Meet Your Kitchen Staff (Or Eat Your Carrots!)

The stunning and awesome volunteers who feed the 14/48 artists are usually artists and/or theater enthusiasts who do it for the love. This Kamikaze kitchen staff is made up of the King of the Kitchen, Alex Samuels, Barb Cavanaugh and Meghan Arnette.

Barb partners with the amazing 14/48 staff designer, Gary Menendez. This is his thirteenth festival. She's always come to see the show, but this time is her first time volunteering. Now she's "come over to the dark side" as Tim Moore has said. She said her employer, Alaska Airlines, is actually donating $15 an hour to 14/48 for every hour she volunteers. 10-12 hours a day for two days isn't anything to sneeze at. Thanks Alaska Airlines!

Meghan, who is admitting she was on the math team in middle school with trophies and everything, has participated in three disciplines (director, band, and actor) and has volunteered for the box office. She mentions a teacher she once had, "who was crazy and would throw pens at our heads. I thought, 'I think I'd rather be in rehearsal.' You expect theater rehearsals to have more yelling, but it was really math class."

"Today I chopped a lot of carrots, but people preferred the meat. So my carrots have been just sitting there and the meat is gone."

Barb interjects, "We figured because it was due to so many men."

"Yeah, it was fascinating," says Meghan. "This isn't a veggie crowd. I actually even told people to eat more vegetables and they didn't listen."

Alex, papa bear of the festival and a little more serious, says, "The thing that worries me is that no one is drinking water. By this time, we've normally gone through at least two of those things [points to water jugs]. We haven't even gone through one yet. [Dehydration] is not good for this festival."

But the watermelon soup is a hit. "It's a soup. It's a smoothie. It's yummy-licious, " said Erin Bryn Fetridge, I think. I'm really not sure because I was typing.

"I took the carrots out of the bag and everything," Meghan says clearly back to the carrots. "I'm really stretching my theater skills."

She adds, "I thought Alex was going to be meaner. And he was just really nice. I thought he'd be really hard core and yell at us like, 'Chop FASTER!' But he wasn't."

"I also PEELED the carrots." She's really obsessed with the carrots. "There's just a lot of them. Also? I peeled so many, they turned my gloves orange. I don't look good in orange..... This is fascinating stuff, right?! Well, there are these things you don't think about as being challenges until you work in 14/48 food service, " she says through laughter. "Also, the leaking cooler almost killed you!"

This is true. It's been leaking all day and onto the carpet of the greenroom, therefore you track it onto the linoleum just past it. This means your shoes could be slippery like mine and BAM! Down I went. "Death of a blogger," adds Alex. Or rather, just a little bruise on my knee. Didn't even drop the laptop.