It’s apparently the summer, and most of my weekends have been doing things to support friends since roughly Memorial Day weekend.
June 12 I was in Iowa City for Riverside Theatre’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to support one of my friends in my Dungeons and Dragons crew. That was helped to happen because I had an intern covering the World Cup Soccer event at the Bijou Movie Theatre. It was a terrific show on an absolutely beautiful night, and apparently, I went on the night many Odyssey theater kids went to support one of their cast members, as there were a number of Mount Vernon people I knew I encountered after the show.
June 19 I was over at Tipton to see “Young Frankenstein” by Cedar County Stoplight Community Theatre to support a friend and fellow cast mate from “Jesus Christ Superstar” who was in the lead role. Since I was there, stopped in to see Ofelia, Elysia, Daijon and Andrea. We ended up grabbing supper before the show, and Elysia realized she knew one of the actors in the production I was going to and wanted to tag along if Daijon would as well.
As I stated on Facebook after the fact – this was one of those PG-13 shows that Uncle Nathan forgot about certain plot elements until I was getting the stink-eye from Elysia about “is this an adult musical?” To which, I said we were at a PG-13 show and supporting friends…
Friday, June 26, it was supporting one of my college friends, Danel Luepke, who was being ordained as a pastor in the Lutheran church. He and his wife, Whitney, were my neighbors in my apartment building in Algona, so it was a kind of reminder of those times and church and him moving from a youth pastor to pastor.
Saturday, June 27 I bumped into my niece, Elysia, while covering Mechanicsville’s Pork Center Days. She was overnighting with a friend, whose dad was one of the vendors at the festival Saturday morning. Elysia and her friend watched the parade with me as I was working (if there was some curly hair in some of my parade shots, that was Elysia).
Last week, it was the “Weird Al” Yankovic concert in Cedar Rapids, as well as catching “Supergirl” in theaters and capped off with a morning Dungeons and Dragons session with my crew Saturday, July 4 in Coralville. The “Weird Al” concert was a delight, and as another Mount Vernon resident said in the merchandise line after the show – a lot of Mount Vernon residents made the trek for the concert as well.
A lot of these adventures have been helped by the six interns that are sharing my byline in the newspaper this summer. Some of them, like Grace Escritt, John Charlson and Breck Goodman have hit the ground running to help provide coverage and knocked it out of the park with early assignments. Others, like Abby Princehouse, Ella McEntaffer and Cadence Dighton – they’ve been on staff or helped cover these communities for a bit now and continue excelling as well.