go do laundry, work on another line, clean the bathroom, have to come back to the song in the middle of it because I got an idea, and so on. But it was strangely fitting considering the subject matter!

Now I just have to bridge one gap that occurred when Leo shortened the 11 o'clock number, and I may have a workable libretto. Although I still have to get 6 minutes out of the thing! I did some consolidations and somehow only lost 17 seconds. Time for the dramaturg again, because Mikey's stuck. But I do intend to read it through again for continuity, and maybe something will come to me then.

85 days and counting.