It’s Gonna Be A Thing

Saturday = Hallowe’en = Harry Potter Day. Having already celebrated Hallowe’en twice, I really wasn’t feeling it on Saturday. I forced myself out of the house to go with Sienna to the market on Edgware Road, and we got some cheap fruit and dashed hurriedly passed the fish stands, then pried myself into my costume (as awesome as it is) and made my way down to the “Dungeon”, the prep room for all parties. We ended up hanging out there for quite a while, which was really fun. I don’t know why people were so eager to go to Camden, because I had more fun in the flat than I ever had in Camden. We met some other American students who were friends of a friend of a student in our program, and played some games and jumped around, reminiscing about Miriam and all our awesome teachers.

Then, when everyone drunkenly made their way to Camden, Tierney, Ann, Geoff and I decided that we really didn’t feel like it. So we went to Trafalgar to go to a pub - because we felt that we had to, being in costume and all that - and met a few people very briefly, before heading back home and just having our own party in the flat. I had really forgotten how much I prefer just hanging out with friends than going out to clubs and stuff. We had a great time! A wonderful All Hallow’s Eve.

Sunday was pretty lowkey. I had a quazi date with the French guy I met on the plane from London to Toulouse. I met him in South Kensington - which was a pain because of a bunch of lines being closed. My timing to get there was so perfect, I can’t even tell you, but coming home took almost twice as long because of signal failures and I don’t know whats. Then I tried doing work, but just ended up hanging out more with Tierney and Geoff. I’m really excited about my and Geoff’s scene in Acting, it’s going to be so awesome there will be standing room only.

But today was a fun Monday. In Movement, we did shelf work, which is not as scary as it sounds. Basically, we would make a platform with our bodies, and then climb on top of each other, or slide down each others backs, etc. In Historical Dance we actually got work done, because certain people were in a bad enough mood from Movement (for being scolded or I don’t know what for not paying attention) that they didn’t mess around. I was in a very good mood, and lucky enough not to be affected by the tension a lot of other people were experiencing, so was thrilled when we got as far as the other class, and even ended a wee bit early. We also had lunch with Nigel, my new dramatic lit teacher, before our first class with him. It was really interesting, but I think that because of the lowkey Movement class, I didn’t have enough endorphins or whatever, and was just having a hard time focusing. In Stage Combat it was the same. It felt as though I was using someone else’s body. But I had a good time with Gordon. He’s super fun!

Then, Geoff, Tierney, Ann and I headed straight from school to the outer skirts of Zone 2 to go see The Spanish Tragedy. It’s, according to Michael, the most important Elizabethan play. It was what Hamlet was based off of, and basically ushered in the Jacobean era of play writing. We decided to go today, of all days, because Michael was taking his other students today, and we needed to see the play with Michael, and see what his other students were like, and what his relationship with them was.

Getting there was an unhappy adventure. We were hungry, and got pushed off a train and forced to wait another twenty minutes for another, then walk down a sketch area to the theatre, but the moment we get there, we see Michael’s beaming face (shining, as you know, with a Shakespearean light) through the doors. He seemed so genuinely happy that we were there, and told us later that he was very happy we made the effort to come.

The play was fantastic. It turned out, the guy who played Touchstone in As You Like It was the main character, and he was, of course, phenomenal. It was weird seeing the play not knowing anything about it, but with Michael there, he answered any and all questions. We got to sit next to him, and his wonderful - albeit somewhat inappropriately loud - commentary made the play that much better. It was truly chilling though… incredibly tense. I couldn’t feel my hands afterward.

And on the way back to the train, we went with Michael, and he was giving us a little impromptu tour of the town we were in, and telling us all these fun little anecdotes, and just being such a friendly, one-of-the-guys guys. At the train platform, I’m really happy we had him with us, too, because someone was being incredibly … shall we say suggestive, minus the “suggesting”, and Michael totally saved us. We only got to ride two stops with him on the train, but it was an experience of a lifetime. Then, home for more quality hang out time, and a little sleepover party. Woo!

Oh yeah, and Michael loves us so much more than his other students.

Man, did I laugh yesterday. I also got super pissed off.

This was a “Miriam Friday”, which means that I had the audition workshop with Miriam, who is brutul and a line reader, if you remember. Then you’ll also remember she’s heading to the end of her life, and it’s her sheer will power that’s keeping her alive. After Shakespeare - which was wonderful - and Speech - which just consisted of chatting - I headed towards what was sure to be my doom along with Sinead and Caitlin. She was surprisingly good about giving line readings and saying “Vary your tone” for Caitlin, who went first. Then I went.

“What was that line with the ‘why’?”

“‘Why should I love this gentleman?’”

“OK, give me that, and lead into it.”

“It’s the first line.”

“Right……………….. Well, you put the emphasis on ’should’, and I think it should be on the ‘why’. ‘WHY should I love this gentleman?’”

“WHY SHOULD I love this gentleman?”

“You’re putting the emphasis on the ’should’ also.”

“I thought the stress was supposed to be there because of the iamb.” (It is.)

“Just try it with only on the ‘why’.”

“WHY should I love this gentleman?”

“…. ‘WHY SHOULD I love this gentleman?”

So then I do it again, and normally she stops you every time there’s something she wants you to change, and she didn’t stop me, so I’m just plowing right through the monologue, all proud of myself, thinking “I must be doing really well, she’s not stopping me or anything!” I get to the end, look at her, and she goes,

“Why should I love this gentleman… Hmm…”

I can see I was absolutely riveting. Then, Sinead went up, and when she started doing it again, she was significantly better than the first time. She said afterwards that it was her best delivery of that monologue. Miriam also let her get through that entire one, but for a very different reason. Sinead finishes, and the three of us turn to look at Miriam. She appears to be in deep thought, but then it lasts a moment too long. I jokingly think in my head, “It’s as if this is a scene from a movie and she died. Haha…” But she continues to remain immobile. We all exchange glances with each other as we realise what’s happened: Miriam has fallen asleep.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to describe how difficult it was to survive this experience. We were all thrown into fits of laughter, as silent as we could make it, but one has to breathe! I’m hiding behind my hair, Caitlin is biting herself and Sinead is covering her mouth with her hand, when Miriam wakes with a jolt and says, “Yes… Very good.” She then proceeded to comment on the speech, and Caitlin and I were still laughing uncontrollably. I felt so terrible, but I was sweating and thought I would die of overheating and lack of oxygen. Getting out of that room was a relief!
It turns out, she also fell asleep during the next two people’s sessions, though midsentence that time.

Shakespeare was wonderful. We finally got to put Comedy of Errors up on its feet, and Michael is such a fun director! He was right in the action, and he is - as was to be expected - astonishingly brilliant in his direction. You get the feeling that he just loves your character so much, so when he’s giving you a direction, you can’t help but be eager to do it how he wants.

Meanwhile, Stephanie (ahem, STEPHANIE) got a text from one of the British Heythrop boys we had met, inviting us to this club tonight. I usually am pretty good about not-naming things that I’m going to diss, but this one must be named because I want to discourage anyone from ever going there, ever, so here it is: KOKO. KOKO KOKO KOKO! We were all super excited, and if we dressed up in full costume, we could get in for free. So we all got dressed up, and because none of us wanted to use our actual Hallowe’en costumes, we were all riffling around in the little clothes we brought for something that could pass as “full costume”. Needless to say, we looked awesome. Sienna was a biker chick, and looked so badass, and I was a greek goddess, and looked pretty cool, too.

We make the long trek down to Camden, meet some Americans on the tube - because the only people we seem to meet are American - and finally get to the club right when it starts to rain. We wait in line, singing and having fun and eagerly awaiting the awesomeness of what that night would be. We show our International Student IDs to the bouncers, the ones issued to us by our schools, they look at them, and say,

“We don’t accept these IDs.”

What? What? “What?”

“We only take passports and driver’s licenses.”

“But these have our pictures and our birthdays on them. We’re twenty!”

“You could buy these online for £5. We only take passports and driver’s licenses.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I mean, who brings their goddamn passport to a club? That’s the single stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, next to not accepting a legit student ID with a picture and a date of birth. I mean, our IDs are only valid for a year, who would get a fake license only valid for a year? Not only that, but who would buy a license and make themselves 20 instead of 18, if they were under 18?

Dare I say we were seriously peeved? So we got a drink at the bar across the street, then made the trek home, where a creepy old man didn’t get the hint that he was a creepy old man, and went to bed.

At least, I got to watch the Avatar trailer five times today.

Yesterday, Wednesday, our Theatre History teacher was sick, so Richard came in and showed us a scene of Henry V, which actually features a scene where horses and two people die. For real. So that was fun. But he also gave us some good Q&A time with some useful advice, and some cute 6 year old Richard stories, including him memorizing the prologue from, what else, Henry V and winning a talent competition with it, because he was a six year old reciting Shakespeare. If you get a chance, you have to get him to tell you this story. Then, we had our masterclass with Samuel West, who was the lead in Enron. He was absolutely fantastic, so we were all looking forward to it a lot.

I had no idea what I was in for.

The man. Is perfect. He is currently reading Cosmos. (We had a moment where he mentioned Carl Sagan and pulled the book out of his bag, and I clapped, unable to help myself, and he looked at me and said, “You know it?” and I nodded frantically. Then he called it a “forgive me, mind fuck”.) He said that if acting hadn’t been his family profession, he would have gone into Astronomy. He’s also a socialist, absolutely intelligent and well-read, and an atheist. The fact that all this came up with our one hour conversation with him is what makes him perfect. Plus the fact that he’s an atheist, socialist, astronomy-enthusiast. And an incredible actor. Anyway, I proceeded to print this picture of him, and put it up on our bulletin board with the following caption:

Sam West: The Dream Factory Mascot

After that, we had acting, and Hay Satan got properly chewed out for not even having the plays he is doing scenes from, even though we’re supposed to have gotten them this summer, and he was given homework to do on them for the past two weeks. I’m really excited about the scene I’m doing in that class. I’m doing something from Arcadia with Geoff, and we did a little work on it, and it was just so easy. Every once in a while, you’re lucky enough to work on something with someone where it’s just not work… You just agree on all the choices you each make, and it flows really easily. So I have nothing but “thank god”edness in that class. (If that doesn’t read, say it out loud to yourself…)

Sienna’s aunt had given us information about something called “Adult Night” or something at the Science Museum, and it’s free, so we decided halfheartedly to go down to that. Neither of us had  a lot of energy, but we thought we would regret it if we didn’t go, so we did. Well… I can’t describe how long the queue was to get in. It started at 1845, which is a little after when we got there… by the time we reached the end of the line, which spanned over several blocks and across multiple streets and rounded a few corners, it was nearly 1900.

Needless to say, we bailed, then spent the next half hour walking around the block trying to find a frozen yoghurt place Sienna had researched (as our reward for walking to the end of the line). We eventually found it, it’s called Snog, and expensive, but man is fro-yo good. We had forgotten what a comfort it is to eat, and I have to say that it felt good. I got Snog buttons - “I need a Snog”, “Do you want to Snog?” (can you see a pattern?) and “Get Snogging, it’s natural”. At home, Tierney brought some people she knew who were visiting London from Rome where they were studying abroad, and we hung out with them till they had to leave around 2300, then watched an episode of HIMYM with the gang.

Then, I still couldn’t sleep. Around 0030, I was on facebook, and looked at who was on the chat. One of the guys we had met previously (let’s call him Glenn, after Glenn Beck because he’s a douche - but I don’t know that he is till later, so his name is just Glenn with no double meaning for right now), who is friends with the insanely cute guy (mentioned in the previous post, let’s call him Siddig, after Dr Bashir) was online. For some reason unknown to anyone but … well, the gods? I started chatting with him. I asked him about Siddig, and he was all, “yeah, he’s single and interested.” Well, yay! says I. And I’m about to leave, when I get this

“Btw, this is Siddig.”

Obviously, I don’t believe him, so I keep saying, “haha”, “yeah right”, “OK, ‘Siddig’”, but he’s not letting up. Eventually, we make plans to go get a drink or something after my last class. Then, this morning when I check my facebook, Siddig has sent me a message saying “Glenn pretended to be me. I don’t know what he said, but it wasn’t me. Sorry, see you around. Siddig x” or something along those lines. (In Britain, they sign everything - twitter, texts, facebook, e mails - with an “x”. I kinda like it.) So I replied with, “I figured it was him. Oh well ^_^ -insert idle chatter about something unimportant here- Be sure to give Glenn a nice kick in the ass for me. X.”

So needless to say, that was a disappointment. But my audition class went really well, and Alexander went fine. I also had my meeting with Richard today where he quizzed us on our day trip last Saturday and told us what all the teachers had to say. I basically got the question right, and all the teachers that he mentioned had just wonderful things to say, as well as really helpful general notes. But I didn’t get to hear what Michael said. But my most consistent comment was “intelligent” which kept me beaming for quite a while, because of all things, I’d rather be intelligent. Voice was fine, we did a lot of floor work, so I almost fell asleep several times, and we started the Dublin accent in Dialects. That one does not come naturally at all, but we listened to recordings of Colm Meany. Made me feel knowledgeable because I was all “I thought it sounded like O’Brien!”

I just love knowing things.

Then, I took a nice walk down through Hyde Park to visit the Peter Pan statue, at long last. I got to think a lot, and see a bunch of ducks up close, and run my hands all over the Peter Pan statue. It was beautiful. Then I came back to the flat to get ready for the Orchestra. They played Strauss at first, which was pretty incredible. I was one of those people who thought that the conductor just kept time with his baton, and didn’t understand why people applauded him at the end of the show, but it’s so much more complicated than that. It’s as though every note is in response to something he does… Absolutely amazing. And I knew that Beethoven’s 7th was going to be played, because Richard and I talked about it on Saturday. They played a Mozart next, which I found to be very relaxing and somewhat boring, but the pianist was impressive. Then… at last… Beethoven’s 7th. A tear did fall down my cheek. It was beautiful, and the conductor was just… magical. It really was like watching someone do magic. I mean, Harry Potter magic, not Will Arnett illusions.

Once home, on facebook, Glenn had the audacity to start a chat with me saying, “How was your date?” (All day we had been sending him facebook chats from other people’s accounts saying, “Hey it’s Aylia”.) And then, I tried watching the new Avatar trailer I had been waiting for, because it was released online today, but internet just has to hate me! So thanks for letting my watch half of it.

Monday was, we all knew, going to be rough. It was another twelve hour day, with lots of movement, and I hadn’t done any working out over the break. It actually wasn’t terrible… still can’t do a handstand or any of that. Sword fighting was fun. We learned a routine, and I absolutely can’t wait for us to do a whole choreographed scene. Historical Dance was normal, and it was our last class with Nicolette for Dramatic Literature. We’ll be switching over to Nigel for the next class, and he’s really cool. Trouble is, every time I say his name, in my head goes “Helloooooo, I’m Nigel Thoooornbry,” from The Wild Thornberries, and I can tell it’s going to get super annoying super fast.Then, during dinner before our evening masterclass, we actually got to meet some Heythrop students, and one boy was so cute! They told us about the Heythrop Hallowe’en party that was Tuesday and told us to come, and we chatted and stuff and got really excited. More on that below. But first…

Our Masterclass was absolutely revolting. This woman… First, she asks us to do a very intellectual analyzation of a character from this stupid play, but what she really wants us to have done is be able to go up in front of everyone else and talk about ourselves as the character. Well, Geoff and I had a great time being the Maid (boy my bullshitting abilities were at their peak, there - even I believed myself), but I could have gone up, tap danced, and she would have said something along the line of “That was… absolutely incredible. See how she managed to create the inner turmoil of the character, and turn it into an audible response with her feet, which really shows how grounded the character is.” Hugh went up, literally without having read the play, did not even know how many daughters he has (this is the main character, after three other people at least have gone up and said, “I have five daughters”) and she says he’s brilliant.

“My name is Bernarda Alba. … uh, you know… I have…” (he checks the character list on the front of the play after a lot of fumbling) “I’m not a mess. I have … seven daughters. No! Six daughters…” (he has five) “Uh…”

You can guess how the rest went. Ridiculous.

Tuesday was a better day. We had Shakespeare with wonderful Michael, in which we just drilled our Julius Caesar speeches, because we had the showing that afternoon, then Physical Theatre, then our outing to the Tate Britain. We got to see a few things, not the most interesting paintings, I don’t think, so I’d like to go back and look around, but it’s really cool how much you miss. I mean, every detail in these paintings mean something. It’s impressive.

After that, back to school for Julius Caesar. I practiced some movement thing, and am so happy that now I can do it, and the showing went reasonably well. For me, at least. Richard called us “creditable” which is the best we could hope for, and I know I did the best I could do. They all had a meeting about us afterwards, and we have individual meetings with Richard on Thursday to discuss that.

Then, after a frantic trip to Primark for some last minute costume details and a hasty homework session with Geoff, Stephanie (STEPHANIE!) and Sienna and I got ready for the Heythrop Hallowe’en party! I was Nurse Chapel, and looked awesome, Sienna was a genie, also looked awesome, and Stephanie was Hello Kitty. Looked fantastic. Pictures to follow on facebook, of course. Steph did my makeup and I did her hair and it was just an awesome fest. We headed towards the pub for the train, and had a priceless moment where the train just went straight past our stop without stopping, and we all froze and starred at the fine red print over “Cannon Street”. When we asked the people at the next stop how to get to Cannon Street, the incredibly helpful metro worker said, “Er… walk?” and you could just hear the omitted “dumbass”.

Piffle.

In any case, Cannon Street really was right there. The party was in an insanely cool pub. The bathroom was behind a secret bookshelf door, and there was a potions cabinet that looked straight out of Snape’s private stores, and the Seven Deadly Sins were drinks you could order out of awesome potion bottles. We got free drinks with entry, but it took about an hour to get them, because there were over a hundred partiers, and two bartenders. We saw the cute guys from Monday’s dinner, but they were so aloof, that it was sad.

The British are so creative with their costumes, though! We saw a Spock (yes, I got my picture taken with him, obviously), a Waldo, The Mask, several Peter Pans, Amy Winehouse and that heroin guy she dates or something… And here, when you don’t have a costume, instead of wearing a cape (if you’re a guy) or underwear and bunny ears (if you’re a girl) you just cover yourself with blood. Can’t wait for the real Hallowe’en!

That was already a long entry, so today’s adventures will go up with tomorrows.

I want to start by thanking everyone who’s been reading my blog. I’m happy that you have been enjoying my accounts of life here in London. Posts are slowing down a bit as the schedule becomes more basic, but they will always come. Also, due to the postal strike here in Grand Ol’ England, there are a bunch of postcards that are just sitting and waiting to be sorted somewhere… Here’s hoping that it ends soon, so you’ll get your postcards!

An amendment must also be made to London Day 43. When maman came to the National Gallery with us, we also got a wonderful little cream tea with Sienna at the café. Merci, maman.

Also, look at this picture I found! It makes me happy:

A Picture of Daddy I Found Online

Friday was a weird day in terms of schedule. Normally we have Speech, and Shakespeare twice, but instead, we had half an hour of Speech (half an hour of Caryll talking at us) and then we worked on our Julius Caesar speeches with both Michael and Caryll. Then, we worked more on Comedy of Errors and I totally made Michael laugh out loud with one of my lines (”Not this, but troubles of the marriage bed.”) and it was wonderful!

Then, Geoff, Sienna, Ann and I were supposed to go see that show of Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, and we’re all happy, walking to the theatre, and a guy stops us with the pretext of telling us where to go, but of course we already know.

“You going to the theatre?” he said.
“Yes,” said Geoff, looking confident and excited.
“Theshowhasbeencanceled, so if you’ll go down to the counter downstairs they’ll give you a refund.”
There’s a stunned moment when we’re sorting out what he just said.
“Wait… are you serious?” I asked.
“Yes, unfortunately, I’m sorry, so they’ll give you a refund downstairs.”

Well… Due to a back injury that Geoff witnessed on the night that he went, the show was canceled, and it was the second to last show. They kept telling us that we could get a discount on any of the other things at that venue, like movies or food and drinks (they kept mentioning drinks). We got our refund, but of course since we got all the tickets at the same time, with cash, they have to give us one big check and mail it to us… but hmm. That’s interesting, as there is a postal strike going on. So we have to wait for that to be over, before we can get the check that they will mail to Geoff, then Geoff has to deposit it, and then he has to pay each of us back for our tickets. He had been looking forward to it a lot, so he went to get a drink, of which we were supposed to get 25% off - he didn’t.

Afterwards, we headed home, got some ice cream and port and had an “I just got dumped by my boyfriend” night.

On Saturday, we had a day trip to Stamford. It was a very long bus trip (two hours), but Sienna and I sat at the front next to Michael and Richard Digby Day (who we are now on first name basis with, so will be henceforth referred to as “Richard”). Our first stop was a church in St Petersborough, which is not pronounced anything like that, beware. Our tour guide took us as idiots, asking us if we knew what “Vikings” and “barrels” were… It was because we were Americans. But it was cool, we saw Mary Queen of Scots’ former grave, and Katherine of Aragon’s grave (she was once married to Henry VIII, though a lot of women can say that). It was cute… not particularly interesting.

Then we went to Stamford, a very quaint little city still in the 18th century. They shoot lots of movies there because there are certain angles, where you look out over the city and see no signs whatsoever of the modern age. It’s pretty neat. It was a self-guided tour here, so we saw a museum with clothes from the biggest man in Stamford, who must have weighed 300+ lbs, and the smalled man in Stamford, who was actually American, “Tom Thumb”, who was about two feet tall and perfectly proportioned. There was a market, and I found a lovely ring to replace my old black one which fell apart, and I’m very happy with this much more legit ring. It makes me feel like a magic person. I also found… wait for it…

Original -wait for it- cells -wait for it- of -and here’s the BIG wait for it- TITANIC! That’s right, on sale at a toy store in Stamford, I found limited edition cells from Titanic. That put a big fat smile on my face.

After that, we headed towards our final destination: Burghley House. (There are a bunch of silent letters in that, too.) It’s an absolutely enormous house, privately owned, too. There are more than 200 rooms in the house, and 18 are sectioned off from the rooms the private owners use (parents and their three children) so that we can visit them and see all the paintings and old cabinets and Ming vases, etc. It was cool, but not really interesting to describe. On the bus back, Michael, Sienna, Richard and I talked a bit (Richard and I share a favourite of Beethoven’s symphonies which we will see next week) and Michael was cheeky, and then we all fell asleep. I got a nice video of everyone on the bus sleeping, it’s pretty funny.  Then, Geoff came up to our flat and we watched oodles of How I Met Your Mother and played around till pretty late, before resigning and going to bed. We gained an hour of sleep, however, due to switching back to normal England time… or something…

Then, today, the only thing I did besides homework and watching more HIMYM with Geoff and Tierney, was go to the National Portrait Gallery, but we didn’t stay very long, which was a bit of a bummer. But there was a nice picture of Daniel Radcliffe on display. Mmm. One day, I’m going to marry him…

I woke up dark and early Wednesday morning to go to the airport. I was admittedly nervous about the flight, being there on time, etc. Babette and the kids were coming to pick me up and they were there early, like wonderful people. Sammi had a bag of fossils for me, which was incredibly sweet. Traffic made me more nervous, and their devil-may-care attitude once we got to the airport also made me nervous. They really kept me from going to the gate till the boarding minute, so I was panicking a little, because my experiences with airports are LAX and DIA, big international airports. So we hung out and took pictures while I silently suffered, but for nothing, of course. I was the only person at security, and got a middle seat near the front of the plane. And what a small world, I sat next to the same woman I had sat next to on the flight out.

Everything went smoothly with my EU passport (oh yeah) and my bag was literally right there when I got to baggage claim. I had my ticket for the Gatwick Express, got on a train that was right there, left in five minutes, and tube from Victoria to Warwick. Easy as pie. I caught up with Sienna and Tierney and did some grocery shopping because I had potatoes and pasta and rice.

I really tried, I really did, to do homework in the evening, and only partially succeeded.

This morning was mostly average. I did get quite worked up about Avatar, James Cameron’s new groundbreaking moviecomingoutDecember18thwhichlooksjustsoamazing! First movie by my favourite filmmaker in 12 years, since he made my current favourite movie. Yeah, it’s that big. My least favourite class today was canceled, so I had a really good day in that area. We had Twednesday today because we didn’t yesterday, obviously, and the place we found was nice. Expensive, woa, but we’re going to go back and get stuff for take away (cheaper) and try some more of their tarts, because they had a lot.

Then Geoff and I took off to get tickets to see a one man show starring the grandson to Charlie Chaplin, and is the son to the daughter of Chaplin that my mother worked with in the circus! What a small world! Tickets were expensive, but Geoff kept assuring me that it was worth it, so if it’s not, I’ll… make him watch Titanic again with me. Because oh yeah, when we got home, watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother, then watched…. TITANIC! And it was amazing. As per uje. I decided that Titanic is to Cameron as Hamlet is to Shakespeare. It’s that good.

Due to the hecticness of my schedule for the last couple days, I haven’t had time to write the blog posts day of. So I apologize for the streak lately of double and (in this case) triple posts.

First, Happy Birthday to Maman from Tuesday.

I woke up late, and was all in a tizzy to get to school on time. Physical Theatre was a lesson in improv, and it was of course really cool. Then Shakespeare was good, we started work on The Comedy of Errors. I had my heart set on playing Dromio of Syracuse… I had big plans for that part… but I got Luciana instead, which isn’t a bad part. It’s just not Dromio of Syracuse. It was highly enjoyable having Michael direct me in that part, though. I made him laugh. It made me happy.

Then, I rushed off to see mom at her B&B for lunch. She then weaseled her way into coming with me and my class on our cultural outing to the National Gallery - as she is so well known for doing. She seemed to enjoy it, at least that’s the feeling I got from her constant whispers and questions and comments at my elbow. It was neat to hear about a few of the paintings there, and the stories that go behind them. It’s not just a scene, it’s “Her hand is like that because of this, his face is like this because of the other, etc.” on and on and on. Every aspect of it is meticulously planned. At least, that’s how they present it to us.

Mom then left us and we went off to our second Masterclass of the week. This time it was with a director named James. He, I believe, helped to found the Hampstead Theatre, where we saw The Fastest Clock in the Universe. He was somewhat intimidating, but really seemed to know his stuff. I did get a very rushed feel from him, and I don’t know if that was because he didn’t want to be there, or if it was because he had too much to talk to us about in two hours. Regardless, it was neat, but just neat. Then, I went to meet mom for dinner at her B&B. She got me a salad, and got herself a salad she didn’t like, then she got us a birthday chocolate cake and yoghurt to share, neither of which she liked, of course. Hurrah. So far, she’s been off to a great start.

Then when I talked to her yesterday morning when she joined us for Twednesday, which she was supposedly looking forward to, she can’t eat because she’s nauseous, and she didn’t sleep last night, and it was awful. So happy that she’s having a good time.

Theatre History, Masterclass (useless, virtually, today - a Producer woman named Thelma?) and Acting. In Acting, we’re doing scene work, and I got lucky. I got Arcadia with Geoff, who is at least really easy to act with in improv scenes, so I’m happy. It’s making up for me not getting Dromio of Syracuse in Shakespeare. Then, there were auditions for the Heythrop Christmas show of Little Shop of Horrors, which Sienna and I really want to be involved with. We had talked to the office, and they said it was fine as long as it didn’t interfere with LDA work. The trouble is, we don’t know what our schedule with LDA is during the performance, so we probably won’t be able to be in it as it is. Bummer. But we still went to the auditions, and it felt good being the strongest auditioners. By far. It’s a little of a cheat, because we both want to do this for a living, and they all study theology and philosophy. It’s weird, but… I miss auditioning.

Then, we headed over towards where the theatre is, the Royal Court, to see Enron. The plan was to get dinner there, but LDA neglected to tell us that the Royal Court is in the most expensive part of London. So that was an adventure.

The play was really good. It was exactly what it sounded like: a story about Enron. I was eleven at the time that it happened, so it was really cool to see it illustrated artistically and explained simply for us. They used a lot of really cool imagery, and all of it had to do with the actual Enron story. Like, the things they created to eat all their debt were named “Raptor 1″, “Raptor 2″, etc. So they had a Jurassic Park theme, with raptor eggs that hatched, and eventually became raptors to eat all their debt. And one of the main guys in charge of that whole collapse drew comparisons with Star Wars and stuff, and they had a really cool dance with lightsabers. They took a bunch of archival footage (making us relive the 2000 election and the craze with Florida, as well as September 11th) and used verbatum speeches from the actual people involved - who this play was about - to make really neat segments. A lot of it was just a narrative of what happened, and the people behind it, but it was interspersed with song and dance segments which were just so good! They worked so well with the play, and were all done really well. There was a moment when I had chills during the beginning of Enron’s peak. I wish I could describe it to give it justice, but I can’t really. There was a Q&A after which was pretty interesting, then I went to see maman for a bit after, before heading home to do nothing. Oh well, homework.

Today, I woke up late. AGAIN! What is all this about? Maman joined me for lunch, which was nice, and we were supposed to get tickets for Les Mis tonight, but - and I figured this would happen - we didn’t. She wasn’t feeling well, so we decided it’s not worth buying those tickets and having her sit through the show and not enjoy it. Instead we walked to Regent’s Park and I made a quaint little dinner for her here, before she headed home, and I am just sitting here, trying to get up the courage to do homework. It really feels like it should be Friday. But it’s… it’s not. What is that about?