Busy day today. After actually sleeping well last night, I got up and went to Sac Theatre's 2-day festival on its second day. I....suspect it might have been more of a children's festival? I say this because probably 80% of the attendees were kids performing in some kind of program or other. I only caught one of them, but it sounded like a lot were in something. I did see some random single or coupled adults here and there so I didn't feel SO weird, but the weirdest I felt all day was going to the first workshop, which was 95% kids, a few parents, and then everybody but me and one other girl left around 10:20 to go be in a kids' show. Awkward, but what can you do?

The first workshop was stage combat, so I learned how to fall down (okay, so I know that from Urinetown, still went well) and how to do stage punching and ducking vs. fake stage punching, and then combining it together. The other girl and I did pretty well for noobs, so good for us there.

The second thing I went to was a performance of "Actor's Nightmare" by Christopher Durang (uh-oh...I saw "Actor's Nightmare" and thought "this sounds more exciting than whatever the other option was" (I asked what it was when I checked in and didn't really get an answer, I think it was another kids' show? Maybe? Super cryptic name for whatever it was, like an abbreviation or something) and then I heard "Christopher Durang" and was all "oh shit, he's totally weird." It was done by 9-10th graders, having a good time at it and doing a good job. An accountant somehow ends up unexpectedly playing the lead in several plays--Private Lives, Shakespeare, something along the lines of Waiting for Godot (except now it's "Waiting for Lefty" because Godot finally showed up and sucked) and finally, the beheading in A Man For All Seasons (the Thomas More one, right? Haven't seen it). One chick actually reads aloud the stage directions while doing them ("picks nose"), etc. Quite a thing.

The third thing I went to was supposed to be a stage makeup workshop, but it turned into hair styling, which I found quite useful for asking how one teases hair and detangles it. You curl your hair, THEN tease the roots, apparently. Good to know, 'cause I would have done it the other way around!

After that I left because lord knows I had to go shopping. I hit the big thrift store and got myself a beautiful marbled peacock-colored dress along the lines of one of my tie-dye ones (the clerk loved it too), that was the cheapest purchase of the day. Then I dragged my butt to DSW for the dreaded Shoe Shopping. I haven't gone regular shoe-shopping (I've had to buy shoes for various stage shows the last few years, either online or at Capezio) since pre-pandemic and obviously I haven't worn all the shoes as much as usual, but the sandals and my black Mary Janes clearly need replacing, so I got black sandals, cream ones, and new black Mary Janes. My heel has been randomly hurting for some reason since I quit the CC, so I was trying to find padded bottom shoes.

As for the dreaded Wedding Shoe Shopping, I was hoping to find blingy heels I could stand to walk/dance in for four hours--with this heel problem, to boot. I found a few pairs of heels I could have perhaps stood to wear, albeit not blingy, one pair of low heels in silver-ish, but ended up going with a pair of cream-ish flats with padded soles and rhinestones embedded in them. Not the heels I wanted to play Donna, but at least they bling and are comfy. I finally used my $200 gift card from work on this stuff and then still had to pay $80 after that. God, I hate shoe shopping. I get the nicest ones I can for the cheapest I can (hence DSW) and this is probably all the shoe shopping I'm doing for a year, but bleah, pricing. Oh well.

Finally, I headed to the mall and the Icing store to look for cheap wedding jewelry bling. Which cost me $60, sigh, and that's throwing in three free items (I got some novelty items for bridesmaids) after that. I spent way too much time trying to pick out a necklace, trying to find earrings I wouldn't be allergic to that were blingy/not boring, whether or not to get blingy hair clips and whether or not they'd hurt my head, etc. By the time I finally left I had to book it back home real quick, grab the food for the next thing and then drive out to Linda's.

The play reading was fun. Most people brought/had chips n' dip--I* found out about a fabulous onion pickle dip Nancy found out about and gave to Gail, who said, "I only make things with five or less ingredients." "ME TOO!" I said. Linda had tortilla soup (delicious) and guac and chips and I think otherwise there was foccacia? All delicious and I hadn't eaten all day because I'd been too busy, so that went well.

Not a whole lot of people showed up--me, Gail and her husband Bill, and Ed (from TnT2) and his wife, Tiger. (Yes, I'm also wondering about that, but did not ask.) I dunno where the hell everyone else was, but Linda was saying she wanted to do more of these like every month/every other month, as long as they could get scripts, which is hard. She said someone suggested to her that everyone just rotate in a circle saying each line instead of assigning roles, which makes everyone able to read all the time. This was great fun, especially people doing different voices as different people were playing the same character. The only one having an issue was Bill, who seems to be having some kind of eye problem and literally was having trouble reading. Linda finally got him on her iPad thing and that seemed to mostly help.

We read "Shakespeare in Hollywood" by Ken Ludwig and adored it. It's apparently a play about the actual filming of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1934, with most of the people in it being real people at the time (except the lead actresses, who are changed to other people for some reason), and then Oberon and Puck--the actual ones--show up in Hollywood for 24 hours because Hollywood is magical. Oberon falls in love with Olivia the actress and she does too, Puck gets out That Flower and it makes its way around Even More People and causes Even More Trouble. Then after all the errant lovers are cured (I note that Will Hays falls in love with his own reflection, and Olivia falls in love with Joe Brown while he's in Thisbe drag) and Will Hays is briefly turned into a donkey head guy because he annoys everyone, the fairies start fading, and Oberon wipes Olivia's memory and has her fall in love with her costar Dick (who already loves her) at the end. It made me verklempt. I really loved it. Would be super fun to do, albeit a bit hard to cast 8 guys playing mostly real life characters from the 30's that they may or may not have heard of, only four roles for women, and a ton of set changes. Well, maybe someday?

A good time was had by all. We also looked up the movie afterwards/watched the trailer on IMDB (Gail was the only one of us who'd seen it) for comparison.

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