Tuesday:

Something unusual happened last night: I had two sex dreams. I will tactfully not reveal the subject of one of them, but the other was having a threesome with the Tennants. Good lord, brain.

Work: well, I'm not totally fried today, yay, emails aren't that bad, yay.

No therapy today, I spent lunch outside, it was nice.

After work I watched a Crowdcast on the authors of "Reclaiming Her Time," about Maxine Waters. It's by Helena Andrews-Dyer and R. Eric Thomas, who writes hilarious columns and "inventor of the Auntie Maxine meme." I didn't really take notes on this except for a few quotes: "Someone needs to write a Hamilton about Maxine Waters." -nuff said! "He's a nice young man. THE SHADE!" -on a former opponent of hers.

I think that Tuesday night knitting group is dead--I've tried logging in three times in a row and no-show. Eh, bugger it, I'm going to have rehearsals on Tuesdays starting next week anyway.

Review of Robin Hood from Loretta: "Just watched Robin Hood video. Lots of fun. Loved the use of all the different songs. I didn’t realize you have such a good singing voice. Other than you, the only one that can sing is the actor that played Robin." LOL on this one since Robin (Cameron) is a trained singer. Then again, so's Alexis, so....I dunno.....

Dawn wants us and Loretta to get together outside one of these weekends. I'm ... .not thrilled at the idea and am getting scared, but at this point I really can't say shit against it, other than to have to unfortunately point out that the upstairs neighbor is intermittently smoking pot so maybe we shouldn't meet here (though they didn't do it today, so that was nice).

Wednesday:

Work: My boss told me to send an email requesting (something I know tech support can't do, and pointed out multiple times saying that) and even though I obviously sent it as my boss's email, I got spanked for asking for it anyway, in the "You should know better! I have told you and told you this!" sort of way by the techie. Greaaaaaaaat. My boss was pretty much all "good to know."

Well, other than that, stuff got done today, so there's that. One of my major seasonal projects got done, so yay.

Rehearsal: Sean started asking everyone what the most interesting thing they had going this week was. Sample answers were that Tom is still eating with people socially distantly (um....is that a good idea?! oh hell, his wife has it already....), Kallie got her driver's license and then the car broke down, and one kid got cast on a TV show in Utah. I said mine was the farting play ;)

Quote and notes: Mac: "We don't have a website yet, don't ask. We do have an Instagram."

Sean wants the chorus to come up with characterization of the spiders they are.

It's interesting having memorized (somewhat to mostly) a lot of my lines before actually reading them with other humans for the first time. Like today I found out that Illy (playing Fern) whispers the word "conspiracy" behind her hand, and it's hilarious. Not sure if I should be doing it or not myself, but I couldn't resist also doing the same thing before then going into the rest of my line. It's adorable. Sean likes the conspiracy whisper. Yay.

Sean told a story about his friend, "Future Joe" (apparently Sean will look like this guy when he's 90) and said that Charlotte ages quickly in the pages that we have.

I'm still kinda concerned about little Brennon getting on cue with the lines. I know he's finding out ON THE DAY that he has lines (Sean is pulling lines from the three chorus members to give him some), but it's still a little concerning.

Sean on Avery getting to direct traffic: "It's not very often that they ask the troublemaker to help out, so you're all whoohoo, where's my badge?"

Sean is encouraging Kallie/Wilbur to react to stuff Fern is saying, like blabbing what the old sheep said to me. "You can kick her if you want! Well, you can’t kick her now." Illy is cracking me up. She’s being told to make faces and the like to Wilbur as her bestie.

Sean wants to ambush anyone who isn’t in the room and then have everyone jump out. It didn't work because Riley saw it.

Michael--who I think is a tech guy, I forget--came on for a while to talk about stuff. He did a brief screenshare of what he's trying to do with Charlotte. "Her torso will be the entire spider body." I'm not sure how to describe it, exactly: there's a spiderweb background and then you see him with a long torso and 8 arms climbing a string.

He said "I'm going to bring you all green screen felt material" (how?!), suggested using portrait mode on phones, and said something about "full body puppet that we can move around on the stage." Best position for camera is level to your head....I don't know if I can do that one? Anyway, Michael said we'd tackle this on a case by case basis.

We did one readthrough where everyone was standing up. I don't know how great that looks on me (I fear all shots are just hitting my boobs), but at least nobody complained about the sound when I wasn't straight up talking to the microphone.

After that, I went on Zoom for a C.L. Polk and Mary Robinette Kowal event about the book "The Midnight Bargain," which I think I want to get and right now I am debating whether or not to ask for it for Christmas or to just give up and buy it myself (oh, fall.....).

MRK gets all excited that the main character, Beatrice, has pockets. "I'm a fashion designer. THERE ARE POCKETS." CL

There are secret codes in books. She watched Bletchley Circle, and an episode of Person of Interest. You need to know the spell that breaks the code.

"I have a humongous Pinterest board." and "So when I was thinking bout how the story was going, I'd doodle dresses in my sketchbook." MRK is totally distracted by this and shares.

In the book, magical women who are married are forced to wear a collar that stops their magic so their babies won't get possessed by spirits. "The burden of the solution is put on the people who bear children." On men: "'the problem is solved and it asks them for nothing."

"I use the illusion of the historic period to talk about modern problems."

In the book, you can't have magic and love with a man at the same time. if you do magic, you are a hidden spinster shame whose accomplishments can never be learned. Can't have love and magic. "Both choices are equally wonderful and horrible."

Beatrice is most prized for magic and least allowed to use. Beatrice using her powers is compared to drugs. MRK is all "Mighty Mouse got his power from sniffing flowers" and then notes she's never done any.

"I was clapping on the first page and remained happy all the way through."-MRK on reading the book.

"I kind of invented Facebook for magicians."

"I wanted to escape into a world that was beautiful and troubling, and I wanted my heroine to win."

"In times of strife, we gravitate towards musicals and comedy." -MRK

"This is way too easy, you have to make this harder." -someone said to her on the first draft. She got the idea while doing dishes.

MRK stopped writing her own book while on deadline to finish reading this book. "Screw it, I just want to read this in one sitting."

Hahahaha, they thought they shut the stream off BUT SOMEHOW I AM STILL WATCHING THEM BEHIND THE SCENES AND I AM SO AMUSED AT THIS. Alas, they eventually figured it out and removed me from the meeting :P

I was supposed to do a storytelling event after that, but somehow they never sent me the link and I reopened my email and checked the eventbrite listing over and over again and no dice....oh, whatever, they put it online later anyway.

I have now spent an hour and a half going over all of my lines in the sections they are in, so that's pretty good. I've divided up the scenes into nine sections, I spend fifteen minutes drilling each section in rotation.

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