From the husband:
“So Jeff was asking about your costume.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I told him it was looking fantastic. He said, What, even better than the Promethea costume? And I said, As amazing as the Promethea costume was, she’s outdone herself.”
I feel all warm and squirrely inside.
Ed. note: The husband is biased. Terribly supportive and encouraging, but biased.
Done!
Actually, I was done mid-afternoon yesterday, but I told myself that I was not going to sit down at the computer because I’d look up again and it would be time to leave for orchestra.
Besides, I’m reading a Christopher Priest book (you may remember my impressed-ness with The Prestige) called The Extremes. It’s taken me a little while to get into it, because it seems to be about the FBI and VR and people-going-postal massacres, but damn, it’s well-written. I got my husband’s vest done as well, and forty-five minutes of practicing that, to my astonishment, sounded fantastic. Ah, the things I can accomplish when not chained by e-mail, blogs, and the lure of the wilds of the World Wide Web!
I’m off to work today. Fnyeh. I’m very fnyeh about things at the moment. (You know, Ceri, this word is so fitting at times…)
In my fnyehness, however, I can look at that terrific costume hanging on my bedroom wall, and say, “I did that, wow!”, and “Two sleeps ’til the party!”.
I’m such a kid. And this costume thing is even worse now that I’m an adult, because now I personally know every hour that went into the creation of the costume, as opposed to watching a parental unit do it for me and getting excited about it second-hand.
Note to self: if you decide to have two layers in a costume, you have to hem two layers.
Sigh.
Three days ’til the party. I’m 98% done. Just have that wretched second hem to do. Thank the gods that Ceri came over yesterday and helped by pinning the first hem in place for me. I have to practice that Handel today (yes, I know, I had all week to do it, and predictably, I did not), and I’d like to get the basic four-seams-and-I’m-done completed on my husband’s vest, too.
I went back to the sinus medication this morning. The light on-pseudoephedrine feeling is preferable to the heavy, I-can’t-even-think-let-alone-function feeling of having my sinus cavities clogged up.
Onward, ever onward…
Aha! A photo from the recording! (Thanks, JD!)
That’s Anthony on the left as Vlad himself, me in the middle as the damsel in distress, and Taras as Bram Stoker in the background scowling at his script…
Hmm.
That sinus medication has been my best friend since Thursday night. Now, I have a rather slight build, and I don’t have a lot of body mass, and I know darned well that medication hits me like a ton of bricks. So upon opening the bottle that MLG left for me, I wisely said, “I’m going to take the lowest, lowest dose they recommend, and I’ll take it half as frequently as they tell me to.” I’ve learned my lesson in the past with sinus meds. Oh, yes.
So all weekend I’ve been able to breathe easily, I’ve had no headache, and I’ve been pretty relaxed and on the ball. Clear-headed. Centred, and a bit remote, but clear. Terrific!
Yesterday in Kingston, though, I kept thinking about Bill for some reason. Okay, I was doing theatre-associated work; maybe that was it. It kept nagging in the back of my mind, though, and I finally dragged out the bottle of Tylenol Sinus and read the back with intent. What was up? Why Bill? Why sinus medication?
Then it sank in. 325 mg of acetaminophen, 30 mg pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. Pseudoephedrine. Didn’t Bill blog about this?
Aha. In Kingston, I took one near the beginning of the day, then another after lunch just to be sure. I also had a Vanilla Coke, two green teas, and a cup of coffee (which my husband should really just physically stop me from doing, no matter how much I hiss and spit at him). Thirty milligrams of pseudoephedrine is really not a lot, but along with a steady intake of caffeine and sugar, all mixed up in my tiny little body, well…
Let’s just say that I’m going to take a day or two off and see what happens.
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!
How this happened in such a short time, I truly do not know. I’ve only been watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer for a year. (In that time however I’ve managed to catch 90% of all the episodes in seasons one through five, half of season six, and I’m up to date on season seven. Woo! I love Space and their reruns!)
I was kicking around, doing that random jump between new blogs selected from links on other people’s pages, and I came across a Buffy Purity Test. (No, I will not give you the link. You really shouldn’t be wasting time on these things. I’ve been so good for so long, and now, all has crumbled to ashes…)
I am, according to this high-tech, scientific evaluation, a Manic Academic Buffy Fanatic. Parts of this profile include “You believe that god made stupid people because there are so many”, and “Rainy days and automatic weapons get you down”, both of which made me laugh a wee bit too hard this morning. The next quiz (they were all on the same page, I have fallen so far) had me closely identifying with Giles, out of all the BTVS characters. What, do my fingers seep “academic” into the keyboard or something?
In addition, I found a wonderful, wonderful Onion A.V. Club article on Is There a God? that asks a slew of entertainer-type people thier opinion on whether or not God exists. The answers range from funny and whacked-out to thoughtful.
I should go do some real work now.