collisionwork | May. 23rd, 2008

This has been a crazy busy week, and it ain't over.

Ambersons rehearsals - trying to keep other shows in play - fixing up The Brick - teching the six Tiny Theater Festival shows the last two nights, trying to get all the set pieces for Ambersons built by tomorrow. And a parental unit is coming to visit us overnight. Oy.

We were up cleaning the apartment (which had reached a condition that could be described, with no hyperbole, as "squalor") until 4.30 am. I woke up at 6, got back to sleep by 6.30, then up again for good at 8. I think the 10 or so Red Bulls I drank last night may have something to do with it (an actress in one of my plays works for the company, and had a free case dropped off at The Brick - this is dangerous . . .).

And we still have hours ahead of cleaning the home and The Brick.

Berit may have cracked - she's created the Magnificent Ambersons board game:

"You're the spoiled scion of a wealthy Midwestern family at the turn of the 20th Century! Roll the dice! Watch your path as the board spreads and darkens into a city! Pick a Morgan card - your invention flourishes and you move four spaces - uh, oh! You've landed on the Minifer chute, and you lose all your money in a headlamp company that fails! Can you avoid the boarding house path, and wind up in your new Romanesque mansion? Hey, you're hit by a car, and your old girlfriend's rich father decides to take care of you for the rest of your life! You're MAGNIFICENT!"

This is, of course, actually the scale model built by Berit so we could work out the complicated blocking of 20 actors and 16 set pieces for the show in advance (not quite scale - all the people are 4' tall, but that was necessary - and I'm just a two-dimensional outline on the floor near the lower right). I think it looks like Stratego. It wound up not working for us as we'd hoped (just too distant a system to actually block with; I need real bodies), but I think we'll have it on Berit's table tomorrow as we work everything out with the actual actors - since we'll keep being short of people at every rehearsal before we open, it'll help us remember where everyone is supposed to be, backstage, onstage, or off downstage.

From the 25,578 songs on the iPod this morning:

1. "Times About" - Dick Kent - MSR Madness 5: I Like Yellow Things
2. "He's Got The Knack" - Graffiti - Turds On A Bum Ride volume 3
3. "Hey Nonny Nonny" - Violent Femmes - Why Do Birds Sing?
4. "Give It Up Or Turnit Loose" - James Brown - Star Time
5. "The Wayward Wind" - Patsy Cline - The Legendary Patsy Cline
6. "Flashin' Red" - The Esquires - Pebbles Volume 4 - Surf'n Tunes!
7. "Help Me Rhonda" - The Beach Boys - Greatest Hits
8. "I Don't Understand" - George Jackson - Lost Deep Soul Treasures 3
9. "Road Runner" - The Music Explosion - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol 5
10. "Grand Slam" - David Lindner - Soundsational Sampler