It can be difficult to remember to slow down and enjoy what little summer we get when so much is happening. It’s been unexpectedly and surprisingly warm and sunny these past few days, and I reckon I very nearly missed it doing little things like catching up on sleep.
Build Your Own Musical made it through rehearsals and had its opening weekend. We feel under-rehearsed but the show is a lot of fun, and I in particular have valued a lot of what I’ve learned just from going through the process. Musical improv, unfortunately, isn’t much like riding a bike for me: if I don’t keep up at it regularly the skill evapourates from me like morning dew in a sunnier climate than this. Between the thought-out and extremely precise philosophy our director has and the sheer repetition of doing this show, I feel much more renewed in this area. As a bonus, I’ve been able to incorporate what I’ve been learning from my vocal teacher this past year, and it’s been extremely helpful. When it comes to singing I’ve always struggled with technique and lessons have been a matter of baby steps; I may still be delinquent when stood next to some of my more talented/skilled counterparts but I’ve made a lot of significant advancements and I’m proud of them.
In the meantime I’m keeping up with Theatresports at the Intiman, and that continues to be surreal. Unexpected Productions is also now doing shows at Edmonds Community College, which has a pretty spectacular new black-box theatre that they just completed before cancelling their theatre program, leaving it wide open and unused. I did a show there last weekend since the Intiman was closed for Bumbershoot, and it’s no Intiman but it’s still pretty sweet: ultra-modern, large and spacious (seats 220), great amenities (dressing rooms, scene shop, costume department, etc.)… no fly gallery or orchestra pit and the wings are pretty small, but still, it’s a pretty kickass space for a college that no longer seems to need or want it.
I’ve finally got around to posting some photos from the vacation. They’re pretty random, I’m afraid, and perhaps a few too many pixels wasted on random shots of animals (or Elizabeth feeding animals), but there are some nice ones nonetheless:
The director of the staged reading of When The Boogeyman Spent The Night also posted a highlight video and a full number from the show; the interested may choose to check them out:
Here’s a free closeup of my makeup job:
That’s about it. Throw in an overnight business trip to Portland (a bit inconvenient but I do generally enjoy taking the train) and call it an update. Really it might not seem like much, but when you’re rehearsing several days/nights a week and then doing improv shows late at night on the weekends, it tends to consume most of what you’ve got.
Our vacation to Florida was a big success on the whole, if bookended by less-than-stellar travel experiences. We spent three days in Orlando visiting Universal Studios and particularly The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, followed by a week down at Sanibel Island off the Gulf Coast where we were able to spend some time in the sun and with my family.
I got a number of photos of both the theme park and Sanibel. I’m especially proud of this one:
You might notice I’m wearing my leather jacket in the photo… the first couple of days we were at Universal, it was down near freezing, and actually colder than it was in Seattle. That was a bit disappointing but it mercifully warmed up by the time we got down to Sanibel and the more leisurely part of the vacation.
Sanibel was beautiful, and with the warmer weather than last year a much better experience for the three primary activities of biking, swimming and laying on the beach. It’s just nice to walk around in shorts and get my vitamin D from the sun instead of artificial gummies, frankly, but the beautiful scenery and majesty of the ocean is a big factor as well. I’m a big fan of all of the birds on the island, and there is an aviary that I enjoyed biking to where we got to feed and even (on one occasion) play with the birds there. There are plenty of photos, but I also got this cute video of a bird bobbing its head back and forth:
If the vacation itself was meant to renew us, we paid the price for it in our travel experience. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened on the way down, but it was a three-legged flight with Southwest during which we couldn’t leave the plane. It was about eight hours all told, and I had naively failed to bring a proper meal on board with me, and was both surprised and disappointed to discover Southwest doesn’t offer any in-flight meals for sale.
If that was stressful, it didn’t begin to compare with our flight home with Delta. That was only two-legged with an hour and a half layover, but our first flight wound up being delayed over two hours, meaning we would be unable to make our connecting flight. So they rerouted us through Atlanta, which as last-minute alternatives go could have been worse, since it was only scheduled to arrive three hours later, although it meant a much more tiresome four-hour layover. My only concern in all of this was that Elizabeth and I be able to sit together on the flights. The flight to Atlanta wasn’t a problem, but it was also just a short hop from Fort Myers. I was infinitely more frustrated by the second leg.
They wouldn’t assign us seats until the gate opened an hour before the flight, so I waited patiently for that to happen, and was first in line to make sure we could get our seats together. Sure enough, we got boarding passes with adjacent seats assigned to us and good to go. Then, as we were actually boarding the plane, as they scanned our boarding passes new slips suddenly printed out, reassigning us to different sections of the cabin, both to middle seats (and myself in front of the exit row, so I couldn’t even recline). That was a five-hour flight, and I was grinding my teeth in silent outrage through most of it.
It’s taken a while to get back into the swing of things at home – perhaps evidenced by how long it’s taken me to get this post up – but we’re mostly returned to our routine at this point. We’ve been seeing our friends a lot (in no small part due to Elizabeth scheduling them for free massages as part of her coursework), and that’s been nice.
I also made my return to the Theatresports stage this past weekend, and that was surprisingly fun. I performed pretty decently, I thought, with several strong scenes throughout the evening. Saturday was unexpectedly cool because I was scheduled to run lights, but one of the other players was feeling sick and traded out for the less stressful job with me. We ended up selling out the house and having standing room only, though, and it felt really great performing to such a large and enthusiastic audience.
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.)
I’m composing this blog from the airport, en route to San José for a couple of meetings. I’ll be returning this evening. They have free wifi here, but it’s terribly intermittent and unreliable… I probably won’t be able to post this until later.
It was a good weekend for improv, thanks to the Emerald City Comicon. Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis from The Guild (Zaboo and Vork) came down to play Theatresports with us, and it was one of the few times I’ve seen the house entirely sold out. It’s a rare privilege to get to play before an audience that’s not only standing-room only, but packed with actual fans of the people on stage and are just excited to see them, and predisposed to support them 100% because of it. Riding on Jeff and Sandeep’s coattails, I think it’s fair to say we could have said or done just about anything and it would have been a hit, but I’m pleased to say we actually did some pretty good improv up there. The entire show was recorded and put online here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FB79E499A4A14508. I got the biggest kudos for a Shakespeare Scene where I played a scheming, three-legged cat:
(The scene doesn’t get started until a few minutes into the video.)
It was nice to feel successful at doing a Shakespeare scene, because I had an audition about a month ago at Wing It Productions for a Shakespeare-based improv show that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I hadn’t auditioned at Wing It since I did The Beauty Pageant with them back in 2005, but when they announced their Shakespeare show I couldn’t resist. It turned out to be a very large group audition with about 30 people going for 4 to 6 spots, and I surprised myself at how tentative and mediocre I was. I had a couple of better scenes and attracted the interest of the auditioners, but by and large just flubbed the whole thing. I’m particularly annoyed by it because out of the 30 people I feel I was a top-runner that came pretty damn close, and if I’d only managed to do what I normally do instead of, well, flubbing the whole thing, I probably would have been cast.
Anyway, it felt good to do the form some justice again. And I got my obligatory noogie photo of myself with Sandeep and Jeff:
Sunday I actually went to the Comicon and performed as part of NERDprov: improv themed around nerdy subjects. It was a decent show although we had difficulties with the stage and the microphones. While at the Comicon I got an autographed copy of the first issue of Dr. McNinja, and also saw the booth for Night Zero, the photography-based comic I did a guest spot in earlier this year. (I went to the Night Zero launch party last week and got a couple copies of the comic… I’m actually in the corner on the back cover!)
Wednesday evening I fly out east to see my parents and attend a friends’ wedding. All this flying would have me exhausted if I wasn’t already having trouble sleeping these past weeks. I really don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s cramping my style.
We had our annual homeowners meeting for our condo complex this past week. It was good to get an update on where the construction stands; if things continue according to schedule they should be done in July, which would be terrific. Maybe then I’ll be able to get some sleep, at last.
My first project with Übermind has been released: Priceless Picks for the iPhone. It’s already had a very positive response these past few days. The national TV ad campaign for it rolls out tomorrow, so it’ll be interesting to see where things go from there. Anyone with an iPhone can download it for free from the App Store.
I’ve only seen rough drafts of the TV commercials, but they look really cool. The advertising company also released this on YouTube:
It’s not as polished or exciting, but gives you an idea about the app and its functionality. (I do love how they brazenly attempt to make such calculated and clearly beautified figures play as though they are casual and off the street.)
The project is a nice showcase of my 3D/game engine for the iPhone, as well as some excellent technology I developed for 3D mapping, and some cool animation stuff I was able to do. There is yet more performance I could have squeezed out of it, but that will have to wait for another release, I suppose.
I’ve been taking things relatively easy at work as we wait for the dust to settle from this launch and find out where things will go over the next little while. I’ve returned to Theatresports in the meantime, and tried to catch up on my social life a bit. Went to a superhero party, saw a couple of movies, that kind of thing. Today Übermind is having its 10th anniversary celebration barbecue, and I’m going to try to squeeze both a friend’s show and another friend’s birthday party around that.
Other than that, there’s a lot of other complicated stuff going on in my life that I’m not really ready to discuss. The next few weeks should prove interesting, though.
