Day 3

Woke up at 5:30 and tried to run my script, next thing I know, I look over and it's 7 am already.  Did still manage to catch the early bus, but no breakfast, so ran over to the student grocery store to find something I could eat (there wasn't much I could.)  $7 for a small tub of hummus. I passed on that and bought vegetables instead.  Students get gouged at every turn (housing, tuition, food), no wonder they have so much debt when they graduate.  And on another note, why do the majority of dairy alternatives need to have added sugar, and other junk, in them?  If I'm cooking something with it (mash potatoes, or mac n' cheese-neither of which I do at this point, but I used to), why would I want it to be sweet?  An old lingering beef.  And there's way too much added sugar in our diets.

Went to a show last night, almost 3 hours, got home at almost midnight.  It was set in a non-recognized Russian town, around the time of Stalin's rule, but where linear time is not a factor, and it touched on issues regarding loyalty, torture, what you will do for your own ends, but it seemed that every time it was starting to hit deeper, before it could really set into the audience, it went into comic relief (or absurdity) to let the audience out of the uncomfortable places.  I found myself wishing the writer had let those things hit the audience harder.  You're bringing them up, they mean something to you, they should mean something to us, but we get off the hook.  Don't let us off so easily.  At times it made me think of Gogol, as well as a show put on by The Satori Group last year called "Return to the Albert Joseph," (though those both went deeper and held you there unrelentingly), "1984," and Shakespeare (for the use of the comic relief). The show was "Zappoi!" by Quinn Armstrong, at the Annex Theatre.  I didn't mind the comedic/absurdist aspect, just the sudden slight-of-hand use of it, as if to say, "no, I didn't just say that."  Yes, you did, and that was a good thing.  We tend to push these things under the table because we don't want to think about them, and yet, they still happen.  It's good for us to look at it.

I'm about half memorized, I know the gist since I wrote it, but have not cut enough out.  I know an overall staging element I want, but need other eyes on it.  Have been running songs in my head, one after another, but haven't come up with the right tone.  I want it to have an empowering aspect to it, but not overly so, which would be jarring to the rest of the piece.  That'll be my evening: memorizing.

(February 22, 2015) - I guess though, my review is only what I want more of, less surface, a little more depth in life.  But the reality is, so many things that might be deemed "important" are drowned out by things such as celebrity news or the latest diet trend or reality tv.  On any given day, the news feeds online are filled with distractions: something about the Kardashians, something about the Duggars, what some woman wore and how hot (or not) she looked in it, disregarding anything about her personality or anything she might actually think or have done, or some actual story blown up out of proportion (OJ Simpson trial, Jody Arias trial, minute-to-minute coverage of a snowstorm that doesn't actually manifest, etc) to distract while decisions that actually affect your life get made, that you don't hear about.  So, that sleight of hand is everywhere, "There is poison in the water...this just in, so and so debuts her post-baby bikini bod!" (So the drunken bear playing the violin and the stereotypical, airheaded, teenage sexpot, aren't that far off base.  And yeah, it was probably supposed to be a comedy, or at least absurdist, but you bring in the interrogation element, so...?)