East meets WEST

[violetclm]

Stuff I talked about being in the future in the last few paragraphs of my last (non-Django) post is now in the past! Such is life. I did indeed go to Connecticut for a few days to catch up with extended family -- mostly grandparents, although an aunt and one of her sons made a brief appearance -- so that was generally relaxing. We went in the middle of an unusually rainy summer for there, but the only rain we experienced was on the first day and later at night for a couple of unpredicted thunderstorms. The rest of the time the sun shone, which was pleasant, and I made sure to bring along my trusty (modulo surrepticious leak) water bottle for two rounds of blueberry picking. Said berries were turned into various confections, and both my father and I took quite a few home on our separate return trips.

As I believe I mentioned, I went home earlier than he did so that I could get to the WEST acting conservatory on time -- our original scheduled flight home had its tickets bought before I was confirmed in (/approached about?) the conservatory, and would have had me returning two days in, and so had to be changed. Unfortunately this turned into a horrible mess. I called the airline on or around the 10th of July while at the San Jose train station en route to Oakland by way of Livermore, and they changed my flight (but not my father's) to one leaving two days before, which would get me back home some twelve or so hours before I had to go to WEST. The airline representative told me that I would be sent a confirmation email about the flight change, but the email was instead sent to my grandfather, who had purchased the tickets in the first place. There were some phone calls exchanged, and eventually I managed to explain to him why I had changed my return flight two days back.

Flash forward to the day of my departure from Connecticut. I arrive at the airport and discover that the boarding pass printer will not, uh, print my boarding pass, because I have arrived more than two days in advance of my flight and that is just too early. I wait in line to speak with someone and explain that the machine is apparently accessing my old record, rather than the changed flight, and she looks me up and discovers that my grandfather, on receiving the flight change confirmation email, called the airline, assuming they had made a mistake. The airline informed him that I had in fact called them, but he said to change the flight back to the original date and not to do anything more with it until he told them otherwise. And he had never told them otherwise in the intervening weeks, so I listed as leaving two days later, and there was no room left on the flight I had tried to switch to some weeks previous. In fact, the next flight with room on it to San Jose was not until the next day.

However, there was a flight a couple hours later to San Francisco, which was farther off but still seemed doable. While I flew across the country, my mother and I communicated over phone to find a way to get me from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, which involved my taking one of the last running Caltrains of the night and jongod's brother picking me up from part of the way there because there weren't enough buses running at that hour. Unfortunately, there was an unexpected thunderstorm in Dallas, the stopover city, and one way or another my plane did not get into San Francisco until at least an hour later, by which time there was not enough transportation still running to get me out of the city. For want of anything better to do, I caught a BART to Powell St., where another of my aunts (and her daughter) were staying in a posh hotel for a few nights for a business meeting and crashed on their cot for a few hours. They had, of course, been informed in advance I was coming. I awoke from a fitful night at about 4:20 AM, caught another couple BART trains to the Caltrain station, rode that to San Jose, and caught a Highway 17 bus to Santa Cruz, where I arrived a scant two hours before the WEST conservatory was to begin. Moral: double check everything. I have my train ticket to Portland already and it is sitting next to me right now where I can keep a mistrustful eye on it.

But then! I shaved, I showered, I think I probably ate something, I printed out some images for a dramaturgical assignment, and I went to WEST! Fortunately it's only about five blocks from my house, which also came in handy most days for the lunch break. Glorious! Despite its travails, there was something relaxingly familiar and predictable about the Middlebury intensive last summer, and this feeling returned, each day more or less the same in that I'd be at WEST (minus lunch) for seven hours a day Monday through Friday, though with different content each time. For the first week we studied various aspects of theatre... rhythm and rhetoric, dramaturgy, "viewpoints," masks, the IPA (ugh), and so on. Occasionally it dragged a little, and some of the teachers were less appealing than others, and nothing ever become of our final dramaturgy assignments which makes me sad, but on the whole it was pretty darn cool. I had many a moment of looking forward to applying something at Lane and then remembering we'll just be doing some silly musical revue thing next semester, which likely wouldn't offer much chance for detailed direction. Eh. And the conservatory relied heavily on the students/kids being very dedicated people, which Lane students definitely won't be...

For the first week, there were twenty-one of us, and we lost six for the second week who had only signed up for the one week program for one reason or another. (In-between weeks, and before the less-around six had had a chance to desert us, we went up to Shakespeare Santa Cruz and watched all three of their shows.) I had known (or known of in Cassandra, who left after the first week,'s case) six of the total twenty-one beforehand, but none particularly well. I'd heard a lot of good things about David, and myriad_rainbows has a rather explicit approval of Dylan, so it was interesting to spend a whole lot of time with them both and get a better sense of who they were and what they were about. Heck, the conservatory was probably worth it for that alone, putting aside all the other cool stuff that went on. I'm sure I talked to everyone at least a little at some point, but most of my someone-I-didn't-already-know energies were put to a fascinating PCS student with an awesome variety of responses to things. This seemed a familiar model for me... enter unfamiliar situation, try to determine who's the most interesting person around, usually female because I hate men, latch onto this person as best friend and develop other connections as a second priority. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad model, although it naturally develops problems if the intended target isn't actually all that interested. In the second week I just ended up hanging out with David and folks more, but the PCS student was still really cool, as well as a good actress.

For the second week we put on a play. Yeah. Specifically a shortened version (about an hour long) of Midsummer Night's Dream. We got our parts and scripts on Monday around 5 PM, and performed on Friday at 7 PM... you do the math. Especially considering that there were lunch and other breaks so we didn't spend the full seven hours rehearsing each day, plus we worked on unrelated monologues for a couple hours on Wednesday. Despite the rehearsal process lasting four days, only two people had scripts on stage, and the number of lines flubbed was really quite respectable. We had extensive blocking, character choices, images, tiny bits of costume and properties, and no budget. We played to a packed(-of-our-family-and-closest-friends) house and it was amazing! Everybody had a good time. I am more than impressed with what a bunch of dedicated individuals can throw together in a short period of time. Here are photos of the final pre-performance runthrough (of which we had about three). I was Lysander, Dylan was Oberon, David was Bottom, Maggie was Titania, Bettina was Starveling/Moonshine, and Nick was Theseus.

Minus a few furtive hours at nitoya2's birthday party on the night of the 5th, my social world had been rather limited to a set twenty or so people ever since I had gotten back from Connecticut, but that changed almost immediately after the show was over. Danielle came over for a bit, and then I went off to the bus station to pick up my friend from Middlebury/Bulgaria whom I discussed visiting in Oakland in my last such post. She visited for about forty hours (a step up from my twenty-fiveish), and although her feet hurt, we got around a lot, jumped on the trampoline, sunned ourselves by the boardwalk, talked about the past and future, and occasionally ate. There were no extreme misadventures as there were in Oakland, unless you count missing a bus, but we had lunch on Saturday at Sitar, the Indian restaurant downtown. I'm not sure if anyone goes there whom I know but I recommend people to do so, it's very good food and they have a TV in the corner constantly playing bollywood music videos. How can you go wrong? Anyway, it was a lovely visit.

Monday morning I went back to WEST, or rather right next to it, at a french bakery, to meet with Maggie, not for conservatory reasons but because she is thinking of applying to Reed and I happen to know things about Reed and thus can answer questions and that is exciting. Even though she's thinking of taking a year off between high school and college to go travelling and have more time for applications, which means that even if she did apply to Reed and get accepted, it wouldn't be until I had graduated. Hrm. Afterward I played a lot of phone tag trying to schedule that night's big event, in which nitoya2 and I taught improv at the local Teen Celtic Music Camp. (We ended up getting, after many phone calls to various people, a ride up and back from myriad_rainbows' mother.) nitoya2's brother, myriad_rainbows' sister, and zoew were among those in attendance, and we ran through workshops and games for two+ hours, had a lot of fun, and were paid fifty dollars each! Really all I do these days is jobs with great hourly rates but very brief durations. It was nitoya2's last day in Santa Cruz before she went back up to Lewis & Clark -- actually she was originally going to leave on Monday, but I persuaded her to leave a day later so that we could teach improv -- so plaidsupersquid and Barak and Sophia accosted us after we got back from the camp and most of us stayed up until about 2:30 AM chatting about stuff in various places before wishing her a good night and good semester and all that. The rest is silence...