6.12.03 – just another day at the office

live theatre, folks. you just never know what’s gonna go wrong. there’s the usuals, the emergencies one can plan for: injuries (have first aid supplies and training on hand), the trap door malfunctioning (have a backup plan for those entrances), inclement weather (have ponchos to protect the costumes and garbage sacks for the audience members), wildlife (mention the skunk in the curtain speech so no one freaks out when she makes an appearance), and so forth. and then, there are those things you couldn’t have imagined. for example, tonight. in midsummer we have an actual 1963 volkswagon beatle that we drive across the stage a number of times during the show. there’s a fair amount of off-stage maneuvering as well, getting the car turned around in small wing space and so forth. after 40 years of loyal service, the horn decided to short out tonight. such that everytime someone turned the wheel more than about 2″, the horn would toot. picture me trying to do a 6-point turn off stage left (engine off, crew pushing the car), all the while the horn is “beep” “beeep” “beep” “BEEEEEP” “beep”ing through one of Puck’s monologues. now that’s comedy, folks.

6.11.03

us at the slithy tove concur with jake’s disappointment in the new and improved Liz Phair. her new single, “Why Can’t I?”: pure candy pop. even her signature off-key voice has been tweaked by a team of engineers into being pitch-perfect and so generic that it could have been sung by Avril Lavigne or any of a million other faceless one-hit-wonders. i am SO disappointed. compare it to a similar transformation made by Jewel: she appeared at halftime during last week’s San Antonio vs. New Jersey game wearing hotpants, baring midriff and sporting plenty of body glitter, singing candy pop so sugary it made my teeth hurt to listen to it: (lots of backup vocals to help bury any sort of individuality that the singer’s voice might have, repetitive lyrics that ultimately, mean nothing — you know the routine). and Jewel, you’re no Britney. leave the midriff baring to the likes of Christina Aguilera. not that it’s fair to compare Jewel to Liz Phair, but they were both artists who broke onto the scene by doing their own thing, and now selling out for reasons i can’t begin to fathom (it’s not like they need money, or more recognition to get gigs). prediction: “Why Can’t I?” will top the charts. we’ll be hearing it piped into the supermarket, repeated hourly on the radio. people who’ve never heard of liz phair will be buying up her new album, and then dumping it in the used bin six weeks later. she’ll be a pop sensation, rising to stardom on a big pile o’ garbage.

if you’d like to torture yourself, you, too, can go to lizphair.com and see the spectacle.

and while i’m bitching, take a look at this advertising banner i pulled off of blogspot earlier this evening:

isn’t there something kinda problematic with placing an ad for humanitarian aid in iraq next to an ad for “shock and awe” t-shirts? ick.

6.10.03 – you can’t always get whatcha want

ah, rep schedule, i love you so much. midsummer opened last weekend. for my trouble, i grew some new freckles, which i think just makes my face and arms look slightly dirty. now i’m rehearsing comedy afternoons and performing midsummer at night. zeke is neurotic as ever, given that A and i have both been working noon-midnight everyday. he manifest his distress on my day off by throwing up all over the kitchen floor at 7am, then climbing inside the fireplace (there are birds nesting in the chimney), and leaving sooty paw prints all over the house. while mopping up cat vomit, i thought, “people have children why?”

one of the perks of working in ISF’s outdoor theatre is that its location, five miles out of town, nestled between the river and the foothills, means that wildlife is still nearby. last week a doe poked her head out of the bushes backstage and watched us from about 50 yards away; and in the trap room there is a nest of baby birds, still featherless with great, bulbous eyes and loud voices. mama starvling flies in and out of the trap room with mouthfuls of green catepillars at dusk, keeping a wary eye on us from across the room. if we get too close she flutters to the concrete floor and does her best injured bird impression, to lure us away from her nest.

5.30.03 – codependence

no, no, i didn’t die of SARS, thank you for your messages of concern. just busy rehearsing midsummer and comedy of errors – rep schedule can be murder, although, thanks to my recent demontion, not nearly as stressful as last year’s summer season was.

codependent pets are keeping andy & i apart for the weekend – he has to sleep at his parents’ house so that their dog, Calvin won’t get lonely; i have to stay at our house so that my cat, Zeke won’t have abandonment issues. we left rehearsal at 10, call across town at midnight to say goodnight. who says pets resemble their owners?

cops just broke up the party at the Noisy Party Every Weekend house next door. the sound of fence cracking alerted me to the fact that teenages were using our backyard as an escape route. i stood on my back porch in pj’s and mis-matched shoes, gesturing with the tv remote and all but yelling, “you kids stay outta my tomatoes!” yup. i’m old.

5.25.03

i just might be boise’s first case of SARS. i feel about that good, anyway. everything hurts. to cheer me up, andy took me to see Mighty Wind tonight and the ten minute walk to the theater and back just about killed me. i wash my hands before i eat, what did i do to deserve this? come on, antibodies. time to rally the troops.

5.24.03 – My Date with the Triple Meat Sandwich

there’s something so alien about having a bad cold on a really hot day. the dry air sears my throat and then drinking hot tea just makes me sweat even more than the combination of fever sweats and 95 degree heat already are. ugg. i hab a code. (spoken with a stuffy-nose-voice)

summer landed upon us with a vengeance. not that i’m complaining, mind you, i love hot dry weather, and it’s good for my S.A.D. zeke doesn’t seem to like it tho. he drapes himself over his cat tree and says “mow”, which i take to mean, “it’s too hot to be wearing a fur coat.” we don’t have an air conditioner, so the house is roughly 10 degrees warmer inside than out by the end of the day. this also marks the beginning of afternoon thunderstorm season, a rocky mountain weather phenomenon that pleases me greatly: each day dawns warm and sunny, and around 4 pm big thunder clouds roll up over the mountains, it rains or blows briefly, the sky gets all dark and dramatic, and then by 6pm the whole show’s over in time for golden evening light and a late sunset.

hmm. gotta force my hazy sudafed brain into writing a restaurant review about my lunch at Giacinto’s Trattoria for the Weekly. i think i’m going to title it: “My Date with the Triple Meat Sandwich, or They Put Ham Where?”

5.21.03 – so the topic sentence of this paragraph is: i’m even broker than i was before, but i have cool pants

j.crew warehouse sale. whomp whomp.

last night i dreamt that my right leg was covered in these pale grey spots, like the kind of paint freckles you get from working with watery black paint, only it was some sort of mysterious rash. i remembered the dream this morning when, while getting dressed, i noticed a series of bug bites all the way up my right leg – flat, round red freckles. did i somehow know in my sleep that i was being bitten by something? and where was my trusty, spider-eating cat when i needed him?

5.20.03

i moment of silence, please, for the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. goodbye favorite show, now i’ll have no reason to rush home on tuesday nights. i confess that my eyes teared up just a little bit at the very end of the series finale, but then again, i’ve cried along with Buffy and the gang for several years, so what’s one more pulls-at-the-heartstrings episode? hell, i saw the Scooby Doo Movie just so i could see Sarah Michelle Gellar kick some more evil butt while wearing 3″ heels, which is, well, what she does best. in college i turned up my nose at the Buffy fanatics, but then i spent the better part of a year laying on my sofa with an undiagnosable balance disorder, and Buffy Night became a highlight for me. my theory as to why the show was so successful is that it’s a classic comic-book formula: villains that look like big lizards and zombies, a superhero who has to struggle to balance her personal life with her superhero life and the emotional isolation caused by that split, a team of side kicks who have their own quirks and skills, a mentor who is older and wiser but ultimately can’t help the superhero make difficult choices…it’s all there. plus, beautiful actors and an excellent lighting director. it really couldn’t go wrong.

i won’t spoil any surprises for those of you who haven’t had a chance to see the finale yet, but i have to say that i thought Giles, Zander and Andrew passing away a sleepless night by rolling dice and moving characters around an RPG gameboard was a nice touch. Giles: “Great! Now I’m an injured Dwarf with the strength of a doily!”

5.18.03 – disgruntled

it’s may 18th and do you wanna know how cold it is? so cold that i was still wearing those little stretchy black mittens when i was riding my bike around town today. it’s deceptively sunny outside – big puffy white clouds sail around in a blue sky, the trees and grass shimmer green in the bright sunlight – but when you leave the house, this blustery north wind chills bones. my plans for a vegetable garden have largely been on hold because temperatures are still dipping below freezing at night. little seedlings in cut-off milk cartons line the shelves of our bathroom, which has been transformed into a temporary greenhouse these past six weeks. with the row of 60w light bulbs just inches from their milk cartons, the little seedlings have been coaxing into sprouting even tho it’s still wintery outside. two more of the cucumber seedlings committed suicide yesterday tho. they just keel over in their carton, hang their heads limply over the side and turn dark green. i don’t know what they want from me, i give them water, sunlight, nutrient-rich dirt, but still they march on to their deaths. luckily i started about 10 seeds but i really only want 1 cucumber plant.

there’s really no point whatsoever to this post, i just woke up from a nap and i’m disgusted with the weather.

5.17.03 – p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n

trying to sit down and write an article for the weekly, but the trouble is that i have NO angle and the subject just isn’t a catchy one (human (dis)interest piece on two guys who are founding a film school in boise). methods of procrastination used thus far:

-slept late

-went to a kickboxing class (whee!)

-made lunch

-read a victoria’s secret catalogue

-played with the cat

-put away my laundry

-took a shower

-got coffee

-checked email

-read the usual blogs

-flossed

-investigated bugs in the javascript on slithy tove

i can keep coming up with stuff to do, no problem, but this damn thing doesn’t seem to be going away by itself. nerg.