BadMormon

Layered Sound and an Opera about Nixon

YouTube - Nixon In China (Opera): Act I Scene 3 .

Images Say It All

(a)muse collective – raw art now.

Quickie from the Trenches

Sitting in the sound booth at rehearsal for “No Traveler,” more impressed with these women I work with than ever before! Penny and Sam have so much fun creating this piece of stage art. And out of this fun comes some serious genius.

It makes me so anxious for my own show. Wanting to dig into a character, having a director take the lines I wrote and showing them to me in a new way, adding dimension to my choices.

The writing I bitched about before was mostly done. I definitely scrambled up until the last minute to get a script fully together but it worked! Crazy! I felt so insecure in the manufactured choices. I mean I sit there and I have written a speech for SexyBack at the bar and then I say so what then? My brain sees nothing. The images in my head of a woman sashaying around are still. Ok. “Then I guess someone would talk to me right? If I was at a bar? I would bug someone? Ok, she drunkenly zeroes in on um, fine, THat one!” and a new moment is born but what about the next and the next and…

I’m used to writing as a flowing piece. Even if I don’t know where it’s going usually once I start typing an actual piece of serious writing (no the blog) it just comes spilling out. My fingers fly and words come out and I have it, beginning middle and end. Really amazing to sit down with something more dredged up, created in blocks and read it out loud. Having the 6 people gathered around laughing, crying and letting me know that I have a solid piece that will work.

Satisfying.

I’ve put it way until done with this No Traveler business. It’s also enlightening to watch a show being created as you start your own. Having read Penny’s script from the beginning, watching it change from bits on stage, to workshop, to this final product of a stage dressed and acted upon I see the difference from head space to real life. Gets me excited and ready to do all the work NOW. EARLY. SOON! I want to have it memorized a month before rehearsal even starts. I want writing final by end of jan. I WANT to WORK. List and organization and sets saved for and built so we set up and simply act.

I’m so excited by ALL of it. I spent so many years NOT doing theater that I forgot how much I have always loved all of the process. The hours of waiting in a theater while other rehearse. On this production I’m stage manager and even as painful a thing as that is to be I LOVE it! Why? Cause I’m a sick puppy. I’m addicted to live performance and this small black box. But mostly it’s an addiction to the amazing art me and my friends create together.

Latest Art!

Penny Pollak’s “No Traveler” I’m stage managing this show, trying to publicize, and watch the rehearsals. It’s gonna be good.
Even before I started a Collective with Penny Pollak I was watching her host an open mic, somehow generous and open to every performer on her stage and then in another playwright’s work – “Broken Dog Legs.” She blew me away and is one of the many reasons that I agreed to be in a collective with her. You don’t turn down the amazing talent that is backed by hours of hard work. And now it’s her words, her vision. Come See it. Penny Pollak’s “No Traveler” – Directed by the amazing Samantha Jones.
get tickets here:

Starting on the next step

I’m a flincher. Some of smallest things make me cringe into my spine automatically and I constantly have to force myself into an action.

The item I’m flinching from today is the next writing on the script for the show that I have to do and etc. I’m afraid of my own work. I’m afraid of opening it and seeing it sucks. that I can’t think of anythign else to say. that it will be cheesey and over the top. that i’m writing something i can’t pull off. that it’s all a big mistake. that I will fail.

makes it so hard to open the text document and do the work

grrrrrrr

I’m a Mean Mean Woman…it’s true.

via YouTube - theCAUSE Turtle Blues .

This song came up on my ipod on the walk home and I realize how much I LOVE IT! and then I looked at youTube and realized how many people have taped themselves singing. TheCause was the one I liked most. This next one simply delights me.

A Very Yoga Christmas! TONIGHT

Facebook | A Very Yoga Christmas!

It’s an (a)muse production, in association with HorseTrade Theater Group – 8pm till whenever we get done.  acts, bands, cupcakes and secret santa (bring a cheap gift – get a cheap gift)

This is was the family party should be like.  Come Celebrate the holidays.  And check the video for a sampling of the artists you’ll see.

Not sure what to write

It’s one of those days where I feel a bit crazy. Where the stress is up in my shoulders, around my ears, slouching me as well. I’ve done a whole lot of justified procrastination while coughing still, a cold that never ends lodged in my lungs.

I’m not feeling horribly sick, just low and tired and coughing phlegm. kinda needy for conversation and attention. Those on the internet with me today can attest to that.

I have succeeded in a beginning place for my show. A rough draft, sketch even, of the ideas I’ve had for this thing. I did it, wrote it beginning, middle and end.

i have no idea how to think of it. The ideas were so real as I typed but who knows if the writing brought it through at all. There is definitely going to be much addition of monologue and I’m, as with most first drafts, not happy with the ending. I sorta saw it but sorta just picked it so I could end the damn thing. I wrote myself into one of those corners.

See it’s a one woman show but the character is interacting with a bar full off people in the story and there reaches a point where if it was a multiple-acted play the other characters would be speaking. But it’s only SexyBack talking. I’m not jumping between characters, it’s her talking and reacting in a way that is spose to let you see the other side of the conversation. You know, insert clever acting here! So the ending is a smoosh job. Just smoosh it in there so you can say DONE! and work with it later.

Yeah, as it stands I’m pretty sure that I’ve written an ending I can’t even pull off.

OH and the director wants to do a read through now – OUT LOUD! She want’s me to say all those words I slammed onto the computer in a hurry to simply have something to start with OUT LOUD! Terrifying. Absolutely Terrifying.

And it’s been one of those days where I find all my friends are concerned with my becoming reliant and close to someone new in my life, include the new person, and it’s like really? you can’t hear the frigid sound of the long hallway of closed doors that is my center? Really? The things people say they see in me that are “heroic” and the parts that they see as vulnerable seem to be quite the paradox of a person, as I place the equation on the keyboard in front of me.

Funny they don’t see the way I’ve drawn my boundaries regularly excluding an including people as I like, trust, realize I’ve misunderstood who someone is… Funny they don’t see this as the natural process of selection in a community. Of course I will be open. How can I see what you will take if I don’t give? How will I see what you give if I don’t open to your attention? When you fuck up we’ll see what it’s like and adjust and it can hurt but what the hell else is there? When I fuck up it will be the same for you? No one is perfect, and from 39 years on this planet with a variety of assholes and bitches in my life I have to say I like my method of sorting them out in my personal space.

Am I low and depressed now? OF course! I have spent the last year trying to figure out how to get my heart what it needs and found out I can’t. It’s life. It’s death. It’s taxes. And it’s the reed bending in the wind, spider silk strong, adjustable and always ok with herself because she’s already done her long run.

I have this one telling me how I deserve someone to nest with, make a life with and I sit here and look at my dirty apartment that has 100 items I look at and remember what they mean to me, who gave it, where I was, why it matters and go what? I made my life. I’ve nested. My random fantasies of couplehood are of someone helping me clean my life and running my office while I work and annoy my child:) It’s not of a girl waiting for a wedding. It’s not of buying furniture and combining a home. It’s 12 years of living for me and the kid and being pretty set in my ways.

Ok, sometimes I fantasize of someone helping to pay the rent. But I think that is simply everybody’s fantasy these days.

I’m all up in the internet today.

I’m understanding now, as I’ve written this blog while talking life situations out with two other friends on ichat, because I keep getting these snippets of conversations and sentences and judgments and rumors of people’s attitudes but no one is sitting down and just talking to me about it that it was driving me crazy.

And no one seems to want to trust me with the idea that maybe I can negotiate another friend in my life just fine thank you very much, even as I negotiated them. None of them saw the weeks of this person talking with me to get in or remember the warmth I’ve given to them in the same way when my “open affection” switch is thrown.

I think it’s my face. Just a bit too sweet for the shrewd, conniving, bitchy ass, evaluating mind inside of it.

Entitled Old White Guy Cries NAZI!

Or Nizi. It’s hard to take a complaint about my own behavior seriously when the man accusing can’t even catch a typo on his title.

Then there’s the whole Accusing of Nazism.

So this Old White Guy*, who I’ve seen around the open mics of the LES for a few years now shows up to Penny’s. He is not known by this room. He is recognized by the two of us left over from a past we would like to be shunt of. As he stands in this room he starts taking pictures the Lighting Guy IN THE BOOTH above Old Man, and to the side, notices the view finder zooming across the room to light on my friends bosom. Dirty Old Man has put the picture up himself to prove how NOT wrong he is. Why? Because to Old White Guys every woman in the room is an object. And if he wants to take a picture of her clothed breast and cleavage WITHOUT A FACE and WITHOUT PERMISSION he will call it ART not PREDATORY OBJECTIFICATION.

So yes, if you call concerned friends who do not like dirty old men that can’t identify their own grossness Nazis then yes, we were Nazis. If you think it’s Nazism to not allow an audience member to video tape and photograph anything they want then yes it’s Nazism. (we won’t mention the understood tradition in ALL the mics I’ve been at of NOT photographing or video taping out of respect for the person developing their art.) Of Course neither of us – me or the tech guy – has gassed millions of human beings but why bring that into a conversation about why an Old Entitled White Guy Can’t Do Exactly What He Wants?

Penny tries to have a space for artists to work on art. She also wants a space where women are not accosted. An alternative to the rooms that are about drinking and hooking up or the misogynist comedy clubs where women are simply treated like shit. A place where the focus is the stage and the performer and not the audience members headless chest region that the picture taker claims he had no idea he was taking and yet the guy in the booth saw clearly what was in the view finder.

PLEASE NASTY OLD WHITE GUY – DON’T COME BACK

*he has since removed the internet page with the photos and complaint of our Neo-Nazism and demands of an apology from me.

More writing discipline

Stayed home, have writing to do, have a schedule and a show coming and a deal with others to fulfill. Have been sitting here noodling around in the story.

–

ok, i didn’t do the work. i laid down and fell asleep on my amazing couch. I’m feeling the sicky in my throat and lungs, nose and not awakedness.

But I can’t miss anymore writing. The show is just a few months away. The words need to be written so I can memorize. Or you know, do something. In one of those moments when you wake up and go, “wow, oops, what time is it?” I set my alarm for 5:00 am. Snoozed til 5:30. Started noodling around again, telling myself to write and now I’m back at the blog. Can’t let it sit here only half written! People are counting on my hard hitting in depth look at procrastination and what avoidance of work can bring you too.

Mostly it’s cause writing a one-woman show to put up in march is INTIMIDATING!!!!!! That’s a lot of words, a lot of points, a lot of expectation, a lot of work.

“So go do it marsha!” you all say! “Stop spewing your internal monologue of NOTHING all over the internet and GO WRITE YOUR SHOW!!!! ” Sigh. Ok my lovelies, you are right. Off to write anything – as long as words are on the page.

oy.