BadMormon

So Now

I write.

I have this show I have to finish off. I have to figure out who to cast for parts that are pretty thankless supporting rolls. I’m wondering if it’s smart to try and write a solo show that contains other helpers in it.

I’m considering alternatives if every human being and situation going on melts down because that is what it feels like will probably happen. Not hard to simply turn things into pantomime i guess but maybe wood posts on wheels with cardboard cut outs? i can swirl them around the stage?

Tonight I surround myself with my comforts, my piggy little white clinging to middle class comforts of computers, video games, candy and drink. I look at my severe emotional issues that I keep grappling with, and which i assume are the residue of the human condition, and which a sardonic half-lip twist helps to mitigate, and know that it doesn’t matter. It will go into the script. I will eat it all day as I play pleasant for clients and son. I will find as much to laugh at as possible because there is nothing else.

I will work. So that when i finally can’t push myself anymore I may have enough to pay rent and rest.

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.

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

Wednesday Writing Night 1

I’ve been doing pretty good about the writing after 8pm.  Just not ever home at that time.  But now the deadline is in place and the show has to be written and I’ve found someone I respect deeply and am letting myself revert into all of my needing to be perfect and please habits to give her pages when agreed upon, into making us proud.

The actor/director relationship can be a strange one.  And frankly I’ve chosen to do something so profoundly risky, not only something I’ve never done before but really 15 years since I’ve carried any sort of a long time frame on stage as well as the fact I’m gonna WRITE IT!!!!

It’s based on and  alcoholic southern woman, SexyBack.

I have set aside my Wed nights for writing and research and work on this project, part of which looks like it’s gonna be a bit of journaling on ye olde blog.  And as I turned on the still free hulu.com I had in my queue an Intervention: SYLVIA.  A southern drunk woman.  Research.  Coincidence that makes us believe in things.

“Where are my babies” she wails, her children having been taken away due to her inability to care for them.

My show is writing itself!

It’s not amusing to watch, it’s not comfortable, it’s not entertaining. She wails too long, to drunkenly for the actual pathos of grief.  And every word and thought is tragedy at what she has lost.  And continues the cycle of drink, drink, drink.

Sexyback will be a different woman for sure but it’s a perfect place to begin the measuring tape of reality to stage and how what I want to say fits in.

Ok, excited now.  Decks are cleared for creations.  BOMB AWAY!!!!!!

My Bubble of Bubbly Happy

Oh man, it can’t last, I know that. On all levels something is gonna come and sweep it all away but right now I want to document the fact that I’m having a happy moments.

Stage the other night, tues, was a new level of the character, SexyBack, that I have been working on. Acting and performing is a weird thing for me. I can toss off an act in an instant if I have too but on the big ones I pretty much hypnotize myself into a character. Sometimes better than others.

And I got into it last night. I have a conscious part of my mind thinking, what should I do next? as I make up my act on the spot, on the stage, in the light. The rest is unknowable. I’m not sure what it is I do but, as I contrive actions that might entertain, my monkeys in the basement brain stir up phrases and things that come next. It’s sorta volleyball set up. I look off and wonder, humm, what next, must say something and bubbublblbubublPOP! “I drink because I care.” and I do something for the next 30 seconds.

I always come out of these performances and sets dazed, sorta high from the endorphins and adrenaline and the trance of art. I never feel like I’ve done anything at all. It seems to me that I just thrown bits out, hit my marks, delivered the correct line but I have no idea what it looked like on the outside. I figure it sucks.

Of course this is usually when people come to me and tell me it was a great performance.

That it went somewhere.

I don’t think that Tues night was oscar caliber or anything, but I did hit a new level in it, in the character, brought out a more of the reality of another person and less of the “act.”

That makes me Happy.

Plus there was a whole lot of fun, laughing, eating, enjoying before and after and all I could do was look at this amazing group of people I hang out with and grin. So freakin happy to be in this collective now, one that we’re trying to base on real honesty. The stuff from the middle once the ego is gone. It takes a lot of practice, but what we’ve managed so far feels like it’s working to me.

Love, so much love surrounding us at that show.

Then I come home to a teenage boy, so happy to see me, so happy to have had a-do-what-he-wants night in the apartment, so cuddly, and we lay down on the couch, him spooned by me, my arms wrapped around him, him telling me he’ll go to the bed once I’m asleep and we both snooze off. He’s alive and a little smelly, and wiggly, and putting a kink in my arm. I’m not moving. We slept the morning away.

A day of tired tired tired, but satisfied, relaxed, settled for a moment in what has gone on. It’s all ok, no expectations of the future, too tired to even think about it, no pain rearing it’s head, all is too alright.

I’m not an optimist so I do know that this can’t last, no matter what. It’s a rule of life. It changes, it goes up and down and, of course, I am doomed! I “KNOW” that.

I’ll take it though, this moment of soapy, rainbow glory. I’m in a place of happy.

Thank you Internet. I love you much. More than I can ever tell you. Even if you think you get it, more than that.

And as the next request, because somehow I feel like if I stop asking for stuff you will forget I am here and it will all go away, I think I want the thing I need. Whatever it is. The next step on the path of personal growth. But maybe not in a dramatic and devastating manner? Maybe? lol, crap, what did I just ask for? I’m rollin my eyes at myself.

YouTube – Sexy Back 3-31-09

YouTube – Sexy Back 3-31-09.

FYI – I never ever can sit through a whole video of myself.  I’m a wuss.