Happy Easter

Happy Easter!  Today's the day, the big finish to a pretty immense weekend for us.  You can see this photo op for Mom and Maddie before the large amount of people are here at the campus.  We're here about two hours early today, but there's already a line outside, people lined up to get a seat in the sanctuary so they can see this massive production.

This morning, we were there getting everyone costumed for one more day, and still doing laundry.  That's a somewhat interesting thing about these productions.  There is a large amount of blood that gets on the clothing that Jesus wears, of course, and on the shroud and on the Romans in the vicinity of Jesus.  All this has to be either spot-cleaned, or put in the laundry.  Mom has wisely created alternate costumes for the alternating services, and meanwhile, we're down in the laundry room waiting for things to wash or dry off.  

Abby is someone that works for production, and she makes sure we all get really well fed.  She takes special care of Mom and Bill, our long-time pianist, who both have pretty special dietary needs.  She gets some grilled items and gluten-free items that are just perfect for breakfast.  Today after the second service there were chicken wings that were really tasty.

It was a long day, and first of all, here are some interesting pictures and videos from the day's services in the main sanctuary.  There are a few videos I took, the first one a short little sequence of Kevin, who plays the part of Jesus, seated on a donkey and ready to go out for the opening Palm Sunday number.

These above are photos from the church photographers.  It's easy to take a fantastic picture in that sanctuary because everywhere you look, it's just so well done on that stage.  Meanwhile, Maddie is still on the big screen at that opening number.  Just prior to Jesus walking out there, a video shows of crowds lining up to see Jesus, waving palms.  The camera lingers on Maddie just long enough to see her peek around with curiosity, and then brighten up at the approach of Jesus.  

One more video that you won't see in too many places.  It's the prep for Jesus.  Now all this time before he's even in the garden, Jesus is wearing elaborate make-up and scars beneath his costume.  As the Romans take him away, he has a very quick turn around where he gets bloodied and prepares to carry the cross on his back.  We have a video that shows the Romans and their cruelty, something we shot a month ago, and while that is going on, there's a super quick process back stage where Camille, Elizabeth, Josh, and Ansley quickly go to work, getting Kevin soaked and covered in blood. 

It's amazingly fast and efficient.  This team has been doing this for four years now, and have it down to precision.  Mom and I have been up there getting bloody items and delivering food to the team from time to time, but largely "the Bloody Buddies" have been in that room the whole weekend, and exhausting process, I'm sure.

Oh, and by the way, we still had KidPak this morning.  I was helping out with that somewhat.  I created this Wisenheimer skit, where kids would find out "what's in your Easter Basket" by way of our famous "biometric scanning device."

The cool factor today was that Maddie herself was operating the slides for the computer in the sound booth.  She was in the control seat helping out this morning, which was pretty awesome.

We had services at 9am, 11am, and then 3pm.  And then... we had clean-up time for a bit.  And then we just had to get home. It wasn't terribly late, but we were all very, very exhausted.  One more thing to do though:  Maddie had an Easter Egg Hunt at the house!

This was a Loki-themed Easter Egg hunt, where different Pop figures had different clues to give.  A few of them involved her looking up a particular date (time travel!) to see what was invented then, and when you knew what it was invented (a video game system?  A car?  A microwave?), then you knew where to find the next clue.  Each clue was wrapped like a scroll with a nice green ribbon, because Loki likes green.

Ultimately, the clues led right back to where things started, an ouroboros, and that's where Maddie found Sylvie's gift - a new sword! - and an Easter basket featuring many of the Funko Pop characters from the Loki series that she got clues from all along.  

She already had a Mobius and Loki and Alligator Loki too.  Now she has Sylvie, Ouroboros, Victor, Ravonna, and Miss Minutes.  Plus, she has some more Loki-themed coffee, some Loki pins, Season One of the "Loki," and a good bit of green plastic eggs, and green jelly beans.  Oh, and the one item we got about nine months ago:  a "Loki" movie poster.  Yeah, that was the last item ever from Disney Movie Rewards, and we finally opened it today.  We had it for Christmas when the thought occurred to us to do a Loki Easter basket.  So yes, we'll see Loki on Maddie's bedroom wall soon enough.  

But for tonight, episode one was just fine.  We popped that in... and that was all the energy we had for tonight.  We did some reading, and we said our prayers too.  It was quite a weekend though, wasn't it?