My mom also feels that I should have taken a moment in my last post to plug the bakery that delivered my cake, so... Mazzota's! They deliver right to your dorm! They make delicious rum cake! Woohoo.
Speaking of edits I should be making to my last post: remember how I said that I hadn't gotten a callback for the play I auditioned for last week? Yeah. Turns out that a couple of people dropped out, and so the director asked if I would be willing to take a role. Amusingly enough, she called me pretty much right after I had considered auditioning for another play and then decided that maybe it was for the best if I <em>didn't</em> do theater this semester. I eventually decided to take the role, though, because heaven knows I can never resist the opportunity to play angry old ladies. For some reason it's a role that suits me very well.
In addition to being an angry old lady (in The Curious Savage, in case you were wondering), I'm also planning on sitting in on the rehearsals of The Canterville Ghost, which is the musical that I co-wrote with the rest of the Wesleyan Musical Theater Collective. (Two of my other co-writers are directing and stage managing.) I have really high hopes for this show, and I really want to see how it develops, from the words we put on the page to an actual finished product with lights and costumes and everything. Exciting stuff! I'm hoping I can bully them into letting me make the poster.
[Under the cut: pictures, academic stuff, and a video!]
The Canterville Ghost is based on a short story by the fabulous Oscar Wilde, although we took a fair amount of creative license to change it from a satire to a tragicomedic musical. (I like creative license; it's an incredibly useful excuse.) The four of us (the bookwriters, that is; there were more composers, thankfully, since if we hadn't had composers this enterprise would have sunk like a guy who betrayed a mob boss in Jersey) also spent a ridiculous amount of time in a room together discussing what elements of the story we were going to discard, which we were going to keep as-is, and which needed to be edited. I am pretty sure that by this point, we have all spent <em>way</em> too much time together. It was pretty awesome.
(Randomly, speaking of pretty awesome: SO MANY GREAT PLAYS ARE GOING UP THIS SEMESTER. IT'S GOING TO BE AMAZING.)
Also: apparently there was a movie version of the Canterville Ghost starring Patrick Stewart and Neve Campbell. I have not seen this version. Actually, to be completely honest, I haven't even read the original story in full. I read the wikipedia entry, let my co-writers catch me up on anything else that was important, and then went from there.
Okay, so other stuff:
This semester I'm taking Narrative and Ideology (I have an intellectual crush on the teacher and we're watching 80's movies; I am in love with this class); Theory 1 for Anthropology (which I have to take, but find incredibly interesting nonetheless); Commodity Consumption and Consumer Cultures (which, trust me, is a <em>lot</em> more interesting than it sounds and hits pretty much square in the center of things I'm interested in in Anthropology, despite forcing me to read Marx); and Techniques of Fiction (which scares me a little in the way any fiction class scares me, but the professor is really nice and I'm sure it will be helpful).
I've actually been having a little bit of trouble with my ToF assignment for Tuesday; we're supposed to listen in on other people's conversations, write them down word-for-word, pay attention to quirks of speech/repetitions/etc., and then fictionalise them in some way, but I've found some problems with this.
Professor, if you find your way to this, I hope you know that I'm not trying to insult the assignment at all. Conceptually speaking, the idea is pretty perfect. What better way to get a sense for dialogue than to pay attention to how people actually speak?
What's more, if I still lived in Clark or Writing House — places with frequently-used common spaces — I might have been able to do it with far more ease. I could have just brought in my laptop and waited for other people to come fill up the space with their voices.
Outside of that, though, it can be hard to find a space where you can sit close enough to someone to overhear every word they're saying. Moreover, if you're concentrating on typing everything up word-for-word, it's difficult to concentrate on other aspects of their communication — and that's assuming that you <em>can</em> type everything up word for word, which I could not. I'm a pretty fast typer, but people talk really, really quickly. They would be two or three sentences ahead before I had finished typing up all the "like"s and "you know"s.
In the end, I gave up on trying to type as I listened, and just decided to take out my phone and record some of my friends' conversations, which had the added bonus of being A) loud, and B) more interesting than most of the other stuff I could catch people talking about. Then I just replayed the videos several times and typed everything up. That should still count, right? Right?
Whatever. Creative problem-solving due to enhanced technology! Whoo!
Here, have a short sample clip of some of the stuff I filmed:
("SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU'RE DESTROYING MY CONVERSATION")
Of course, I have no idea how to textually represent all the people talking over each other, but if I figured out how to solve the listening-in dilemma, I'm sure I can make this one work, too. Tim Gunn should be proud of me.
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