Australian Tour Journal

Tuesday, January 4
Today was exhausting! We had rehearsal all day for the Opening Ceremony. We arrived at Olympic Park and were shown to our dressing room area backstage...well, ok, it was actually a storage room. Volunteers kept walking thru with signs and other materials and would stack them against the wall. Odd...

Paul and I met with the technical staff of the Festival and the BMW Edge Theatre. Everyone was very nice and accommodating and we were able to quickly work thru most of the technical issues associated with performance of Mosaic.

After the show, we received a message from the cast that food was necessary! One problem with Olympic Park is even though its a beautiful sporting facility, it is quite isolated from downtown, so there is limited access to cafes, restaurants etc except for the restaurants located on the complex itself...all of which were closed. So we made a quick trip to a nearby Subway, got some subs and chips and delivered them back to the hungry folks at the park.

There was a dress rehearsal scheduled to start at 6:00...then it got pushed back to 7:00. Our part is somewhere in the middle AFTER about an hour long portion where all the athletes parade in. The Deaflympics, in existence for 80 years, is the second largest sporting event in the world, second only to the Olympics, and over 3500 athletes will be partiicipating....so that's a long parade of athletes.

A few hours later everyone is hungry again. It wasnt helping that down the hall in other dressing rooms there were several platters of food put out for the celebrities and some of them weren't even there! So...well, let's just say the celebrities had less food after we made a casual stroll pass their dressing rooms.

The show is set up so that each continent of the world has a presentation. We are in The Americas section with other performers from that region. The lead singer for our song, Go West (by the Village People) is Sophie Monk. Other celebrities in the show are Travis Collins, and Guy Sebastian (the Australian Idol!)

Stay tuned....

Max-i-mime tries out his cowboy costume	Handlers parade with dozen of over-sized puppet athletes
The Deaf youth of Australia participate in a song with Sophie Monk.	Sophie poses with young fans