Dan Posluns

I have some photos of the Austin trip, some just shot from my phone and others taken by people with proper cameras.

Behold some of us in our costumes for working the convention floor:

You will notice they consist mainly of astroturf and ping-pong balls. The astroturf scratched our arms throughout the day, although it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for some people.

Most days we only worked a four-hour shift (or even less), so it wasn’t all that bad, although by the end of the one day I worked a full eight hours I was about ready to torch the place. It was a little depressing to see the spotlight shining on greed… how people would flock to the free hats and do everything they could to procure them, the things they would say and do to try and get more than one hat (there were two different colours, and man, was that ever a huge mistake), and how they would scour for whatever other swag they didn’t need or often even really want but could still obtain. I’d label it an American phenomenon but there were people from all over the world at this conference and the visitors were no better than anyone else.

The trip itself was fun but not exactly eventful… we mostly went out during the evenings to eat whatever we could on Microsoft’s dime, then go out to bars or whatever (although a couple nights were spent in hot-tubbing at the hotel and the like). We saw a country band perform at a honky tonk, and an eighties cover band at an outdoor patio bar. The weather was sunny and tee-shirt warm (although it was cold in the mornings). I drank entirely too much, but so did everyone else.

Our final evening we had dinner at Fogo de Chao, a Brazillian steakhouse (or churrascaria) like the one I went to with my parents back in New York City. It was a fantastic and expensive meal… I had a look at the final bill for the thirteen of us (twelve from Unexpected plus Amy the event planner) and sure am glad that Microsoft was picking up the tab for that one!

Other highlights for me included:

• Seeing a new member of my work team who is wrapping up his affairs in Austin before moving to Seattle. He took me out for what I imagine was the most authentic Texas barbecue I got to experience on the trip. Good stuff!
• Got to see a guy I knew back in Software Engineering at McMaster. Was a little shocked to realize that it’d been five years since we’d seen each other. I was pretty loaded at the time, though, so that softened the blow.
• Hung out with Asaf, a guy I studied improv from and performed with occasionally back in New York City. A few people made it out to his show on Thursday but I was too exhausted. :(
• Tried fried pickles at Katz’s Deli, as well as celery-flavoured soda. Felt weird that I had to come to Texas to get Jewish food.
• Discovered that Austin boasts free print versions of America’s Finest News Source at just about every street corner and shop. Why can’t we get this in Seattle?!
• Wore a cowboy hat. Proof is in my gallery. I was surprised at how good it looked on me, but then that hat looked good on everyone that wore it.
• Found that Austin was generally a very hip city with a much lower cost of living than Seattle and an excellent climate in November… don’t know if I could stand it in the summer, though.

I haven’t had much time to stop and rest since getting home. I’ve taken a little time to catch up on my DVR’ed episodes of Stewart and Colbert, but mostly I’ve been running around doing improv stuff, and consumed by our very compressed rehearsal period for Christmas Carol.

Speaking of which, A(n Improvised) Christmas Carol is one of our company’s most popular shows, and I will be playing Bob Crachit every evening, so it’s a good opportunity to come out and see me play! As the audience, you get to decide everything ranging from Scrooge’s business, to the nature of the ghosts, to Tiny Tim’s ailment, right down to whether or not Scrooge learns his lesson and gets to reform at the end! The format of the show is fairly rigid so as to keep it aligned with the source material, so it’s unlikely to be the most expansive improv you will ever see me do. But the cast and the format are both brilliant and it should provide for a rollicking good time with a true Chistmas classic. It opens Friday, so go see it!

Dan.

I’m composing this entry on the last day of my trip to Austin with the delegation from Unexpected; I fly home tomorrow morning.

It wasn’t actually made clear to me when I was first offered the spot that I wasn’t going there to perform, but rather to be a booth monkey for Microsoft at the convention. (It seems in previous years the improvisers had performed as well, but that got cut from this year’s schedule.) Working the floor wasn’t exactly fun, especially in our ridiculous golf costumes (pictures forthcoming I’m sure). It still boiled down to an expenses-paid vacation from Microsoft, though, hanging out with the other UP improvisers and with a respectable stipend to boot, so I don’t regret doing it.

Austin has been really nice, and I’ve enjoyed the sunshine and the summer weather in November. Between time spent on the job and time out partying with everyone else, though, I’m going to need a vacation from my vacation.

It’s been an insightful trip… a few surprises; some old questions answered and some new ones made manifest. There are moments that have left me wondering if I’m the biggest sucker in the world. I hope I’m not.

I think I’m ready to go home, though.

Dan.

So last night we had a follow-up condo meeting to the failed vote on our assessment a month ago. We revoted on essentially the same package with some minor modifications (for example, it’s now conditional on 15-year funding being acquired for those that need it). It passed this time with 61% approval… not exactly a landslide, but I’m glad the board isn’t trying to proceed with just a marginal majority either.

The board has really screwed the pooch on the management of this, in my opinion, and they are lucky to have passed it on a second go-round. It’s not that the plan is a bad one - it’s solid enough, even if I think we could have gone with some less-expensive options to placate the people who are really going to be struggling with it - it’s just the public relations from the board and the management company to the homeowners have been absolutely abysmal, to the point where people before the meeting were practically brandishing their pitchforks in full lynch mode.

In the end, though, enough people saw that it was the right thing to do to vote it ahead… now all the board needs to do is find a bank willing to negotiate 15-year term loans for the people that need them and settle a few final terms of the contract (they’ve been given a 3% leeway for increases since the previous bid expired). Once that happens, I can officially be poor… as Roseanne said when they shut the power off to her house, “well, middle class was fun”.

Of course, the intent behind this is to protect our investments and recover the value of the assessment in renewed appreciation on our homes, but as I said before, it’s still a mighty bitter pill to have to swallow.

In other news, it seems I will be playing Bob Cratchit as well as any number of other auxillary characters for the entire run of Unexpected’s Improvised Christmas Carol, opening toward the end of this month and running through December. I’ve already contacted my dialect-coach friend and in exchange for a nice dinner she plans on helping me master a rudimentary (and most likely comically exagerrated) cockney. So I’ve got rehearsals for that, and I’m also going to Austin all next week with the improv entourage, so while things aren’t quite like they were during tech week for Rocky, they are busy as usual.

Dan.

Well, Rocky came to its bittersweet conclusion this past weekend. I had somehow talked myself into the responsibility of making gifts for everyone who had been helping out on the show, and this proved to be a fairly monumental task, as there were no less than 17 people helping out at every single performance, plus five others we wanted to suitably honour: the director, producer, stage manager, music director and costumer. My initial plan called for a cast photo to be taken, which would be turned into photo-greeting-cards that we could sign and distribute to everyone. I was then going to find five inexpensive collage-frames for the others and load them up with photos of the show.

I ordered the greeting cards online and they arrived on Wednesday, but were printed at about a quarter of the resolution of the original file I sent in and looked horrible, so without sufficient time to place another order I wound up spending an evening designing them myself, going to Kinko’s and getting them printed and cut there. Meanwhile I was unable to find suitable collage frames in the budget I’d requested from the cast, so at one person’s suggestion I undertook the task of making the collages myself and fitting them into generic 16×20 inch frames, which was of course a much larger project than I’d originally signed on for or imagined.

In addition to these, in a stroke of luck/genius I’d come across mad scientist alphabet blocks which seemed like a perfect cast gift, but in order to give everyone blocks with meaningful letters on them I would have to order several sets. In a quick correspondence with the business, however, I found out that not only for a small price increase per block I could select individual blocks, but for a slightly greater increase they would let me pick all six sides for each block, which meant I could custom-tailor a block for each cast member. So for a smaller price than ordering multiple sets I was able to get each cast member their own customized mad scientist alphabet block with letters that I found meaningful to them. Sweet.

On top of this, I wanted to give the cast members a framed cast photo, so I had to get that taken care of as well. So last week was pretty much spent embroiled in getting all that together, and my condo looks like an arts-and-crafts tornado ran through it as a result.

Emotions ran pretty high for closing weekend. All three shows had sold out early in the week, so we knew we’d have good audiences. It was a long run and a good run and of course the only alternative to ending it while still wanting to do more would be to end it once we were sick of it, so there’s no option but to grieve and move on. My only frustration was that after many months of pristine health that was nothing short of miraculous I finally succumbed to a cold on our closing weekend, which of course had to be when they decided to make a video recording of the show. Boo. Fortunately the cold hasn’t affected my throat much, but it hit my lung capacity pretty badly, which wreaked havoc on my solos. The various meds I put myself on also impacted my acting in general, I think. Oh well.

I’ve added some more photos of the production to my gallery, including a whole slew that were taken when we went to see the movie version at the Admiral Theatre, and a couple of the cast with our most famous guest narrator, United States Congressman Jim McDermott:

Some newspaper came and snapped photos of the event as well, but I haven’t heard anything yet about the article.

As sad as I am to see Rocky pass on from my living world and into my life’s history, I finally made it back to an ensemble workshop at Unexpected yesterday and was startled at how much I missed my life there and doing improv. As much as I love doing scripted work, there is a naked honesty that improv provides that other forms of theatre cannot, and the people over there are so excellent that it pains me retroactively to have been removed from them for so long.

I suffered from the usual I’ve-been-away-I-sure-hope-I-remember-how-to-do-this syndrome, but I managed a couple of really decent scenes (and one spectacularly terrible one, but that’s how the improv cookie crumbles) and once I got into it and the feeling of it started flooding back to me, I was almost shaking from how much I missed doing it. I really look forward to sinking my teeth back in over there.

Dan.

The last week or so has been stressful. A friend who is close to me had a health scare, and my personal life has been even more heightened and ineffable than normal. It’s Friday, though, so the show reopens tonight for its second-last weekend and I get to leave my mundane life and problems behind and go lose myself in the insanity and inanity that is my character.

Rocky Horror only has six more shows, so please buy a ticket and come see it before they all sell out! (Oh, I just stumbled on another awesome idea for cast gifts, so that’s something else I’m looking forward to.)

Out of the blue, I’ve been offered a spot through Unexpected Productions to go down to Austin, Texas for a week in November and perform improv at an annual Microsoft conference, expenses paid (and a handsome stipend for myself to boot). Normally they request six specific company members, but this year they asked for a delegation of twelve and I suppose I lucked out in getting offered a spot in the remaining six. It actually took some time to decide if I would do it, as it means liquidating my remaining vacation time for the year, and just as our team is starting to ramp up it’s size. But on further consideration and consultation I realized that I would be a complete idiot to turn down the chance to have a free vacation somewhere warm and that I’ve never been before, where I’ll be getting paid to do the thing I love alongside some of the most fantastic performers I know. So I ultimately said not so much “yes” as “hell yes”.

Once Rocky Horror wraps up I’m going to have nearly half a dozen shows of various friends to go and see, improv to catch up on, and this conference in Austin. I’m still optimistic that November will be less busy than September and October were, but the gap is narrowing.

Dan.