Been an eventful couple of weeks. Elizabeth and I kind of fell into being cast in a staged reading of a new children’s musical, being held at the prestigious Seattle Repertory Theatre. The play is called When The Boogeyman Spent The Night, in which I take up the mantle of the eponymous Boogeyman, a tired, grumpy and sarcastic ghoul (typecasting? …actually, the question mark is unneeded, the perpetrators have already plainly acknowledged it as typecasting). We do the reading next week and have precious little time to prepare in the midst of millions of other things going on in our lives, but from the one rehearsal we’ve had so far it’s clearly going to be a blast. The five of us performing are all good friends, one of whom plays a little boy that I get to positively terrorize. Who could ask for anything more?
We almost couldn’t make the scheduling commitment; our three main nights (split between two rehearsals and the performance) are precisely sandwiched between a weekend holiday at the beach in Moclips, WA with Elizabeth’s family, and our two-week vacation in Canada.
We’ve already been plenty busy. Elizabeth had her graduation ceremony last week – a major milestone for her – and just yesterday we had a follow-up barbecue party at our place to celebrate both her graduation and upcoming birthday. I also had my last Theatresports that I’ll be performing at the Market Theatre, at least until the renovation is completed and we move back in. I felt a sudden nostalgia upon its completion, a sort of sadness for a chapter that’s ending, even though not all that much ought to be changing. I helped out with organizing stuff and cleaning out for the move today (a process that’s being spread out over several weekends; today was the only day I am available), and it’s amazing how much history is in that place, as I went through records of concessions sales that were over 20 years old and threw out instruction manuals for 286 computers and the like. Among the spoils were some pricelessly old headshots of some of our current ensemble members, which I fully intend to scan and post online for all of our amusement.
We’ve had a few days of summer and that’s been nice, but have yet to experience the monstrous heat wave that typically occurs for a brief period each year. I actually snapped a little earlier this spring and bought a portable air conditioner after a short heat wave we experienced, thinking I could get a good price on last-year models (which I did), and that by getting a portable one I could trundle it in and out of our storage locker so that it wouldn’t be taking up space for the vast majority of the year when it isn’t needed. So far it’s proven a good plan except that we haven’t needed it a single day yet. Which is just as well, as it’s noisy as hell (pretty much all of the portable ones are), but I hope I’m not made entirely a chump for purchasing it.
I’m very tired, but it’s a good kind of tired. It’s that time of year when there are just a ton of social engagements and preparations to make for the end of the year. Tonight alone we are managing to cram in both a wedding (which is unusual in and of itself: a wedding on a Monday evening in December) followed by the holiday party at Unexpected Productions.
Yesterday was my thirty-first birthday, and it was about as nice and low-key as I could have wanted, although we still went to a friend’s cabin for her family’s annual dinner/bonfire, which meant two hours of driving and my allergies coping with their dog.
We’ve been mercifully lucky when it comes to weather, with the temperatures hanging around the mid-forties and not dipping below the mid-to-high thirties. Yesterday alone the weather report called for snow mixed with rain, but instead we had beautifully clear skies and temperatures in the forties. I hope I’m not jinxing things, but we’ve only got one more week before Elizabeth and I jet off to Florida for two weeks… I’m hoping with all my might that the snow continues to hold off until then. (And then, of course, that we get sunny, warm weather while we’re in Florida and not the record low temperatures we had last year.)
Not much else worth reporting at this time. I’ll try to catch this blog up after the holiday…
A lot has been going on at work lately, and yesterday I had to fly to San Jose and back, all in a single day. Both flights were booked solid, and the only ticket I could get for the return flight was first class (which the company went for, as it was less expensive than having me stay overnight). I’d never flown first class before, although I think this barely counts as the flight was less than two hours and about as “budget” as first class gets. The extra space was nice but I was expecting more pampering… we got free alcoholic drinks and a small bruschetta plate, and that was it. At least I got to be first off the plane.
(Typically my biggest factor in seat selection is how quickly I’ll be able to escape the hell off the plane. I didn’t actually have a choice on the flight down, and they stuck me in the aisle seat of the very back row. It should have been okay in that regard, as the flights to San Jose often exit from the rear of the aircraft as well as the front, but it took them so long to get the stairs to the back of the aircraft after we’d landed that the plane was almost done exiting by the time they opened the rear door, grr.)
I figure that this may well be the only time I ever fly first class. In that light, it was pretty disappointing… I certainly don’t see myself ever paying the extra money voluntarily, at least not to Alaska Airlines, who operated the flight.
My return to improv has plateaued since the last time I wrote here… it’s been a while since I had what I would consider to be a really strong performance. To make matters worse, last weekend I threw out my back while picking up a fellow performer… I’ve had backaches and pains before, but this is the first time I’ve ever seriously thrown it out, to the point where it was nearly impossible to stand up. It happened right before intermission, most of which I spent backstage lying prone and in intense pain. I faked my way through the second half, with the rest of the cast covering for me as needed. It took most of the week for the pain to subside fully… of course, Robaxacet isn’t available in the United States (at least, not OTC as it is in Canada), so I was mostly stuck with it.
We had a minor snowpocalypse last week that shut most of the city down for a couple of days. This didn’t impact me too greatly, working from home as I do, but it impacted Elizabeth and (combined with the back pain) generally increased the stress levels of myself and everyone I know. So Thanksgiving was a welcome respite from the stress, as was turkey and pie and the general overindulgence that goes with the holiday.
Hopefully we can make it through the next month without another snow dump… it’d be nice to escape to Florida without having to deal with that again!
This second run of Cannibal went out with less of a bang and more of a whimper, at least for me. In particular I succumbed to a cold the final weekend and my voice pretty much gave out on me, making it an extremely difficult final couple of shows. I will miss it as much as I miss any show I’ve enjoyed doing, but it’s pretty rare to arrive at the end of a five-weekend run of anything and still be craving more of it, especially once you’ve had that first taste of freedom on a weekend where you’re not already booked solid with performances.
Which isn’t to say this past weekend wasn’t busy, but it was nice not having the same marathon of performances… I had to work pretty hard in that show, and it took its toll on me. Instead we went and saw a friend’s show on Saturday, and then a wedding on Sunday. The wedding was something else… it was between two relatively high-profile members of the musical theatre community, and was utterly delightful in an incredibly dorky way, to the extent that it took place on a theatre stage and had a number of performances by their singer/actor friends, and even a villainous attempt to kidnap the bride (which I totally predicted would happen). The truly best part was getting to hang out with one of the largest cross-sections of both Elizabeth’s and my friends, and generally have a fun, relaxed time (in formal wear!) with a lot of people we don’t get to see as often as we’d like.
The cold, meanwhile, has pretty much vanished, as most colds tend to do for me: it greatly improved after only a couple of days, but I’ve been stuck with a few lingering symptoms ever since.
My spare time is also being highly monopolized by a super-secret project I’ve been working on for a long time, but is now finally picking up steam… I won’t divulge the details of it online, but it’s exciting!
Fall has hit us pretty hard but we’ve also had some extremely unusual and delightfully sunny, crisp days amid the ones where we are drenched by a constant onslaught of rain and darkness. I’ve begun using the fireplace again, which is a balm to soothe my frazzled nerves that I will never take for granted, although I had a rather strange experience trying to purchase firewood from Safeway where the cashier told me they stopped stocking it at the end of summer, as the managers thought people only wanted firewood for camping and couldn’t imagine any possible reason a person might want it when it was cold and wet outside. So I bought it from QFC instead.
Maybe it’s time I come to terms with the fact I’m just not very good at updating this blog as frequently as I used to. I hope that you, the few loyal and lonely (and intensely bored?) remaining followers of it, aren’t too disappointed. I will still attempt to get something here every few weeks, but please excuse my continued transgressions.
We had a few weeks of utter hell heat-wise, where temperatures pushed up into the nineties and it was stifling. So it was perhaps ill-conceived that myself and three friends chose to follow it up with four days in Las Vegas in the middle of the Nevada desert, where temperatures were well over a hundred. (Plenty more on that in a bit.)
The weather has been bi-polar… the heat-wave came out of nowhere, and during it I could barely sleep and had near-constant headaches. The moment it ended the temperature dropped right back down to the 60′s. I think I’m gonna start looking for a portable air conditioner I can use for the two weeks or so of summer that it’s like this, and keep in storage for the remainder of the year. My barbecue, unfortunately, hasn’t weathered the summer so well. It was in storage during the construction, and I then brought it out for a very successful party, but my next attempt to use it the middle burner simply wouldn’t light, and I could find no problems with the assembly. I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement ever since, but I’ve had no luck finding a good price on a grill that has an infrared rotisserie burner (one of my upgrade criteria) that can also fit on my rather narrow patio. I’m hoping that prices will come down sufficiently as the season winds to a close for me to pick something decent up.
I’ve been doing a lot of improv lately, some quite successful and some not so much. We’ve been doing theme nights this past month, probably the most interesting of which was our Shirts vs. Skins night, where I eagerly volunteered to be on the skins team and do topless improv alongside two other performers almost as pasty-white as myself. It was a very good show for both myself and the team, and the audience was on our side and hysterical the entire time. This weekend I will be representing Canada in our Natives vs. Non-Natives matchup… it’ll be interesting to see how the audience treats us in that one.
Without a doubt the biggest thing to happen to me recently is the trip to Vegas that I went on with Elizabeth and our two friends Colin and Ashley (you may remember them as Brad and Janet from the production of The Rocky Horror Show I was in). We’d planned it nearly two months earlier in particular because people in the group really wanted to see two Cirque shows: Kà and O. So we booked our tickets and rooms at the hotel and went this past weekend.
It was a pretty fantastic trip overall, and I took a bunch of photos with my iPhone. We stayed in the pyramid at the Luxor, one of the older hotels on the strip but also a well-renowned and regarded one. Our rooms were a bit dismal, but one does not go to Vegas to stay in the rooms, so we were okay with it, until Elizabeth found a leaky pipe in our bathroom, at which point I was able to negotiate an upgrade for the four of us to much nicer rooms in the East Tower with more space, better amenities and an impressive view.
We were there from Thursday night to Monday afternoon, and it was pretty much a whirlwind. The Cirque shows were incredible, fantastic, and all sorts of other adjectives I cannot do them justice with. They were both so much more than the touring show I’d seen in Marymoor by my condo. If I had to choose a favourite to recommend it would be Kà, which is far more story-based than most Cirque shows, and I found it both intense and positively gripping. O was pretty spectacular as well, and truly gorgeous, but unfortunately I had an allergic reaction in my eye that made it difficult for me to properly enjoy most of it.
In addition to this, Elizabeth and I went to see Penn and Teller, whose Bullshit! series we are both afficianados of. This show was a ton of fun and a great time. I was pleased with my ability to figure out how some of their tricks are done, although there were definitely some that stumped me. I don’t agree with all of their politics, but it’s hard to deny their charisma and what generous and genuinely well-intentioned guys they are. Probably the most telling indicator of this is that after every single show they wait outside the lobby while their audience (easily over a thousand people) mobs them, and gives each and every one of them the chance to get their picture taken with them and an autograph signed. It’s how I increased my collection of celebrity noogies to include both Penn and Teller.
Other highlights included my gambling at the blackjack table and turning $30 into $100 (although the next day I lost another $50). And the four of us also made the heinous mistake of going to a timeshare pitch in order to score free tickets to the Bodies and Titanic exhibits at the Luxor. We justified it as being a rite of passage, as none of us had attended a timeshare hard-sell before and it felt like we should know if we could make it through intact. It turned out resisting the sale wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as getting out of there in any reasonable amount of time was… it was supposed to be for two hours over lunch at 1 PM, but we didn’t even begin until 2 PM (by which point we were starving) and didn’t get out of there until 4:30, which cut into the time we had to spend with friends of Ashley who lived in Las Vegas. There were some highly entertaining stories we got out of it, but I think we all agreed that the stories still weren’t worth the hassle.
All in all the trip was a huge success, and it was a great idea to go with a similarly-interested couple that we could have fun with. It’s a shame to go back to work, but I don’t think I’ll miss the desert heat. You can check out my photo album of the trip, and here are a few teasers:
I also took a couple of videos…
Kà preshow, featuring balls of fire! (Make sure to watch through to the end.)
