Sudden Fastness Makes a Surprise

Good lord, it's 11 pm and I didn't do the weekly blog post I always do, come hell or high water (or other occasions where I've forgotten or was too busy)?

Busy week, busier day. Every time I think I have casting, or rehearsal schedules, or rehearsal spaces, all lined up in a row and ready, something comes along to kick them all over.

I'm seeing a few people in the next few days for the last remaining parts, so that's okay. As for rehearsal space . . . I'm still working on that. I have it for much of the time I need, but not most. A few emails to make tomorrow on that . . .

We had the first rehearsal of A Little Piece of the Sun on Tuesday, which was just blocking, which isn't really a "just" on this complicated show with lots of bodies moving around (and I didn't have all the bodies around either so I could keep track of them). We got through a quarter of Act I, which wasn't bad, and we should go faster next time. The cast pays attention and works quick, which will be essential to get this big mother of a nasty documentary play done.

Sunday we read Foreman's George Bataille's Bathrobe with most of the company for the first time. We're still missing three cast members, which should be solved in the next few days, so at the reading Becky Byers, Maggie Cino, and Bryan Enk showed up and helped out by reading the missing parts. Sounded good and became a lot clearer to the actors -- it's somewhat of an abstract script if you're not inside my head, but hearing it aloud and discussing it made the company "get" where it's going, I think. The cast we have will be terrific. Now to get the last three members.

And before that, we read Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck with most of the cast over in Gyda Arber's garden on a hot sunny day, and everyone but me seems to have gotten a sunburn (Berit missed bits of her arms with the sunscreen and wound up with some VERY unusual patterns of burn there). And THAT cast was dead-on perfect from moment one.

So . . .

. . . in many ways I'm in great shape for the August shows. Except that once again it's becoming impossible to get all the members of any cast in one room at one time (no matter how early I cast everybody, in this group they're going to want up doing other shows in June, or even July, and their availability goes out the window), and each of these shows has large sections that NEED to be rehearsed with the full cast or they're impossible to work (and Bathrobe is ENTIRELY like that). But it can't happen, it seems, so once again I have to work around it as best I can -- a skill I have by now, but don't enjoy the employing of to the slightest degree . . .

For relaxation, I keep futzing around with my iPod in the continuing, silly, pointless, obsessive attempt to make it the ABSOLUTE BEST 80GB iPod in the civilized world, cutting things and adding others, updating old versions of tracks as I find better digitized versions of them, or as I did recently, replacing most of The Beatles' released catalog as it exists now with the original mono mixes (which are better). Also, discovering that an iTunes upgrade a couple of months ago rejiggered my settings so all new tracks I put in were being sampled at a higher bitrate than I require for digital use (and thus taking up WAY too much disk space), so I had to spend time going back and redoing those tracks properly (and freeing up 10GB of disk space in the process).

This means that sometimes playing with my iPod as a "relaxing break" from the play work backfires and I just get intensely focused and irritated that I can't "fix" things on the iPod as fast as I'd like (since I have to listen to at least three sections of EVERY track that I don't know so well - or at all - that has wound up on there so I can decide if I want to keep it).

Here's what comes up as a bedtime Random Ten from the 25,645 tracks in the little bugger right now . . .

1. "Something's Gotta Give" - Pere Ubu - The Tenement Year
2. "Innocence" - Kirsty MacColl - Galore
3. "Colossal Youth" - Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth
4. "The Mercy Seat" - Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man
5. "I'm So Glad" - Screamin' Jay Hawkins - The Night and Day of Screamin' Jay Hawkins
6. "I Enjoy Being a Boy (In Love With You)" - Linus of Hollywood - Right to Chews: Bubblegum Classics Revisited
7. "I Got a Bag of My Own" - James Brown - Star Time
8. "Hey Joe" - Patti Smith - No Thanks! The 70s Punk Rebellion
9. "Carry Me Home" - AC/DC - Dog Eat Dog b/w Carry Me Home 7"
10. "Delitto al Ristorante Cinese" - Detto Mariano - Poliziotteschi Graffiti

Berit's going away to visit her family for a few days, and I'd love to go with her, but I have too much work to do here -- besides the work on my own shows I'm doing some more work with David Finkelstein and helping Tom X. Chao out with something for an upcoming show of his. Berit and I also spent a fun but tiring LONG day last week helping Gyda Arber shoot her sequel to last year's interactive hit Suspicious Package, which will be in The Antidepressant Festival at The Brick in June.

Oh, right, and we had a great benefit party at Galapagos! Well, I don't know if the "benefit" part was a success (not my department of The Brick), but the "party" part was great. Photos of the big event can be seen HERE (and Berit can be seen in a couple of shots - I appear in NONE of them, which may be for the best, as I became a kinda scary hobo whenever someone paid attention). It was a helluva bash!

(I had a unfortunate end to the evening when one of the three bottles of mead, brewed by actor/friend Heath Kelts, that I won in the raffle - which I had REALLY REALLY wanted - was lifted from my bag, and I was a little angry and sharp at the end of the evening, but got over it -- and I wound up getting a replacement bottle form someone this week, which was good . . . I'm still pissed about the original theft, though . . .)

And I don't have a show of my own in this year's Summer festival at The Brick (THANK GOD!), but I am MASSIVELY jazzed about the lineup we have going on, including shows from some of my favorite theatre artists: work from Nosedive (James Comtois and Pete Boisvert here), Ten Directions (Audrey Crabtree and Lynn Berg), Blue Coyote (Matthew Freeman), and a brilliant company I've long been hoping would do something at The Brick, Theatre Askew (Tim Cusack and Jason Jacobs). Also new work from Adrian Jevicki, Gavin Starr Kendall, Danny Bowes, and the terrific looking Adventure Quest.

(I haven't made my life any easier by being excited enough by the work that I've agreed to do the light design for four of the above companies . . . ah, well . . .)

Anyway, I need to get some sleep, and there are no new kitty pictures this week yet again, but I like this combo photo I made up to go in a little double frame Berit's giving a special someone for a special holiday this weekend . . .