Posts Tagged ‘first times’

Find out where it lived

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Spelling Bee is moving along at something of a blitzkreig pace. We open April 1, a scant twelve days from today, and it feels like there’s still so much to do… we’re rehearsing most nights, though, so I’m certain we’ll get it all done. I’m starting to gain a bit of confidence with my part, but there is a ridiculous amount of random information I need to retain, even with my cheat sheets and cue cards that I’m allowed to have on stage. The cast is talented and a lot of fun to work with, and the show should be entertaining. We run all through April and tickets may be purchased online if you’re interested in seeing it.

This was a pretty good weekend for Theatresports for me. I got to emcee on Friday, which is something I’ve missed doing and enjoyed returning to. I then played on a fun team on Saturday, and while the show wasn’t as narrative-heavy as I’d like it managed to have a healthy number of charming moments that I feel good about in it. There’s a chance I’ll be able to continue doing some Theatresports while Spelling Bee is running, since Theatresports doesn’t begin until 10:30 and Spelling Bee is only a 90-minute show. I hope I can pull that off, although I know I’ll probably kill myself from exhaustion if it’s more than just a few times.

My condo board attempted to have its annual meeting this past week. Out of 101 units, we were 11 units shy of having a quorum, which was simultaneously annoying and depressing. They are going to attempt another one next month, and hopefully we’ll get enough people there to at least keep business from grinding to a complete halt. One of the women there confided in me that she believed this was the homeowners’ way of “sending a message” to the board, which pissed me off to no end, if for no better reason than one of the purposes of the annual meeting is to hold an election for new board members, and if people wanted to really send them a message then it seems the courageous thing to do would be to show up and vote a new board in rather than wasting the time and money of everyone in the association. I am frequently annoyed by both the cowardice and the attitude of entitlement that so many people in this complex display… there are plenty of things the board does that I disapprove of, but I recognize that they are volunteers doing the work that nobody else wants to do, and it baffles me the way people are willing to complain about their work without ever offering to step up themselves. At many of these meetings I’ve observed that there seems to be some kind of mental disconnect for people that keeps them for understanding that we are all paying for this, and that when we need to reschedule a board meeting, for example, the cost of mailing everyone, renting the space, having the management company attend, etc. comes out of all of our own pockets, not just the board members they want to stick it to. And then they somehow expect to win over the opinions of people like myself, when they a. refuse to show the commitment to even show up to meetings (let alone invest the time and effort that the board does), and b. make us pay for their antics. Grrr.

In more condo news, I took a crack at what was a first in home repair for me: fixing the leaky faucet in the kitchen. That faucet has been dripping on-and-off ever since I took possession, but until recently I’ve been able to get it to stop for the most part (or at least drip at a slow enough rate that I don’t notice it) by yanking the articulating handle around in some kind of mysterious, visceral routine. Over the past few weeks, though, I’d been gradually forced to acknowledge that the situation had worsened, and that the faucet was going to drip no matter what kind of mojo I worked on that lever.

I’ve been hesitant in the past to fix it for two reasons: I’ve always thought that replacing that countertop (and getting a new sink as part of that process) would be the next major upgrade I did to this condo, and – perhaps more significantly – plumbing terrifies me. Water-related repairs take a lot more effort, care and accuracy to do things correctly than many other home projects I’ve done, and the damage caused by a leak if you screw up can be enormous. And yes, fixing a leaking faucet usually only means replacing a rubber O-ring, but my particular faucet has a much more complicated repair process that requires replacement of springs, rubber stoppers, a ball chamber, etc.

I got the necessary repair kit from Home Depot, which was an adventure in itself, since I identified the several parts I needed online and confirmed on their website that they were in stock at my local warehouse, but then could only find one of the parts on the shelf. I had to go through two associates who were unable to help me find the remaining ones, and listen to both of them brush me off  when I brought up the website, claiming that it didn’t have any specific information and only a general catalogue, before I impatiently explained to them that no, these days the website told me exactly how many were in stock at each location, and that according to it there were actually sixteen of them in this very building, and that I only wanted one of them if they would be kind enough to find out for me where it lived. In the end the second guy sold me an after-market repair kit instead of looking, which I was hesitant to take because there was nothing on the packaging that said what original parts it was compatible with, although on visual inspection the contents looked like they matched well enough and there were few enough alternatives on the shelf that it was probably correct.

Doing the repair was no picnic, as there weren’t very specific instructions and the kit had multiple sets of springs and rubber seats to choose from that were all very similar and hard to compare to the old and deteriorated springs and seats. The rubber seats also didn’t fit well onto the springs, and there was nothing in the instructions that detailed how to deal with them. It took me a couple of tries to get it right, and I freaked out a little when I first turned the sink back on and it actually leaked worse than it had before, this time from the base as well as the spout. I also found some minor dripping from the pipes under the sink, which had me really worried since it was nowhere near the faucet, although it doesn’t appear to have persisted after I completed the repairs and may have just had something to do with how I was manhandling the faucet. I eventually got everything more-or-less correct and it no longer leaks, although I’ve told Elizabeth we need to be gentle with it, and I am still shining a flashlight under the sink for the next few days to make sure everything is copacetic.

Someday, I would like to get that entire counter and sink replaced. Someday.

Dan.

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Tequila-inspired

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

A lot has gone on these past couple of weeks. Where to begin?

Two weeks ago I went to a friend’s birthday party, who decided that for her 30th birthday she wanted flying trapeze lessons. So a bunch of went to the local circus school to do their introductory course, which consisted of a couple of hours swinging in the air above a giant net.

As with most things, the scariest part is probably the anticipation. This meant the whole phase of climbing up a ladder to a wobbly little platform 30 feet in the air, having them switch safety lines on you (and telling you to “hold on” while you’re being switched), and reaching out in an incredibly unnatural position while trying to hold a heavy bar at eye level, with nothing but air and net beneath you. We each did about four or five jumps, though, which meant I got to revisit the scary anticipation phase several times. In my brief time there I didn’t get to the point where it became second nature… in fact, I think I actually got a little more scared as I went to do subsequent jumps.

The first jump was straightforward and fun enough: jump from the platform and swing from the trapeze, then when given the command lift your legs into a sitting position and drop into the net. My eyes grew wide with alarm as she described the second jump to us, though: we were to jump off the platform, then at the far point of the first swing lift our legs up into trapeze bar, then at the near point of the swing release our hands and swing by our legs, then once we’d swung once grab the bar again, remove our legs and return to an arm-swing, then as the next swing began kick back-and-forth three times, release and do a backflip to land in the net.

Perhaps even more surprising to me is that I was able to do almost all of it. I had trouble getting my legs into the bar and that delayed me a swing, and then my kicking was pretty uneven so my dismount lacked sufficient speed, and I only did a three-quarter backflip. The next time I went up, though, I managed to do the entire thing (although I still took an extra swing to get my legs into the bar).

Don’t believe me? Well I’ve got proof:

trapeze_1 trapeze_2

Last few weeks have been interesting for improv. Same weekend as the trapeze, I was fortunate enough to get cast in two teams: one on Friday and one on Saturday. Unfortunately my Friday team didn’t do so well, but my Saturday team had a pretty solid show and I felt good about my performance. We ended up losing by a single point… but what was really odd was that the audience practically revolted against the judges with their booing, to the point that the emcee decided to give us one more challenge to attempt to settle the score. Due to a judge’s error at the end of that challenge, we ended up tying (something which isn’t supposed to happen), so we ended up in a “sudden death” skill competition that my team got shut out on. So it was about the most crushing defeats imaginable, and one of our team members (who happens to also be the artistic director of the theatre) proposed we come back the next week for a grudge match. This felt a little weird to me but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to perform again. So we came back and we lost a second time, fair-and-square.

The whole judging thing in Theatresports is awkward. It’s designed as a way to engage the audience, focus their attention and galvanize them alongside the teams on stage against a common enemy. Whenever I judge, I always play the “arc of the show”: throwing lower scores at first and eventually opening myself up to higher scores at the end. But with King of the Hill and teams returning from week to week (which we’ve been doing for about a year now), the scores are a lot more significant and it’s a lot harder to get stage time if you don’t win, so it’s harder to keep the competition friendly. I, for one, would be happier if we returned to random teams, and we may do that eventually, but for now it is what it is. This weekend I am doing tech and judging, and who knows when I will improvise on stage again.

That said, I could certainly use the chance to redeem myself… Wednesday was Cinco de Mayo and my friend really wanted to do a tequila-inspired drunken improv performance with five players. I’m usually the first to shoot down drunk-prov as something that almost uniformly goes bad and is a bad experience for the audience, but he’d never tried it and I felt both obligated to him plus the need to challenge myself to something I expected to be very, very difficult.

So myself and four others showed up on Wednesday with bottles of tequila and prayers in our hearts. Now I’m a very light drinker to begin with, but knew I was going to have to show some mettle… we started downing the shots then eventually moved the table out to the right side of the house so the audience could see us getting sufficiently liquored up for our performance.

Now I’ve been plenty drunk before, but almost never to the point where I’ve had trouble walking upright. I did at least seven shots of tequila that night, and was a total mess. The improv went predictably similar to a car going at highway speeds through, say, a tree, but to my credit I at least tried to hold it together and had the sense to take my time responding, for all the good it did us. Elizabeth drove me home that night and put me to bed, and I was pretty much useless for all of the next day. It seems I just can’t recover like I could when I was twenty anymore.

In the midst of all of this, something rather unexpected has happened: I’ve joined the cast of another play. Driftwood Players is doing And Then There Were None (better known as Ten Little Indians), a murder mystery by Agatha Christie. This show isn’t normally the kind I exactly leap out of my chair to do (not the least of which reasons include I’m unable to do a British accent), but I got asked by the director personally to fill in after one of their leads had to back out for health reasons just before rehearsals were starting. It looks like a fun cast and a decent play, and I get to do a nicely comedic character role. Plus I’ve wanted to work for Driftwood in the past so it can’t hurt to do this show for them. I am going to need an unbelievable amount of dialect coaching, though.

Dan.

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Virtual shelves

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

My first application that I’ve written for the iPhone has hit virtual shelves! Say hello to iProv, a handy reference tool for improvisers that catalogues and displays over 250 improv games and handles, organizes them by tags, lets you search, track your recently-viewed and favourites, etc. and even choose a random entry by shaking the iPhone!

I wrote it as a feet-getting-wet project for the iPhone, which is part of the reason it’s free (the other main reason being that it’s based on free material). In addition to writing the program itself, I’ve set up (and most significantly, written documentation for) an infrastructure to allow the improv community to help collaborate on the program’s contents, and that’s over at http://iprov.sourceforge.net.

If you own an iPhone, please check it out even if you aren’t an improviser, as I’d appreciate both the stats on the iTunes website and the feedback from you.

Otherwise, life plods along, with a couple minor detours. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, which wasn’t helped one night when I was called at 4 AM to liberate an intoxicated friend from the police station (I was sleepy and there was a ton of reverb where he was calling from, so when he first called I thought it was from beyond the grave). It was a DUI and thankfully nobody was hurt, but it’s the first time I’ve ever been called into that sort of service so that seemed noteworthy. I also went to a cool fundraiser/cocktail party for a friend’s dance troupe… I normally find any sort of dancing pretty intimidating so it wasn’t until the bar had received a significant donation from me that I would even consider sharing the floor with the room full of “professionals”.

I’m annoyed by things that are breaking in my world. Ever since the chains on my tires snapped during the recent snowpocalypse, my right-front tire has been making a quiet grinding noise against a piece of metal that won’t stay put. I’ll get it looked at the next time I’m in for service, but for now it’s just troublesome. And now my washer has apparently broken… it quits half-way through the rinse cycle, leaving my clothes soaked and still a bit soapy. I have better things to be spending my money on… although most of it is sitting in savings anyway, waiting for the spectre of the assessment that’s supposed to happen on my condo to actually materialize.

Just the other day I opened a money-market account at the suggestion of a helpful bank teller (who also scored a nice referral fee). It apparently has all the liquidity of a savings account (so long as I don’t withdraw more than 5 times a month, which is fine, seeing as I have yet to withdraw from that account even once), but with a rate that floats about a percentage point higher. I feel stupid for not knowing about this kind of thing already.

Dan.

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