New Toys

So I just upgraded my OS to Tiger. If you have no idea what that means, I pity you. :D

Nonetheless, I downloaded a Dashboard Widget that allows me to post blog entries from my desktop without ever having to load Safari (my internet browser). How cool is that?!

So I just had to post an entry, just to see if it would really work.

Single-serving Friends

As the summer season draws to a close and the final two weeks of show approach, I can't help but feel a small amount of regret for something I know is inevitable. It's woven into the fabric of the business that I'm in. There's no avoiding it or getting around it unless one makes especial effort. I'm talking about never speaking with anyone I've met here again.

I've made some pretty good friends here. There are people who made my first day more bearable just by being their sweet, approachable selves, people with whom I wasn't sure I'd get along who've become the people I spend all my spare time with, people who make me laugh louder and longer than anyone has in a long time. And I'm going to miss them when we all go our separate ways in two weeks and a few days. Unfortunately, we won't, for the most part, keep in touch. We'll become busy with our separate lives and think, "I wonder how So-and-So is doing. I should call them. Or email," but we never do. We feel bad, and we miss them terribly (for a while, anyway), but we never do anything about it.

I don't know if there's any other business in which this happens. One reason being that your average corporate cog doesn't pick up and change office buildings and co-workers every two months or so. But even with people who are independently contracted I don't feel that they get as close to their coworkers as performers do. We - actors - form strong bonds with our castmates and crew. We spend most of our waking hours together: we go out together, we eat together, and get frustrated and wonder why the heck we continue to torture ourselves with this profession together. It's also imperative - if we want to create a show worth watching - that we are open and comfortable enough to show truthful thought and feeling on stage. That openness transfers to our every day dealings with each other, and we become friends more quickly than in the outside world. Instant friends. Almost.

The downside to making such close friendships with people who were, three days ago, complete strangers is that once your close association is done, the friendship doesn't have anything to sustain it. You realize that you don't have that much in common when you've moved on to the next show. (And sometimes you wonder why you ever liked that person in the first place.) Also, the slow kindling of normal friendships gives the relationship time to develop and grow, rather than flaring up suddenly like a piece of dry newspaper and burning out just as quickly. Lasting friendships need time, and actors just don't have any when thrown into the midst of the show creation process.

I'll miss everyone I've met here. I hope they'll at least keep me posted on how they're doing, even if we don't talk all the time. Lucky for me I have this website so I don't have to extend too much effort on the "keeping people updated" front. ;)

Oh, and...

...Ariel and Will/Aisha/Jenn/Mom and Dad, I need to call you, I know. I haven't forgotten. Soon the madness will end and I'll have some spare time when I'm not eating or sleeping or rehearsing or working in the shop to have a nice chat with you.

Let me clear my throat.

Things are moving along here at the theatre whether we want them to or not. The last show of the season opens in a week. A week. There are still some songs I don't know. It doesn't seem as though we'll have any more music rehearsals (even though I'm not the only one who needs them), so I'm on my own as far as learning and memorizing the music goes. But instead of taking this morning to do just that, I was expected to work in the shop. And while I don't fault the techies for not really having any kind of substantial technical crew with which to work, and I enjoyed listening to my iPod and painting, but with only two weeks to mount the show, I feel like asking actors to use the time they're not technically in rehearsal to be crew members is ludicrous.

Apparently, last year, they began rehearsals for the last show at the beginning of the season and thus had six weeks to prepare. This year they gave every show but the children's show (which was an hour long) only two and a half weeks of rehearsal time. Excuse me, but no. Other theatres may be able to rehearse their actors all day and get a show up and running at night in two weeks time, but they don't expect their actors to build the set or sew the costumes as well: they HIRE A CREW.

Ahem.

Anyway.

It may seem a little bold to write about these things here when I'm quite sure that there are people reading who are involved with the theatre. But these aren't things I'll be keeping to myself when I leave. I will most definitely voice my opinion in whatever feedback form we get at the end of the summer.

Nonetheless, after all is said and done, I've enjoyed meeting the people that I've met this summer. They're good people, and most of them are doing their best to make this crazy theatre thing work. Would I do it again? I don't know.

Slogging through.

So. How are the children?

Kidding.

It's Monday, and I'm dog tired. My second show of the summer opened this past weekend, and it went pretty well. I wasn't so sure it would happen at all for me, but everything settled in after a shaky preview night. Saturday night was by far our best show: we got a standing ovation and came out for a second bow. That's always an ego boost.

I really wanted to catch up on sleep this weekend, but it didn't happen. I kept, inexplicably, having to get up at obscene hours of the morning and never getting a nap in between rehearsal times. On Friday morning I was up at 6am to drive to Minneapolis for an audition at 8:40. That, however, turned out to be a wise thing to do, as I ended up getting the job. And it's a particularly good one, too (read: I will be able to pay rent and eat for a few more months). Hopefully I'll get a copy and be able to post the results here so you all can see it. It should be a fun ad: I had to get all my fingers sized on Saturday for it. See if you can guess why.

(I think I had some other good news, but I can't remember what it was. That's what I get for not writing in here promptly.)

We've now begun rehearsals in earnest for the last show of the summer, which means that my mornings and afternoons are from now on devoted to learning the show as quickly as I can. I've missed all the evening rehearsals because of the show currently in performance. I feel as though I've been thrown into a party where everyone already knows each other and all the latest dance moves and I've been studying in the library for the past 10 years of my life. I'm a lot lost, a lot dazed, but nonetheless excited. I was ambivalent about the show because of its reputation as fluff, but it's really quite funny, and some of the music is beautiful, even if it silly.

Oh! I just remembered my other good news: I have a show for the late summer/early fall, which will also bring in some more income. Fall is always a hard time for me work-wise, but this one seems to be shaping up nicely. Just goes to show that worrying accomplishes nothing.

I live.

I do. It's just that my show just opened, and I've been running back and forth between here and Minneapolis, and oh crap! I need to be at rehearsal in 4 minutes. Bye!

Struggles.

The cast of my current show assisted the cast of the children's show in their strike*. During our break we sat in the gallery and ate our strike pizza and gabbed. One of my current castmates was talking about our next show in which I play one of the wards of the Major General (if that isn't a gigantic clue to the name of the show, I don't know what is). He has consistently argued that I don't fit in with the other wards, who are (almost) exclusively blonde and Scandinavian. Initially, I reminded him that a "ward" is not the blood relative of whoever is taking care of them: they're adopted.

(I'm about to talk about my next show as if it were a real family, so bear with me, and remember that I'm not talking about real people. :))

Once again, on this strike night, he dragged out the topic of my relation to the rest of my "family". He said, "I know they're all adopted, but if they weren't that would be a stain on the Major General's reputation." I hadn't really been listening that hard until that point, but at that I swiveled around, looked at him and said, "And why is that B***?" He wouldn't give me a straight answer, other than insisting that "he was just saying" that because I'm different than the rest of the girls that something was different about the relationship between my "mother" and "father."

I had to try very hard not to get angry, but I did raise my voice. After asking him several times why my presence in the Major General's family would be because of something bad, I finally explained to him: "Your saying that the Major General's reputation would be tainted implies that my mother was a whore," which, to me, is the crux of the problem. Just because I am black doesn't imply that the Major General had an affair with my mother, or that she was a prostitute. I take issue with the fact that that's the first thing his mind jumped to when trying to explain me away. The director of the children's show pointed out that another cast member's family is of mixed race through adoption, and I think that put a sock in B***'s mouth.

But there's no reason why my "mother" couldn't have been the Major General's first wife. I am the oldest anyway. But what irks me the most is that I know that this is the way many, many directors and artistic directors think in this country, and I think it's worse here in the Midwest. They cannot conceive of a healthy, normal relationship between people of different races, and when they read a script, they only see white people in the central roles. It's like people of color can only have certain types of problems (i.e. black people are only troubled by drugs and crime, not "how am I going to deal with growing up/getting married/loss/grief/anger etc").

And I don't think colorblind casting is the answer, either. There are some plays and some roles where it would be highly inappropriate to cast someone who is not of the race originally intended. It has to make sense. But that is not to say that a director can't consider a person of color for a role that doesn't have any racial requirements. Unfortunately, I don't feel that most directors do. I've heard it said that they "don't think there's a large enough talent pool of actors of color to choose from" and excuse me for saying it, but I call b.s., especially when the companies I hear saying it most cast the same people over and over again. (One of these companies decided to throw us a bone by producing a well-known play for a 90% black cast. My question is why can't you cast us in the other plays you choose for your season?)

There are companies that I avoid auditioning for because I know that I won't even be considered with any seriousness. I'd name names, but the people that need to know already feel it in their bones and avoid those companies, too. They look at audition notices, see the plays being produced and who's producing them and they know that it would be pointless to go because they will be ignored. And if this isn't you and you're wondering how we know and think we're over-reacting or misinterpreting, we just know. And you probably never will because you can't put our skin on and walk around in it. I don't think you can't attempt to understand, but you will never know how we know. We just do.

I didn't mean this to turn into a rant, but as a black actor, it's something that I struggle against every day and it's frustrating. Some people are so deeply indoctrinated with institutionalized racism that they aren't even aware of it anymore, and there's only so much I can do to change minds.

Before you label me as "a crazy black woman" I also know that I have to walk a fine line when I'm talking about these kinds of things. I know that I will most likely not be cast in 90% of the things I audition for, and that my not being cast doesn't mean that a particular theatre company doesn't cast actors of color ever. I'm not calling out racism every time I'm not cast in something. But that's not what I've meant in the past few paragraphs. I don't get cast, but neither do any other actors of color. I look at publicity photos, I go to see the shows, and I wonder, "Where are the black people? The asian people? The Latinos?" I'm not there, but neither is anyone else, and to me, that speaks much louder than the defense of "we just don't think there are enough."


*strike: to disassemble the set and lights and put away the costumes of a show; generally closing it down

Gossip is naughty.

I forgot that Lindsay Lohan is filming in St. Paul this summer. Apparently she's been having fun in Minneapolis though.

From Page Six® of the NY Post:

"TEEN terror Lindsay Lohan is at it again. The 19-year-old star, a regular under-age imbiber at hip clubs in New York and L.A., boozed it up the other night at Chino Latino restaurant in St. Paul, Minn. (uh, wrong, Chino is in Minneapolis, foo!), where she's shooting 'A Prairie Home Companion.' While she 'did eat, too,' according to our snitch, Lohan might want to take it easy. On the set of 'Herbie: Fully Loaded' and the upcoming 'Just My Luck,' her late-night partying landed her in the hospital for 'exhaustion' and delayed filming. Our St. Paul tattletale noted: 'We wouldn't have even noticed her if it hadn't been for her stupid hat.'

Too bad I'm not wandering around my neighborhood: I might have spotted some celebs.