Tell you all my secrets

I spent all day yesterday stage managing a workshop for the Native Heritage Center. It was the final day in a week-long project to start a resident theatre company there led by 3 actors from L.A. There are so many stories to tell I'm not sure I can even do all of them justice. I had a ball. I finally officially met a local actor who does a one-man show about growing up Native in Alaska. I didn't get to see it, of course, but Mark did. Mark already tipped me off that Jack uses Mark's mom in the show - she was the adoption counselor who helped reunite Jack with his Native family and he describes her as being a little Lilly Tomlin (which is fair). I had planned to introduce myself to Jack at the end of the first night, but the organizers mentioned my last night *just* before that. Next thing I know, I'm getting hugs from Jack. He told me the audience always responds to the character she is based on because he just pours his soul into her. Then he kept introducing me to everyone as 'Little Lilly Tomlin''s daughter-in-law. It was very sweet.

At the end, the organizers gave me a Zuni fetish of Jack Rabbit. I was so touched I almost cried.

I had to leave the potluck early to get out to the film shoot. Levi asked me to actually appear on camera as one of the passed-out druggies. He also asked me to draft 8 or 9 people for the shot. I, of course, asked geolinguist and scooterpbakes. We were the most unlikely looking group of passed out meth/pot heads ever. But we did look awesome thanks to spaceyacey523 and the other make-up artist.

I got to spend the whole shoot passed out with my head on geolinguist's thigh and my ass in spaceyacey523's husband's lap. The poor boy was such a gentleman he had no idea where to put his hands and finally ended up with them on
geolinguist. geolinguist knew just what to do, though. He put them right up the back of my shirt so the spectacular bruises from being cupped by the accupunctureist were front and center just like I planned.

And those bruises are something. Mark says I look like a ladybug.

But here is one reason why yesterday sucked.

One of the set pieces we have to deal with is a large fake log half-buried in a snowbank. It's a very cute effect. The snowbank was painted green for a Summer Conservatory show. My set designer - the Diva's sister - decided it would be too hard to paint it back and instead decided that someone should hot glue white sheet batting to it.

spaceyacey523 spent what had to be at least 3 hours gluing stuff to this log. We only had 1 piece of sheet batting, so that went across the front. It had kind of a funky fold in it, but no big deal. After that one sheet was in place we were left with nothing but the kind of batting that you use to stuff stuffed animals. It hot glued into place like puffy while blobs, or perhaps warts, but the show opens tomorrow and we had no choice. I burned 2 of my fingers badly and accidentally pulled the blister off one in my haste to remove the burning hot glue from my poor finger. Then spaceyacey523, not ten minutes later, did the exact same thing. It was very hard not to call her monkey-see-monkey-do for the rest of the night.

Finally the log was done. It didn't look great, there were places that looked rather diseased, but people kept reminding me about the 20-foot rule. The first thing my tech crew did was scrape fully 3/4 of the white stuff off the log while trying to move another set piece around it. But, finally, after 2 days of tech, we made it to act 2 and the log came out on stage. There certainly was something to that 20-foot rule - the log looked completely different than it had backstage. There was a moment of silence. Then a small voice from the back of the house rang out.

"Oh my God, it looks like a giant penis."

That voice was mine.

When the crew finished pissing themselves with laughter I asked my lighting designer, name_ommited if there was anything he could do to make the log look less like a dick.

When that round of hilarity passed, I ventured a glance at the stage again. Nope, I still have 2 boys with a sled sitting on a giant phallus.

"name_ommited," I pleaded. "Isn't there anything, a wash, a special gobo, anything at all you can give me to make that thing look less like we castrated the Abominable Snowman?"

I got a blackout.

So yesterday I was walking in the hall after the show and I hear one of my young actors loudly explaining to his grandparents; "You see, there is this word that you can't say because it's a really bad word, but everyone backstage has been saying this really bad word all the time and - "
So I pause and I call over "Don't worry about it, we'll deal with it tomorrow."

His grandmother's face nearly splits open with relief. "Oh good," she sighs. "You know about this?"

That is when it dawned on me and I found myself standing in the middle of the hallway in the Performing Arts Center explaining loudly for grandmother and all the other parents to hear:

"The really bad word that you can't say is not, repeat NOT the F-Bomb! It's only MacBeth! Not the F-Bomb!"

Now that the show has gone well, this is a little bit funnier.

ATY opens shows at 10:30 in the morning for a school audience, then to the public in the evening. Wednesday night, final rehearsal, the actor playing the crazy uncle didn't show up because of work.

Not a good situation.

The next morning, one of the mums brings in an emergency understudy for the role.

A kitchen broom with a fantastic cartoon face painted on it and a pink bow tie.

The actress playing his girlfriend admitted it was probably the best tension breaker anyone could have done for all of us.

I saw this posted already, but since my hairstylist was kind enough to share it with me...



ASPEN, Colo. — Julius Caesar lay dead and Brutus was talking to his co-conspirators about swords and blood when he paused and excused himself, saying "I seem to have stabbed myself."

Aspen actor/director Kent Hudson Reed accidently cut his leg open with the knife he was using in an outdoor performance of "Scenes From Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" on Wednesday.

He tried to carry on, "but my boot was filling up with blood and I was flubbing my lines, wondering if I was going to pass out, wondering if the audience could see the blood."

Portia (Susan Mauntel) took Brutus to a hospital for stitches and play narrator Tyson Young announced the performance was canceled.

"That's what you get for trying to kill Caesar," he said.

Reed said actors normally don't use real knives, but the scene was set up so none of the performers were close enough to hurt each other.

"But I hadn't thought an actor might stab himself," he said.

Reed said the show would go on, although Brutus might be limping for a while.

Someone just opened the office door, clucked like a chicken and took off.

We're down to the last of strike, just sweeping, mopping etc, when I'm called over to the far wall of the theatre. There, about 8 feet up the wall, is a tampon. Some of the girls worked a bit about tampons into the show, so a couple of the boys celebrated the last performance by unwrapping them, soaking them in water, and hurling them up at the wall of the theatre.

Luckily one of the culprits was still there so, when I finished hollering, I sent him up the ladder to get it down.

That's when he looked about 15 feet up the wall and said the immortal words "Boy, I'm glad you guys didn't find that one."

When I finished hollering and the group of us gathered together to look at the tampon 15 feet up the wall and consider how to get it down, another actor uttered probably the truest words of all: "You know, in about 2 weeks, this is going to be a really funny story."

I got up early this morning to go do a school visit. I get to the school, remind the teacher how she knows me (we did a show together about 7 years ago), talk about why I was scheduled when I was and then she explains that the kids are still frantically working on final scenes today. She proposes that I go wait in her classroom, she'll finish up some things, bring the kids to me and I'll have a few minutes to talk to them before their next class.

No worries. I set my stuff down, grab a section of newspaper from the recycle bin and pull out a chair. Then the voice comes over the school intercom:

"____ High is having a lock down. Please begin lock down procedures. This is a lock down drill. No, excuse me. This is a lock down. Please begin lock down procedures."

Okay. Worries.

I poke my head out into the hall and tell the teacher next door "I'm just a visitor and -"

"Close your door, pull down the shade, lock the door and turn out the lights! NOW!"

I, of course, can't figure out how to lock the door. Plus the window shade won't stay all the way down. So I spend the next 10 or 15 minutes standing at one side of the door where I can kind of see down the hall at an angle listening to the faint echo of walkie-talkies in the distance.

Finally, they announcing that the lock down is over and it was, truly, not a drill. There was a report of a weapon outside, so APD had to come search the building.

At this point the teacher comes back. She takes one look at me and her eyes get really big. It seems she has always told the kids that they would go hide in the orchestra pit in case of an honest-to-God lock down. So she got all of them down there, closed the door and THEN remembered I was upstairs.

I get to go back to the school on Thursday to talk to the kids.

Today we had an event at the PAC.  One of the kids who always comes to Conservatory was there.  She just does Conservatory, so I only get to see her once a year. 

When I saw her, I exclaimed at a rather loud volume: "M.G.! You've GROWN!" and gave her a big hug.

She returned said hug and exclaimed back, in the exact same tone of voice "ghost_light! You colored your HAIR!"

If I'd been drinking Diet Coke, I would have shot it out my nose.

and the trees say "Fuck you, ghost_light."


A Christmas Story 2006 is ghost_light vs, the trees.

As noted before, December 8, 2006 has seen ghost_light trip over one tree (much to the hilarity of the school crowd and take a full-body slam from another evergreen. Tonight we add a tree deciding to divide mid-scene=change, leaving ghost_light holding the top portion as the base goes careening across stage. Of course, while ghost_light is giving chase, the lights come up.

Gooood night, everybody