When I awoke Tuesday morning, the day of the scavenger hunt, I was ready to go despite the terrible weather. It also happened to be the day I was to open in Rent, so a busy day all around. I made sure to wake up particularly early to be ready for it all, even though I was exhausted from hours and hours of rehearsal during the last days to weeks. As I walked into class, I scouted my competition….only kidding, but in all honesty what resulted was a highly competitive contest, and I was not about to be bested! My team darted out of the classroom at the first opportunity. Sure you can plan, but you can’t win from the classroom. It was a strategy that worked quite well, as we headed straight for Times Square, and got off to an early 5-0 lead on the other teams.  We decided to begin before our fourth teammate arrived, as she met us in Times Square wasting very little time. I took the initiative of leading my team to all of the spots that I knew of and were relatively close to each other in order to score our early points. Many of these locations I only know  of because of trips I’ve taken in my previous classes, like with Professor Krebs to the Signature Center (the building designed by Frank Gehry), and around there I knew of some off Broadway theaters as well. I also knew that the Lyceum Theater was 100+ years old from a tour we took with his class. It seems to have served me well. It was great to get a chance to work as a team with some of my classmates, and we really were trying to win. Unfortunately, a second place finish was the best we could do, as we ended the day with 20 points…not a bad showing at all (especially for a rainy day). What I learned about theater history from this scavenger hunt was more from what the other teams posted, especially those that went for the more obscure finds. Like, who would have thought that one of the theaters (and this one we found) was financed by selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees? Being a big baseball fan, I had to figure that one out. And the theater where Rent was first performed? Well, I know from researching for my dramaturgy packet that the answer is the New York Theater Workshop, but that was a little too out of the way for our plan of attack. Some of the other answers I didn’t know, I looked up, and decided that they were too long of a train ride away. And others were answered in rather creative ways by the opposing teams, with more than one answer satisfying a clue. Overall, it was one of the more interesting ways to spend my Tuesday morning-afternoon. I just wish the weather was better because it probably wasn’t too smart to run around in the rain with a show to perform that same evening, but even in defeat, it was worth it (even if that defeat could have been offset by ONE more find). There’s always next time, and by that I mean, now I’ll be able to stop and think about the places of theater history that most of the time, I’ve just been passing by. And I was also very happy to get feedback from my teammates that I had shown them a thing or two that they had not known before. But…we still should have won, we worked so well together. But, congrats to team 1 I guess…and thank you Professor Caplan for the adventure!