Legally Blonde Is Complicated

 The first time I did Legally Blonde, it was with 3D Theatricals in October 2013.  I was playing one of the Keyboard books, which meant I was using MainStage.  

After finishing the programming, I decided to count the number of patch changes because I could tell that there were a LOT of them.  The final number was 320.  

Normally, a keyboard book for a show will run 150-200 patches.  Some shows have a lot fewer.  "Company" has 75.

When I did Legally Blonde for NoSquare Theater in 2024, the music director pointed out there were "a LOT of key changes" in the score.  So I decided to count them.  

Final number?  115 in Act 1, and 71 in Act 2 for a whopping total of 196.  "Chip On My Shoulder" in Act 1 has 32 key changes alone.

The moral is clear:  If you don't like playing in lots of different keys, then maybe Musical Theater isn't for you.

Hidden Mickey Wiki is almost ready to go

Mrs. Pianoman and I got our first annual passes in 1997, and started going about once a week.  Within a few months, I had discovered Tom Shaw's "Hidden Mickeys of Disneyland" site, and was forever hooked as a "Hidden Mickey Huinter".

Tom stopped posting updates sometime around 2006, and I'm not sure why.  Updates that should have been posted never appeared.  (For example, the "other hidden characters" from Country Bear Jamboree in the new Winnie The Pooh ride in Critter Country.)  It was never clear to me whether Tom was just burnt out, or whether it was something worse.

So that's when I got the idea of creating a wiki-based Hidden Mickey site, and registered "hiddenmickeywiki.com".  Due to the nature of Hidden Mickeys, and how they can appear and disappear at the whims of Imagineers and Cast Members, I thought it made more sense for Hidden Mickey information to be in a wiki format.  Perhaps a community solution would be better than just a single monolithic site.

The domain registration landed in my hosting account, and it has been there ever since.  Work on HiddenMickeyWiki never got started, mainly due to life getting in the way.  Work, musical theater, family, etc. etc. etc. -- there just never seemed to be time to get started on such a large project.

Retirement changed all that.

I still have work to do on California Adventure and the Disneyland Resort (including Downtown Disney).  Once that content has been migrated from Tom's site, I'll be ready to move all the data over to it's permanent home.

I'm going to be using my retirement blog to post updates and info about the site.  Makes more sense to do that than to create a new blog for it.  The site is directly related to retirement anyway, so it seems to be a good fit.