NOT Castle Hamster!

Yes, amazingly, this blog post is not about Castle Hamster - though it easily could be, for the Trials and Tribulations continue and it's still not finished ...

It's about The Kelpie's Song which is the pantomime I've written for Calder Drama - the local drama group here in Lochwinnoch. Last March I wrote them the community play The Spirit of Lochwinnoch and they still seem to be speaking to me after that - so this latest production is due to be performed on the 24th and 25th of November and rehearsals are well under way.


Now, one of the challenges in The Kelpie's Song is that part of it is set in the underwater kingdom of the King of the Kelpies - there's a local legend that says a wicked kelpie lives under one of our lochs but in the pantomime he lives under the River Calder - and so a set has to be created that looks magical and watery. The other challenge is that The Kelpie's Song being about a kelpie, which is a kind of water-horse, usually white, the actor playing the part has to wear a mask. And it was to the creation of said mask that yesterday I turned my attentions.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of young Allan last night as we swathed his face in plaster-of-paris bandages, but think Revenge of the Mummies mixed in with Phantom of the Opera. After allowing the plaster to dry out we removed it, and I for one was mightily relieved not to find Allan's eyebrows, ears, or other vital parts of him, adhering to the inside ...

So this was what was sitting on my desk this morning when I came downstairs ... and the problem of how to morph it into something resembling a mystical horse - the problem with which I had finally (with difficulty) got myself off to sleep last night - was the order of the day.

If I've ever done anything like this before it's long disappeared into the deepest chasms of my memory, so basically today I was making it up as I went along.

First I patched up some bits that looked a bit threadbare. Then I had a Long Think, and I thought that what I really needed to do was get rid of Allan's understandably 'human' features. So I rolled bits of moist loo paper into little sausages and bound them into place with more bandage ...

.... and this is how it looked at Close of Play this afternoon.

Goodness knows how I stick the ears on. More bandages, I suppose? And since horses have eyes on the sides of their heads, I need to move the location of the eyes away from Allan's own eye-holes NOT FORGETTING that Allan does need to be able to SEE ...

So there we are. Almost makes Castle Hamster look like child's play ...?

What am I saying????