9.8.01

so i realize this site’s been a bit of a downer lately. but man, combine the stomach flu with a touch of PMS and throw a tech week in there for good measure – it’s enough to piss anyone off. at any rate, i won the battle (for now) between me and my stomach, so things are looking much rosier this morning.

tonight the musical review Forever Plaid opens the fall season at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. the basic premise of the show is that in 1964, a small-town harmony group was tragically killed in an auto wreck, just before their first big gig. for reasons only loosely explained as “astro-technical stuff”, the group has been suspended between worlds for thirty-seven years. for more reasons that are largely unexplained, they are suddenly given the opportunity to come back to earth and do one last show, and only then will they be allowed to ascend to heaven. this is where the show begins. so the for Forever Plaid boys stumble onto stage, suitcases and plaid tuxedos in hand, and perform about 12 1950’s style crooners such as “Cry”, “Chain Gang”, “Moments to Remember”, “Heart & Soul” and lots of other things that i think my parents and grandparents listened to. the fantasy gets a bit out of control in the second act and the boys perform the entire Ed Sullivan show in three minutes and eleven seconds – the whole bit – accordion, cymbals, the singing nun, fire-eating, topo gigio, senor wences, sock puppets, you name it.

corny musical reviews aren’t exactly my thing, but the show is a crowd pleaser, and there’s something to be said for making people happy with your art. of course, i think the role of theatre is to challenge, not simply entertain, and so in that sense this show seriously falls short. but the fall musical is the money-maker for the theatre, and we all need theatres to make money or else who will pay starving artists like me?

i discovered some really cool things about energy fields and auras and myself last night, but i don’t have time to write about it right now. more tomorrow.

9.7.01

i know i promised you all something more fun today, but all i have to say for myself at the moment is that it’s tech week, i’ve been eating junk and not getting enough sleep all week and this morning i woke up and my intestinal track decided to revolt. i’m not a very happy camper. i have to go to work now.

you want fun? go read the onion.

9.6.01

i wake most days with a curiously hollow feeling, as if i lost something last night and haven’t quite remembered what it is yet. i’m greeted by this sense of let-down, the sort of feeling you get as little kid waking up the day after christmas and realizing that there’s nothing but january ahead of you. perhaps it’s the season, because i’ve always hated fall. there’s something about the dying-ness of all of it that just gives me the creeps. give me a cold nasty spring day anytime over the slanty fall sunshine. i think part of the problem is this house, too. when i was growing up here, this house generally had no less than six or seven people living here, plus enough animals to start our own neighborhood petting zoo. it was a house that was full of noise and laughter and chaos and life. now i’m back here, feeling lame for living with my parents five years after i left home the first time, and the house has grown silent like a tomb. my parents are both off to school and work at 7 am, and when i get up at 10, the house is cavernous and oppressively quiet. getting out of bed is a battle fought and won with inertia. i start with the simple motions; feed the cat, wash my face, maybe some cranberry juice. the sense of loss fades away as i get busy; once i’ve left the house there’s only a faint, nagging reminder that the empty space in the house is waiting for me at the end of the day. by the time i get in around 2 am, my parents are asleep and the house is dark and silent again. it’s fortunate that i’m a deeply proactive person; otherwise this depression might just engulf me. instead it just makes me dread the mornings.

the obvious solution here, you might point out, is to move out. find my own little space, or find some roommates to share a place. good point. but what the hell am i doing in Boise, Idaho? i came here for the theatre work. i’m living at home because otherwise the theatre would have housed me with some other host family. but the season is quickly drawing to a close and i hardly have anything lined up for the next year. this is, in part, because i am spending october and november in europe. i need to worry about what to do when i get back when i get back, but fundamentally, i’m a planner. i like having a few months laid out in advance. i’m reaching the end of my tether. it seems like a couple of months anywhere is about all i can take before i start getting antsy and need to move on to somewhere new – new challenges, people, places. i don’t deal with comfort very well, it seems. when i was in college my life was full enough that i never wanted to go some place else. what happened since then? i suppose there’s a reason when everyone tells you that the college years are the best, to cling to them and all that crap that, while true, can’t actually change the pace at which one lives one’s college years.

the simple truth is that i’m lonely.

i suppose this is enough self-pity for one day. tomorrow, i promise something more fun.

9.2.01

yesterday marked the close of the summer season at ISF with the final performance of Amadeus. the play was good, but i’m glad to see it go. it was time. i had this wonderful closing night moment at the end of the play. at the very end, i’m standing backstage, leaning against one of the wings facing toward the back of the theatre, just off the left side of the stage. above me is the central truss from which lighting instruments hang. it is painted a dark green metal and lit by blue footlights, giving it a light bluey-green hue against the black night sky. as the four final chords sound, the stage fades to back; i can tell because as i look up, the truss slowly fades from pale green to black, and then it vanishes and behind it the night sky comes alive, peppered thickly with stars. the final chord drifts away into the stars, and there is that moment – that precious moment of silence, in which the audience, the theatre, the stars – the whole world we have created – holds its breath, and remembers, and then the instant is over. the applause erupts, tears down the world of the play and ends the moment because it is a moment that simply can’t be sustained.

the unique and defining feature of theatre, to me, is its temporal existence. it’s what music was, before we had ways of recording it. every performance is uniquely defined by not only the presence but also the experience of the actors and audience. no performance can be exactly recreated or recorded. archival tapes of plays are made for reference, but if you’ve ever watched a videotape of a staged performance you’ll see that the video is only a skeleton of what the performance was. it’s like looking at a dead butterfly pinned into a case. you can see the beauty, but the life is gone. people frequently ask me if i want to work in television and movies as well as theatre. to me the two art forms couldn’t be more different. in film, the camera becomes this layer of glass that separates the viewer from the experience. to me, film IS the dead butterfly inside the case. its beauty may be extraordinary, but the life, the magic is gone. the temporality is what makes the event so precious, and it’s what completely obsesses me about my chosen career path. i don’t like to use the term career, because that brings to mind a business in which power, advancement, position, salaries, etc are what matter. to me, it seems like a career is something that you do during the day, and at night you turn back into the other person that you really are. i don’t want a career. theatre is who i am. it’s what i do. if i could do anything else, i would, and my life would probably be much easier as a result. but this is what i was put on this earth to do, at least for the time being. i’ve had to make some difficult choices recently w/ regards to my career and my personal life. and i’m aware that there will be many more to come. but the way i see it, it wasn’t me who chose theatre – but rather, theatre chose me.

the funny thing is that my approach to relationships and the people in my life is so completely opposite to that of theatre. i can love a play because i know that the fact that it won’t exist forever is part of what makes it precious, but i’m incapable of doing the same when it comes to the important people in my life. knowing that the moment, the relationship, the good will and good times and friendship and companionship can’t last forever hangs over me in a little black cloud. i want cling so fiercely to the special people in my life. yet the irony is that in the end, it is theatre – temporal, inconstant, unpredictable theatre – that remains a constant part of me, and the friends who move in and out of my life. perhaps theatre is meant to teach me to be grateful for the special people that i’ve had the opportunity to encounter in my life, rather than trying to catch and preserve those friendships, like the butterfly in the display case.

8.31.01

today’s reason to be happy: i finished the crossword, all by myself.

today’s reason to be unhappy: i’m TIRED and have lots of paper work to do and it’s 1 am. i’m about to go into another tech week, kids, so i may drop off the planet for a bit. i’ll resurface once Forever Plaid opens, i promise.

8.29.01

you know what my problem is? i’m used to getting whatever i want. no, really. i mean, i work for it; i work really hard in fact. but that doesn’t change the fact that in the end, i’m not really used to dealing with disappointment. it’s the whole middle-american you can do/have/say/be anything if you just work for it trap. it leaves us always wanting more and interpreting disappointment as a sort of failure of our own. i’m spoiled, i guess.

(i’m reading Love in the Time of Cholera right now – it’s all about people not getting what they want)

8.28.01

according to my daily calendar, the 5 things i should be happy about today are:

free-association

symphonies

angel food and devil’s food

escapist reading

decorum

not such a hot list. i’m all for free-association and the occasional dip into escapist reading, but i don’t like angel food or devil’s food cake, and as for symphonies and decorum, well, you can take ’em or leave ’em as far as i’m concerned. here, i’ll free-associate my own list:

5 things to be happy about:

twilight

zeke (the cat)

9 hours of uninterrupted sleep

being busy

new adventures

— off to rehearsal —

8.27.01

checking my stats file, which i rarely do, i discovered that these are the top search phrases that led people to my site this week:

buying sex toys in iowa

tiny tove movies

tove scene

tove tiny

indigo girls galileo download

dream interpretation backpack falling cliffs water

death by guns america canada

nick bantock pictures griffin sabine address book

tiny tove

it’s unfortunate that four of the search phrases involved tiny tove, which i vaguely understand to be some sort of child porn thing, but i’m quite certain that slithy tove came first. i hope that the person who wanted to buy sex toys in iowa had better luck with the next site he/she checked.

8.26.01

my accomplishment for the week: i finally grew enough hair to wear it in a ponytail again. goodbye, high maintenance hair. it’s been nice, but i really don’t think we were meant for each other.

8.24.01

after tonight, there’s just one amadeus performance left.

because 80’s hits it makes me laugh.