Thursday, March 29, 2007

Just Five More

With only five more shows left to go of Fiddler, I can't help but think that I'll miss it. It will, however, be awesome to just be able to rest nearly any night of the week.

Mmm...Rest. I'm looking forward to that. 96 performances is a freaking lot.

Monday, March 26, 2007

The Thing About Callbacks

I love acting; I really do. I derive great amounts of both joy and pleasure from it. As you may or may not know, however, in order to act, you must go to both auditions and callbacks. Sometimes these callbacks are far away, and you must drive for forty-five minutes to get there, and then drive for nearly an hour and a half to get home because Cal-Trans decided that last night was the opportune time to shut down Interstate 5 a few miles before before the exit to my apartment.

Sometimes the part that you make the afore-mentioned journey for only has three lines: "All right, knock it off," "Impossible," and "Goodbye boys." While you are thankful for the callback, you can't help but spend your minutes sitting around waiting at the callback trying to figure out just how much gas spent driving comes out to on a per word basis.

I love acting; I really do. But sometimes, just sometimes, I'd rather be taking a nap.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Advertising

And by that, I mean I did a commercial. It's going to air during Padres games. I'm going to be on tv.

That's kind of cool.

Monday, March 19, 2007

The Problem with Having a Bushy Beard

To the left is a picture of myself from back in December when I was in a great need for headshots, and ::mandy:: very graciously took a few.

The beard has not really been trimmed since that time, so it is, by now, very, very bushy.

A few moments ago, I turned my head to the left while I was sitting in my cubicle at work, and my heart started to race as I could have sworn that I had seen a dog run through my cubicle. This would have raised a variety of issues, not the least of which being the question of why exactly there was a dog in the work place.

However, there was no such luck. As you may have guessed, I had just seen my beard in my peripheral vision, and I mistook this for a furry quadroped.

I have to say that I'm glad that it was the beard, as the only other explanation is the massive amount heroin running through my system. And by "heroin," I mean love.

Starbucks Crumble Coffee Cake

The crumble coffee cake at Starbucks is delicious. I love it. Were it possible to marry a pastry dish without scorn from ignorant people who just don't understand our love, I would consider marrying it.

However, the honeymoon with my new infatuation has to end sometime, and mine ended this morning when I read that each piece of coffee cake has 500 calories. I'm sorry, but that is an exorbitant number of calories from something that doesn't even have frosting.

As you can imagine, this realization led to the first real fight in my secret relationship, which I will document for you here.

Me: Coffee cake! I love you! How can you be so bad for me?
Coffee Cake: ...
Me: How can you just sit there in silence? I demand a response!
Coffee Cake: ...
Me: Oh, I see how it is. Consider us over!
Coffee Cake: ...
Me: How can you be so cold and cruel?

In other news, the call back that was supposed to have been on Friday got pushed back to this coming Sunday. I was really hoping to get it out of the way on Friday, because then I would know one way or the other more quickly. I guess it's kind of exciting to still be in the running, though.

Unfortunately for me, I have verified that one of the two other actors who is still up for the same part is one who has already worked for the theatre. With this theatre liking to hire the same actors repeatedly, this doesn't bode well for the AC. However, I continue to think that the director is really interested in me for this part, so I guess we'll just have to see how this plays out. Theoretically, I have a 33% chance. I like those odds.

Friday, March 16, 2007

A Call Back for a Call Back

Yesterday afternoon, I received a call from the theatre company mentioned yesterday, requesting me to come in for another call back, which I will be going to tonight.

Based on a variety of things which may or may not prove to be mind games in my own mind, I really think that the director wants me for this role. As I have never been this far in this theatre's audition process, I don't know how odd it is for them to have a call back for a call back.

I REALLY want to get into this show. I'll keep you updated on how things progress.

Part of what makes me think that acting is a good career choice for me is that I love both auditions and call backs. For the most part, I am pretty confident in the abilities that I have, and I am very willing to work on the abilities that I don't have (see: dancing). With this in mind, auditions become less about self doubt, and more about just trying to do your best, which I think is a trait that all of us have had pounded into our little heads since grade school. Certainly I don't get cast in every show, but not every show needs my type of character. I can usually accept this pretty well.

Here's to hoping this show needs my type.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

A Call Back

Yesterday, I had a call back for a part in a show about a certain Old Testament biblical character who had a certain coat of many colors.

While I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, I really think that I did a good job, and I also kind of think that they liked me. The only thing (and it's quite a major thing) not in my favor is that an actor that they have used before was also up for the same part, and this company tends to like to continue to work with people it has already worked with. This makes it so much more important that I get in, because then I stand a chance of them just calling me and asking me to do other roles.

The show plays at a local theatre company that, while it looks like it would not give me points for getting in the actors' union, pays its non-union actors pretty well. As we all know, supplemental income is always a nice thing.

The director said that the company would let me know within 72 hours, which is nice in that some theatres say nothing, and you are left alone to scrutinize why they aren't calling and how you could have possibly done better. This way, I know that if I haven't heard by Saturday, I'm probably out of luck.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles

My branch of the company that I work for has, probably, seventy employees. Nearly all of these employees at some point during the day need to use a particular database. Unfortunately, for some reason, this database can only accommodate 38 users at a time.

Let me be the first to say that the idea that 38 out of 70 workers can use this database at a time is EFFING BRILLIANT. This fact PLEASES ME, and doesn't at all make me want to SHOOT MYSELF IN THE FACE.

Ahem. Excuse me.

On the plus side, the company has decided to start stocking the fridge with cranberry juice again, so, uhm, I guess at least my kidney health will be first rate when the rest of my body goes into total meltdown mode.

Monday, March 12, 2007

If You're Looking to See a Bad Movie...

You should go ahead and rent the movie La Moustache. I originally read about this movie in one of the girly-froofy-"men's" magazines that I read (Esquire), and the premise of the movie that the magazine laid out sounded pretty interesting. The movie was supposed to have been about a man who, on a whim, shaves off the mustache that he's had for years and years to play a joke on his wife; the man is then thrown a curveball when his wife claims that he's never had a mustache. Based on this premise, I suspected that this movie would be whimsical and joyful, a la Amelie or something out of Monty Python, or at least poignantly beautiful, like one of the myriad of sad, yet achingly funny movies that Bill Murray has been making in recent years.

Boy, was I wrong.

The first fifteen minutes of the movie were just as advertised; that is, a man shaves his mustache off. The wife denies it. After that, though, instead of hilarity ensuing, the man and his wife just get progressively angrier and angrier with each other as the woman continues to deny the fact that he ever had a mustache. We do learn that the woman may be a pathological liar based on an incident that is revealed from her childhood by her brother. However, even if she is a liar, the man is still up a creek due to the fact that no one else he knows is able to remember that he has ever had a mustache either.

The anger continues, and the man jumps on a random plane which is going to Hong Kong. The narrative then moves to about twenty minutes with very little dialogue while the man rides in ferries. That's right; with the audience not knowing what is going on, the director opted to film the man taking boat rides. Eventually the man makes it to what we can only assume is Bali, which is based on the fact that his wife had a series of photographs that was marked Bali from a vacation that the couple apparently went on a vacation to.

The man lives in Bali for an amount of time equaling the amount of time necessary to regrow his facial hair, and, one day, he comes back to the hotel room he's been staying in to find that his wife (who he left in France when he travelled to Hong Kong and with whom he has had no contact with) is packing up clothes and saying that this had been a good vacation and that they need to catch the flight in the morning. She acts as if she has been with him the whole time. She then makes some comment about how he should probably shave before they go back to France.

He shaves his mustache again, and she likes it and she remembers that he had a mustache. The film closes with the man opening his eyes after being asleep with his wife.

That's it. That's the whole movie.*

Now, this film leaves the viewer with many questions, not the least of which is "WHAT IN GOD'S NAME JUST HAPPENED?" Is the man crazy? Is his wife crazy? Is she a pathological liar? If so, how did she find him in Bali? Was this some elaborate practical joke that went astray? Do I just not understand the conventions of French cinema? Neither my girlfriend, my engineer roommate, nor I (all of which are fairly bright, college-educated people) could figure out just what the point of this movie was.

If anyone out there in cyberland can figure this out and will explain it to me in a way that I can understand it (that is, with pictures and farm animal sounds) I will be forever grateful.

*We missed about three minutes of the movie because the dvd that we rented was bad, and refused to play those three minutes, no matter how much cajoling we offered. Perhaps everything gets wrapped up in those three minutes, but I highly doubt it as those minutes were towards the middle of the film, which is generally where the rising action of a narrative occurs, and not the climax or the denouement, which, come to think of it, I didn't ever find. Come on, French film makers! Denouement is even a French word! Use it in your movies!

Friday, March 09, 2007

New Commenting

I do apologize for having to now moderate comments, but it appears that too many people are now leaving links on this little site-e-poo trying to peddle their wares of viagra and celebrity sex tapes. While this was amusing at first, mostly because I figure that there are all of about 6 people who come here regularly, it has grown tiresome.

In other news, I still haven't heard back from my grad school audition. I kind of expected that it would take a few weeks for them to decide that I was the best choice, but even so, I still hoped that they would make their decision more quickly.

On the other hand, perhaps they, in looking through my transcript, have realized that I got that "C" grade on my under-grad senior recital (I wrote 45 minutes of original choral music for that dang thing...what does everybody want from me?), and they have decided that I am therefore too average to join the higher echelon of their student body. If this is the case, I will strike it up as yet another reason that I should have thought twice about trying to get a music degree from "Frank's Technical College of Applied Dentistry and Metallurgy."*

Sigh. Some day I'll get into grad school. Some day.

*The college I went to is actually a very fine college. Really.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

An Apparently Bullet-Proof Get Rich Quick Scheme*

1) Write lots of bad checks for thousands of dollars to Indian casinos to get cash to gamble.

2) Get paid for the bad checks before they realize that they're bad.

3) When the casinos come a-calling wanting their money, tell them "huh-uh."

4) Go to court.

5) Let the judge rule that because the casino was lending credit to an American citizen on Indian land, the American courts can't force the citizen to pay for the checks because America has no jurisdiction in different sovereign nations.

6) Get off scot-free, with, hopefully, some of the money you wrote bad checks to get.

*This is according to a news report I heard on the radio, but haven't been able to find a link online. Kinda crazy, huh?