Damnit, this should be all posted already. Why does the internet hate me? Argh…
by krisis
Personal
I’m always preaching about how i find beauty in imperfections, and there were three distinct beauty marks on my part in the show. Two of them were ugly and misplaced, but one of them was shining and perfect – it reminded me of that mole on Cindy Crawford’s lip.
The first mess-up that mars my memory of the show is my classic blunder on opening night, where i totally forget the second verse of my solo song. Normally i love to make mistakes while solo on the stage, because then it’s solely my job to fix them, but in this situation i was trapped because my accompaniment was a taped piano. Even though i made up a whole verse on the spot, and even though i hardly ever broke character in the process, i felt trapped by the piano pounded forward while i was still spinning my mental wheels in the mud.
The second blunder was totally the opposite. In our sneak preview Laurel started a scene with the wrong monologue … one that came later in the scene after i made a crucial entrance where my hand would be injured for the whole of the play. With half the cast on the stage, we were sent into a panic. The intelligent thing to do would be to wait Laurel’s monologue out, and then replay the part of the scene that came beforehand, but with so many people present we could hardly communicate our intention. As it was the scene just blundered along without me, and i was left to my own devices to get my hand injured onstage and then get my ass to center to talk to Laurel. Everything got done, but it was sloppy and could have been pulled off without a hitch if everyone had thought it through better.
My favourite mistake was with Laurel, and it happened twice. There are a handful of scenes … three or four short exchanges … that hinged solely on Laurel and I. We would have total control of the stage on which no one else could intrude until we resolved our lines. In one instance i dropped a line, and in another she dropped hers, but both times we maintained eye contact and fixed things. Once i had to go back and redo a line so the audience would hear it, and Laurel stood ready with her response. The other time the ball was in Laurel’s court and i let her know that i wouldn’t say a thing until she gave a line to let me know where the scene stood. Both times the transition from lines to mistake to fix to lines was so smooth that the rest of the cast had to ask what happened afterwards.
Laurel never loses control of the stage; it’s a skill i could stand to learn a bit better.
I have this idiot clear red poker visor on right now, because our director Bill had this obscenely large box of them (frightening only because it implies he had some sinister use for them in the show that never came to fruition) and he had the entire cast and crew pick one of the garish colors out from the box during our strike. Honestly, it’s sort of like always being under a red spotlight, because it casts the same glow the lighting gels do, and it washes out all of the red coloring of my hands when they’re in the light. Maybe Bill meant to say we’re always under the spotlight, or maybe he just wanted to get rid of thirty ugly poker visors, or maybe he just wanted his whole cast to look silly as they trudged home from the show.
There was this idiot kid dead center tonight. I talk to the audience once at the very beginning of the play, and once at the end; at the beginning i am in character and warming them up to the sort of show they’ll be seeing, and at the end i am totally myself, telling them that there is no happy end to be found. The ending is hard to find humor in, as the primary cast stalks up to the front of the stage one by one to remind the audience that there is no happy end. Tonight i walked forward for my solo bit of the epilogue, and that kid was right there. I remember him from orientation …, he wore this idiot blue visor with all of his chunky dyed blonde hair sticking up behind it, and he kept trying to break dance at night even though he was awful at it and he was getting in everyone’s way. It struck me that he mocked everything because he wasn’t really a part of any of it.
Tonight i walked past him and he wasn’t laughing with me but at me, and not in the way an audience is meant to. I just said my line to him and walked away. “Unhappy endings were expected too…” I had the stage, i was a lead in a play with my own song and my name listed first in a program, and he sat there in the audience and tried to have power over me with his hollow little laugh – as if i was supposed to see him mocking me and just break character and forget all of my lines and break down and let him win. But, he had nothing on me, because no matter how much i might have hated being in this play every night, when i’m on stage i am in charge.
He wasn’t wearing his visor, though. And i’m sitting here, wondering what else i have in common with him.
I wish i could write songs about stuff consistently. For every “Hold on Me” that talks about physical things like sheets and walking down the street, there’s a “Splinter” that isn’t grounded in reality at all. The latter case is fine, but if you aren’t going to talk about anything real you need to craft a strong metaphor, because just the words aren’t going to hold your song together. And too often it’s just words…
Eek. There’s something wrong in a relationship when one of you has been head over heels the entire time, and the other one is continually warming up to the other. Eventually warm turns to hot, and head over heels after all those months comes off as pretty damned cold. Or something. Didn’t Alanis Morissette write an album about this feeling? Don’t i own it…