Lounging... Its fun to reinvigorate! National Comedy Theatre Phoenix is in year four and we felt we were ready and excited to push it to the next level. We did some cool stuff this year, we built the stage and updated our lighting. That wasn’t the whole idea though… we actually started the process of planning the Lounge sooooo long ago… Simple plan (yeah right) move the ticket booth to the current concession area and remodel the Blue Room into a cool, classy, comfortable lounge where we will serve our regular concessions and soon, beer and wine as well. Our vision was for a place our SuperFans to relax and be awesome before the show, at half time and after the show in a place that invited hanging out and having conversations. As always, we started off by not only putting the cart before the horse but we pretty much put the cart in the middle of the living room before we even thought of finding a horse… that’s how we roll. Not purely by choice, but there it is. In hindsight, ripping out the wall was probably, logically, the LAST step to undertake… but the opportunity to hit something with a sledgehammer isn’t one to pass up lightly so that ended up being the FIRST thing we did… and as such we ended up with a big black plastic sheet up in the hall for a couple of awkward weeks. There are no old adages about knocking down walls. If only Benjamin Franklin had once said “we who knocks down walls before first furnishing the room within has black plastic sheeting in his future…” we may have thought twice about the fun of sledgehammers. And if old Ben had also offered a quip about how “finding a commercial style bar is darn near impossible, so get your Home Depot credit card in order before you take hammer to perfectly good wall…” we might have had an easier time of things. Luckily Ben DID say “beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy” so at least we had motivation! Finally things have started to take shape. We found a cool old bar at Stardust that had obviously been salvaged from the house of some very fancy and elegant human being. Lucky for us, that human being decided to get even fancier and more elegant and donated their vintage hardwood bar to Stardust where we snapped it up gleefully. We set to seeing it upcycled and repurposed it to fit our room. “youre going to paint that beautiful wood?” is an indignant phrase I heard a fair few times during our build out process… yes. Im going to paint that beautiful wood. Look around… this place is a festival of color, life and fun… this “elegant” and “fancy” hardwood bar was probably perfect for the stoic English gentleman who recently had it ripped out of his palacial estate… but for us it’s a bit too stodgy. It needs to get on board the NCT phoenix train. So I painted the beautiful wood, built an extension, and pilfered the cabinet doors to, as The Dude would say “really bring the room together.” And now the finishing touches are being finally touched. Im doing what I do best, rediscovering and repurposing long forgotten items and bringing them into our world. The result is coming soon, and it will surely be cause for celebration, casual hanging out, and further moving NCT into the realm of greatness.