The other day I accidentally left a candle burning and I left my apartment for several hours. When I got back, there was such a delightful odour in the apartment and thankfully (and more importantly,) the place hadn’t burned down. My boyfriend said to me: “You scare me sometimes;” words I’ve only ever heard uttered to people losing their marbles.
Am I losing my marbles, maybe?
Note to self: Work out the ol’ brain more with daily sudoku.
I suppose a great way to stick to my New Years resolution of writing more/all the time, is to write more in this blog. I know it’s supposed to be behind-the-scenes confessions about my time at Humber (Clown) College, but well, it’s the Holidays still, we don’t go back to school until Monday, so in the meantime, please excuse my non-school-based rambles.
My cat’s in heat.
(Why do I always talk about my cat? I don’t mean to. I don’t think any cat-owner means to talk about their cat(s) as much as they do. They’re just so adorably distracting.)
Last night we cuddled and spent the evening catching up on hours upon hours worth of Glee. Hey! I don’t care what you have to say! That TV show, love it or hate it, is bringing more and more children into the performing arts. I wish Con had a glee club when I attended school there. We had an improv team that couldn’t afford to go to the only improv competition for French schools in Ontario. It was all the way in Timmins. That’s pretty damn far from the Niagara Region.
We couldn’t even put on plays. We tried to once, but interest and enthusiasm among the cast was so low we had to cancel it (AND I’d nabbed the lead! #unfair) Trying to compare my high school education with high schools on TV is impossible. They don’t write shows for 300 or so French Canadian public school children, most of whom’s ambition remains “staying a live to deal pot to the next generation of Wellanders.”
I think small-town Franco-Ontarian culture does have a place within pop-culture. Somebody get me on the phone with TFO!
I should probably have written that last bit of rantiness in French.
Eh bien. Peut-être la prochaine fois.
With the launch of Facebook’s new Timeline and, as time, in the real, non-social-networky world goes on, I’m beginning to realize I have a bit of an obsession with time. Let’s add the word “time” in here one more time for good measure. Time.
I’ve never been the greatest at managing time. I used to sign up for many extra-curricular activities, (dance, piano lessons, army cadets, sports, improv, taxidermy, etc.) I was out so often that some of my fondest memories are of my parents and eventually my siblings rushing me from one place to the next. It was a regular occurrence for the driver to brake especially hard at red lights and stop signs when I was trying to put on my cadet dress uniform over top of my ballet tights in the back of the moving car.
In university, I became a bit better at managing assignments, but not until third year. I’d had enough of all-nighters because I worked. I needed to be (somewhat) conscious to up-sell popcorn to miserable suckers. I began to recognize patterns in the professors’ assignment-schedules, knowing I would be given a certain amount of time to write a certain amount of essays that were all going to be due within the same week so, I’d begin writing them well in advance. By fourth (and fifth) year, I had pretty much managed it. And if I still couldn’t finish on time, there was always bribery. Sexy, sexy bribery.
I finished school and moved to France and there, time sped up. It started to feel as though it was going so fast I was spinning. (Note: it might have been all that wine.)
When I came back state-side, (province-side?) I was obsessed with seeing people; staying in touch with friends I’d made in France and re-connecting with school and work friends – booking and often over-booking myself, throwing parties at which I would try to combine all of my social circles at once in an attempt to save time and thus, kill several birds with one party-stone.
It is impossible to combine everything in one. Comedy in Toronto is helping me to realize this. On any particular night, there are at least a dozen performances I can attend, either as a performer, or (more commonly) a spectator. I can’t see them all. I can’t do it all. And there are parties. And there are other meet-ups. And there are joke-jams.
Then, there are nights in.
Nights. In.
Sometimes they’re the simplest and the most meaningful.
I’ve been down a bit lately with regards to our sketch troupe falling apart. I had all these ideas for sketches. Even when I didn’t have any ideas, I knew that if there was a show coming, I could sit in front of my computer and come up with something funny for the show.
But now, without a sketch troupe with which to perform, I’ve decided to turn my sketch ideas into short stories. The first one I’m working on is Christmas-themed, which is good because there’s no way I’d be able to stage it on time before Christmas. Once we start school up again, people will have moved on from the whole Holiday thing. (Ah, How fleeting is our time?…)
I don’t know if the humour I wish to depict on stage via sketch performers will translate as well onto the page. Maybe it’ll be more difficult when it’s not possible to see the reactions on the actors’ faces.
Hopefully readers’ imaginations are still capable of visualizing such emotional responses in their minds…, if the piece is written well enough!
Ooooh. New challenges!
Holy Crap. I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since the Moneyball review. I have been BUSY, ladies and gentlemen! Time feels like it keeps speeding up. I’ve been completing assignments the day before they’re due, staying up past midnight, despite having to work super-early in the morning at the Career Centre.
It seems in each class, we’re working on major projects. There isn’t really one in which we’re working less hard than the other. It’s crazy! The workload is by vastly greater than last year, but folks, I am loving it.
I’m working on a chauvinist male “bro” character called Brian for my Acting class. It’s both liberating and challenging to portray the type of male I absolutely despise.
I’ve written and submitted the first draft of a 10-minute play (more dramatic than comedic) play about a soldier of the First World War who visits a French brothel. Apparently, I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time spent in France. Like it or not, talking about hundreds of thousands of dead guys for 5 months straight two years in a row really gets into your head.
We’ve completed our clown pieces in physical comedy and are now moving onto different techniques.
In sketch writing, we’ve been working on two major projects: a parody of a TV show (I chose Star Trek, obvi) and a monologue script based on a person we know upon which we’ll be building characters.
In stand-up, Larry’s teaching us what it would be like to work in a writing room, working on a late-nite host’s monologue. The humour is very topical, news-related, so it’s been helping us with the LaughDraft news as well (which we will be filming this week after a long hiatus!)
Finally, we’re working on writing a sit-com. I won’t reveal too much about that at the moment, in case anyone reading this blog decides to steal my class’ ideas and prevent us from ever working on this project in the ‘real world.’
And then there’s all the ‘outside school’ stuff… and work…
Life is crazy!!!
…Just the way I like it.
Brie Watson 