Outside The Standard Deviation

Oh look another post about theatre!
Last week and the week before, I spent some time at Bob Jones to help with their competition play and watch it evolve. Honestly, I wasn't so sure about it at first, but after a few tweaks and costumes were added and the set was completed, I knew it was going to be extremely successful at competition.
District competition was this past Friday and Saturday, and I was so happy that I was able to be there to watch my friends compete with their Individual Events (IE's) (like monologues, duets, pantomimes, etc.) and to see their original play, "The Standard Deviation" yet again.
I was excited to see James perform his IE's, so I went with him to both of them. The first one was his comedic monologue. We got to the room to find that the only other people there were the two judges. I was the only audience member. So that was kind of strange, especially when his monologue ended and I was the lone applauder. But he did great, of course!
Now, I'm not going to tell the whole story about his duet, but basically it didn't happen until much later than it was scheduled to. It was supposed to be before our play, but it didn't happen until afterwards. Again, I was the only audience member.
My friends, Erin and Sarah did two duets together. I got to see their classical duet, but I didn't get to see their awesome pantomime this time...

When awards finally came around, I was going through my list of awards I knew the one act had in the bag already. Before the one act awards, we found out that James' monologue and both of Erin and Sarah's duets made it through to State! The duet that James did got superior scores, but they were disqualified because he was filling in for another actor and their director didn't know they had changed their rules for substitutes. I was also really proud of one of the kids that was in the beginning drama class I student directed last year for making it to State on his first year of competing!
Finally, it was time for one act awards. They got every single award I expected and more. 3 all-star cast members, Best Actress AND Best Actor (what?!!), Best Scenery, Best Costumes (which I called before the costumes were even finished), and they qualified to compete at State competition! They cleaned up that table of awards!
I am beyond proud of the actors, techies, and directors of this show. I can't wait to see how they do at State, but I am so sad that I won't be able to be there to support them this time... I know they'll do marvelously as usual.

The Never Ending Tech Week

As I talked about in my last post, I will be going back over the events from October and telling you guys about them. A lot of cool things happened, I can't just ignore them! I do have a very special thing to blog about from this weekend, but that won't be posted until tomorrow.
Today I'm going to talk about my experience with one of the community theaters here for the show, "The Never Ending Story." I was so happy to get back to doing tech work again. I do wish I could have done more during the show, but I did a lot of painting during tech week. The very first night, Katie and I spent 5 hours painting set and props.

 We did black sponge painting on the top of this set piece and on the stairs.

We covered these masks in glow paint (this was before we started working on them).

After (and height comparison).

And we had painted the wood texture on this set piece during the weeks before tech week.

The girl who was basically the head painter lady did an awesome job with these as well:

Sadly, they used blinding blue lights during the scene that these were in, so the art wasn't as visible. Oh well, it wasn't up to me. 

When we made it to our first dress rehearsal, we didn't have jobs for the show. Katie and I were told that we'd be given jobs as they came along. Meaning, the minute they realize that they need more people on something, during dress rehearsal, with an audience, we would get our jobs. Luckily, we ended up with something fairly simple, which was hooking and unhooking a makeshift turtle shell to and from a wire. That was it. That was our job. I was glad that they had a job for us, but I was also frustrated that they threw it at us at the last minute. We got a chance to practice it a couple times the next day, but it was fairly simple and we figured it all out quickly. 

The worst thing about it was that, for the rest of the show, all we did was sit backstage and play games on our phones and eat snacks. For anyone else, that might have been great. "Cool I only have to do this one thing 8 times and sit around and play games and I can get college credit just for that!" Yeah, it's a great concept. Yes, I got out of writing 3 papers. But for the most part, I was bored. I've gotten so accustomed to competition play tech. Making sure everything runs quickly, smoothly, and that it all happens in under 45 minutes. I hated that I didn't feel any emotional attachment to this show. I feel more attached to the competition play that my high school is currently doing, even though all I did for it was paint a couple shadows and highlights. 

Anyway, I am glad that I got the chance to work on the show and lift up Morla the turtle and absentmindedly memorize all of her lines.

"I don't care about anything."

I also quite loved the awesomeness that was this horse:

And I loved getting to spend more time with this child:

"I want to hold one up like a bazooka!"

"No Katie, don't touch the-- Oh that looks pretty cool."

Moonchild's couch. Yeah, her name was Moonchild. How drunk was this writer...

So, overall, I did enjoy it. Even though I was bored when I wasn't doing anything. It was a very cool looking show and the kids were great actors. They even gave us little presents to thank us. And Katie and I got to have a couple sleep overs. Yay for theatre! 

Oops...

I honestly could not think of any other title to give this post. I've never been good at keeping up with writing things, which is quite worrisome considering that I'm majoring in English, and now I've managed to forget about my blog for a whole month... Oops... There actually were a LOT of interesting events that occurred in the month of October, and I'm going to try to blog about them within the next couple of weeks. I did tech work for a show, participated in the Ribbon Run, went to a masquerade ball, helped paint the set for my high school's competition show, and Halloween happened! At least that's all of the stuff I managed to get pictures during. I will write more in-depth posts about those things soon!
Even though I haven't been blogging, I have still been writing! Well, I've been writing essays for English class... But that counts! We wrote 4 papers in a row. Most of them were easy, but the last one we wrote happened to be the hardest and the ONE paper that I procrastinated on. The instructor seemed to really like the bits of it that she read in class, but her grading is extremely unpredictable. She gave me a B on an essay which I felt deserved a much better grade, and an A on another essay that wasn't any better than the other. I know that a B isn't bad, and I wasn't upset about getting a B. I was upset that this particular paper was given a B without any good explanation. Oh well.

I've been doing some more art recently thanks to Michaela needing help with making a business card. I did some hand lettering for that and then got addicted to it again. I even started a new banner for this blog! I'll finish that when I get the chance and then make a few updates to the look of my blog. I don't plan on moving any important buttons or anything, so don't worry. It'll be set up the same, just with different colors and backgrounds and fonts.

Last night I did some painting! It was a really quick project on a piece of scrap wood.

The picture of it isn't very great, but you get the idea. I'm very pleased with how my birds turned out. 

So yeah, I guess that's a little update! I don't think I'll be doing "Wordy Wednesdays" weekly anymore, because they started to become a struggle. I can't force myself to think "Oh crap, I need a quote. What quote should I use? What should I say about it?" It's much easier to write about a quote when I have inspiration from something in my life that relates to it. I'll most likely be blogging on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends for the rest of this semester.

Sorry for disappearing, but I'm back now!