Far, far sadder news: The Curious Savage has been CANCELLED, which I'm sure makes all of you very depressed, because I know that all of you were clearly intending to go see it even if doing so would require stealing a helicopter and landing it illegally on Andruss Field. (It would be a great entrance, I have to say. Although you'd have to make sure to check the weather report, because Andruss becomes a swamp after even the slightest amount of rain and there's a strong possibility that the helicopter would sink.)
Anyway, Curious Savage. It's weird — I've been in shows with a variety of strange and bizarre issues, but I don't think I've ever been in a cancelled show. It feels very... odd. You guys learned about potential and kinetic energy in school, right? It feels like that.
[<strong>Under the cut</strong>: Mini-science lesson, Lego Harrison Ford, the rest of my week, and the stuff I promised last week about study abroad.]
So a play is like a rock. When it's just in script form, it's chilling at the top of the hill, unmoving but full of potential energy:
But then when you put it into production, it starts rolling down that hill, building up more and more momentum until it's practically the boulder that tries to crush Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
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| From the Lego Indiana Jones. Did you know that there are also versions of this scene immortalized in cake form? Yeah. Raiders of the Lost Cake. DELICIOUS. |
...Which is why I decided to record all four of my lines so that you could see what I've been working on. (I did actually have a decently-sized part — my character had just taken a vow of mostly-silence. I got to stomp around a lot looking grumpy and randomly turning off the lights.)
I did also say my lines with slightly different emphasis, but I get nervous around cameras. (Thus the accidental cursing. Please forgive that.)
Curious Savage
Anyway! Weekly update: Assassins was AWESOME. Truly, truly awesome. (I do sort of feel like I was primed to like it, what with having seen Heathers earlier the same week and all.) I was discussing it with my friends and I decided that it was the funniest musical about multiple homicide that I've ever seen — which inevitably led us to wonder what other musicals there are about multiple homicide. We came up with Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, and Chicago, but I'm sure there are more out there.
I'm trying to remember what I did for the rest of the week, and honestly, I'm drawing a blank. I'm pretty sure there was a fair amount of goofing around on the internet, but if I talk about that stuff I might as well mention that every day this week ended with '-y.' I watched Working Girl in Narrative and Ideology, although I'm not a huge fan of that movie, and we discussed television and advertising in Commodity Culture, which are two of my favorite subjects. I started watching Cheers. Yesterday I made challah with apples and honey, which is so delicious that I wouldn't be surprised if my flatmate and I demolish it before the end of the weekend.
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| It's got that jagged bit at the back because I couldn't wait to take a photograph before I tasted it. |
And one other thing about this week, I guess — on Monday, all the paperwork was due to the Office of International Studies for students wanting to study abroad in the spring. This would have mattered a great deal more to me, but two weeks ago I decided that I'm staying at Wes for the full year.
You may be rolling your eyes right now, thinking, "Um, why are you acting like this is important?", which is probably a fair question to ask given that I haven't actually mentioned my overly dramatic internal debate before now. Here's the short version, then: I had always assumed that I would be studying abroad. It was almost a natural progression: 1) go to college, 2) study abroad in the spring semester of junior year, 3) profit. (The profit might have come in enjoyment and experience, but whatever, that still counts.) It seemed so self-evident that I sometimes forgot that other people didn't study abroad. (Cough-film majors-cough.)
And then last year, when my sister was busy studying in Chile, I was in the play Sidh with a bunch of upperclassmen who one day started talking about why they were glad they hadn't studied abroad. Why they think they made the right decision in staying at Wes.
Suffice to say, my world was rocked. I had never really thought of it that way before — as a choice to stay and experience more of Wes, rather than as just getting left behind. And then all of a sudden, it was like I was meeting more and more people who weren't huge fans of study abroad, and I started to think, "Well, what if I... didn't?"
But I can never make a decision quite that easily, and so I vacillated about it for ages. Go? Don't go? Go during the summer, and deal with the fact that there most likely won't be as many native students? Shouldn't I go to take advantage of this awesome opportunity? But isn't Wesleyan itself an awesome opportunity? What if I'm miserable abroad? But what if I'm just staying in my comfort zone by staying in the US?
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| DON'T I WANT THE WORLD IN MY HANDS??? (from unk.edu) |
Eventually I decided that it would make the most sense to just apply to a program or two, see if I got in, and then make a final choice later. This decision combined two of my favorite things: prevarication and procrastination. I picked two countries almost arbitrarily (Greece and the Netherlands) and started applying...
Or I would have, if there hadn't been such a ridiculous amount of paperwork. Seriously, it was like the programs didn't want me to apply or something. Or, you know, like I was so unenthused that the reasonable amount of forms to fill out and questions to answer seemed like an infinite, interminable mountain of bureaucracy.
Which led to even more vacillation, which pretty much continued until I talked to my sister and she told me that I could decide whatever the hell I wanted as long as I owned the decision — and I thought, "I feel like I'm just going to be completing these applications for nothing, because I'm just going to be deciding later not to go." Which ended up being a pretty good hint, as far as these things go.
And then I thought, "You know what I really like doing? Cooking. I could do a summer cooking program in another country. I would be willing to do whatever paperwork necessary to do a summer cooking program in another country, I am so excited about the ideas."
Which was also a pretty good hint, as far as these things go, and is another story entirely, so I won't get into it right now. If I don't get accepted for that, though, I'm seriously considering just going to Ireland for two months to study Gaelic — which I am also more excited about than the possibility of studying abroad in the spring.
Most of the people I know who went abroad, including my sister, loved their programs and had a fantastic experience—and that's really awesome, and I'm super happy for them, and I definitely don't think that people should stop going abroad. I just wish that someone had started beating it into my head earlier that staying in the country is cool, too — even staying for the summer, too. Going to college doesn't mean you have to fling yourself halfway around the world.
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