Calvin and the Dinosaur Museum (RE-POST from 9/3/11)

While I am preparing for my upcoming performance, Chess the Musical, I am rerunning this beginning-of-the-school-year post from 2011. Enjoy!

With the Labor Day holiday approaching, I have had less time to craft a post full of clever witticisms. So I decided to let my students do the work this week. The following anecdote occurred during a second grade class while my student teacher was attempting to introduce herself to the kids. For those of you who have children or work with children, you know you can't make this stuff up.

My student teacher had just shown the kids some pictures from her trip to Italy when little towheaded Calvin raised his hand. She called on him, and he wagged his finger at her, saying authoritatively.

“I’m Calvin with a C. Okay. When I grow up, here's what I'm going to do. I’m going to travel the whole entire world and find every dinosaur fossil in the whole entire world and bring all of them back to Idaho and put them in a huge museum, and I’m going to build it on the plains. I'm going to call it the World Museum, and it's going to have three rooms, Cabella’s size.”

All of a sudden, another second grader named Hank became very excited. He turned around to face Calvin.

“Are we friends, Calvin? Are we friends?"

"Well, yes," Calvin answered Hank abruptly.

"Can I help you now that we're friends?”

Calvin turned his wagging finger on Hank and said sternly, “Now, Hank, here’s how it’s going to be. You can help me find the fossils.”

As the class walked out of the music room, Hank bounced over to me.

"I’m going to help Calvin find fossils because I’m his friend now!”

Later that day, I told Calvin's teacher about the unusual entertainment in music class that morning.

"Oh yes," his teacher said as I finished my tale through a fit of laughter. "I've heard about this dinosaur museum. Calvin's got it all planned out!"

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

As Summer Draws to a Close . . .

My summer is drawing to a close in the best way possible. Unfortunately, because I am having such a great time, I am also finding it difficult to update my blog. I will just share a few of the highlights from the past couple of weekends. Maybe I'll be able to go into more detail later (especially about the cutie in the middle of the page) . . .

1. Rise Against: My husband, Dan, and I went to the Rise Against concert. Dan (yes, quiet Ninja Dan!) actually asked some strangers if we could share their table. This was mostly for my benefit since I have a hard time seeing at concerts. They were happy to share because it meant they could take smoke breaks, and we could save their seats. They also told us we looked about their age . . . twenty-four.

Best. Concert Friends. Ever.

2. Visiting My New Nephew: The morning after the concert, Dan and I drove to Pocatello to meet Desmond, my new nephew. He was only five days old at that time, and I am hoping to go into more detail in the next few weeks, once my schedule calms down. (P.S. I did get permission from my brother and sister-in-law to plaster these adorable photos all over my blog!)

This picture raised some eyebrows on Facebook, like, "Hey, look what happened to Dan and me over the weekend!"

This is the father, guys, calm down.

3. Rehearsals for Chess the Musical: Rehearsals are in full force for the latest production. I chose this as a highlight because I get to be in a show with, not only gorgeous music, but some of my favorite people as well. You may remember my "chess experience" blog post from a couple of weeks ago.

4. Shakespeare: Dan and I watched our penultimate Idaho Shakespeare Festival production for the season. It is always sad to have to wait another year for more Shakespeare, but we really enjoyed watching King Lear last weekend.

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

[Don't] Ring My Bell (RE-POST FROM 7/19/13)

Tonight, my husband, Dan, and I spent some time crawling around the living room floor in an attempt to avoid some guy who rang our doorbell. It made me think of this blog post from 2013. 

It's summer, and that means I am more likely to be at home when people come to our door, for one reason or another. Some of you might be thinking, "I don't like solicitors either." But it's not just the solicitors that make my husband and I roll our eyes. It's everyone, even the Girl Scouts.

(NOTE: I am not a Girl Scout hater. I was a Girl Scout. I just don't like answering the door. I buy at least $36 worth of cookies every year from my Girl Scout students at school.)

Dan and I don't just get annoyed. We deny the doorbell even rang.

I have been known to stay in the office or hide silently behind the refrigerator door in the kitchen until the doorbell ringer leaves.

And if the bell rings while Dan and I are in the living room and visible from the the front door, we hit the floor and spend the next five or six minutes hidden behind our couch.

One time, it was a neighbor friend of ours who knocked on the door, without the least intention of selling us anything. Finally, he called my cell phone. I blamed it on the fact that I was listening to my iPod. (I was actually listening to my iPod.)

"You are entitled to not answer your door, I guess," the neighbor said.

The other afternoon, the doorbell rang, and I fell to floor like I was on a black ops mission. I turned off the TV from my prone position. It turned out it was just a package, and the delivery person had left as soon as the bell sounded.

That same day, a guy with a clipboard had knocked on the door earlier, and I was writing in the office. Perhaps, that is why UPS made me a little jumpy.

The clipboard man came back that evening while Dan was washing dishes and I was reading on couch.

At the doorbell, I crouched beneath the sofa. Dan crawled over to me.

"Is he gone?" he whispered. (Later, Dan said he was only crawling around the floor to make fun of me.)

I don't know what is wrong with us (or, probably, mostly me). Maybe we don't like answering the door for the same reason we don't like answering the phone. Leave a brochure, and we will think about our decision to give money to your cause.

Otherwise, we end up with fast food discount cards we never use or $5 "cookie mix" that consists of a bag of flour and Quaker Instant Oats.

"Maybe we should just get a sign that says, 'No Solicitors,' so we don't have to crawl around all the time," Dan suggested the other day.

"Maybe we should just get a sign that says, 'No People in General,'" I said.

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

The Night I Learned to Play Chess

Once upon a time, a kid I used to babysit tried to teach me to play chess. Because he was eight and had the attention span of a Labrador puppy, he just laughed at me when I didn't remember all of the crazy rules.

Fast forward twenty-plus years, I have been cast in a musical called Chess about a Cold War chess tournament between a Russian and an American (Boris Spassky vs. Bobby Fischer, anyone?). My character in the show is the American player's "second," a sort of assistant who researches opponents and helps prepare strategies. And if the first player dies (I guess a chess match can last so long that the game outlives the players), it's up to the second to finish the player's chess commitments.

Disclaimer: I am going to make light of something that I have realized some people take very seriously. I might even simplify some definitions. A while back, I posted a glib Facebook message about two guys playing chess next to me in a coffee shop, and I immediately received how-to-play-chess links and words of caution about orienting the chess board correctly on stage because apparently chess aficionados care a lot about these things.

So . . . no angry e-mails about how I truly don't understand the chess experience.

"I should teach you how to play chess," said (guess who?) none other than my husband, Dan, when I was cast in the role.

He was much more patient than that eight-year-old I babysat.

He taught me terms like en passant, promotion, check, and checkmate, none of which I execute successfully yet. Sometimes though, I yell out "En passant!" mid-game just for fun.

He taught me "white on the right," meaning that the white square should be to the right of the opponent playing the white pieces, and the queen is on its own color for both players. How's that for orientation, friends?

There's also this thing called "castling," and it sounds totally dirty but it's not because . . . well . . . it's chess, and as the American player says at one point in the musical, "I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine." (Get it? Chess players are too cerebral to bother with . . . you know what?) But "castling" is my new code word for "sex."

I've also gained a perspective on some of the vocabulary in the musical. I've learned the arbiter is a sort of referee.

When one character refers to a gambit (an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage), are we talking about a literal gambit, or are the people the sacrificed pawns in this case?

A chess game is divided into three parts, an opening, middlegame, and endgame. It just so happens that "Endgame" is also the title of a four-part song at the end of the show. It signifies the end of the chess match, but it also serves as a metaphor for the Russian players' psyche when he has to make an ultimate, definitive choice.

I learned how to move each chess piece, which is much more complicated than checkers.

Dan quizzes me before each game on each "character"—Dan: "chess piece"—and how it moves.

Me: "This is the horse"—Dan: "knight"—"and it moves in an L-shape, two squares to one, and it can jump over 'characters'"—Dan: "chess pieces."

Me (after the game): "That was kind of fun."

Dan: "It takes a lot of strategy. I can only think one or two moves ahead."

Me: "I can only think of how to get away from you and, even then, I'm not so successful."

So far, Dan has beaten me every time.

If you are in the Boise area this fall and would like to see Chess the Musical, here are the dates:

September 10-12 at 7:30 pm & September 12 at 1:30 pm

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

How a Couple of Clumsy Incidents Could Be the End

Last year, I published a post about my klutziness, mostly a description of a bunch of stuff I had dropped like it was hot and broken. One thing you might not have known about me, or maybe you have already rightly assumed, is that I'm fairly klutzy with my body as well.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a physically active person. I run regularly on both dirt trails and pavement. I hike and mountain bike (acrophobia be damned). And in the winter, I have been known to do a little cross-country skiing.

But it was after one of my four-and-a-half-mile runs a few weeks ago that I found myself in real danger. I slid and fell into the splits as I was exiting the shower. My foot hit the frame of the shower door, preventing me from completely toppling to the ground, and I ended up with a purple bruise on the arch of my foot for a few days. I thought maybe I could pass it off as a running injury if necessary.

When my husband, Dan, and I go hiking, it's always entertaining (more for him than for me) when I walk over logs.

"Come on, ballerina," Dan will say, reminding me of my fourteen years of classical dance training that doesn't seem to have made a difference in my current ability to balance, as he snaps pictures of me awkwardly stumbling across fallen trunks.

Most of the time, I end up scooting across on my butt.

A few weeks ago, Dan rode his bike home from work in a surprise thunderstorm. That was funny, but I am the one who almost died.

I posted the photo below along with the following story:

Dan, biked home from work in a thunderstorm on Wednesday. I was getting ready to call him and find out if he wanted me to pick him up, but he had already left, right before the storm hit.

The truth is, I was a little delayed in calling him because I ran outside to stand up the watering can that had gotten blown over. (I wanted to catch the rain water.)

When I came back inside, my wet feet slipped out from under me, and I ended up on my butt, stuck underneath the kitchen chair. Hence, I did not get around to calling him as quickly as intended.

One thunderstorm and my whole world becomes very dramatic.

My arms and tailbone ached for a few days after that excitement.

I predict falling off a mountain (one of my biggest fears, by the way) won't be the end of me.

I'll probably just take a spill on the sidewalk, hit my head, and that will be it.

(Oh, wait! I already did that once when I was about seven. Ended up with a slight concussion.)

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.