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Professor Timothy Tickywinkle's Tantalising, Terpsichorean Time Machine
 We were looking forward to a break following Captain Lightning and the Smugglers, but our young audiences decided they wanted more. So I wrote Davey Dogood and the Black Diamond Mine. But there was a problem… almost none of our regular performers were going to be available during the summer holidays!
So we postponed the season until the Labor Day holiday weekend in March and, together with our regular collaborators, the Wonthaggi Theatrical Group, we decided to present a different production that required very few adults during January. (By now we had an eager group of aspiring young actors who were keen to be on stage themselves. So we decided to take the plunge and create a show for them to perform during the summer holidays.)
I wrote a simple show about an absent-minded professor who invents a time machine and, together with two young friends, heads off on a series of hair raising adventures to the Stone Age, Neverland, Nursery Rhyme Land and Panto Land. Because we had so many children in the cast, I based the plot structure on what would become the successful structure for our school productions, which began later that same year.
The time machine dominated the front corner of the stage, hooked up to psychedelic lighting and a super-powerful smoke machine that, the first time it was used, quickly emptied the 800-seat theatre! (The operator hadn't had a chance to test it and didn't realise that the length of the ducting pipes meant delays in the smoke appearing and stopping. Smoke alarms, a false fire alarm and a smoke-filled auditorium meant a break in the performance of about 45 minutes while we cleared the air.)
A short time later, when smoke began to billow again (controlled, this time), some of the youngsters at the front of the theatre, with a loud "Oh, no!" took to their heels and bolted from the theatre. Life's never dull around our productions!
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