Tag Archives: long wharf theatre

Going Home

I stole this link from Scott Ruggels. It’s an awesome Dutch minimilist puppeteer. Go to “filmpjes” and watch away!

http://www.xs4all.nl/~lrvk/lejo/

Yesterday was my last day at Long Wharf. It was very nice and everyone at the theater has been extremely supportive of me and my decision to leave. Bill the props carpenter got me an AWESOME Cowboy Bebop T-shirt. It was funny, too, because I had just recently been scouring the internet searching for one, but all the ones I found were either:
a) Horrible or uninteresting designs or
b) Images of Faye in a lewd pose
I never thought to look at Hot Topic.

Anyway, these next couple of days will be full of packing and pre-moving stress. I am happy to be going home, but I am very tired and don’t feel like deciding the next step in my life. I have a web design job lined up to bring in a little bit of money, but I’ve always hated job hunting. Anyway, I probably will be fine once I get a bit of rest, I have much to do when I get home!

Birthday Madness

My parents sent me a cast iron teapot with 2 matching cast iron cups. It’s reeeeeeeeeally cool looking, and holds a lot of tea. I guess I’ll have to expand my tea horizons beyond Oolong now. It also has a dragon on it, and since I got a dragon teapot last year for my birthday, and another dragon themed teapot a few years ago for Christmas, I guess I might as well say I’m collecting them now ^_^

I also got, from my parents, money that was specifically intended for me to buy myself a Nintendo DS. This was great, because it’s been a long time since I’ve been excited over getting a toy for a present. Plus, I haven’t had a hand-held console since the original Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear. I went to the game store with Scott, and discovered they were selling Game Cubes for $60! This was highly tempting, because I’ve always said I’d like to get a Game Cube for cheap, for the sole purpose of getting Warioware and MarioKart, which would probably be the only two games I’d play for it. Tempting, yes, but I stuck with my original plan and got a DS. I’ll need something to keep my occupied on that flight to Japan!

Today at work, the prop shop threw me a little birthday party, complete with donuts and video games at lunch time. Then the most surreal thing happened. Billy the props carp showed me this crazy game for the PS2, Katamari Damacy, which is very silly and quirky, and great fun. I thought it’d be a fun game to get, and I almost considered asking to borrow it to show Scott and Geoff at home. Well, when I got home, Geoff started leading into a story about this crraaaaaaazy game he got for PS2, and I thought “Oh man, it’s going to be the same game.” Sure enough, Katamari Damacy. I think this is an omen telling me to go out and buy it.

So we had a birthday dinner at the house, and then Carleton’s family surprised me with a gift! Not just any gift…Scott sneakily heard my temptation lament at the game store, and the whole family went out and bought me one of those $60 gamecubes, along with the my 2 coveted games. SO EXCITED!

It’s been a very long time since I’ve gotten so many fun toys for my birthday, and I don’t think I’ve been so excited about video games since that Christmas when I got my Sega Genesis. I am endlessly grateful!

Linguisticky

This gave me my first laugh for the day…

Most professional writers have a cutesy answer to the common question “where do you get your ideas?” They’ll say things like “I don’t know,” or “stop asking me that,” or “I make them up, okay? I make them up.” Hilarious! But unhelpful nonsense all the same…

The past couple days at work, Billy and I have been discussing odd little features about language–weird origin things, like how pie came from magpie, where you’re not really sure if that is the true origin or if someone made it up who thought they were clever…or who really was insane. (to quote Tony Haigh, “If the hat fits, wear it!”)

Anyway, aside from all that, I think my favorite word is “vicarious.” I can remember distinctly the moment I learned that word. It was a vocabulary word in some high school English class. Through a drone of nonsense words that would only show up on the SAT, this little gem popped up. I read the definition, blinked, and thought to myself..

“This is the single most useful word I have ever learned in school, ever.”

What a great word. It is such a complicated and yet very common abstract experience. Several sentences’ (or at least one lengthy one) worth of sufficient explanation summed up into one tiny, glorious, USEFUL word. Because of its usefulness in life, I learned the word instantly. I cannot remember another word I learned from a vocabulary list, though by now I’m sure they’ve been submitted somewhere in my language database.

Billy said there was a German word that means “something you don’t want to do, but have to do,” and that we needed such a word in English, since that pretty much sums up most of life. I forget what the German word was.

Words are so cool. That’s why I keep linguistical word magicians under my eye: Dave , Ryan , Brendan , Mariah , and all you other writer sorts.

2004 Review

-January of 2004 started out with Centre term and The Yellow Boat. It was an amazing experience, and made me think that I might want to do props as a job. The show itself was a joy to work on, and the end product was so powerful.

-Also in January, my need for companionship drove me to acquire Fish, my first betta. He’s still going strong–moved all the way up to a 10 gallon tank–and he provided many things for me through that spring term of senior year (namely company, and someone to care for–sometimes at my own expense).

-Spring of 2004 was a flurry of busy times in my memory. I recall a lot of pain and sweat. It culminated towards the end, where it all paid off at the conclusion of my senior art exhibition, in which I was informed that I had acquired a job for the next year. The sensation of relief and excitement afterwards was amazing.

-I made the best of my last summer ever. It was an outpouring of pent up creative juices into various forms of art, spending time with good friends, and having Carleton nearby. I made it a point to never be bored, and milked the time for everything I could.

-The fall was the start of the changes. Moving up here, starting my job, having various intimidating grown-up things tossed at me from all around–it was all rather overwhelming. I’ve learned so much working at Long Wharf, both good and bad. I’ve acquired all kinds of exciting new skills, and all kinds of unpleasant new knowledge.

-Winter rolls around, and it is time for change. It is strange, I love the things I get to do, I love to be able to create. But at the same time, I am not happy here. To put it bluntly, working in theater sucks balls. It is not worth it. People say that to work in theater you have to “really love it,” more and more that’s starting to sound like a cop-out, something people say to reassure themselves. I remember hearing about when Laura Beth Adams gave up theater to move to Arizona and teach aerobics, or something like that. Everyone seemed so shocked, and even outraged, but I think I can empathize now.

I don’t know what to do now. I took this internship to find out if I really wanted to do this as a job, and the answer is a resounding No. Would quitting be along the lines of abandoning these people or this obligation? Or would it be the right thing to do, the braver thing?

More than this has taught me that being brave is terrifying and painful.

Flash-piece art!

Once upon a time, Nate the Master Electrician went to the mall. He stopped by some store or another owned by an Asian couple. The store sold luggage or some such, but it also had little toys up at the front that you could buy for kids.

One such toy was a coloring page. It was a fuzzy page of black line art that you could fill in with colored glitter–a fairly typical toy. However, Nate knew something was amiss when he saw the toy was not called “Glitter Art”, as might be expected, but “Flash-piece Art.” After figuring out that “flash-piece” was a translation of “glitter” from another language to English, Nate turned the toy package over to read the instructions. And this is what he found:

https://www.wertle.com/gallery/d/793-1/flashpiece.jpg

He immediately purchased the toy and brought it back to the theater to share, and we all learned new words like “fundus”, “exiguous”, and my personal favorite, “tridimensional”.

(if the “I obviously used some computer algorithm to translate this” instructions weren’t funny enough, I also got a laugh over the fact that it was a coloring page for a picture of Snoopy–a completely black-and-white character)

CRRRACK!

Today at work, as a special event arranged by Company Management, my boss’s chiropractor came in to give a free crank to the run crew and the interns. He told my boss later that he was totally shocked at how many young people’s bodies were totally busted, and named me off as one of the busticated. It comes from slouching all my life, I think, and after my adjustment I was thrilled to find that trying to stand up straight no longer was a painful activity!

I’m going to try and force myself to stand up straight as much as possible until the usual pain returns (as a quick chiropractic adjustment surely won’t undo 10+ years of bad posture). All that whining I did when I was little and my parents told me to stand up straight, what was I thinking?

In other news, I moved my betta and his one-eyed catfish companion to a 10 gallon tank the other day. Fish is loving it. He’s grown to be so large that even his old 5 gallon was starting to feel cramped. Once I get the tank cycled, I think I may add some docile tetras to the mix, as I’ve heard the non-nipping ones make good additions to a community tank with a betta.

I may even give Fish’s old 5 gallon to Mr. Laguna (my office betta).

I noticed that although I’m a regular poster to the community, I don’t often show off my fishies in my own journal. So here they are! Fish:
Around when I first got him–

Now under fluorescent lighting!–

The New tank:

Mr. Laguna (the crowntail I keep at the prop shop)

Spaz, the one-eyed Cory Cat (good side then bad)

St. Nick’s Day

Being from Kentucky, and growing up in Louisville no less, there was a time when I thought that the Kentucky Derby was a normal holiday, like Easter or Halloween. I just figured everybody celebrated it. When I got a little older and the scope of my mind expanded beyond my immediate surroundings, that changed rather quickly.

However, I discovered this week that *apparently*, not *everyone* celebrates St. Nick’s Day. Who knew! It went like this:

(Tuesday)
Me: “Oh drat, I totally forgot about St. Nick’s Day!”
Boss: “What’s St. Nick’s Day?”
Me: (after I figured out he wasn’t kidding)…WHAT?
Boss: Huh?
Me: You know, St. Nick’s Day, with the shoes and the candy!
Boss: …WHAT?

Horrified, I proceeded to ask every person who walked in the prop shop that day if they knew about St. Nick’s day, what with the shoes and the candy. Nobody did. I had NO idea, people in Connecticut apparently don’t know anything about this holiday, or maybe just people in New Haven? I then attempted to figure out what regions the celebration of St. Nick’s day fell into, but I had no luck whatsoever.

For those who don’t know: On the Eve of the feast day of St. Nicholos (Dec 6), you hang stockings on the fireplace mantle. You then get goodies–small things, usually candy or a slinky (having most assuredly broken last year’s slinky, at least that’s how it was with my family). If you want to be super-traditional (or if you live in a dorm), you leave a shoes out in the hall overnight, and St. Nick (your RA) leaves candy in them for you. Perhaps not the most sanitary of holidays, but still! You get goodies! It’s like pre-Christmas gratification.

My props carpenter said that the tradition probably died out as the whole St. Nick/Santa Claus/giving presents thing got merged in with Christmas. But hey, WE still celebrated it!

What other holidays am I mislead about? Time for research.

Rudolph with your nose so bright…

So, I figured as long as I’m on this Hero’s Journey, I might as well consult an Oracle. Delphi was a bit too far away, so I settled for a Christmas-themed flower supply store in Wallingford where–after venturing through a “Winter Wonderland” of frightening yet festive robots–one could enter the private chambers of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. As I went in with my props-mates, Rudolph offered us a clicking, jerking, animatronic greeting. We chatted with the beast, and he sang Happy Birthday to one of my co-workers, all the while rolling his vacantly-painted eyes in a creepy, robotic fashion. Finally, I asked the Ora…I mean Rudolph to tell my fortune*, and he told me, “You will wake up happy.”

Satisfied with my consultation, I went looking for a cyclops, or perhaps a hydra, figuring that’s my next course of action. There weren’t any at the park.

*For a moment, I thought about asking why Bono counts “1, 2, 3, 14” in that U2 song. I mean, that’s a pretty big leap from 3 to 14. I’ll save that question for another Oracle, I guess

A New Beginning!

Well, I finally gave in to Brendan’s many praises of NewsBruiser and decided to give it a shot. Upon realizing that I have no sense of design or color scheme, I’m still working on customizing the look. Default theme for now ^_^

In other news: Halo 2 is awesome, but I’m sure everybody knows that already. It is bittersweet, though, as waves of longing for old Halo friends wash over me every time I play. I miss you guys so much!!

First show at Long Wharf was a success, now we are putting up a show that we got shipped in from Hartford Stage. The Mystery of Irma Vep looks like it will be quite funny. Stay tuned.