Letters to Holly

Friday, November 14

Rehearsal Seven: Hello Again

I got a call from the current artistic director (and the director of the spring murder play). He's still pursuing me to take over his job, and I'm curious about it. I need to learn just what kind of manpower, equipment, and money we have before I design a set. This new position might not start until next year. I don't know. He's asked me about this for most of the year now. I don't want to bury myself in this company. I want the freedom to run to Asheville if they're doing a great play. had I not been neck-deep in the script committee, I may have tried out for Misery. I didn't get to even see that one.

I have about four pages of ghost mumbling down, and I have about eight more to go. This new deadline to bee off-book has rattled me, and I'm cramming to learn the lines. When we arrive, we meet a new techie: the courtroom director. You might remember that she and the guy who was to play Marley butted heads in ugly fashion last year, and now I have to begrudgingly whisper thanks that he bowed out. Not that I'm in any way happy he's sick, mind you. The courtroom director will be our soundboard operator.

We're informed our playbill bios are due right before Thanksgiving, and I'll probably just recycle my bio from the spring show. I spend more of my commute playing with the accent. I was in an Agatha Christie show a few years back, and we all had British accents, and we all sounded like actors fumbling through British accents. Well, except for the lady who actually was from England. She was fine. The spring show was originally set in England, but I asked to dump the accents out of fear that they plus the script load would be too much to wrestle with. And I'm sure I was right about that. We menfolk are also under direction to grow muttonchops. When the costume director asked me if I was doing that, I said I'm puffing out my cheeks as hard as I can.

We run through Act Two once and then run the second half of it again. That means I did my ghost lines twice, and that will help me learn this stuff. I hope to be in costume before Thanksgiving so I can focus on what's essentially puppetry. I can't make eye contact, and I have to talk with my hands.

Moving Picture of the Day
The new trailer for Watchmen, the end-all and be-all story for comics-as-literature. If they keep the book's ending, I'll be shocked.

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