Deranged Ramblings

Its been a very busy week, but I finally have a few moments to spend with my lonely blog. Just hours ago I returned to Utah from Las Vegas, where I spent an enjoyable two days and far too much money on fun but frivolous things like clothes, a pair of sunglasses, and tickets to a preview night of "Avenue Q" (which won the Tony for Best Musical over "Wicked" and totally deserved it, I don't care what you other theater people say - it was so good). But what I want to talk about, mainly, happened the night before I went to Vegas, during our Saturday evening performance of Macbeth. Macbeth started last Thursday, and its been going pretty well. The audiences have been a rather decent size considering the venue is difficult to locate and, lets face it, we're doing not just a Shakespeare play but a bloody tragedy dressed in punk/goth clothes. Thats not generally what appeals to the theater going audience of Utah Valley (whose average age is over 100), but we've ...

I don't quite fit in socially at work. It's not that I don't like the people I work with, its just that I come from quite a different background than most of them do and consequently we don't really have much in common. Most of them, for example, do not have college degrees, enjoy country music, do not speak English (in some cases, have never heard of Marcel Proust, John Locke, Patroclus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Laurence Olivier, Thomas Pynchon, James Taylor, David Sedarris, or Spencer Green, and think I'm showing off when I use "big" words like "effeminate" and "sequential." And yet, despite all this, I'm consistently the one saying stupid things and generally giving the impression that I'm a big idiot. As witnessed by the sorry scene that happened Friday afternoon: I'm not a rude person. Its never my intension to offend, and in fact I feel I put a lot of effort into being non-confrontational, considerate, sympathetic, and app...

Ok, so I'm so completely busy with rehearsals I have no time for the blog right now. Let me announce when my plays are now, though. Macbeth Aug. 25,26,27 ; Sep. 1-3, 8-10, 15-17 House opens at 7:30, show starts at 8:00 Admission is $7.00 for students with ID card, $9.00 for everbody else The 25th of August is a preview night, and its cheaper. I think its $5.00. It's an outdoor theater with stone steps for seating so feel free to bring a blanket or a pillow to sit on. Its kind of hidden, so here's how to get there: 1300 East Center Street Provo, Utah 84606 From I-15, take exit (Center Street) east toward the mountains. Follow Center street until it passes 900 East. (As if you were going to 7 Peaks Water Park). Just past 900 East the road will bend to the left. Instead of following the bend, turn right onto the Utah State Hospital Campus (please observe posted speed limits). When you come to a round about (round planter box), turn left and follow this parking lot around to th...

I'm no longer fat. Ok, so I never was fat, really. But I was certainly heading that way. I was plagued with nightmares of myself at forty watching TV from my bed while eating a drumstick, so large I could not support my own weight, and then dying of a heart attack. Nothing I could do was stopping the inexorable process. I would stop gaining weight, then lose a pound or two, then suddenly gain a bunch more. More and more of my pants were going into the "do not fit anymore" pile. The final straw came when we saw the costume designs for the upcoming production of Macbeth that I am in. My costume requires me to wear a very tight shirt, which looks really good in the rendering, but I worried about what it might reveal. I pulled the shirt I was wearing back from behind, making it look tight in the front so that we could get a preview. "Uh-oh," said my director, the lovely and talented Barta Heiner, "looks like you got a little extra flub here," and she grabb...

Given that I am still a young and virile twenty-something, one might expect that I would have some exciting and wild plans for the coming weekend. However, those who know me well would tell one that this is rather unlikely, given my history. They would in this case be wrong, I am proud to say, and ought to be ashamed of their quick and thoughtless judgements that I am inherently boring; because this weekend I'm spending the large bulk of my time babysitting my mother's dog... er... dogsitting her dog. So you can see that I'm not going to be doing anything boring or uninteresting because, really, how much more interesting.....um... can... you...... get? This dog has been a member of our family for some years, and yet I referred to it (rightly) as my mother's dog. He was her baby from the very beginning, and they've always had a special relationship that the rest of us couldn't quite understand. But I should go back to the beginning. The story of the dog really st...

As many of you know, I’m something of an actor. Currently, I’m rehearsing for two plays at the same time, and they are both Shakespearian tragedies: Hamlet and Macbeth. On a totally unrelated note, I’ve been really depressed lately for some reason. So, anyway, I’m up to my eyeballs in Shakespeare, but then, being an English major, I’ve been deeper than that before. But, really, what is the deal with this guy Shakespeare? Why is he still so appealing to so many people after four hundred years? Is it the nifty vocabulary, the hypnotic iambic pentameter, the presentation of deeply essential human themes? Or is it the dirty jokes, the cod pieces, the silly banter? In my opinion, the secret is clearly the cod pieces, but a lot of other people think there's more to it. My English professors taught that Shakespeare was part of the “holy trinity” of the mighty English writers, along with Milton and Chaucer. But wasn’t Shakespeare just some guy trying to write plays that pleased L...