I'm in a better mood today than I was yesterday, thank gawd.

I finished the knitted cat last night. I admit, it kinda helps.

The first major dilemma of quarantine has erupted: I am about out of mouthwash. I have about a day's worth left in the apartment. I have spent the last two days debating whether or not for the sake of my dental health to leave the house a week before I absolutely have to leave the house and physically go buy mouthwash, or wait a week until I really have to deal with the grocery issue, or what. I ended up solving this by ordering a Brita pitcher online (I might as well suck it up and buy one now even though I usually prefer to go out and buy flavored water) and then ordering four bottles of mouthwash so I won't have to deal with this for a while. This time they actually so far WILL ship the mouthwash to my house--last time I tried to order any they ran out-- so I got my order in ASAP while I could. Delivery on June 4. Whew.

While playing Scavenger Hunt in the bathroom, I found some horrible bottle of...black...tar?...stuff (It said something like "Vitamin E" on it, but) that had spilled in a container. Well, that shit was NOXIOUS, I could not get it off of much of anything and ended up throwing out the container and most of the bottles covered in tar because it took so long to get it off my hands and the bathroom sink. Yuck.

I have also discovered one fun bonus of quarantine: while playing Scavenger Hunt through the bathroom closet--looks like while I may not have had any stashed mouthwash, I really don't need to buy anything for the shower again for ages-- I found several bottles of perfume. Now, I normally can't wear perfume here because everyone in California is either allergic, asthmatic, or just hates perfume. But hey, if I never leave the damn house, what does it matter if I douse myself in perfume? I might as well!

I usually only know my current(?) left hand side neighbor is alive when he runs the disposal these days. Tonight, he is watching TV loud enough for me to hear it. And....I hear multiple voices in there. WTF.

Between Coughy McSmokesALot on the right and Mr. Party Animal on the left, I’m gonna be surrounded by virus, aren’t I?

I saw a reference today to Schroedinger’s ‘Rona. That sounds entirely appropriate.

I did the rest of Much Ado today. I downloaded the Zoom update and found that it was now permitting me to use green screen! Huzzah! So I downloaded a nice garden background. However, in the half hour before we started, I discovered that the green screen would not let me use a piece of paper (Benedick's bad poetry), a veil for the second wedding scene, a fan as a substitute for the veil.... So I ended up taking the backdrop off for the last scene.

I took some photos of my bedroom setup to use the blank wall/screen to send to Beth for Dropping Bombs, and later attempted to see if I could use green screen in my hallway if I set up the laptop there. Answer: NOPE, for whatever reason, I became the green screen instead of the background. Darn it.

I did end up attempting to act out the scene where Don Pedro is describing a conversation with Beatrice, just for kicks even though I'm not really "in" the scene, and gave a thumbs up to Benedick threatening Claudio. I also held up the bad Benedick letter to the camera, just for kicks.

Chat snark:

"At least no one calls you an ass." Dogberry to me

From Me to Everyone: 11:11 AM*
Another Mystery of Shakespeare: where WAS Hero that night? She never tries to give an alibi....
From BORACHIO to Everyone: 11:13 AM
Likely a late night of terraforming her Animal Crossing island. It's not always something people are proud to admit.
From Me to Everyone: 11:27 AM
We blame Animal Crossing for everything these days....
Another mystery: if Beatrice normally sleeps with Hero, where was *she* that night?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm *looks askance at Benedick*
From DON PEDRO, Prince of Arragon to Everyone: 11:29 AM
Up drafting a terrible love letter to Benedick, one assumes . . .

* (OH FUCK I 1111'D AGAIN, Y'ALL. I did not even notice that at the time of chatting. Seriously, who made that repeating number shit up as A Thing??)

Claire's library is putting on a "Song of Myself" event tomorrow, which I can't attend because it's 2 p.m. my time, but she made it sound fun when she said things like, "Ready to do something scandalous? Walt Whitman got FIRED for writing "Song of Myself" in 1855 - and we want you to read the poem with us LIVE online in 2020!" and if you didn't want to read aloud, "or just watch from afar if you're worried about your reputation."

Oh yeah, there's also this snark from me:
I love how this plot is based on Borachio and Margaret having kinky role-playing games in Hero's room.
"Oh, Hero!" "Oh, Claudio!" "Oh, I hope my employers don't catch me at any of this!"
We'll try not to forget it, Mr. Dogberry. YOU. ARE. AN. ASS!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, it was a delight, Coleman emailed me in glee afterwards. Next week: All's Well That Ends Well, I signed up to play Diana and spent a lot of time going through the scenes to set up a few people who can sign up to just read 5-6 different short parts, if necessary.

On the good news side in my email, Bridget recruited someone else to add to the Virtual Readers Theater mailing list (I haven't met her, but I'm told her daughter was excellent in The Miracle Worker as Helen), have been chatting with Coleman a bit (she signed up to play Parolles...interesting choice in All's Well That Ends Well), I got asked to write a biography for Femme Fatale and realized that I actually have a LOT to put in mine, huzzah! The link is up to sign up for the Zoom.

Later in the day we had Dropping Bombs rehearsal, sans Mike the waiter, who I guess followed the call of the wild outside or something. So we rehearsed the second scene (that he's not in) alone, and then had a very interesting conversation about the plot of the script and how while we all like it, we feel like there's some holes in it, like "Why did Leah want a divorce?" and how she tried to commit suicide the first time. Beth and I (not sure if Mel feels the same on this?) were all, "We have questions for the director about this stuff," at the very least during the talk back after the play is over. I said I was absolutely down with inviting her to a rehearsal sometime if she wants to go. We also discussed how Kate thinks she's a logical, rational person but maybe isn't so much. She's a playwright, I said, so she's a Drama Person* and I think both Leah and Kate are playing their own roles, with Leah playing the cheerful hippie and Kate doing the opposite as Ms. Logical And Reasonable. Kate is in denial that she's emotional over the announcement, and Leah tries to drop bad news as well, literally cheerfully as possible.

* Seriously, my #1 question for the playwright is, "How much is this based off real life, because between Kate being a playwright and the script itself feeling very true to life.... I dunno if I will phrase it as such if/when given the opportunity, mind you, but I really wonder.

We had some discussion on suicide, not all of which I am going to mention online since shit is personal and all that. But mostly we were talking about how sometimes you don't necessarily know why someone did it, compared the "cry for help" suicide a la Rebecca Bunch* to those who don't let on, and discussed how some folks really "don't want to be a bother," which I related to because of my being sick of being A Problem at work, and when your brain loops back and forth--could just be in your head but has some basis in reality. And I had a new theory as to why Leah might have wanted the divorce-- I'm thinking that after her attempts, her husband's family were probably really against her. We're told "Aunt Carla" stopped speaking to her--I assume that's the husband's sister, and the grandparents thought they should get divorced. I'm not saying that's everything, but maybe that was a contributing reason since it sounds like she and her ex-husband are still on good terms.

* I guess we've all watched Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Seriously, doing theater is really helping right now. It was a much better day than yesterday.

Re: yesterday’s Pick A Card: speaking of, here’s another one (pile 3). The stingray only acts when it absolutely has to....not that I know much about them, but that sounds fitting. It’s a theme with them that you have to contact them first. They’re afraid of coming forward and causing a huge shakeup in your life (oh, go ahead, I’m used to it). “They really want communication,” the 8 of Wands card came up twice. The Lovers came up twice. “They’re really considering it.” “They’re trying to work on a creative way of going forward.” “I almost feel like they are ready for that Tower moment.”

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