Dan Posluns

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.

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.