4/10/01 - 8:08 PM
A smile can be a powerful thing.
I've had one on my face for most of the day...in fact, the past several days, which is terribly odd. Especially me, Duchess of Depression that I tend to be.
Matt recently corraled me into playing the part of Uve, a Jewish woman in the musical he wrote for his screenwriting class. No big deal, said I. I can sing, said I. I'm not a fantastic actress but I can say lines off a paper and stab Evelyn with a letter opener, I said.
Today was supposed to be the day of the opening. My smile has been strained but fairly genuine all day. Yesterday, Matt scrambled to help me learn the song I had a part in, dubbing a vocal version onto a practice tape for me and letting me see an older version of it on video tape twice until I thought I had a good idea of what to do with it. We had a bitch of a time getting that thing down because Matt, talented though he may be, doesn't know squat when it comes to writing vocal music. He doesn't have vocal experience so what we end up with is stuff that sounds great instrumentally but the second you try to fit the words into it, you get some very frustrated singers. It probably doesn't help that he's got two altos (me and Ev) singing soprano notes and one tenor (Mike, music major) singing something that he isn't real comfortable with, either. Ev managed to fix her part today but I'm stuck trying to stand on my toes and reach those crazy notes.
Not to mention, like I said, today was supposed to be the performance. I showed up in an empty room at 1, like Matt asked us to and proceded to read the first chapter of Stephen King's "It" while waiting for other people to show. Matt came in not long after I did, then followed by Marco and his sister. Marco is a friend of Matt's, in the same screenwriting class and they're both in each other's scenes for class. So Marco, Matt, Amada and I wandered around for a while, hashing out scenes and vocals and shit. Soon, the rest of the two shows showed up including Ryan (Uve's husband), Dave (Hitler) and Mike (Ruth [Ev]'s husband). About this point, we started noticing people coming in and sitting down.
Once we were all collected and starting to set up, Matt and Marco looked up into the audience and both sort of went, "Umm... something's wrong here." No one was from their class. Oh, sure, they found two or three, but mostly, it was a Music in Society class come to take a TEST. In the room where we were going to do our performance. And the Screenwriting class was nowhere to be found. Matt and Marco and the few people from the class started a mad dash to locate the professor while the rest of us tried to keep from losing our sanity backstage while the MiS proff kept coming back and saying, "You know, the CHORALE room is open," and hinting that we should move our filthy *snif* THEATRE asses out of HIS area.
Finally, we moved ourselves to the library, where Matt and Marco had found their proff and were trying to decide what to do with the fifteen people in cast/crew of the shows. Without that lecture hall, we really couldn't do much and Matt couldn't restructure his scene to fit into the Map room in the library. Marco could, however, so they went ahead and finished there while Matt reschedualed for next Tuesday. We might be able to reserve the Black Box Theatre instead, which would be nice for the theatre people, since they know that stage better.
And Dave lost his mustache. During Assassins, Dave played Charles Guiteau and had a fabulous full beard of some thickness that he trimmed down afterwards to a fairly nice goatee. After he agreed to play Hitler for Matt, he promised to shave everything but a little bitty Hilter mustache just for the show, then take it all off. He did but since the show was rescedualed, he'll probably have to go with paint or make-up for the next round. Matt was disappointed.
I think we all were. We worked hard to pull this thing together in a last minute because Matt lost his original cast/crew to a Lysistrada matinee. Now, Matt could go back to the original people but Ev and I told him we'd stab him with the letter opener if he did. He promised he wouldn't. *grin* Poor Matt. He looked so frustrated and I hugged him a few times to make sure he knew that, though I was frustrated, I wasn't mad at him. We all knew it wasn't his fault that the schedual got confused. Even if Ev was threatening to stab him. But I think the fact that I couldn't stop smiling helped a little. Maybe. Or it was just annoying.
I listened to Semisonic walking around campus today and I can't help but smile when I'm listening to music and walking. It was a beautiful day, even if a little cold, but the sun was out and there were only a few poetic clouds in the sky. I enjoyed my day, hopping between classes and the musical and Ev and Matt. Ev and I ended up in the library media center for a long time, staring longingly at the vinyl and the video tapes. We ended up renting "The Yellow Wallpaper" and a two-tape set of "Les Miserables" but we only got to watch the former today. We'll sack out in a TV room tomorrow and watch Les Mis. *grin* It's been a good day.
