STINKY LOG STARDATE July 4th – 6th We said goodbye to our friends, dads, lovers, and dogs on Monday, July 4th, and headed east on the 10 freeway. The first show and the pre-show rehearsals are in Las Vegas, and you know what that means!! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

One armed bandits till the sun comes up! Suzi won big time. I lost it all. We saw Don Rickles one night and Phillis Diller the next. The rehearsals are at 9:30am (ouch!) the morning of the 5th and will be our only chance to practice and get our sounds right. It is also our first opportunity to see our stage set up and running (this is our first attempt at dressing our stage, and Vegas makes it seem all so natural!). The set is hard to describe. It is sorta a snow/ice drift fantasy. It was designed by a guy who puts these types of things together for the Santa section in malls at Christmas. It looks cool, suspended icicles, snow drifts on our amps, and a ten-foot snowman with a carrot nose and a black stovepipe hat. There is one tiny problem, though: this guy has never had to make one of his sets portable or withstand weather or be taken apart, put into boxes, then put back together again. All that could go wrong went wrong. The opaline coating that gives the flakes their snow-like glimmer started to come off when touched, all the boxes the sets came in where the wrong sizes, and to top it off, a warm, desert, wind kicked up and one of the snowflakes went renegade, flying off it’s pole and landing in the arms of one of the union guys (ooops). Live and learn. Hopefully, this will all work out. I will keep you posted. Finch