Latest photos

Ok now that I've whined about my boring life some more, here's some of the latest shots I've taken!  These are from Disneyland and one shot of my first set design!

It's cloudy again, and I'm really ready for warm sparkling Spring to be here.  Feeling very cooped up and I need some adventure. 

The show has opened!  I survived!  Barely.  Still have to work in the new actor and go through that transition, but at least I have some down time now.  So now what to do with that down time?  Today I'm trying to convince myself that it's ok to just lay low and relax, but there's so much to be done.  I know that my body needs the rest.  I joined the gym and I so desperately want to lose the weight that I feel like I shouldn't ever be resting although I know that's not valid.  So here I am.

More change is coming, I set the wheel in motion for a major life change yesterday, I'll discuss more when it's been made public knowledge, but will be a huge relief.  I've got to keep pushing forward, kids. 

Spring, I need you!!

Life returns...

Even in the darkest of days, and I'm not fool enough to think that these are even close to being the darkest, there is a glimmer of light, a respite, and today was such a day.  I have been reminded that I am not yet dead and that spring is very near and there are still new experiences to be had.

In spite of all the non-stop drama, I took the day off from the theatre today and went with Jami to the Irish Fair in Pomona.  It's a small festival, not very exciting, but we met up with Bob who introduced us to Ken O'Malley and the Twilight Lords, an extremely talented Irish band.  The lead man is obviously Ken O'Malley, and as we sat down and I listened to him sing, I was transfixed.  An Irishman, from Dublin, and I had goosebumps as he sang Irish rebellion song and love songs and songs of longing for the homeland.  Irish music reaches my heart like hardly anything else can and he nearly brought me to tears in the middle of the LA Fairgrounds.  All my worries forgotten as I fell in love.  A feeling I haven't had in months, and was beginning to fear I never would again.  An older gentleman, but what matters that?  How I long to be with a musician again.  To share a life and listen to them play and sing to me alone.  Silly I know, but it is a pretty picture. In a fit of foolishness, I confess I found him on Facebook and sent him a message just saying that I enjoyed the show.  It would be lovely to get a response, but I certainly mustn't expect one.  But wouldn't anyone like to get a random complementing email out of the blue?  Just enjoy the lovely day and be better tomorrow, that's what matters.

Just good to know I'm still capable of feeling irrational hope and happiness.

A beautiful day.

March 6, 2011

Life on the roller coaster. Rehearsals are coming along.  Two weeks in and I'm finally relaxing enough to actual feel creative about it and I think that's mainly me feeding off of the actors' creativity.  I could really use some designers but it's not looking too good at this point.  I'm working on the set design myself, Anthony's going to do my sound which is cool and I desperately need a lighting designer.  Just feel like too many bridges have been burned in the last few months.  You go into these things thinking you're going to find a support system, people will help.  And there are your friends who always do, and I'm eternally grateful for them.  Then there are some that you realize you shouldn't count on as much as you had hoped to.  And fair enough, I really don't want people to do anything out of sheer obligation.  It just makes me a little sad. It's a very lonely feeling.

I don't know what's going on lately.  I feel very isolated.  Alienated, that's the word.  I no longer belong anywhere.  Invisible.

As I work on As You Like It, I fall more and more in love with Arden.  I approached this show with the idea that it is Eden and what would be my idea of paradise, and now I just wish I could make it real and disappear there myself.  A forest, peopled with artists and lovers, each just doing their own thing and living together, if not in harmony that would be boring, but at least peaceably.  Why can't people work together without pissing on each other constantly and bickering and competing?  Why do people have to be so mean?  I sound like such a hippie right now, but seriously? The theatre was supposed to be where I went to get away from the bullshit of work.  A creative safe zone.  Now it just seems like everywhere I go, I'm just in the middle of everyone's battling egos and I'm just supposed to take it all.  It's impossible to create in this environment. 

Yeah, sorry for the super depressing post, it wasn't what I started out to write this morning, but it's what came out.  Everything just seems difficult right now.  And trite and completely uninspired.  Fucking depression, it's evil.  Just gotta ride it out.  Changes must be made.

All that being said, and in spite of all the bad juju I feel, I think the show's going to be good.  It's starting to gel and we're finding the humor and I hope that my cast is happy and having fun with it.  Everyone knows that I love Shakespeare and will do any of his shows, but I didn't start out with the knowledge & love of As You Like It as I did with Midsummer and that scared me a little.  But I'm starting to love these characters as much as I do Puck and the others.  No matter how low I am, I have to trust the magic and know it will be ok.  It's a mystery. :)

Sunday morning and the sun's starting to come out.  Spring is so close, only a couple of weeks away and things will look up. Would they notice, do you think, if I just ran away to Arden?

February 19, 2011

So I've fallen behind a little bit, but the last couple of weeks have brought some interesting and stressful changes.  But they haven't really dispelled the winter blues. It's Saturday night and I'm home, again, blogging and watching X-Files, listening to the rain and trying to stay warm.  I seem to have no social life left at all.  Nothing left but the theatre, and that's not really cutting it right now.  If anything, the theatre is what's depressing me.  Let me rephrase, certain people at the theatre are depressing me, because they are jerks, and I'm so sick of being the repository of everyone's frustration and anger. 

In the meantime, I'm directing a show, as of last weekend.  Not at all what I wanted to be doing right now, although it has been nice to have something to work on.  I just pray god that I can get a cast and pull this off.  My second Shakespeare is underway, As You Like It.  Nothing like living on the fly.  But it's a good show, some beautiful writing of course, and really, it's not like I have something better to do.  I just need to get out of my head and have fun with it.  The problem is that it's February & March, the time of year when my soul lays dormant and I seem incapable of truly having fun.  I don't know, everything's changing, I can't help feeling like there's somewhere else that I'm supposed to be, I just don't know how to get there.

Anyhoo, wish me luck all! I'll try to keep you posted here.  In the meantime, here's the latest show pix I took for Almost, Maine, which opened today.

1/30/11

I'm not very happy this morning, kids. I know part of it is the sheer exhaustion from living with these allergies for the last 2-1/2 weeks but I'm just feeling very isolated.  The demons are putting up a fight.  I've had nothing social to do all weekend, and I get to end it with a day of dealing with theatre business, which is sucky as I kinda feel like people only want me when there's work to be done.  I know that's not actually true, but it is how it feels sometimes.  I just want someone to come looking for me cause they miss me.  But then I'm just as bad.  I don't exactly contact people all the time with nothing to say. No offers. Sorry I'm being self-indulgent in my Sunday morning pity party.  I have the doldrums.

So what did I do this week.  Well, the major entertainment of the week was going to SCR to see Midsummer.  An interesting production, a little disconnected I felt as far as general theme, but I can see they used it to distinguish between the fairy world and the normal world.  The normal world seemed to have a very late 50's/early 60's element to it, all smart dresses and suits.  Helena was the stand out in the mortal world, the actress played her as adorable and gawky and her comic timing was wonderful.  The other lovers were good, but nothing extraordinary.  Lysander also did a wonderful kind of nerd and I liked him as well.  The fairies were, I don't know, kind of raver/club kids and mostly males playing gay.  I wasn't thrilled with them.  Oberon & Titania were double cast as Theseus & Hippolyta as most productions seem to do and I liked Titania well enough, she played her very playfully, had a very Madonna like vibe to her and yes there were pop song & dance numbers which I found quite annoying.  I don't want to come to see Midsummer and end up in the middle of a Broadway musical, but more on that later.  Oberon was rather dreadful, I could see no differentiation in character from Theseus, he was very stiff.  That makes me sad as I'm always partial to Oberon, probably as I've rarely seen him played well.  Puck, on the other hand, was very interesting.  He had this David Johansen, New York Dolls, Clockwork Orange thing going on.  Very old school rock star with crazy Mick Jagger moves and a strange affectation of speech, an older Puck then I've ever seen played, I found him rather fascinating.  During the lovers scenes in the forest, the fairies were always present in the background, and they undressed the lovers throughout the show so that they literally performed half the play in their underwear.  I thought this a very interesting conceit, a physical manifestation of the emotional stripping down that occurs on the fairies turf, but it kind of bothered me that the lovers took no notice of it whatsoever.  I get that the fairies are invisible and all, but when coming into physical contact with mortals you'd think there's be some recognition of it.

The Mechanicals were lovely, mostly played by the elder statesmen of SCR, but they didn't really shine until the final play within the play which was hilarious..  Bottom's ass head was very cool, fashioned as a skull with leather patches sown on the back and up to make the ears with fairy lights in the skull.  Quite lovely. 

But the final scene was a horrible disappointment.  They took Puck's beautiful monologues at the end of the show, and turned them into a full blown Broadway hip hop dance number with Puck half rapping them over the music, while the entire cast including the Mechanicals came out for the number.  You couldn't even hear what he was saying.  I was a sad bunny.

All in all, it was an enjoyable evening though. :)

I have watched a number of movies in my confinement, including An Education which was very very good, I love Peter Sarsgaard.  Adorable.  Yesterday, I not only forced myself outside for a hike and picture taking, but I managed to stay in the rest of the day and not turn on the tv until 9pm!  Read quite a bit and got some housework done, so a productive day really.  Working my way throught Celtic Myths and Legends now, which I'm enjoying.  I finished Bloodsucking Fiends on Tuesday before I did more theatre work.  Sigh.  Very good book, great ending.  I do think that Fool is still my favorite of the Christopher Moore books although I liked Lamb a lot as well.  He reminds me a lot of Tom Robbins. 

Well, I guess that's it for this week.  I'll conclude with some of the pictures I took yesterday down at the estuary, I'm pretty proud of them. :)

More on Facebook if you want.

Loves!!

1/23/11

It has been a busy week, without anything of note really happening. 

I find I have begun to stray from my good intentions of eating decently and exercising.  Mostly because I've been in the thralls of a hideous allergy attack for the last week.  Can't breath, can't stop coughing, exhausted. But I keep going as I hate to give in to such physical complaints.  Unfortunately I may be running out of steam.

Monday was movie night, Coen Bros.  Watched Fargo and O Brother, Where art Thou?, both of which I had seen before.  Great movies.  Also, on my way to movie night, while picking up my repaired boot, I ran into the Gnome, whom I used to work with and whom I had a huge crush on.  That was exciting, I'm afraid I got rather twitterpated and grinned for 2 days, obsessing over him for the next 24 hours, finding him on Facebook and so forth.  But fortunately, that didin't last long.

Tuesday was a spontaneous trip to the Huntington Beach Farmers Market, where we ended up at Gallaghers and won 2nd place at trivia night.  Pretty cool.  Wednesday, Disney with the stepmome, Thursday, dinner with Flynns, Friday Disney with KT and last night, Merry Wives and Poxy Boggarts.  Hasn't left me much time for reading or watching movies or you know, resting and feeling better.

I did watch the season opener for Masterpiece yesterday, caught up on the first two episodes of Downton Abbey with Hugh Bonneville.  Really enjoying it, can't wait for the next episode.  It takes place on a British estate around 1913.  The lord of the manor has three daughters and the estate will be entailed to a 3rd cousin, who is a lawyer and basically it's a story of class distinction, dealing with the servants and the changing times and the politics of the aristocracy.  Plus the scandals that go along with that.  Very well done so far. 

Today I have done nothing in an attempt to rest.  Watched tv all day.  I really need to write the press releases for the upcoming shows, but I'm feeling really lazy and I so don't want to.  I just want to sleep until whatever's causing these allergies goes away.

Useless.