Yawn. I need a weekend after my weekend. Not that I was rushed; I just went from appointment to appointment to appointment from Friday night all the way to this morning.

I saw my osteopath for the first time in a couple of months today. When I emerged from my warm flat to walk over to the sports clinic, the world was quite dark, and a few cars even had dustings of snow caught in the crevices between windows and frames (that dreaded S-word!). When I left again over an hour later, I could just see a line of pink through the clouds to the south-east, but wow, was I relaxed. We truly don’t understand how our bio-mechanic operating system gets off-kilter and requires more energy to run efficiently until we’ve been tuned up.

I spent Sunday in Kingston at the local COGECO cable TV station, in production meetings and rehearsals for the live True Story of Dracula broadcast the Midnight Players are doing on October 31st. I love the slogan our producer came up with: Radio As You’ve Never Seen It Before! The whole premise of the show is that we’re doing a 1930s broadcast in front of a studio audience. If you’ve ever seen the film Radioland Murders, then you know exactly what we’re trying to reproduce. Radio features used to be performed live in front of an audience: performance theatre with scripts, nominal costuming and sets. For The True Story of Dracula we’re doing the same sort of thing. I’ve done radio shows in studios, radio shows at a mike for recordings, and radio shows with no broadcast at all in front of an audience, but working with cameras and a standing mike is new for me. Watching the rehearsal rushes yesterday, I can see that there’s a whole different dynamic required; a TV camera asks that the actor make eye contact, or at least not have their eyes glued to a script, for visual interest’s sake. This means, of course, that the script has to be pretty much memorised, so you can interact. Which leads me to wonder why we’re even using scripts at all, since if you’re holding a piece of paper with words on it, even if you know those words backwards and forwards, your eyes will instinctively glance downwards and try to capture the phrase, get tangled up in all the lines, and as a result you stumble. Mankind doesn’t trust itself very much; we tend to second-guess ourselves and create more problems than we’d have had if we’d stuck with our first instincts.

It’s going to be a blast, I know. While I’ve worked with cameras before, on films and interviews and such, I’ve never been involved with live broadcasts. I’ve done eighteen years of live theatre, though, so to see the two blended will be fascinating. JDH took some digital photos of the first rehearsal, so when we get those up I’ll link them so you can get an idea of what was happening (now that I’ve figured out my Sympatico storage space!). You’ll just have to imagine the set and costumes that will be there on the 31st. (JDH, by the way, filmed a fantastic mocumentary section on the life and times of our ol’ pal Vlad, looking slightly scruffy and professor-like as he told creepy stories in the basement of a chilly old deserted school. Complete with rather large millipedes and slamming doors, none of which were faked.)

And before the 31st, I have that Hallowe’en party that I need to finish my costume for. Ceri is coming over on Tuesday to help me hem metres and metres of fabric (bless her), and I have an hour of quick stitching for my husband’s costume (which he developed all on his own, and he’s doing the bulk of the work; I swore I’d not do anyone else’s costume again for years, but an hour of donated time on my part is fair, I think); then — ’tis done! I’m going to get even more wear out of it than I expected — I have another party to attend at the beginning of November, which is just fine with me: the more mileage, the better!