Thankful

So, the housemate that witnessed my freak-out about the toilet told me last night that he put on gloves and pulled out the paper.  I was going to say, "It's the little things,"  but that would diminish the action.  It was a huge thing.  It wasn't his problem to deal with (nor mine, but I usually do), and he did it anyway.  In a very major way, that's hard to explain, and regardless of his reasons, because, at times I feel like I am shouldering a boulder up a really steep mountain by myself, his doing this made me feel like I wasn't alone.  And for that, I am most grateful.

Monday

Still processing.

Went to a Posie's show the other night.  They were great, mostly played from "Solid States" (a few from "Frosting on the Beater" and a few from the other albums) but then for the encore brought out original line-up from "Dear 23" era and played some of that, and then some with Dave Fox on bass.  It was the best I'd seen them in a while, the lining up of life, I suppose.  It was also super cathartic.  (And then I ruined that by reading the news.)  I probably went to almost every show they ever played in Seattle, including record stores, solo stuff, etc..., back in the 90's, early 2000's.  My favorite Seattle band, possibly my favorite band.  Sorry, I can't think straight lately.  (Anxiety, stress...)

Went to "It's Not Too Late" by Markeith Wiley at On The Boards over the weekend, where he performs as "Dushawn" Seattle's first black, late-night tv host.  A seed of this played at NWNW a couple of season's ago, and was one of my favorite performances, so I was looking forward to it.  And I liked it.  Glad I saw it.  It challenged me in ways I'm not ready to express, because I haven't wrestled with the challenges enough yet, and how I face up to them (whatever that means.)  Doing a lot of that in the past couple of weeks.  There is a lot of change.

Haven't done anything for class in the past couple of weeks, so I have to tomorrow.

Had an audition yesterday.  For some reason, I had it in my head that it was a table read (I think I saw an early call that mentioned those words, but I might be remembering that wrong.)  So, I did script work.  In the end, in was improv work on situations from the script, so, more like a call-back, and on camera.  It was good, I need to get more comfortable with that anyway.  And maybe it was slightly easier than in the past because I had done a lot of script work; thought about the characters, their arc, the obstacles, wants, beats, etc.  Also, I knew a lot of the people in the room.  The most intimidating part was that the person that the story is about was there, which on the one hand was great, because we could ask questions, and on the other, scary, because what if we are offensive in characterization?  Had a singing gig after, it went well.  I think people were actually listening.  It was in a food hall, so people don't always listen, and the sound doesn't always carry well.  During a couple of songs though, it got super quiet.

At home, someone tried to flush a bunch of dirt and shredded newspaper down the toilet.  I had ten minutes to catch a bus to get to work, and actually stood there staring it down.  Considered donning gloves and pulling out the paper, but in the end left and caught my bus.  Texted the landlord (sorta' feel like a jerk about that, but I always feel like a jerk when I assert myself.)  It seems clean now, but not sure how that happened.  That was Saturday, no one has spoken to me since then.

But who puts newspaper in the toilet?  Sigh.

Disbelief

God I'm depressed.  My head hurts and I feel like I need to vomit.  Hate won today.

The rest of us need to work to make that a temporary state.

Inner and outer weather

Another day, another inch of rain: the new normal.  A relatively free weekend (no where I have to be), and am only now getting around to reading scripts (a screenplay I'm participating in a reading for in a couple of weeks-a really good screenplay, written by a former classmate-so need to do character work on two roles, plus Chekhov, plus continuing monologue work for class/auditioning, etc.)  Found a copy of Eric Morris' "No Acting Please," and am reading through that in hopes of finding exercises to help work through my blocks, help make me more available, physically, emotionally, etc.  Also found some Uta Hagen class DVD's at Scarecrow that I rented, but have yet to watch.  And I need to work on this music-cataloguing project before tomorrow morning.  All in all, grateful for the extra hour before then.

Sloshed my way over to the Farmer's Market this morning because I thought this apothecary would be there, and I was interested in an immune tonic, but they were not, in fact, at that market.  Must've read it wrong.  Lugged about 10 lbs of heavy produce home instead: my workout for the day.  (Winter squash, apples, massive cauliflower, carrots, a quart of broth in a glass jar, etc.  Had this fantastic mashed cauliflower a few weeks back, and keep thinking about it.  Easily as good as mashed potatoes, only better, as I didn't have any bad reaction to it.  Probably takes close to a week to recover every time I eat them.)

Elsewhere, feel like I'm on the threshfold of major change, and it scares the crap out of me.  Trying not to run away from it...do the work, do the work, do the work.  There's a lot of work.

Carry on

Decided to continue on in the class, and then will have to take a break when this session is over.  I wonder how much more I would've gotten out of my previous acting classes had we ever talked about beat work?  I think it was always assumed people knew what it was from some past experience.  I did the whole sequence starting from knowing nothing, and we never covered it...still, better late, than never.  It makes a huge difference.

Continuing the work on the Chekhov scene, just for fun; my scene partner is no longer in the class, but also wants to continue to work on it.  Re-visiting "A Doll's House," and "Oleanna," and also a Christopher Durang piece for monologues.  Not sure where we are with scene work, there were only five of us last night, and we all worked monologues; I think the goal is to to have 6-8 working monologues at any given time.  Still trying to get in touch with my inner five-year old.

I want to continue working on scene work for what to do when you don't have dialogue, and let's face it, if you're a woman, in most plays, you have large chunks of time when the male characters are talking, and you get one word answers, to their monologues.

Have a goal of dedicating an hour a day toward acting, whether that be reading plays, preparing for auditions, looking for auditions, working on scenes, writing, going to class, etc..., I just need to make the commitment, there is nothing to lose.  Also need to get on the long-range goal setting with the belief that if you don't know where you want to go, you won't get there.  You will always be thrown off course by every crisis that presents itself.  That'll still happen, but if you know where you want to be, you can at least right yourself.

Stayed up late and watched "White God," a Hungarian film about a mixed-breed dog, the mistreatment it endures, and it's eventual revenge.  Very hard to watch, but forced myself to see the full two hours of it.  Wasn't sure of the genre, could be considered a horror film, the way the unwanted dogs form an intelligent army, hunting down those that had mistreated them.  Some call it an allegory (and those two things can live simultaneously.)  There is this fight within the main dog between the good it had been, and the evil it had been turned into (through abuse), and in the end, when he faces off with the girl who had loved him (and to whom he had been her only real friend), it remains unclear which side wins out.

And then because I stayed up late to watch that, and the darkness of the mornings now, I woke up at 7:23...will be glad for the clock change this weekend.

Tuesday and decisions

The show was fun, in the end (Maggie Lee Showcase at the Pocket Theatre, part of Fringe Month.)  Not much of a house, at least as many performers as paying audience members, but I enjoyed watching everyone else.  I think there were four short plays and seven monologues, broken up into three sets.  I was in the last group.  Was so nervous before I had to go up, thought I'd forget everything, rush through, skip lines, freeze, shake, etc., but in the end, though I think I said a couple of wrong words ("fall" instead of "drop," etc.), it went alright.  People laughed a lot, it was probably the lightest of the monologues.  I think I'll keep it for auditioning, but I'd really like to work on it with a director.  I had toyed with the idea of looking at different audience members, but then nixed that after feedback from my scene class, but as it turned out, couldn't see anyway (because of the lights), so hopefully didn't let my eyes wander too much, an ongoing issue, though it's getting better.

The Chekhov scene is difficult, it's the opening scene of "The Cherry Orchard."  Why I say that is because the section we have, doesn't seem to have a "turn" in it (i.e., the characters do not change from the beginning to the end); and also, they aren't listening to each other, for the most part, they are just talking.  Will need to bring a strong action.  There is, however, plenty of humor in it, and the Lopakhin speech is loaded, pretty much sets up all the class changes of the era: the end of the gentry, and a rising up of a middle class.  I think of an innate desire to more than survive that drives people to do what it takes to thrive (or at least not go backward); you see this a lot in Jane Austen's stories (among others) and we tend to view those women as villains, but in the situation they've found themselves, they are working with what they have to get ahead (marriage), i.e, Lucy Steele, Isabella Thorpe, etc.  I see that in Dunyasha, and later in the play she bemoans that she can't go back to being a servant (she is a servant, and of the servant class, but has been pretending to be gentry, and getting away with it), and she has an offer of marriage, but it's less than what she wants, not who she wants, though she is keeping it as an option.  (Society is the villain; perhaps if social structure and laws governing rights were different, these women would still be villains, but they get a pass, from me.  Dickens, writing later, has real individual villains: the abusive headmasters, the Murdstones, Uriah Heep, etc., in addition to society playing that role.)

Have to decide if I'm gonna continue on in this group.  I'd like to, I find it immensely helpful: to be working on scenes, to get feedback, to be able to practice monologues for people, etc...just have to figure out the money situation, where I can cut expenses elsewhere.  I probably can, but it's pretty tight.  It's priority, right?  If I keep making the same choices, day after day, nothing will change, at least not something that I have agency in, toward my own good, my own future.  Outside, things I have little control over are constantly changing, but I'd like to act, and not just constantly wipe myself out by jumping here and there to react to changing circumstances, and never proceed in the general direction of where I say I want to end up.  Even if it's a little bit of progress, to move forward, and to see the destination ahead.

And I'm still trying to decide how I can take a vacation, in my head, sometimes I've already left.  It'll have been 5 years, but I still feel like a privileged ass sometimes for mentioning it, and yet, I can also feel myself festering for lack of travel.  I'll make it happen.

Back to earth, three hours into the workday, I realized I was wearing my shirt, backward, and inside-out.  It's fixed now.

And my friend is leaving town, moving to Philly, too expensive to be here.  Saw him last Friday for the last time, though, it's true we'd fallen out of touch, and so I appreciate his effort to say goodbye.  One friend I could talk about almost anything with (our conversations went everywhere, has been that way since we met, 17 years ago he reminded me, how is that possible?) and always feel safe there, could always be myself.  I find that's not the standard acceptable behavior.  He's spoiled me to everyone else.

Early

In the calm before the storm.  It's so quiet, no wind at all.  Never got super windy here yesterday, seemed to be between 10-25 mph all day, even after the storm was said to have passed.  It's already raining.  The trees are still in brilliant leaf.  I was thinking if more leaves had fallen in the storm yesterday, perhaps there would be less impact in the storm today.  They are so beautiful this year!  And I want to go for a walk, but there was a notice to stay out of the parks, due to falling branches and trees.  The ground is saturated, it probably wouldn't take much to push over a tree that was ready to go, and a lot of them are weak from two years of drought.

A blue jay breaks the silence, I guess I should get out of the house.  And cook, before the chance of losing power.  And I have rehearsal space booked in a few hours to get these words out of my mouth.  Seems to have become a problem, more so lately.  Like a fear of being heard.  Fear of being wrong?  Of being called out?  They aren't even my own words and I can't seem to say them.  The inability to take up space.  Have a week to work on it.

Also, new scene for class from "The Cherry Orchard."  I do love Chekhov.

All the possibilities of the day stretch out before me, and the time slips by while sitting here looking at things on the internet, accomplishing fewer and fewer.

Ah, the storm changed track, and the winds here look to be like yesterday (though, higher gusts.)  North of here is forecast to get slammed.  I think last time we had a storm this strong my parents lost power for a week.  Don't remember losing power at all.

Sunday evening

Another night, another soaking, and this one in just one block.  Missed the debate, somehow I thought it was tomorrow night.  At any rate, was attending a performance about magic mushrooms at On the Boards.  I got on a volunteer list last year, and so get to see shows in exchange for taking tickets or watching the door.  So, I signed up.  Didn't think I was all that interested, in that I don't do drugs, but in general, I like seeing the performances at On the Boards because of the mix of artistic disciplines.

Have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to love this show.  Probably my favorite performance of the year, so far.  Everything worked:  story-telling, movement, costume, embodiment, sound, lighting...it was everything I want in a performance.  I was also surprised to find tears running down my face at one point, and I think the woman next to me might also have been crying.  I couldn't tell you why or even where (though, in the first half); he's just a good story teller (Alan Sutherland, Little Brown Mushrooms.)  (And Douglas Ridings as the chicken...nailed the movement and behavior, without being a cartoon, he was a chicken.  Not actually sure why there was a chicken, but I liked it.)

The performance begins with talk about space, about Sputnik.  And then about building a spaceship to travel to other worlds.  So a rocket ship is built on the side of the stage, and then the two dancers lure the chicken to it, and I suppose I thought they were just gonna send it off alone, but they loaded themselves into it as well.  It had to do with the idea of what would you take with you?  And a pet seemed like a good idea, and a pet chicken, even better, as they also lay eggs.  He later goes into the life-cycle of the mushrooms, and how they have evolved to grow around humans, their preferred growing medium being something produced by humans.

I was talking to someone about Paradisical Rites (St. Genet, 2013) before this show, Sutherland was buried on stage through the first two acts of that, and he referenced that at the beginning of the show tonight, saying that no one would be buried alive, or beaten, or made to bleed in this show (there was nothing violent about it at all.  There were children in the audience.)  The person I was talking to also mentioned that I should compare Ridings performance in that show, with his chicken in this one, and see what I think of his range.  I think all the performers are fully committed to what they are doing.

(I also mentioned that as much as I hated that show, due to things it brought up for me, things I carried into it, it stayed with me, and made me dig deeper, and that I think art should do that (though perhaps not always so violently so.)  He (the man I was talking to) said he thought about it for weeks after, as well.  He also mentioned that things such as drug abuse and assault shouldn't be glossed over, but should be violent and painful to watch, because that's closer to reality.  Perhaps we gloss it over (tv, movies, etc) because we are (rightfully, perhaps) frightened to face it head on, we'd rather it didn't exist, or at least not in the sphere where we live.  But it does, (I come across used needles on a daily basis now), and yet if it's invisible, we don't have to do anything to make it better.  If we have to look at it, maybe we will work toward real solutions, maybe we'll see someone we love, or someone like us.  There are a lot of traumatized people out in the world, the path we're on isn't really working, a series of bandaids, to push it down the line for someone else to solve.)

Saturday evening

Another night, waiting for a bus.  Students, back in town, populate the evening sidewalks, so no lonely waiting.  The sidewalk doubly-protected from the rain by both a walnut and a spruce tree.  From the safety underneath the branches, I watch the rain (really, more of a mist, though it looks dramatic as it swirls under the light, being moved in one direction, then another, on the whim of the wind) and it billows like snow, if it were only colder.  At any rate, the rainy season has returned: got drenched several times today.

The first gig tonight was an auction, the second, and organ dedication.  On the final movement of the last piece (Symphony No. 5 in F minor Op. 42 No.1, Charles-Marie Widor, the Toccata, to be specific), I had the urge to run to the aisle, and lie down to listen to the sound move through the space.  Somehow I imagine in this instance, it might be acceptable, but I don't do it.  Thoughts of paintings at the Art Museum that were meant to be viewed from below, and not at eye level.  How the docent suggested lying on the floor to view them, and how I did go back to do that when there were fewer people in the gallery, security unfazed by my action: I wanted to view how the artist intended.  And I think the organ, in it's fullness, was meant to be heard from the middle of the room (there are pipes in both the front and the rear of the space.  The ones in the back were out-of-commission for decades.)  We only sang one song in the actual concert itself, though more in the dedication part of the evening.

Still working on "Coal Miner's Daughter," as we opted for a rehearsal without camera last week, and I need to run my piece for the Fringe show in class soon.  I have a pretty good sense of context (it was written as a stand-alone monologue, so I had to make it up), but we were just told to pull it together on our own and show up before the performance.  The comment I get most of the time, is that I haven't made each thought distinct enough (in general), and I suppose it's because I was thinking that what I was saying was one thought, so I haven't been breaking them down enough as to what I want and how I'm going about getting it. Also, I think it's supposed to be two minutes, and I'm sure I'm running longer right now, so I'll need to cut out pauses, and make them more strategic: it's actually quite a bit of text.

I hope someone recorded the concert, would like to hear how it went.  I was on the end and could only hear the person behind me, and the person next to me.

Walking home

A Friday night, but no one around.  Empty streets, might as well be the middle of the night.  On one side of the street, the houses blocked by high walls, like a fortress, the other, an empty park.  I feel small, I walk briskly.  When I left the earlier party, a few furtive drops of rain touched my face.  Further along, two blocks, maybe three, I can see a shower under the street lights, which are few and far between.  I breathe a sigh when I get to a main intersection, with traffic and streetlights.  I cross to the other side, and then the bus passes by, going in my direction.  I suppose I could've tried to run for it, but my feet hurt, so I walk on.  The rain begins to soak through my jacket.

I remember as a preteen, or early teen, three of us sneaking out of a slumber party for the thrill of it, to see if we could get away with it.  Some story about needing a pillow, when everyone else had fallen asleep, we slipped outside, the air chilly, the streets dark, spooky and exciting at the same time.  A car of older teens pulling up beside us, and I was afraid, but one friend kept her cool.  They left us alone.  First we snuck into one of our houses, then mine, where we ate chocolate cake: I don't know how we didn't wake anyone up.  Then back to the party, and in through a sliding glass door.  In the morning, no one believed us.  We never did bring back any pillows.

Rain falls harder, the sidewalks glistens, puddles form.  People are sitting in the bus shelters, but I think the wait will be long, and it's late.  They are probably just trying to get out of the rain.  I walk on the other side of the street.  More walls, there is a loneliness to the night, a separation of those behind those walls, inside, and me, out here, gradually getting more soaked, and picking up the pace because it's late.

At home, I hang my jacket to dry, drenched through.  35 minutes door-to-door.  In the end, I guess I could've called a cab.