Wake Up, Juliet

Today is an exciting day for my husband, Sean. He’s been working with a team on a book fansite for the past year and a half, and they’ve had tremendous success with it. Their success was given a boost today when Random House named them the OFFICIAL fansite for The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series by Michael Scott! God only knows where they will go from here, but with a movie in the works, this series has Harry Potter potential for blowing up.

I’ve had the pleasure of observing some of the inner workings behind this team, and it’s taught me some things about making a blog or website successful.

1. Find a need and fill it – The concept for this fansite came about when there was no fansite for the series. They approached the author and asked his permission, and with his blessing, a forum was born.
2. Have a solid team – In this instance, a team was needed to build something to accommodate potential size and magnitude. The team started small, but as the site grew, so did their team and their skill set. When it came to forum moderators, they recruited from within with existing forum members who were active and reliable. And what is most important is the constant communication that happens between team members.
3. Create community – The original idea behind the site was a forum, a place where fans could discuss the book series. As the site grew, a podcast was born that included poll questions and emails from fans. The fans became a part of the show.
4. Run a tight ship – The series is geared towards Young Adults, so a no tolerance policy was created and enforced to keep the forums age appropriate. Moderators were always present and active on the boards. This was huge when they were reviewed by Random House. They were flame-free and a safe haven for young fans.

So congratulations to the entire Flamel’s Immortal Portal team! Your hard work and diligence has paid off and I cannot wait to see where you guys go from here.

I joined Weight Watchers and attended my first meeting 5 weeks ago. Part of me feels like I should keep this a secret, because part of me feels like I shouldn’t need a program to eat sensibly and keep the weight off, or worse, what if I fail at this like I have with other programs. But before my brain thinks, the big mouth part of me spills it. And I think this is best. Spilling the beans creates accountability, and it makes friends and family aware, which will hopefully lead to support in social situations.

Sadly, I have to admit that I already stumbled a bit. The first few days I tracked and did very well. Then the weekend showed up, tech week for Romeo and Juliet came, and I slacked. It was still in the back of my mind, so I was more concious about what and how much I ate, but I was not diligent. The next four weeks I weighed in every other week, managing to eek out a .8 lb loss each time.

Last week I headed to a new location, one just up the street from me, with renewed sense of determination. I am sick of this cycle I’m on which does nothing but leave me depressed and loathing myself. I’m paying for this program, I’m going to make it work for me. So I got very friendly with my tracker over the past week, successfully tracking most of my intake for 6 out of 7 days. I felt the hunger pains, but I was determined to succeed.

Yesterday I stepped on the scale, praying I didn’t gain. Praying that my focus and diligence would pay off.

“You’re down 1.8 pounds. Good job,” the receptionist said, sticking the printout to my book and handing it back to me with a smile. “Have a good week.”

1.8 lbs…in one week. 3.4 lbs so far!

“Thank you,” I said back, and added a silent ‘I will’ in my head.

It’s nearly tech week for my latest show, Romeo & Juliet. You know how I know?

I had The Dream last night.

What is The Dream you ask? It is otherwise known as the “Oh Sh*t” dream. You’re putting on a performance and suddenly you’re coming up on a scene that you don’t know. You’ve never rehearsed it, you didn’t even know it existed. But suddenly everyone else knows about it and you’re a deer in the headlights.

At least my dream offered up some variety for this show. We were having an “open” dress rehearsal (still a rehearsal, but some people are invited in as audience members), and we get to the end and I realize we missed an entire scene. Then we start to see a second audience start to fill in, and I’m talking about numbers that would fill a house! None of us realized there was to be a second run through, but we shrug and go along with it. Until Sean comes up to me and says “I can’t stay, I have to go to bowling” and walks out – leaving us without a Romeo.

Luckily none of these dreams have yet to manifest themselves in a real performance.

So on its way to our door is a refurbished Project Runway edition Brother CE5000 (I swear the Project Runway aspect meant nothing to me). It was a good price and it had good reviews on Overstock.com.

It will be such an upgrade from what we’ve got now.

Old machine: 1 stitch (straight)
New machine: 50 built in stitches and 87 stitch functions

Old machine: heavy as a boulder
New machine: supposedly lightweight with a handle

Old machine: buttonholes were done by hand by moi, who sucks eggs at it
New machine: 5 styles of one-step auto-size buttonholes (now I won’t dread Sean’s doublets!)

Old machine: free at a yardsale, no manual
New machine: Instruction booklet in English and Spanish (you know, in case I want to put my minor to good use)

So yippee skippy! I will be doing a happy dance when it arrives, and perhaps I will no longer avoid sewing.

Oh goodness me, how quickly time flies…

It seems like yesterday I got the call to play Juliet, and today we’re a mere 2 1/2 weeks from opening night.

*gulp*

People are starting to make reservations – Sean’s mom is calling to reserve 12 tickets for a show!

I really shouldn’t worry, things are looking good, and shows always come together remarkably fast in the last few weeks. Everyone seems to suddenly realize that we have a deadline to get our act together. But butterflies come with the acting territory. Especially when I’m spewing out the balcony scene like no one’s business one minute, then Act 4’s lines somehow get misplaced in the deep caverns of my mind. It’ll be my new marketing strategy – Come see whether Juliet can remember her lines! Everyone loves a trainwreck.

In truth, I jest. My nerves were typing just then.

Our director isn’t helping. Monday evening he brings up the subject of Mr. James Earl Jones, who he had the pleasure to have drinks with while over in London a couple months back. Apparently he’s been chatting with Mr. Voice-of-Darth-Vader’s son, who set up the interview, and it was mentioned that they would come to Stageloft. And they’ll be “at home” (not too far away) during R&J’s run.

How cool would it be if he did come to see the show? Highly unlikely, but freaking awesome if he did.

I could totally be discovered…

But now back to my regularly scheduled reality.

Theater is a very big part of my life, and I love everything about it.  Ok, I don’t really love drilling lines into my brain, I wish they would stick without much effort. But it’s a small sacrifice for everything else. People ask me why I do theater, why I love it so much. And my answer is “It’s a chance to escape your own problems for a couple hours and just be someone else”. There are many many more reasons. But where else can you become someone else?

Ok, I suppose identity theft and double lives could fall under that category.

Where can you LEGALLY become someone else?

Well, I suppose if you change your name…

Anywho.

The part I hate the most about theater is the very first step: the Audition.

Auditions are terrifying. At least to me. There are those out there who really enjoy auditioning.

Sickos.

I’ll take my most recent case. Stageloft Repertory Theater is putting on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Who has two thumbs and wanted the part of Juliet really really (almost too) badly? This girl. It’s one of the few great female roles in Shakespeare. Men have Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, the list goes on. Women? Not so much. There are a few, but with men filling all the roles on stage back in Shakespeare’s day, the demand for great female roles wasn’t as important.

My biggest worry going into this audition is that Juliet’s age is called out in the play. She’s a mere 13 years old. My time was running out to play her. I have confidence in my acting abilities, especially with Shakespeare, but age and casting I have no control over. I could give a great audition, but if there isn’t a “Romeo” in his 20s to match me, I’m sunk.

So what do I do?

Convince my handsome and talented 20-something husband to audition with me. He was wavering about the idea, I just used my womanly wiles to tip the scales in my favor.

Audition day came and we headed to the theater. We saw friends and past castmates who were also auditioning, which lightened the mood. I flashed back to a year before, when I was stepping into this theater for the first time to audition. I knew no one, and it was scary! It’s no longer scary, but I still eye all the strangers (particularly the competition), and wonder how good they are. How good will their readings be? Auditions make me paranoid and extremely self concious. I’m not proud.

I was pleased with how my readings went, so I left feeling quite confident. We went out to dinner with friends and discussed and overanalyzed what we thought would happen. The director told us we’d hear the next day, or the day after. Thus began the worst part of the whole audition process. The Wait. The Wait is why I always try to go the last day of auditions, and if appointments are scheduled, at one of the last times. I can’t stand the Wait. My brain goes into overdrive, analyzing my performance, the comments made by the director, the competition, and convinces myself one minute I have the role and the next that I’ll be devastated.

I was on the edge of my seat the whole day at work. Every time the phone rang my heart raced. But the call didn’t come. The Wait was killing me. I’ll admit, I became a little obsessed. That night I went to a cafe with friends, and my phone sat front and center on the table all night. I may have poked it several times, saying “Ring darn you!”

Again, I’m not proud.

Midafternoon on Day 2 of the Wait my work phone rang and I see the director’s name on the caller ID. My heart is racing as I take a deep breath and pick up, chirping “This is Briana” in my most nonchalant, not-freaking-out-over-casting voice.

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks, it is the east, and Juliet must be who I’m speaking to!”

All air escaped from my body and I started smiling like a goon. I may have worried a few passersby.

The Wait was over, and the role is mine. 

Who is my Romeo? Let’s just say it won’t be too hard to be in love with him.

I don’t know what it is, but I find the constant need to be busy or multitask. Sitting on the couch watching TV isn’t enough for me. I must be surfing the internet, knitting, embroidering, doing something else at the same time. Sean yells at me all the time about it, but I can’t help it. I guess it’s just a need to have a purpose. If I’m going to be a couch potato, I might as well be a couch potato who writes a blog post, edits some shots, or makes headway on a project.

My personal calendar is a mess of rehearsals, lessons, meetings, etc. I love to be on the go. There’s so much I want to do in life, and I want to do them right now. Yes I do get the occasional burn out and need to take a month or so off and be “lazy”, but it’s only so long before I’m itching to be in a play or learn some new hobby.

Is there anyone else like this? Too many interests, not enough time? Hands must be busy? Brain must go a few different directions?

I started this post as a “10 Things you Didn’t Know About Me” type thing, but then I started going way too in-depth with some of my items. And I felt they all deserved their own posts.

#2 I have extra ear holes

Be prepared to ship me off to the circus. I am an abnormal freak.

Ok, not really, but what I’m about to show you is my “parlor trick” – you know, what I pull out when a good time with friends turns to a show and tell of your double joints, tongue rolls and ear wiggles. I can roll my tongue, but so can others.

Not everyone has extra ear holes.

And I’m not talking about holes made by ear piercing guns. I’m talking about something that was always there, and I don’t know why.

Presenting: My extra ear hole.

Told you I was a freak.

Ok now that I’ve shown you mine, tell me about yours! What do you pull out as your parlor trick?

P.S.: If you missed the first post of this series, check out #1: I was a zookeeper

I started this post as a “10 Things you Didn’t Know About Me” type thing, but then I started going way too in-depth with some of my items. And I felt they all deserved their own posts.

#1 - I was a zookeeper

For 2 summers in high school I worked at our local zoo. The first year I was a gift shop girl, ringing in admissions, stocking the shelves full of plushies, prepping and wrangling school groups, and running the cash register, which included counting the change that aforementioned school kiddies would pay in. Thanks to my training in Outdoor Emergency Care (for ski patrolling), I also became a medical assistant for our manager. So occasionally I got the call to grab the bag and head to a scene. Typically a scrape or a cut, the occasional heat sickness, but my favorite was a snake bite. I know, I sound sadistic, but this particular kid just wouldn’t give us the whole truth. According to him, he was walking by the pond when the snake jumped out and bit him. After pressing him a bit further (sadly we couldn’t pull out the interrogation lamp and water torture) he owned up that he was reaching into the pond to try to grab the snake when it snapped.

But the best year was the second. I got a job as birdkeeper, and while it had it’s grunt job moments (cleaning cages and washing out food and water dishes which had been terded in) it had some really cool moments as well. The day started early, feeding, watering and cleaning the cages of our outdoor residents. That meant I got to crawl in with the toucans daily. How many people get to hand feed sliced bananas to a real live toucan? As their job? Granted I was always on my toes, because birds are sneaky buggers and one little slip up may have left me explaining to the zoo owners why there are only 3 birds in that cage when there used to be 4.

Next step would be to bring our “commuters” out to their open air perches. Our two commuters were a bratty cockatoo and a blue hyacinth macaw with a beak that could break a broomstick in half and a record to go along with it. In one snap he had broken his owner’s (our head birdkeeper’s) wrist. I had to wrestle, trick, and bribe them out of their cages every day. Some days they’d go quietly, and other days…well, I still have scars from those other days. And I’d repeat this game at the end of the day when I had to bring them back in.

The rest of the morning was spent cleaning cages and feeding and exercising our other residents, who would get their moment in the sun at our noon time show. This was my favorite part of the day.

For two hours every day the head birdkeeper and I would have a slew of exotic birds out on our open air stage. We’d talk about each one of them, demonstrate tricks, and answer questions from the crowd, mostly children. Each bird had a personality, and each bird had a special trick we would try to have them show. Some days they would perform like a star, and other days they were grumpy and took pleasure in making us look ridiculous.

One day in particular, we had the bratty cockatoo’s pal out with us. His name was Fred and he was always a gamble thanks to his salty language. He used to grace the open air perch with his friend until he insulted a customer. From that point forward he was restricted to the barn unless he was having a “good” day, in which we would bring him to the show and let the audience pet him. On this fateful day we thought Fred was having a good day. I had bent down to show off these adorable little sun conures when I felt a very deliberate, and very sharp, pinch on my butt. I turned around to witness Fred booking it back to his perch, wings spread, CACKLING!

You can’t make that up.

You also can’t stay mad. Bruised butt and ego aside, it was funny. And the audience found it hilarious, including Sean, who had just happened to visit me that day. But you better believe I kept one eye on Fred the rest of that summer.

That summer I was exposed to some many other cool animals beyond my aviary realm.

I witnessed the Running of the Kangaroos - the day at the beginning of the warm season when the kangaroos are herded out to their summer enclosure from the barn by the zoo keepers. Did you know that to steer the kangaroo, you merely turn his tail? It’s like a rudder. Which of course is easier said than done when they’re hopping at full speed. I witnessed one of the six foot tall male keepers take an awful dive trying to steer a bitty baby roo.

A baby giraffe was born that summer, much to everyone’s excitement and delight. My friend took me into the barn to see it, which meant climbing up a ladder to the platform with the feeding trough. Momma Giraffe decided she was hungry and she wanted the food that I was leaning over. Do you know how BIG a giraffe head is? Neither did I til it firmly nudged me out of it’s way. It was as big as my torso.

And to cap off the summer of babies, a brand new leopard cub joined our crew. Once afternoon my sister (who had started working in the gift shop) and I went to walk and play with it after hours. There’s nothing like having someone thrust a large, wiggly, powerful baby jungle cat into your arms. You realize quickly that those are big paws with big claws on the ends and he’s batting at your ponytail. You also think for the first time that your hair is really close to your face.  We watched as the cub played with the resident tortoise, jumping on its back and riding it around the room pawing at the shell’s holes. We watched as the tortoise drew in its head and walked straight into the wall, bumping the unsuspecting cub in the head.

It was an incredible summer, and an amazing opportunity to witness so many amazing creatures up close. You can’t get that kind of experience out of a book.

I’m ready to pinch myself. That’s how good this week has been. And it’s only Thursday.

I hope I don’t post this and then bite my tongue when a million bad things bombard me over the second half of the week.

Good thing #1: I was a guest fan judge over at I Heart Faces! I was flattered, humbled, and overjoyed at the request and the flood of comments you all left me. I hope you’ll stick around Can I say one thing? Being a judge is HARD! I wish everyone could win. I do not envy Angie and Amy their job in narrowing down the finalists, and the weekly judges who have to decide all on their own. And the hardest part? Refraining from commenting on other blogs. I tried to remain as anonymous and mysterious as possible, even though my fingers itched to type in the comment window.  Next week I’ll go back to being a regular old contestant, but the comments and encouragement will live with me forever.

Good thing #2: We booked the rest of our Scotland trip! Yes, this meant plopping down a grand for a deposit, but it means our trip is pretty much planned out. We have been planning this trip for 2 years, since we first gave my parents the Christmas gift with a picture of Scotland, promising to take them. We’re book ending the trip with 3 night stays in Edinburgh, and for the middle week we’ll be on a whirlwind cross country adventure, plotted out with help from Paul and Pauline at Homemade Holidays. The trip even includes a stay in a castle with a resident ghost!

Good thing #3: My hubby and I have been cast in Romeo and Juliet….as Romeo and Juliet! I know, Sean will have to shave, we can’t have a hairy faced Juliet but it’s a sacrifice we’ll have to make. (Um…Kidding. Just making sure you’re paying attention) Rehearsals begin Monday and the show goes up between April 30 and May 16. Fancy a trip? Sean and I working this closely could be dangerous. Last night we decided that a lolcat version of Romeo and Juliet was in order.

It hasn’t ALL been good. My poor little kitten Malcolm had to have “the procedure” today. Sean is grieving. London enjoyed his day alone in the house.

Have you had a good week? I’d love to hear about it.