Student Recital

Ben Crisman and Irene Kao just performed a delightful scene as Peter and Anne from the Diary of Anne Frank.

Improvisational worship

The MasterWits performed comedy improv tonight. We closed it out with enacted prayer and then went into improvisational worship. If they were a bag of popcorn, they wouldn't have been ready until five minutes to curfew. I don't think two seconds ever went by before someone would lead out with a song, prayer or scripture reading. We worshipped the Lord for over an hour and a half, and I think everyone was truly surprised when curfew came around. It's my prayer that this kind of full worship will continue when we meet tomorrow night.

Them's fightin' words

Bob Borwick was our latest master class instructor here at MasterWorks (MasterWorksFestival.org). He is the fight choreographer for Taproot Theatre in Seattle, so he taught us how to stay safe in fight scenes, how to fall without breaking something, and how to respect our fellow actors.

In this shot he's hanging out wth some of our students after a round-table discussion he did with Harvey Johnson, the director of our play, and myself. The topic was finding work in the theatre.

Faculty Recital

We just got back from a fabulous MasterWorks (MasterWorksFestival.org) faculty recital. Besides all the world-class musicians, Harvey and Susie did us proud. Harvey Johnson (director from Pittsburgh) portrayed the title role in a monologue from Othello. Susie Somerville Brown (B'way's CATS) closed out the evening with "Think of Me" from Phantom of the Opera.

Billy Sunday's Field

Billy Graham is preaching this evening in NYC, and I hope you'll pray for his ministry. This morning I just got to perform my short work, "The People Jesus Knew," in this tent, set up on the same field where Billy Sunday (and later, Billy Graham) preached in tent revivals. This morning it was for a group called Men Following Christ. These guys have a vision for this field to be filled with thousands the way it was when the Billies were preaching.

End of week one

We've just finished our first week of MasterWorks, and we're all pretty wiped out. Three wonderful weeks to go!!!

Jellical CATS

Susie Somerville Brown, one of our great theatre faculty here at MasterWorks is teaching our students dance steps from the Jellical Ball from CATS. She was in the closing company of the longest running musical in Broadway history.

Peter Parros

6/21/05 3:50 pm
Peter Parros, Dr. Ben Harris on As the World Turns, is doing his first of two Master Classes here at MasterWorks.

He opened by saying "Can anything good come from Nazarth? Can anything good come from soap operas?" He's showing our students that there can.

His testimony is very inspiring, and he laid out a paradigm for acting.

6/22/05 4:07 pm
Now he's working with our students on their monlogues: great stuff.

Compassion

Joyce and I sponsor two children through Compassion: Riquelmys in the Dominican Republic and Wendy Yoselin in Honduras:

The sponsorship process has been delightful! We know we're impacting their lives in a significant way by the letters, drawings and pictures we receive from them. And those letters, drawings and pictures (not to mention their prayers!) impact our lives as well.

I've travelled with Compassion to Bolivia and Honduras, so I've seen first hand that sponsorship money is being used wisely. In fact they made the The American Institute of Philanthropy's list of Top Rated Charities.

You can read my journal with pictures, and watch a video of my last trip:



I hope you'll choose to sponsor a child today. It will change the world for both of you: Sponsor a child Now!

Caught

I am glad to have been caught in the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God.
--Rich Mullens

Salvation is all about letting yourself get wrapped up in the love of God.

God created us so He could be in relationship with us (Genesis 1:26 and 27).

Unfortunately we blew it (Genesis 3).

To bring us back into releationship God sent his Son Jesus (or Yeshua in Hebrew): John 3:16.

Jesus lived a perfect life, so when he was crucified he became the perfect and final sacrificial Lamb. He took on our sin so that it would no longer keep us from God (II Corinthians 5:21).

All you have to do is trust Jesus (Yeshua) to do this for you (Romans 10:9-13).

You can do this right now! Have the kind of LIFE that's been bouncing me around the stage and around the world. Pray this prayer:

Dear Jesus (Yeshua),
Thank you for loving me. Forgive me of all my sins. Cover them for me. Become Lord of my life and help me to live for you.
Amen.

If you prayed that prayer you can have assurance that you will have life more abundant while living on the earth and life eternal in Heaven. There's no magic to the prayer that's here. It's about trusting Jesus (Yeshua) as lord of your life: trusting that He knows what's best for you because he created you. It's about trusting Him to cover you when you mess up.

I'd love to know if you prayed that prayer. Shoot me an email .

If you're not ready to pray that kind of prayer and really mean it, here are some more things to consider: Who Is Jesus and Knowing God.

Thomas Tornado Tinglehoop and the Three Christmas Clues

Thomas Tornado Tinglehoop and the Three Christmas Clues
Originally uploaded by RichDrama.

My brother got me into a Book Expo held at the Javitts Center here in New York. I was able to leave query letters with SEVEN publishers! It was like walking all around the country in a couple of hours.

Please pray that one of these all-new contacts will choose to publish it.

In the query letter I told them that there are comments about the book online, but at this point I only have one. I received numerous emails encouraging us about the book, but unfortunately my inbox was corrupted. Ach!

If you happened to have read the book and have something good to say about it, please go to RichDrama.com/Tinglehoop and click on "What others are saying..."

Thanks so much!

In Christ Alone,
Rich

Photos from Israel

Though Beth lost her sight at birth, her presence on the trip brought a greater awareness of the details of Israel to the rest of us. Here she is "seeing" a replica of a first century cross.

Other pictures from our trip are here.

There were a few from our trip to the Dead Sea that were taken at a low resolution, so they weren't allowed on that other site. Here they are.

Grammy Award-winning cousin

My brother, Bob (left), was in town for the Book Expo held at the Javitts center. He and his wife, Shannon, run Lightbourne, a small company that creates book and CD covers. Bob won a pretty major award for his cover of Reflections in the Ice.

Between Bob and I is our cousin, Nick Brophy. He was in town to engineer an album for the band, Radio Mundial. He won the Grammy for his work on the album, Tribute to Tradition.

Here we are with Bob's wife, Shannon, at LaGuardia Airport:


Nick's brother John was also in town, but it never worked for all of us to be in one place at one time. John designs backgrounds for video games.


Though the Brophy family never lived near us when we were growing up I think it's cool that we all turned out to be full time artists.

My playwriting mentor honored

Tina Howe, who was my playwriting professor at Hunter College has just received the Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival.

Site Feed Updates

One way to know when my blog is updated is to subscribe with a Site Feed reader. Here are a few Blogger.com recommends:

Bloglines (web-based), and NetNewsWire and Shrook (Mac OS X). More are listed at AtomEnabled.org.

I've been fairly pleased with Bloglines. It updates every hour, so it's not as fast as receiving emails, but could be faster if you check your email only once or twice a day. It has a notifier you can download (Mac or Windows) that will tell you when the site's been updated. If you go with them, here's a link that will set it up for you:





Bloglines is free, as are most of them. A lot of sites are moving to site feed updates because all of our email boxes are getting so over-crowded!