bulletpoint check in.... oh yeah!

1) that headshot a few posts ago was created by ms. deborah tjoa. she is a fancy girl with photoshop. :)

2) Speaking of headshots, I picked them up from photoworks last night and they are done and there are 200 of them sitting in my living room and thank freaking god it is finally over!!! Now I just have to write one million letters to every theatre in the bay area and send them the new one. Maybe I’ll wait til the new year…

3) I have been rehearsing a show. this is probably news to some of you since there is soooo much to catch up on. it's called "43 Plays for 43 Presidents" and is a 90 minute play composed of 43 very short plays about every single US President. It's a lot of kooky fun - 5 actors playing something like 136 roles - and has music, singing, silliness, fire, tragedy and dancing as well as a short Bollywood musical number. And I get to fall face first into a bowl of cherries. (anyone know who that president is????) How can this not be entertaining in some way? not too much info up on the website yet, but here tis: http://randt.org/

It’s a small waiver contract, but the show is really cool and it’s been a real breath of fresh air to work on so far with really nice people who are all doing it because they love it as well… all good. :)

4) Recently watched Down in the Valley – an Edward Norton movie (thanks to the AMD!) It was sort of like a modern day cowboy romance psychological thriller character study type thing. Highly recommended.

5) Speaking of movies – just got some amazing news regarding Hog Island. It seems that it has somehow gotten a distribution deal by a company that specializes in foreign and independent cinema. Vanguard Cinema – something like that… This is really pretty amazing and way more than I could have ever hoped for… I’m still processing actually… Plus, I just found out it got into a 4th Film Festival – The Berkeley Film and Video Festival and even won a festival award. Go figure.

6) Things are about to change for me big time at the circus center. I’m being sent up to Trapeze Level 3 (which is basically the advanced class – you stay in Trap 2 as long as it takes you to get all the intermediate moves and only when you solidify those can you move on). I’m being told to move on to the Russian teacher who is not um, well, humorLESS, but definitely not demonstrative…it’s hard for me personally to work with people who don’t give a lot back emotionally. It’s just me and I know it. But she has an AMAZING eye – there is NO cheating. We’ll see – I might wimp out and go with the French teacher, who is also good, but much smile-e-ier and very forthcoming with positive feedback, but perhaps a bit easier on you therefore… I’ve also added an extra day of silk practice each week at the center and my silk teacher is pretty much telling me that I need to work independently now and make my routine. I had been pushing back a lot – but I finally feel ready. And excited – however, the really hard part seems to be finding the perfect music – there’s just so much stuff I love and it’s really hard to pick one! If anyone has any silk routine music suggestions, please send them my way…

Basically I’m strong enough now so that I can do things like climb the rope NINE times and do sets of pull ups and hold ridiculous shapes where my ass is over my head and hold myself on the trapeze by my feet whilst doing sit ups and all sorts of totally crazy stuff that I never thought would happen… it’s a good thing that I am such a stubborn motherfucker. ;)

7) Coraline has been going through all of our old recordings from thanksgiving weekend 2 years ago. It’s been rather enlightening in many ways. Some things sound way better than expected. Some things sound like total ass. It looks like we’ll have some salvageable songs that should be getting up on the website and myspace within the next couple months as well as trying to record a plethora of new ones as well. Basically, we have our work cut out for us still…

8) Had a really fun girls night last week. At the best place in the city – Mescolanza. It was just nice and chill and fun and relaxed and all around excellent. Everyone had a little chance to do catch up, but it was also a night of silliness and weird and funny and sometimes bizarre stories. I learned a bunch of new things about my close friends, which is always cool to do as an adult. It made me realize that since this particular group of us all met one another as adults, there are all these years of untapped stories and unearthed embarrassing moments as well as random factoids that we don’t really know about cause we didn’t have grade school or high school or even college together to obsessively check in with one another about all sorts of minutiae that you only care about when you are a girl of any of those ages. Funny. Pleasing. If only there was time for two a month!

9) The day after thanksgiving was 9 ½ Tart (that would mean me and Dave’s 9 ½ year anniversary). We had a very nice day of chillness in the morning and sleeping in until 11am!!!! Then we had a nice afternoon at the climb gym, followed by tea at Lovejoy’s Tea Room (excellent place, if you’ve never been) and we also picked up a heater for his garage studio and this amazing little vacuum thing called the shark. It runs on batteries, so the lights in the apartment don’t blow and even though it’s pretty small, it’s something! And it picks up birdseed! That’s all I ask for… it’s pretty much changed my life. Then I had a kickass massage with Jen Weed. I was a mess. It was great. To finish up our day, we watched a bunch of episodes of this PBS 5 dvd documentary about all the presidents that everyone in my cast is slowly working through. Dave and I have been having quite an excellent time with them – so much learning! So little time. I am full of history now. Just let me know if you want any. ;)

10) Had Thanksgiving at Mia and Dave’s. It was great. So chill (can you tell that chill is good these days!?). good food (I think it may have all been vegetarian except for the turkey – I was in veggie heaven!). Good people. Good games. Good after food shenanigans involving yoga and acrobatics on totally full stomachs. Excellent. I think perhaps dave and I should never have thanksgiving at our house ever again and leech off someone else from here on out (ok Mia and Dave - you’re hired!)

11) I think that’s enough. I could just keep going backwards in time, but then I would never be done. We’ll stop there.

12) nope – one more thing. Does anyone else feel rather blah about the holidays this year? I feel like I don’t even know what to celebrate anymore...where all this fits in and what this shit is really about. I feel like it’s so hard to find the real truth in any of the festivities under all the commercial bullshit. I just want my friends and family to know that they mean a lot to me and that I love them and am thankful for them and I just can’t stand to get them all trinkets in order to show them that I have these feelings. Ugh. As I said to Arika last night, I would rather have an awesome dinner over red wine with an incredible chat that lasts hours, than feel the need to add my money into the pit of American holiday gluttonous consumerism. Wow. I sound like a scrooge. Perhaps I need to go to the ice skating rink, where I can kick some moves to tunes like “U-u-u-urgent” and “Pour some sugar on me” and all the other incredibly weird things that I’ve heard coming from the loudspeakers each time I walk by whilst pining away longingly to be skating rather than numbercrunching.