Oof, okay, I delayed a good long while again. We've got a big one today, it's Mason Ellison.
As with most of my friends and acquaintances at this point, I first met Mason when working on the 2015 performance of Spamalot. When the principal knight actors like myself were added to the "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" number, Mason led the way in the big whimsical umbrella dance. I once heard him expressing some frustration and fear about if he was getting the choreography right... people being vulnerable always wins me over. All my life I'd been told that everyone else is struggling through life just as hard as me, and I did not believe it because nobody else looked like they were struggling. I value the honesty of anyone who'll admit it. And I made sure that he knew that he was the one I'd been watching to make sure I was getting the steps right -- he'd absolutely been getting it right.
We kinda stayed in touch afterward, and when I made my return to Quincy a little over two years later, we reunited when I was ensemble on She Loves Me and he signed on as crew. And a couple months after that is when I started TAPAS. I brought Mason on board right away because I had him in mind to play the master assassin Artemis Entreri in my Drizzt musical -- I still think that's gonna work out perfectly whenever we get to it.
And in that time, he showed me a play he had written, Better Yet? And when I talked about it and he saw how clearly I understood it, he wanted me to play the lead role. During the pandemic, I pondered how we might still put some art out in the world by producing it as an audio drama. And when I returned to Quincy yet again in December of 2020, we started recording it little by little as pandemic restrictions slowly began to be lifted away.
And so in July of 2021, the first and still only complete TAPAS fiction project was unveiled, and it was Mason's thing.
In the time since then, he's jumped on board our main two stories of Keys & Kingdoms and Irregular Fantasy! - producing, co-writing, he's into it, and he made a last-minute takeover of the role of Mordekai when the actors were first assembled and recorded. As an outsider to fantasy gaming, he's great at helping make sure everything makes sense, as most of us are from inside that world and can't quite see it from without.
Popcorn Culture Podcast was mostly his idea, a way to produce consistent content while working on our big visual media. It hasn't been consistent, holidays and stuff, but we're jumping back on pretty soon. He's proved himself a vital core member of the team, part of the "Team Salmon" that consists of our most important founding members.
In the present timeline, the production of Matilda mentioned in Dominic's entry is still going on, haven't worked with either of them in a while as that rehearsal is in its endgame, so we're taking February kind of nice and easy as far as production, and hoping to hit the ground running again in March.
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