"Guns and Ships" | Up with People Week 6

Title Reference: Guns and Ships from Hamilton: An American Musical

Last week was incredibly busy, but I had so many great experiences. To start off, we officially took our tour “on the road” and went the long way ‘round to Lafayette, CO (hence the title). We did many shows, a bunch of volunteering, got to know each other a little more, and some of us also moved to new host families. All in all, I’d say it was a successful first week on the road.

Shows and Production

We had our first school show of the tour ever this past week! A school show is basically a bite-sized version of the full two-hour show we actually put on in each city we visit. It was a learning experience for everyone involved, but overall it was pretty successful! Throughout the week, our admissions team also interviewed quite a few students from the school we were hosted at so that was a good part of the week as well.

In addition to our school show, we had two regular shows on Wednesday and Thursday night. I was so happy to be over my cold so that I could do the show to the best of my ability. It felt really good to feel like my normal self again! Performing while you’re sick sucks and I would not recommend it. The first night, my Lafayette host family attended the show and the second night, my Denver host family from staging attended the show. It was so cool to be able to see everyone and it’s always exciting to see a friendly face in the crowd when you’re performing.

Last, but definitely not least, we performed at the 2020 Up with People fundraising gala. It is an event the organization puts on every year to help raise money to sustain its efforts, as it is a non-profit organization. The cast put on a few different segments from our show as well as a special number we put together just for the gala. I was very excited to actually be able to play my horn for some sort of Up with People production since I don’t get to do it in the show at all (all thanks to a production staff member who had a vision and encouraged me to see it through!). It was a tiring week performance-wise, but it really did keep us on our toes as we learned to navigate many different performance settings.

Community Action

This was our first week of official community action projects. Community action is the Up with People way of talking about volunteering. For the first round of the tour, I am a crew leader for different community action projects which means I help to organize all the participants and staff going to any given site. The first project I worked on was for a service called Meals on Wheels, and they help to deliver food to community members in need based on age, disability, or income-restriction. Our job was to decorate meal bags for food that was going to be delivered to residents of the community. It was a long day and it took us a while, but as a group we decorated over 400 bags! The second project I did was to help volunteer at a bilingual school in the town of Lafayette. The school focuses on building bridges between English and Spanish and practices multilingualism in the curriculum. I’ve never been to a school with a system like that, even though the school I worked at prior to Up with People had a very high Hispanic population (in which some of my students knew very little English). We did different classroom workshops with them and also put on a small team building olympics for a very large and energetic group of first graders. Last but not least, I along with some other cast mates were pulled for a promotional performance on the local Denver Fox News station. Some of our staff members talked about an overview of the Up with People program and plugged the gala while the rest of us sang a song to promote the show and honor Black History Month. It was quite the varied week in terms of volunteer projects which I was very grateful for.

Host Family Living

I absolutely loved my Lafayette host family! They actually live in Louisville, CO which is the next town over. They are some of the nicest and most giving people I’ve ever met and I feel very blessed to have been placed in their home. It was a family of four with two daughters who were 14 and 16, and they actually go to the high school that we did most of our activities at for the week. There was also the cutest boxer named Milly, and my roommate was Kurumi from Japan! I had lots of yummy food, good laughs, and even a couple of jam sessions. On our host family day, they took us to a pedestrian mall called Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder, CO and we got to go into a bunch of different shops and restaurants. One of the stores was called “Into the Wind” which I would describe as a PG-13 version of Spencers. It was also my first time trying Taiwanese street food, which was so delicious! In addition to the actual food, I also walked away with a giant bag full of taffy and a boba tea. Due to the sheer amount of sugar consumed, I’d consider it a successful outing. Once we got back from the mall, we watched the movie Bombshell which was awesome. We also got to meet some more of their family members that evening! It was so hard to say goodbye because it felt like we barely had time to get to know them, but it was so nice to have met them and I hope we stay in touch!

That’s all for this week! Our next stop on the trip is in Flagstaff, AZ and I hope you’ll stay tuned to read about it!