Tonight was the second annual inter-theatre-company theatre sports night. I participated last year, but to our advantage we had a really great team of people who all knew each other. I was the only stay-on from last year, but another person had competed for another team.

It’s an incredibly nerve-wracking experience and backstage everyone is concerned about remembering the games and trying not to completely go up (ie. die, freeze) on stage. There is also the fear of the unknown because the lights and the audience stare can feel like the weight of a truck on your shoulders when you’re thinking of what to say.

In the first round of one minute games we were chosen for “Word at a Time Story”, where the team tells a story but we can only say one word each. Soliciting audience responses to the phrase “your favourite animal at the zoo”, some odd audience member said “donkey”, and so we told (or at least tried to) the story of going to see a donkey at the zoo. It’s harder than it sounds because you’re ideas are almost always rendered useless immediately before you are supposed to say it. It’s particularly entertaining if its fast and active, rather than just describing something.

For the second round we played “Sing About It”, in which we improvised a scene about making breakfast and every now and then the emcee yells “Sing About It” and the person who is speaking has to break off and improvise a short song. My moment occurred just as I was telling another actor that I didn’t see her name on the pancake mix. It was terror as I turned and began to make up my lyrics. The worst is when you have to set up the first half of the rhyme without knowing what the second half will be. My song lyrics were (something like) “I went to the cupboard / only pancake mix did I see (i figured this might be an easy rhyme) / but noticed it was without / the name of thee.” It was nice to get a laugh but it was more comforting to just find that second rhyme in time.

Our third game was the ace, “Emotion, Replay, Replay, Replay”. First we act out a short scene of maybe a few lines and some clear distinct actions. The first time around it should be fairly mundane and uneventful, but then you have to do the exact same scene in different emotional states. Our team hit gold as we enact a day at the race course. Danny set the scene by playing a trainer grooming his horse. Next, I came along leading a horse to the slot next to his. Fiona and Koby then exchanged a small bit of dialogue about one asking the other how to place a bet. Our next enactment had to be the same, but underscored with the emotion of jealousy. Danny, in a moment of brilliance, bent down beside the horse he was grooming, looked under it, then down as his crotch and said “Aww, Jeez!” Little was done, but just enough for the audience to grasp that he was doing a little comparison, and the audience roared at his use of the ‘jealousy’ concept. The rest of that scene played out typically. The second emotion was ‘happiness’, and Danny again delivered comedy gold by pointing at the horses crotch, down at his, and then let out a very satisfied laugh. Again, I led the horse over, this time giving a friendly wave, and the girls spoke about how one of them won their gamble. Our final emotional state was ‘grief’. Danny followed through with a look at the horse’s undercarriage then a “Oh, God”. At this point I was off to the side of the stage a bit disappointed I hadn’t added much to the scene beyond perpetuating the emotions, when I decided that my horse should be dead. At first I was going to drag the dead horse to the same spot, but by the time Danny had finished his bit, I walked the horse across the stage and said, “You won’t need those legs where you’re going…” and riding on the back (har!) of Danny’s jokes, I got a great roar from the audience and suddenly the night was over for us.

As the final scores were read out, our team took our bows as the winning team for this year, and I look forward to competing next year to defend the trophy thats temporarily sitting on my desk.

Perhaps in some effort to stamp claim to my break from studies, I’ve been immersing myself in fiction. No, not that book, but a range of other things.

Midway through the week I went with Amy and Adam to see a New York Metropolitan youth orchestra concert, which was entertaining, if a little loose with some very ‘curious’ playing.

Friday night Brett and Adam headed out to the movies to see Transformers. I must admit that I was under the impression that we were seeing Harry Potter (that’s what happens when you leave the MSN multi-person chat prematurely), so was a little concerned to discover that someone else was playing Harry, but pleasantly surprised to see that JK Rowling had started including scenes about the Iraq war in her books. After an hour or so when the car began to talk and I realised it wasn’t under a magical spell I looked at my ticket stub and the whole thing started to make more sense. Not a lot more, mind you. It still didn’t explain why everyone thought endangering the lives of a whole city of people was a good idea. Or why the story had to go on for so very long.

It wasn’t but a few nights later I was off, again with Brett and supplemented with Min to see a production of The Government Inspector. Again, a little long, but very funny with a great local cast. Sometimes a simple farce is exactly what the doctor called for, particularly when everyone is having such fun with their allotted bits of ‘business’, rising every time they get a laugh out of the audience.

I’ve been filling the hours in between catching up with some movies. I caught Disturbia (good fun if you aren’t expecting Hitchcock), Zodiac (very still and consuming with a great score by David Shire), Newsies (finally caught up with it, loved the Christian Bale dance solo in Santa Fe), and making my way through season two of Arrested Development (I’m so glad Liza made it back).

While it may sound like I’m slacking off in my own filth (why does that cut so deeply?), I am still busy and at the theatre most evenings or days. Now, where did I put that DVD…

The small three bar heater that has been glowing in the corner of this frigidaire of a room throughout these cold winter weeks spat the dummy the other day. In what felt like a metaphorical fable told by some greek god on a cloud, at first the top globe blew, and soon after the second globe. I’m now down to the lowest globe which fails to even defrost my toes when I stand almost on top of it.

This morning I journeyed into university and slammed some papers down on someone’s desk and screamed “Let me out, you damned dirty ape!” In reality, I attended a prebooked appointment with the subdean and got her signature on a form to state that I am indeed dropping the commerce part of my degree. I’ll now be a lowly Creative Arts graduate, come December. When I explained I wanted to do a graduate diploma of education (to become a secondary teacher), the subdean looked up from her papers and said “Oh, well. I guess that’s something to fall back on.”

Should I go through with it (as much as I’d love a decently paid Musical Director/Performer job to come up quickly and quietly), it terrifies me that in 18 months I might just be a high school music teacher. I guess I still have substantial time to get used to the idea. And I’d better. After studying to be a composer, I looked to other things, and found that commerce wasn’t quite the right fit. Teaching is my final light globe, but I hope at least it will defrost my toes.

Yesterday was a day not of wine and roses, but close enough.

In the morning I high-tailed my way to Sydney on the train (thank goodness they are running again) to meet up with fellow blogger, Jelly. This particular young lady takes the prize as the first ever “interwebs person” I have ever met in person. Actually, right after James (damn, really should have planned this paragraph). I thought I’d be safe because she’s a musical theatre chick, and they are all sane, right? Also, one of her emails contained the line “I promise not to rob or molest you”. That’s sounds like a promise I can risk testing.

In reality, Jelly was such an engaging, passionate and downright spunky lady that I probably wouldn’t have minded if she had robbed me. We chatted for hours about musicals and the like, ate food, wandered the city, occasionally finding maps before loudly declaring, “Oh, we are HERE” as if to appease the surrounding people that we actually did know what we were doing. I even met her entirely charming family before taking my leave, hoping we’d find the chance to catch up again after she returns to her home state.

Once I hit the street, I worked my way, using a combination of the alignment of the stars and an expert sense of smell to the corner of blah blah and whatsit streets where I was picked up by Brett, Min and Adam as they entered the city. Shortly after we met up with Tim and Chae for some dinner in Circular Quay before going off the respective shows we had tickets for. Myself, Brett, Min and Adam all had tickets for Company (which the other boys, and Jelly, in separate parties, had seen the night before).

Company, being a Sondheim show is one I’m particularly fond of. It was surprising then that I was left a little cold by the first act, and more particularly the first half. A lot of the performances in the karate/brownie scene seemed to be played in this broad caricature style that to me undermined the importance of those early scenes as showing Bobby (and the audience) the different nature of marriage. This certainly appeared to be a direction thing, not one or two actors hamming it up. The scenes seemed drawn out whereas in previous productions they hadn’t. The show certainly picked up with Getting Married Today which was hilariously staged, and the second act was thoroughly more enjoyable than the first. Amongst all the bits of “clever” in the show’s direction, I felt the choreography fell a bit flat because by the time we get to the vaudeville pastiche number (Side by Side/What Would We Do Without You), the audience had already seen a lot of that style of movement performed by the company, particularly in the early scenes. Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed the interpretations of the characters, the playfulness the show had and the songs were all fantastically performed. My other two gripes relate to the sound being firstly, the cast were too quiet (in relation to the amplification of the band). At times vocal lines were completely lost in the mix. Secondly, the smallish but highly effective and tight orchestra suffered keyboard strings (which stank so badly), an awful piano patch (general midi piano, anyone), woeful drum mic’ing (as Jelly said “it sounded like someone flicked the switch on the keyboard over to Bossa Nova”). The supplemented brass sounded great, to my ears at least, and I’d be very curious how it worked, as I didn’t pay enough attention to see if it was just a keyboard patch. These really are minor niggles on a really enjoyable show, however, even if an amateur production I saw a few years ago had a larger and better mixed orchestra.

I almost wasn’t going to mention this because who am I to criticise this, but the costumes were just plain weird at times. To quote Jelly (she is so darn pithical!), the costumes looked like “what an old woman thinks strippers would wear.” Because we all know that young people = strippers, right?

After the show, we spent a few hours getting out of the carpark and then made our way back home, stopping in at the McCafe where a rather butch looking security guard suddenly turned pale and started to soil his pants as soon as a real issue started up with some guys yelling at each other.

All in all, such a splendid day of great ‘Company’ and brilliant company.

Suffering, as I previously said, from a mild case of social starvation, I decided to head into town today to run some errands. In the back of my mind, I thought there would be a reasonable chance I’d see someone I knew.

As soon as I got off the bus I headed towards the copy shop to print some posters. At the first set of lights a mother from the children’s theatre group stopped to say Hello, and then I moved on. At the next crossing, a gentleman who shall be referred to here as “Calvin Klein” (why I’m even bothering to protect the fake name he gave the booking office at the theatre I don’t know). He say TLE during the opening weekend, and chatted to me for quite a while after the show in his unique style. I signed his programme and he continued to tell me his plans for the next few weekends. Eventually, Brett and others came over to call me away as someone had noted I was involved in this conversation for perhaps a little too long. Back to the present day, as I stood about to cross I saw him coming from the other side of the street. He must have spotted me and I probably didn’t hide my look of dread well enough. As we began to cross he initiated conversation in the middle of the busy street. I had to quickly dart back to my original side of the street to avoid being killed and to engage in conversation with the guy. “So you’re off to Sydney, then?” he asked. It took me a moment to register that I was actually also walking in the same direction as the train station. “No, just running some errands.” Some more conversation continued before he released me and I crossed and moved on.

After dropping in my poster material I headed back for some lunch. I spotted Troy and grabbed his bag strap to get his attention as he had earphones in. As I did it I suddenly thought “Oh God, I hope this is Troy.” Thankfully it was and we chatted for a while before I bid him good day and set out for lunch. After lunch I was heading down the escalators when I spotted Liana, sister of Chiara (the real one, not the me one) just a few steps ahead of me. We chatted for a few minutes about her forthcoming HSC exams and what she hopes to do after that. As we were heading through the mall, I said Hello to a young guy from the RH&C cast as he passed by. After bidding Liana farewell, I was on my way back to the copy shop. Just as I got to the very same crossing where I saw “Calvin”, another, slightly older man whom I also recognised as someone who chatted to me briefly after a performance of TLE walked by me and in his most mumbled voice said “Fabulous” as he brushed pass me. In any other circumstances this might have been a nice complement, but after the proceedings of the day, I was more than disturbed. Once I picked up the posters I made a bee-line straight for the bus, just a little weary of who I was going to bump into next.

On the bus on the way home I couldn’t help but think, how many times was I the reluctant chatter, and just how many times was I the persistent chatter?