Poetry & Blindfolds

It’s been a very good week.  And if there’s something that makes me very uneasy, it’s when things go well.

The audition for my play, “The Tearful Assassin”, was last Sunday, the 1st of June.  With my colleagues Robert and Kyle directing traffic and Melissa and I throwing scripts at people and pushing them onstage and pulling them off, the event was about as close to clockwork as any audition I’ve been involved in. 

A particular high point was the audition of a woman named M, as she is known on myspace, who is a myspace friend of Robert’s and mine and for whom Robert officiated over her wedding recently.  Robert and I were both dreading her audition a bit; if she was bad or didn’t fit, we’d feel very awkward about turning her down – like the feeling one gets when one takes a best friend to a formal dinner party only to have them turn up in a mumu, spouting non sequitors and offering the guests “jazz cigarettes.”  However, as soon as M took the stage, though, she really took the stage, owning her character far above and beyond any expectations.  Robert and I observed this, wordlessly retreated to a quiet corner of the theater wherein we performed a sudden, enthusiastic happy dance, then returned as silently as we retreated.

The audition was filled with really brilliant performers, most of which we, of course, had to turn down.  Casting is certainly about talent, but it is also about creating a coherent ensemble based on a solid median of ability.  That’s why no actor should feel bad about not getting a part: it is not so much about the actor’s abilities, but how that actor could be seen as fitting into the jigsaw puzzle of everyone else.

In addition to the audition going spectacularly well, word reached me that my pesky book, “This Is My First Time So Please Be Brutal“, finally started showing up on real-life retailers’ sites.  Naturally, I spent the better part of a morning looking at the pages, mumbling, ‘that’s me’ like an idiot.

Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Tower Books
and
ebay (?)

The week was going far too good, so I decided to quit smoking (quickly amended to ‘cut down on smoking’) just to introduce a bit of discontent.  Using my ego as a challenger and the challenged, I dared myself to see how long I could make one pack of cigarettes last.  Result: 96 hours.  I am in a mild storm of withdrawal now, which although it is driving me a little crazy, it is also making some of my arguments on some relgious blogs particularly biting and witty (not that my opponents see it that way, of course).

In one exchange, the topic of crying when people die came up.  I put crying down to simple selfishness; another person said crying is about loss.  She went on to point out that she cried when watching footage of the Chinese earthquake, noting that humans have great empathy for one another.  Sensing she was going on a bit of a tangent from people we know dying to people we don’t, I responded that she was comparing apples and orientals.

I quite liked that one.  That one goes on the wall!  All I need is a wall.

And, at the moment, a cigarette, if only to calm the unrest I so actively seek…

 

 

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