Easter 2023

Easter is here, and today we spent literally every bit of the sunlight hours at Free Chapel, starting out somewhere around 5am and leaving around 9pm or so.  It was a long, long day!  We had three performances again, adding to the three the day before and the one on Friday night before that, concluding with seven total run-throughs in front of packed audiences.  That doesn't include the multiple performances before that, the dress rehearsals and so on.  In any event, we were tired, but we got to the church just before sunrise, and everyone was getting ready to go for another great day.

It's such a powerful production, a moving emotional telling of the greatest story ever told.  Ivan was fantastic as Jesus, but anyone involved in this was a hero, playing such a wonderful part.  That includes Maddie's who we saw projected on the screens at the beginning, and then in person - Jesus always came to her to give her a quick hug before heading down the aisle for the Palm Sunday portion of the story.  We had a donkey, horses, a massive scrim that falls at a key moment, many dancers, singers, and lots of costumed performers too.  The lighting and projections were amazing, as were the video clips and narrations we created for last time.  It was a spectacular Easter production.

We didn't have time to go home, so we stayed at the church.  I picked up some take-out food from Chef Wang's, and the three of us had our Easter dinner right there.  We sat at my desk to enjoy some Chinese food for a while.  Cast members and staff went off in various directions, quite a few finding a place to just sit there at the church and take a nap.  Meanwhile, I found some Big Foot footprints on the ground that I directed Mom's attention to.  Together, we followed the tracks through the auditorium, finding a few eggs along the way with chocolate inside them.  The prints led us backstage, and into the hallway and then eventually to the stairwell, where we found this:

It's Mom's Easter basket this year!  There's Big Foot cookie cutters, Crunchie bars, a Big Foot Tumbler, Big Foot socks, a collection of music by Saxquatch (the saxophone-playing Sasquatch), a Big Foot sized Crunchie Bar Easter egg, and even a jigsaw puzzle made using a picture of a trip we made to the Big Foot Museum recently.  It was a nice surprise.  And Maddie had a trail of eggs to follow too on her own unique scavenger hunt.

Each of the Kingdom Keepers left a clue inside an egg somewhere in the church, and Maddie had to use the clues inside the egg to find a page number and a word located on that page to find where the next clue was.  

She found the word "backstage" in one of the books, and went there for her egg, found in a basket "pushed up there" by the Fairly known as Amanda.  

Later, here's one she found on a rock wall, because she found the word "climbing" in one of the other books.  Charlene left her this clue, which of course led to another one from a later book.

And here we are at the end of the hunt.  She found the word "Vinylmation" in the book "The Syndrome," which led her to the Vinylmation that I have on my desk, which of course is where the basket was at the end.  The basket itself has Pop figures of characters from the original series, including the three villains Malificent (of course), Cruella da Ville, and the Evil Queen.  But there's also Mickey Mouse too.  And you can see dead center of it all the latest Kingdom Keepers book, "Kingdom Keepers Inheritance:  The Shimmer," which we'll start reading pretty soon.  Mom got a signed copy of the book for Maddie.  Oh, and we have hologram eggs in there, translucent Easter eggs that have all kinds of jelly beans inside.

So one last performance at 6pm was there, and it was a party afterwards.  It was a tremendous amount of labor, particularly for Mom, who spent a lot of time fixing things or creating costumes at the last minute for last-minute casting decisions.  But it all worked out, and the end result was something wonderful.  Here are just a few more pictures from the night.

Maddie and her friend Lilia sat and watched the more painful parts of the production together from backstage.  It was very emotional, to say the least.

All in all, it was a wonderful Easter.  And again, here is one of the biggest heroes of the night.

Mom did so much.  No one except God knows the hours she kept, the time spent working on and on and on, even during the production itself.  It started so long ago, the work, work, work.  But she helped make it all happen, with so many props and costumes and helmets and spears and swords and palms and staffs and pottery and cups and headdresses and so on.  

It took some time to clean up afterwards, but we got it done together, and we got home - as you could imagine - super exhausted.  But it was a memorable and wonderful Easter.