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Dan Diana and I went to Anything But Costumes on Sunday. ABC is a prop rental shop housed in a series of old barns and silos down in Flemington, NJ. Pretty amazing. Entire rooms stacked with steamer trunks, wicker wheelchairs, guns, taxidermy, furniture from any era; all really well organized. Among other things, we reserved two working 9' lamp posts (Central Park, circa 1880), a wooden plague cart, an authentic Captain's wheel, and about a mile of thick rope rigging.

On Monday Dan found an affordable studio close to where he lives in Jersey City and will be working this week on the ship figurehead (foam, natch, but made to look like gray weathered wood), along with Herr Knock's straitjacket, the design of which is based on Houdini's brown leather one; he's using an old worn bomber as the base.

Rehearsals have been going really well. I stipulated that all actors be off book by the first one, and most were, which means we were able to start blocking and working on small bits of physcial business almost immediately. Last night we fine-tuned a really chilling scene in which the mayor, played brillantly by Michael Jarmus, stands atop an old wooden box addressing a bedraggled crowd of town elders. The mayor offers public statements and directives regarding the plague, as the small crowd chants, with hollow, vacant voices, the lines of the nursery rhyme, "Ring Around the Rosy," each line echoing and infantilizing the mayor's dire mandates.

And, finally, just ordered the "I Heart NOS" buttons and T-shirts. We're trying to come up with a lot of cool tie-in merchandise. Dan and I are both big fans of Frank's and thought small bottles of hot sauce might be a fun item. On the way back from ABC, we batted around some label names, the best of which is NOS RED CROSS SAUCE (the red cross of the plague figures prominenty in the production).

Thanks for reading! More updates soon!