Dan Posluns

The vacation was good. The more extended family came up for the last weekend, which was nice, as I get to see them even less often than my parents or brother. It was especially nice to see my grandmother, who has been in and out of the hospital these past years and is now pretty much confined to a wheelchair. My aunt also brought up Izzy, who is now 16 years old and getting a lot more bony and less active (but just as curmudgeonly as he’s always been… it’s as though his body has finally grown into his personality).

More blabbering on about Izzy… with pictures!

I got back Sunday evening. The flight was exhausting, as usual… I have a knack for somehow getting rearranged and shafted to the rear of airplanes, as both legs of my journey to Canada had already done so. When I saw the same thing on my boarding passes for the return flights, I spoke to the ticket agent and he was able to improve my seat on the shorter leg to Detroit, but was apparently unable to even access the much longer flight to Seattle on his computer. So the second leg had me at row 36 in a middle seat… the good news was that a family of four traded me the aisle so they could sit together; it should come as no surprise, though, that the bad news was that half the family was composed of a baby that wouldn’t stop crying and a little kid that wouldn’t stop talking.

So naturally much of the R&R I managed to accrue over the vacation was forfeit, and now between work and trying to catch up in the rehearsals I’ve missed for Rocky Horror I’m pretty well spent. It’s good to get back into rehearsing, but last night was my first time singing “The Time Warp” with the cast there and it was scary as pants for me, even though I’d worked on it just about every day while on vacation. Turns out most of what I’d worked on needed to be thrown out anyway, since there are a lot of nuances to the specific version we’re doing I didn’t know about (I only got the vocal score this week and have been working off of various recordings in the meantime). Everyone is very encouraging and supportive but the gap between myself and the others is dizzyingly wide… our Magenta especially has a stunning rock belt, and while I’m fortunate to have her backing me up, between that and the stellar vocals of the rest of the cast it’s all rather confidence-shaking.

Of course, my greatest dilemma is that the one thing this kind of music absolutely demands above all else is confidence, so I have no choice but to fake it and try to fool myself. Thankfully that’s an acting challenge rather than a singing challenge, so I’m better equipped to handle it.

Would that I could still fool myself in the moments between performing, though.

Dan.

I’ve spent the past couple of months bringing a secret plan to fruition, where I hoped to surprise my mother on her birthday by dropping in unexpectedly on their summer cottage vacation.

I had really hoped to kill two birds with one stone and help my dad out in his purchase of a new van by buying it for him in the States and driving it up to Canada, magically saving him about ten thousand dollars because that’s just how much more things cost north of the border. Importing should be almost trivial to do except that Toyota doesn’t want you to do it, and makes it extremely difficult to do so (with new vehicles especially). My dad compromises on some things, but the make, model and age of his minivan are not up for discussion.

In short, they won’t sell to Canadians, only Americans who are registering the vehicle to an American DMV. The hope was that we could use my residency status and address in America to buy the van, and it looked like it would work except that it takes 6 to 8 weeks to title a vehicle in Washington and without the title we’d need a manufacturer’s certificate of origin to import it, which the dealerships wouldn’t provide us with because Toyota is run by assholes.

We finally gave up on it and I settled on flying to Toronto directly instead of Buffalo. I caught the red-eye which included a stopover in Vegas, during which I played my first ever slot machine… I spent a dollar that someone had given me beforehand and lost it before I was able to even figure out how the machine worked. I failed to sleep on the plane and arrived in Toronto at 7:30 AM local time, all sweaty and bleary-eyed. My mom was nearly shocked senseless when she came downstairs and I was there, and much blubbering followed.

I’m now spending the week with them up at their cottage in Muskoka. I am sad that I’m not getting to see any of my Canadian friends this visit, but the downtime up here has been really theraputic for me. We’ve caught one of the most gorgeous weekends of the summer… it’s been sunny and warm and the lake has been quiet and calm. I’ve gone swimming and boating with my folks and working on my part in Rocky Horror but most of all I’ve just been lounging and resting, and it’s been niiiiice.

My biggest complaint is that we only have dial-up Internet access here, and I didn’t discover until I arrived that my fancy-pants laptop doesn’t actually have a modem in it, so I’m forced to use my dad’s computer for all Internet-related activity. I’m trying to goad them into getting high-speed up here, mostly because I think it’d be fantastic to lounge around on the lower deck out by the water with a wireless connection to the rest of the world. Don’t think they’ll go for it any time soon, though.

For the curious, I have some pictures of the cottage taken a couple of years back in my gallery. Pretty much everything is the same… except the baby ducks have grown big and fat now, and still like to hang around our little bay.

Dan.

This past week was fairly exciting, as it was both Canada Day on Tuesday and America Day on Friday. I celebrated Canada Day by claiming the lunch room at work in the name of Her Majesty, the Queen:

I sent out an e-mail to the company that detailed this conquest and included the long version of O Canada. It was well-received, except was eventually defiled by American revolutionaries. Oh well.

America Day meant a holiday from work, and I spent the afternoon in the company of some very good theatre friends who were having a barbecue. Now one of the grand American traditions of the holiday is to try and detonate some of the land you love, but it just so happens that setting off fireworks in Seattle is illegal. Such laws are a trifle to my one friend whose parents happen to own a fireworks stand, though. At personal risk I helped him unload what I was told was a payload probably in the neighbourhood of $2,000 or so.

Now the friend with the fireworks - let’s call him Vee - and the owner of the house - let’s call her Jay - have a long-standing friendship where they have performed alongside each other (both are two of the most spectacular and hard-working talents I have the privilege of knowing), but Vee is very, well, full of life and often when they get together socially at Vee’s behest the more moderate Jay will wind up with a concussion or some other form of mild trauma. I should now note that Jay is not a fan of fireworks in her home - is rather ruffled by them, in fact - and it took a lot of nudging and guarantees of safety from Vee to convince her it was a sane idea to ignite them in her back yard.

So of course what came to pass was that Vee gave the first firework - a simple smoke grenade - to a twelve-year old boy who broke it and caused it to emit a fiery plume. He dropped it and it sat in the middle of the yard, right next to the shoe of Jay’s three-year-old daughter who burst into tears at the sight of her shoe being roasted. The footwear was recovered but not before it suffered some unsightly burns, and the grenade continued to carve out a patch of soil in the grass next to it for quite some time.

Jay got all tight-lipped as she hugged her wailing child and Vee banged his head in gentle disbelief onto grass next to him. I nearly shed tears myself, I was so moved by the poetry of the spectacle before me.

My friends are fantastic.

I tried to hit up another party that night as well: one of the ensemble members at Unexpected has a houseboat moored at Lake Union, and every America Day he has a party there and people watch the (state-sanctioned) fireworks from some of the best seats in the city. I was unfortunately coming after the fireworks, but what should have been a five-minute drive became thoroughly ridiculous as cops had quarantined off that entire section of the city and made it virtually impossible to get anywhere close. There were barriers that kept me from even getting onto the street that his marina was on, and because all of the main and side streets were closed off it took me over an hour just to get back to the highway… as a result I missed partying with all of my improv friends, and caught some minor hell for it later on.

I did Theatresports last night and it went pretty well. I could have been stronger and I think our team could’ve had slightly better chemistry, but I had a good Shakespeare scene and the audience enjoyed it. After the show some girls came to me and got all excited that I reminded them of Buster from Arrested Development. They seemed to think this was some kind of badge of honour and I should be proud that I resembled whom they thought of as the funniest character on the show. I was a little perturbed that I reminded them of the awkward guy with an Oedipus complex and quite possibly some kind of genetic deficiency. It still feels good when the audience takes a personal interest in me, though, especially as I still think of myself as a somewhat unremarkable improviser.

Being in the UP ensemble is such a fantastic and unique privilege; I never stop being in awe of how incredibly lucky I am to have this weekly venue where I can get on a stage and play games with such talented and wonderful people, as though it were normal for someone of my quality to be able to do this kind of thing. I’ll be driving home usually well past 1 A.M. to my suburban condo and unexceptional life, wondering in a bit of a daze what kind of weird dimensional rift I’m coming from where I can be this celebrity to maybe a hundred people, and to know that the folks that put me in that spot will want me back next week. Not everything in my life is as perfect as I’d like, but truly I am blessed beyond measure when it comes to this.

Today I have the second of three weddings, and I’m supposed to be cleaning my condo but am procrastinating by writing this blog instead. I shanghaied my most fashion-savvy friend into helping me buy a new suit - my first new suit in over a decade (I wore the last one to prom). I wound up getting a charcoal, three-button number from Nordstrom’s… I wasn’t prepared to blow the bank or anything but I wanted to spend enough to get something nice and not merely serviceable. The one I got was on sale for $520, marked down from over $1,000, so it very much satisfied my need to feel like I was getting value on the dollar. I also got a new shirt and tie, as well as a belt and dress shoes. Shoes threatened to be a problem as I didn’t realize how ridiculously expensive they would be, but I was able to get a really nice pair from the Nordstrom “Rack” (ie. Nordstrom’s budget/value sibling store) for $100 less than they would have cost at the one I bought the suit at. At the end of the day I spent around $750 in upgrading my entire line of formal wear, which seems like a solid investment.

I will try to get some pictures of myself in the new getup soon, and then you my loyal readership can judge for yourselves. ;-)

Dan.