Crunch time

Everything is coming to a head. The Chinese Angle opens in eight days. We have five of those for rehearsal due to the holiday weekend. In many ways, we're where I'd like us to be. In some ways, we're not. A lot can happen in a week though, and it's a damn good cast. Other bits are coming together. The bar looks nice, and the stairs are halfway finished. Costumes are being assembled and we're talking hair tonight. Details, details, details.

In the midst of all this, I'm trying to get the pre-production done for Submergency. The performance isn't my concern here, but the framework. To be precise, the opening videos. I have the script and the concept. I just need to film them, and every time I've tried to do so at Radiostar, something has come up to eat up our time. Unfortunate, but if we meet this Sunday I should have no problem getting things done quickly.

What I keep forgetting is that Feedback Loop, the playwright's workshop, opens before either of these. Hayes is facilitating the first week, but I need to have various things done for him.

It's good that we have the holiday weekend. That gives me all day Saturday and Sunday to work on these issues before spending Monday helping load everything into the theatre.

trying to chew

Just a quick check in.

"Hi!"

Things are going all kinds of nuts, but mostly in a good way. We're two weeks out from the opening of The Chinese Angle, and it's shaping up nicely... but it's also TWO WEEKS from opening.
Submergency postcards came in and I've started labeling them so we can get them in the mail by Monday.
I haven't touched next week's Radiostar show yet, so I know what I'll be doing Saturday after rehearsal.

I wasn't able to be at last night's Bay Area Professional Small Theatre meeting, but I hear it went well and I get the impressions that we're starting to move towards a specific course of action.

Work kicked my ass this week with lots of Flash programming, but I beat my demons this morning and after several days of smashing my head against the wall I was able to update all six presentations today. Crazy, crazy.

It looks like we're going to BARELY have enough people for the Feedback Loop playwright's workshop, so I need to inform our attendees tomorrow that we're a "go". Part of me was kind of hoping that this wasn't going to happen, but all the pieces are in place, we just need to do it. The trick is going to be finding the time to put the polish on it.

I've been supposed to do a redesign for the Tango and More website, but that's been the thing to suffer the most from this time crunch. I have a basic idea template, so I hope to get that up in the next few days with all the new content. We can adjust it once it's up.

As you can tell, this is a high volume time, even for me. I'm feeling a bit freaked at the moment, but if I can get past the next two and a half weeks, everything will be fun from then out.

Just be patient if I seem a little distracted/absent.

Delays

Today's frustrating was a mixture of frustration and joy. I had hoped to get twice as much done today as we did, but much of the work we had done before had to be re-examined. We've been splitting our rehearsals between my large rehearsal room and the producer's home. My space hasn't been available every night, due to ongoing pre-existing rentals, which is a shame. Well, we had blocked the second act while at the smaller location and things began to look quite different for some reason in the new space (which is much closer in size to the actual theatre).

So, only got through half of what I wanted.

But we got recordings of all the songs, and Adrian agreed to record a bunch of scene change music stings for us, which is going to really amp things up a bit. Even that took longer than expected though, and we had to pack up before we were truly finished as I had other renters coming in.

It can be difficult, when things take longer than they ought to. Hard when you expect to resolve certain things, but find delay after delay instead.

More Joy

Also, we got the postcard art in for Submergency: Damp Summer. The artist, Mark Chun, did the portraits of Ana, Julie, Diana and Barry off of our YouTube clips and stills off of the CCP website. I am officially envious of his considerable talent.

Joy

My last post was about everything going on that was horrible. As usual, what is bringing a smile to my lips is my work. Jenene, when she was giving me my super snazzy new 'do, referred it to as my "other girlfriend". I can't really dispute it.

The Chinese Angle is turning into a daily delight, as the cast is having a fantastic time and the work is easy, fun, and rapid.

Also, the postcards are printed and being distributed. They look pretty nifty.

Close calls, Near misses, and failed saves

There have been some personal crises over the last week.

My mom has been having a lot of pain for the last few weeks and was told by her doctor to have an MRI done. She has a history of cancer, and there were concerns that her spinal problems could be cancer related. She went in Thursday, and got the results today.

It looks like arthritis, which is bad enough in the spine, but it's not life threatening. She has a lot of pain and struggle ahead, but it's something that she can work with and through. It's not great news, but better news than we were afraid to get.

My niece was hit by a truck. She was in the back seat of a friend's car, and the other vehicle "T-boned" the car, striking them full in the side. Her hip was fractured in three places. My first thought was "thank god, she survived". My second thought was "Will she ever be able to have children?"

This may seem a strange thought for me, as I have no desire for children of my own, but I know very well that my instincts are not those of most people.

While in the emergency room, the nurse mentioned that they had an expert in the kinds of fracture my niece had received, and called for advice on how to proceed. The surgeon told them to have my niece on her operating table at 2 that afternoon. Tiny screws were put in place, and less than a week later, my neice took her first steps with the help of a walker. It's going to be a lot of pain and struggle ahead, but it's something that she can work with and through.

In the light of these incidents, what happened to me personally seems barely worth mentioning. Friday morning my laptop hard drive crashed, completely and totally and with very little warning. I was able to mount my drive as an external device and recover some raw radiostar files and video files I had been working on. Some of these were lost, as the machine would lock up whenever I tried to access them to copy them to a safe drive. After several hours of this, I trusted that the office backup system had gotten everything else and reinstalled the operating system. From that point, the machine wouldn't boot at all, but simply restart itself over and over again as it tried to function. The backup administrator was out of the office, and so I had to wait until this morning to find out how bad it was.

My backup client had never been activated. My fault. I had backups of many of my personal files, and my current projects were on another server, but all my photographs (and I mean ALL of them) seemed to be gone. Also, much of the novel and who knows what else. Later, bless him, he found a backup from my last laptop, which had been used as a loaner for other staff before getting rewritten. I can get everything restored, from January 2007 back. I still lost about seven months of photographs (that didn't get on Flickr) and other spreadsheets and records...

It will be a lot of work to recover, and some of what I value is lost forever, but it could have been much, much worse. What I have, I can work with and through.

and yes, I'm getting a better personal backup system.

Snowball is rolling

Tons of stuff going on. Sorry for not updating more. First off, I am a shorn lamb. I haven't put a pic up yet on Flickr, but I'll try to get to that soon. Jenene did a fantastic job on my poor little head, and while people haven't died from the shock of it, I've gotten a lot of double takes.

Rehearsals for The Chinese Angle have begun, and I'm already having a great time with this very diverse and fun cast. We're primarily fleshing out the world they inhabit, which I find to be a very grounding way to begin the process. We learned a lot about the characters that is only suggested in the text, and at least began to answer the questions that the text proposes about our shifty and unreliable personas. This is my first noir piece, but I am really enjoying playing with the conventions and the moral complexities that the genre offers up.

We're very close to a postcard image for Submergency. Mark Chun is doing the art again, and the little sailor man from the last show has become our official mascot with this card. I'm feeling a little ADD with thinking about Chinese Angle and Submergency simultaneously, but they are very different aesthetics so it's nice to be able to steer my impulses into their correct corral.

I'm looking very forward to seeing Stardust this weekend. I saw some clips last year in San Diego, so I know not to expect an extact translation of the book onto the screen, but Neil's happy with it and that gives me a lot of confidence that I'm not going to leave the theatre traumatized. Neil posted a link to this article about how spin and perception of success and failure work in Hollywood, and it is a great reminder of why I want nothing to do with the place.

In other news, I somehow completely missed the fact that Eddie Izzard was performing in SF this last weekend. I am full of fury and rage, as we didn't have Radiostar this last Sunday and I could have attended the show. I am not sure what sin I have committed to result in this travesty, but it must have been a big one. Then again, maybe the gods felt it was a little unjust, since I got a spontaneous lunch with Angela Mazur today.

This weekend looks like a fun one, with a Harry Potter Decompression dinner over at Ms. Creely's, Stardust, rehearsal, Marca Cassidy playing at the Rose Street House of Music (a house concert venue I haven't visited in years), and the reconvening of the Radiostar ensemble after a nice long vacation. There's a possiblity that I might make Three Musketeers out in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon, but after the bus fiasco last weekend, I'm not making any promises. I mean, seriously, you shouldn't have to wait 40 minutes for a bus before giving up and going to the local pub. I'm just sayin'

not actually traveling anymore

I've actually been back for a while, and just posting my entries that I wrote while on vacation. Needless to say, I'm back safe and sound and have been as busy as ever. I just got back today from filming Antero Ali's new film "The Invisible Forest". It's been a two week process of workshops and finally filming up on Mt. Tamalpais. Antero and I haven't worked together since 1999, so this has been a real treat to reconnect. It's also allowed me to spend time with the reclusive doting father, Nick Walker and my old Ubu Roi castmate Juliet Tanner. While I single out these old faces, the entire cast was a delight to work with and I hope to work with each of them again in time. Of course, in the case of Jessica Bockler, this might be difficult as she came out from Liverpool to do the film.

I grew my hair and beard out for four months in preparation for the film, and Jenene Curtis took brave new leaps in hair design in bleaching and dying not only my head silver (as she had done for "Chain Reactions") but my beard and moustache as well. The effect was striking, but not quite complete and required me to acquire some white shoe polish to clear up the banana- yellow spots on my lip and chin. The end result was effective enough that the cameraman, after spending three days with me in the woods, was astonished to find out that I was four years younger than he was.

I may have mentioned this here before, but I was playing an actor in a theatre troupe, and my character was developing the role of Prospero, from The Tempest. Thus, my aged appearance.

I could not shave my beard off fast enough when I got home. It's immense size had been irritating to me for several reasons, but having it full of shoe polish was just too much. Still, I find it odd that there is no longer anything upon my chin to stroke.

I have returned to an immense amount of work for WestEd, which I will be tackling as soon as I finish this post. I've had enough people email me, commenting on how they know I'm on a boat somewhere, that I felt I should clarify what's been up.

There are many, many pictures of both my time on the boat, and on the set of the film, on my Flickr page. (see the link to the right).