The Weston Playhouse Regatta

The starting line...

Today was the day!  The annual Weston Playhouse Regatta!

Every year, the Playhouse community comes together  to race home-made boats (or at least flotation devices) down the West River from behind the Weston Marketplace to the dam just behind the Playhouse.  The rules are simple: a team can spend up to $25 for supplies, but the rest of their boat/raft/contraption must be made of found objects.  Every member of a team who helps to build the boat has to fit on it as it goes down the river.

There were about 7 or 8 teams competing this year (it was sometimes hard to tell).  There were teams from the scene, paint, and costume shops, a few members of Weston's 2012 Young Company, a stage management team, company management interns, some sound engineers...  And they used everything from plastic bins to water cooler jugs to sealed trash cans to try to stay afloat, all the while paddling along with shovels, duct tape-covered brooms, and maybe even a binder or two.  The scene shop (the men standing on the barge below) struggled getting under a few low-hanging branches, but they pulled ahead and won the race.

All in all, it was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon off.

And no regatta would be complete without the obligatory call of "Check yourselves for leeches"!

Mid-race...