After sorting through 448 spam comments - I’m not lying, this is a real number - I’ve managed to find my blog again. I apologize for the long delay between posts, but life has been a bit crazy, and once it settled down, it took me a couple of days to climb back into my sorts. (Get it? Out of sorts?…H’okay.)
Predictably, I now only have one job. My post working for the Oxy Children’s Theatre is gone, and it was fun while it lasted, blah blah blah. I also finished working on The Real Love when we “closed” with our taped performance last Sunday. Such a wild experience! It was an original musical being funded by Supreme Master TV. (I strongly encourage even the not-so-curious-at-heart to look this up on Google. I’ll leave it at that.) I don’t know what the name of the religion is, only that they … “worship”, for lack of a better word, and follow the teachings of Supreme Master Ching Hai. They are vehemently vegan, and their goal is to achieve heaven on earth by being green and peaceful. Well, I’m certainly all for that. But it’s a bit of a strange situation. I won’t say more. Just Google it. Though I will say that at the one and only performance on Saturday, they had a red-carpet outside of the Pasadena Civic Center, the venue where we were performing, with a big, white Greek esque column with scantily clad but simultaneously class women (I believe it was trying to mimic ancient Greek altars) with this phrase emblazoned with gold on top: “Go Veg, Be Green, 2 Save the Planet”. I’m not kidding, it was the number “2″ instead of the word “to”.
Barring the extremely unusual circumstances, it was an incredible experience. I got to meet a plethora of really talented people. We were under such a tight time constraint that people would ask for a new costume or a new music bridge, and fifteen minutes later, there it was. I ended up getting put into the production at the last minute. Two VIP guests who made a cameo appearance in a wedding scene of the play were Mr Dick Van Patten and Ms Shirley Jones. (Google them if you don’t recognize them - like I didn’t.) Well, Mark Knowles, the choreographer, suggest I get costumed so I can assist them on and off stage so they know what to do and when. I had stood in for them during most rehearsals as they didn’t attend very many, so I was really familiar with their roles. So that was pretty cool! Now I can actually put The Real Love - Ensemble on my resume, and it’s not a lie! Not that I was going to lie about it, but now I don’t have to!
So I wrote this entire post, and when I tried to publish it, apparently because it took me too long to write it, half of it got deleted, so forgive me if the following is a bit hard to understand. It might just be me forgetting that I haven’t actually written an important piece of information.
The day after I finished with The Real Love, I started my new job as concierge at Gold Class Cinemas. If I haven’t already encouraged you to look it up, I’m going to now. Google it. It’s a pretty crazy place, and frequented mostly by very serious movie goers and plastic/botoxed bejeweled women and their forlorn husbands. But! Working at a movie theatre where the tickets cost $30 apiece has its advantages. Some of our guests are famous people. On my third day of training a man came in with his wife and said, “I have reservations under Glen Keane.”
To anyone else, this name probably doesn’t mean anything. But to someone who has actually tweeted, and I quote: “i wish i was an animated character from the 1960s. if only glen keane was an animator back then… oh no! i’m starting to yearn! xx”, this name means a lot. Not really expecting this man before me to be the head animator for Disney, the man who designed Aladdin, Ariel, the Beast, Rapunzel and countless other Disney characters since the time of Pete’s Dragon, as well as having done work for Star Trek: the Animated Series, I say, “Glen Keane like the animator?” I regret it immediately, sure that he gets that too much for it to no longer be annoying, but he says, “That’s the one.”
I tell you, all the air got whooshed out of me. I forgot how to do anything, and Glen Keane and I proceeded to have a conversation while my trainer rung him up. He asked if I wanted to be an animator - because who else would be familiar with Glen Keane - and I said no, just a big Disney fan. He told me I have Ariel hair and I said I was going to be her for Hallowe’en. He then offered to do a sketch for me… So as I write this (for the second time), I have hanging on my wall in a protective plastic film, a strip of receipt paper with an original drawing of Ariel by Glen Keane, signed “To Aylia with best swishes from Ariel & Glen Keane”. I was really proud of myself for not crying. He shook my hand and everything, and said bye to me on the way out.
Because of how long it’s been taking me to get back in the hang of real life, I haven’t had many red exclamation marks notifying me of auditions, but I did have one on Friday, and have a callback for Wednesday. So don’t worry, I’m still a good actor. On that note:
If Aaron Sorkin Had Written: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
If Aaron Sorkin Had Written: Avatar
Hopefully, I’ll update again sooner than it took me to post this. Now with The Real Love over, I think my brain is regrowing exponentially, so I’ll be able to tend to real life things again.