Move over Raymond, the Tampa Bay Rays baseball club has taken to the Internet and have added another mascot to the roster this season… direct from Youtube  – meet DJ Kitty! DJ Kitty started his life as a viral video posted to Youtube in 2007 of a real life cat playing the piano. The video was a huge hit and quickly scored thousands of views. To help fire up the fans in the stands while watching the game, the video was played on the Tropicana Field Jumbotron. As the team was heading to the playoffs in 2010, some of the players were kicking around ideas of how to energize the fans. They thought the cat idea was cute and loved how fans reacted to it, so they decided to give the feline an upgrade, especially after the Rally’s restaurant company had began airing commercials with a cat wearing a leather jacket. So, out went the keyboard and in came a turn table, a Rays jersey and authentic New Era cap. The video quickly became a hit with stadium fans and online. Within a few weeks 921,000 people had viewed it which is 30 times more fans than a regular season game! The video was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine online, and on ABC News. Darcy Raymond, the Rays’ vice-president for fan experience, told the Tampa Bay Timesthat he never expected to have such success from the video cat. “Never in our wildest dreams… The genesis really came from the players. They sparked it.” After another losing season and under-performing attendance numbers, the Rays’ marketing wizards decided to capitalize on the video’s popularity and turn the Youtube cat, into a full blown costumed mascot. Raymond, a large furry sea dog creature, is the team’s official mascot, but DJ Kitty...

Just where has Nerd in Transition been? She has been commuting from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach five days a week, traveling two hours each way on our cities brilliantly engineered mass transit system. The reason for this oft repeated time suck? Free rehearsal space in Long Beach. As you may know from a long ago blogumn I wrote, I took it upon myself to produce a version of the play Night Mother. I picked a director I have known for a few years, yet never worked with, approached her about coming on board with me and she said yes. We cast the Mother role, I took the daughter role, and rehearsals started. Halfway through the woman playing the Mother dropped out. Looking at this as an welcome opportunity I pushed the show dates back from June to September, recast the mother role and started rehearsals back up a month later. This is the first time I have produced anything. It’s kinda a big deal. Aside from the obvious career push and artistic actor fulfilment performing in this particular show could provide, my reasons for taking on the producer role go much deeper. I have a horribly destructive habit of starting things and not finishing them. So I decided that the next step up in my period of transition would be to take on a rather large project and see it through to the end as the leader. I also have a wonderfully constructive habit of attacking a problem head on. Such as the time I decided to conquer my fear of singing in front of people by performing the National Anthem in the middle of a roller derby track surrounded by almost 2000 people. The way I saw it by producing...