Chaos Attraction

The Shows

2018-02-05, 7:30 a.m.

Gumbo, Friday Show:

The show went well. It sold out. I flubbed a little bit during the middle of “Deep Forest” (we continue to have issues with the middle of this number as to when we go back to doing the chorus after doing other things and I missed that cue, but lord knows I wasn’t alone), but otherwise I did well. It probably beats whatever happened when I overheard the line, “It’s not Gumbo if I don’t get punched in the face.” Whaaaaaaat?

Weirdly enough, other than having an audience around it was pretty much the same for me as rehearsals! Dawn came to this performance and asked me something about did I enjoy the shows more and I said I enjoy it all, rehearsal or show. I will say that at the end we face the audience in the seats directly and briefly sing to them and...yeah, they looked bored. See, this is why I prefer not to look at the audience. Ah well. The audience in general seemed like they didn’t know if they should ruin the moment or not after songs by clapping, which got to some people.

Everyone is running around doing selfies backstage and having me in them, which is flattering as hell. I sort of want to do the same except I look terrible when I try them. We also sat around watching uh...I believe it was some kind of competitive eating videos.

I was amused at having a conversation with Jasmine about how the guy she is seeing couldn’t find the theater, and later apparently though the show was over at intermission. Maybe not the brightest bulb there, I fear. Also at one point in the show (right before our “Smoke” number) Jasmine found a run in her tights, and I immediately whipped off my dance skirt and gave it to her to cover that up. Emergency costume save for the win!


Saturday matinee:

This one wasn’t sold out, it was kind of the “family” show because (a) it’s the one we were allowed comp tickets for and (b) most people’s giant hordes of relatives came to it. Or in my case, Mom and Mauricio.

Again, it went pretty well except for Deep Forest, which had the biggest cockups ever. There’s one section in which most of us are sitting on the ground while the prima ballerina types do some dancing. One girl comes out and does a solo, then the folks playing elements (Earth, Air, Water) come out and Earth and Air do a dance, then everyone gets up again. Well, the other folks came out way too early during the first girl’s solo and everyone just got cocked up on the timing of everything from there. Ouch. At this point I think the directors just give up!

We had a potluck (with actual gumbo being served) in between shows, which was fun. After the eating we played the game “Bucket of Doom” and then later had a whopping dance party in the theater, which was badass. I wish I could go clubbing with these folks, it would be a blast.

I am also going to miss doing contact improv. That is really fun and not something you can normally do outside of here in life.

Then we had strike. Normally in theater terms that translates into “please clean up the dressing room” (I got mine picked up easily since I kept it all in one spot and threw things back into bags when I was done, but I guess a lot of folks did not), but in this case they also had everyone get into a circle and talk about their experience of the show. This was incredibly touching. I found out who’s been in the show before and who hasn’t and was surprised in both directions as to who was and who wasn’t, some other details I won’t disclose for being super personal. (One guy who studies kinesiology said, “Thank you for letting me massage you.”) I talked about how nobody would ever let me in a show in high school or college so I’m very happy to be in one now.

Other fun things in conversation today:

* Hearing about one person getting fed up at Christmas when the relatives were trying to fix them up with guys, to the point where they got up on the table and said they were gay. An hour later, the same relatives were trying to fix them up with girls.
* I found out that the oldest person in the show is the mom of someone else in the show-her daughter did it last year so she thought she’d join in this year, but daughter didn’t want them to be out about that. I was all, “THAT EXPLAINS A LOT” in my brain because both of them move in very similar manners and I thought it was odd, but hadn’t picked up on them being related. (Then again, the directors are related and the stage manager/another girl in the show are related, but I don’t feel like they have super strong physical resemblances.) The mom also does improv here. I wish I could but their meetings are at 5 pm!
* The aforementioned girl in the white costumes was all, “I am never wearing this again.”

As for the final show, it sold out. I didn’t know anyone in it so that was a bit liberating in its own way. We did not cock up Deep Forest in the middle, finally, huzzah!

After this I was wondering: are they going to have a cast party? Because lord knows I always heard cast parties are the best. (They were pretty infamous at my high school and lord knows I wish I could have gone.) Apparently the cast party is likely to be held some weeks(!) later, but they did have a get together at a Denny’s afterwards, so I went to that and hung out with friends, watched more competitive eating videos (the guy did not look happy eating butter straight), and had some more fun conversations.

In the plants-vs-fire villagers fight scene, the fire villagers beat our plant asses down. I’ve been getting into battle with this one girl, Rayana, who has been fun to “fight” with. I knew she was doing something to my body afterwards-standing above me, possibly spitting, but I can’t tell since I’m supposed to be dead. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “I was killing you and setting you on fire.” That certainly must have been something to see from above... Later when we said goodbye she was all, “I really enjoyed killing you!”

I also heard this story from the stage manager. Her version of this story was something like, “I saw everyone else’s presentations and mine looked like such crap compared to theirs, but I put mine up anyway...and the computer deleted it so I had to start over and then I had to do mine in pink and green paper because that’s all they had at Walgreen’s.” And then they told her she won.
“Won what? Was I in a raffle?” No, you won. Won what? The competition... “I did an ugly cry like Miss America.” Moral of the story: even if you thought your stuff was crap, it might win!

I got home at 2:30 a.m.

I am going to miss these people. I love these temporary family things, I just wish they were not temporary, especially since I can’t really take another drama class at ARC again unless they start having more night classes. I did hear a rumor that Sam might do a show during the summer, so....let’s hope.


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