New Year Dawning

I meant to write earlier, but Blogger was down. So it's not my fault.

A few quick updates on things:

"Vial" for the Bay Area One Acts is two weeks out from rehearsals. I've met with the set, light, and sound designers and things are looking good. I was short an actor for a while, but I think I've got the role recast finally. This one aspect of the production has generated the most stress for me, as I had several actors who would have worked well in the role and would have loved to do it, but were already cast elsewhere. This is the problem with these tiny unpaid festivals. Since you can't pay the actors (casts for 10 distinct one-acts, plus directors, playwrights, crew, etc. etc. etc. would cause the budget to skyrocket, and the venue is expensive enough as it is), it's not unexpected to lose high quality people to paying gigs. Unfortunate, but understandable. Still, we've got a great cast and I think it's going to be a really good piece.

"Nothing in the Dark" is cast, and I'm waiting for confirmation on my violinist. There's not a whole lot I can do about this late March show just yet, so I'm just trying not to fret about the music side of things.

RadioStar continues to go well. We had over 600 downloads of shows last month, and I'm hoping that our audience will just keep growing. Our most popular show has had over 150 downloads since it was first created (we have over 55 shows online now), so I don't know that our actual audience is more than 200 people or so. If you listen to us, please feel free to leave a review on iTunes, or send us an email.

The first meeting of the League of Professional Small Theatre Companies was last night, and while it's way too early to make any predictions as to it's effectiveness, the potential there is impressive. I set up a discussion board for us to use, so hopefully the hundreds of small theatre professionals in the area will be able to more effectively share resources and solutions.

I edited the first of the Submergency videos last night as well. Once I have a few more of them done I'll start posting them online. At this point I think I'll post them on the CCP server as a podcast for iTunes and also on YouTube. That will be 15 videos when all is said and done, and by that point we'll hopefully have another show lined up, so it might behoove us to make Submergency a semi-regular video podcast.

I've started seeing someone, which is a big change over the last two years. I'm taking things week by week, but it's very nice and I'm certainly feeling grounded. She lives in Sacramento, which is actually working out well. She's out here most weekends anyway, so my guilt at the dating commute isn't as great as it might be, and since she's heavily interested in the arts we've got lots to keep ourselves occupied (like that's ever been a problem for me).

Speaking of keeping occupied, I've been taking tango lessons from Gigi and Warren Jensen again and greatly enjoying it, and will begin taking Suzuki acting lessons from Jeffrey Bihr again starting this Sunday. Tango is going by the sideboard for a month or two while I'm in rehearsal for "Vial" and "Nothing in the Dark", but the Suzuki class is on Sunday mornings so it doesn't conflict with anything other than my laziness. A class I will not be taking, but that is of interest, is Paul Jenning's Shakespeare classes. Paul is gearing up to teach Elizabethan theatre technique and is looking for students. If you're interested in this, let me know and I'll forward your information to Paul.

Other good, if somewhat surprising news, is that novelist, playwright, and scholar Mandy Keifetz got married a couple of weeks ago! After a brief and whirlwind romance, Mandy got married while on a visit here in San Francisco. She's staying in New York but will be out here frequently until her new hubby can complete his own move out to the Big Apple. Cheers Keif!

On the dark side, my Aunt has been fighting a mystery infection that is so bad that she's been put into a controlled coma. She's been under for a few weeks now, and they still can't seem to find where the infection is concentrated. It's extremely scary, but every time I talk to my mom there has been no news. It all happened so fast, and now weeks of nothing. No change, no progress, no new information. It's a strange kind of limbo. And stuff like this goes beyond the inevitabilities of old age. It's something darker and stranger and unpredictable and all I know to do is to hope for recovery.

I want to end on something a bit more hopeful, so I'll mention that I've made bit more progress on the novel. Chapter six is finished and I have the outline for what I think will happen in chapter seven all worked out. With everything else going on, though, I'm not sure when I'll be able to announce the next chapter's completion.