First Wednesday

This is the first Wednesday of my Summer Break, 2006. It's nice. So far on my break, I have seen a Broadway show, applied for jobs, and gone to a memorial.

I've applied for jobs at Kroger, McDonald's, and Chik-fil-a. I hope I can get a job at the latter. I wouldn't have to work Sundays, and, when I am working, I'd be among friends (pretty much everyone I know with a job works at this Chik-fil-a). Plus, I'd get there early enough to have breakfast, and on my break I could eat my favorite fast-food item ever created: the chicken sandwich.

I saw Wicked on Saturday with Amanda, her mom, her grandmother, and her friend Sarah. The three kids sat in the fourth row and the adults sat in the sixth. It was awesome! I had heard the CD plenty of times, but to see it live is something I will never forget. After the show, Amanda and I went to the stage door. We got autographs from all the principal performers except the guy who played Fiyero. I saw the understudy Elphaba perform, but I never would have know she was the understudy if it wasn't for the slips of paper in the program and the sign in the lobby (Equity laws require that such things be announced, plus it's just a good idea to announce it anyway).

Uncle Tom's memoial was really nice. It was held at Lake Lure, North Carolina. This is the same place where they filmed Dirty Dancing and some other movies. I got to see some relatives that I haven't seen in a long time, and all of them were clearly trying to figure out how I went from the little kid they all remembered to...this.

I'm going to some acting/modeling audition thing June 8th; wish me luck! (Clearly, i will not be there for the modeling aspect of it all...)

On a less upbeat note: I don't remember if I wrote about this or not, but here it is: janet bought me two third-row seats to see Chicago at the Fox for my birthday. However, her mom recently found the tickets, and took them and sold them. Did she give Janet the money? Of course not. It really amazes me how some parents can be such shit-heads towards their kids. Keep in mind, this isn't the only time Janet's parents have completely screwed up. Janet didn't even know she had a sister until a year ago (she had had a twin, who died, but she didn't know anything about her 30+ yeard-old sister living in New York). I hope Janet is able to get the hell out of there as soon as she graduates, because it's really ruinging her life living with these people. Her father never went to school, and her mother is old as dirt. Why even have kids after a certain age if you know there's a risk of serious problems for both you and the kid?

Whatever.

Animals have an annoying innocence about them. Someone could be crying their eyes out while another scrapes some food off their plate into the trash can, and the dog will get up and sniff around the can for any signs of food that may have missed the opening, completely disregarding their surroundings. It' an innocence that is at times cute; at times unwanted. But it's there, and we keep going without noticing, because we're too busy with real problems (i.e. Those not involving food on the floor).

I'm in the kitchen. The Braves are on the TV (loudly) and we're eating dinner: fish, lima benas, and rice (the really good sticky, yellow kind). The Braves are losing. I't the 13th, and a full moon. I finish dinner third and rinse my plate. I go through my usual routine: rinse plate, put in dishwasher, put in fork, get a drink, rinse glass, put in dishwasher. I'm at the fridge, probably looking for dessert, when the phone rings.

Mom woek up feeling sick to her stomach. We went out today to try to find me a job. i asked at McDonald's, but they didn't have any applications, so I'll just do that online. We went to Pike's and bought grandma a hanging plant and Aunt Chris a cherry tomato plant. We went to Aunt Chris' house to drop off the plat and pick up a bench. We ended up also flipping her mattress and pulling a pot out of the ground that was sealed in by the ivy growing from every possible opening. She already has a tomato plant, so she's going to give it to Bonnie. Around noon, mom drops me off at my old school, Hebron Christian Academy, so I can see some of my old friends in "The Sound of Music." It was really good. i felt bad comparing their sets and scene changes to ours, but then i reminded myself that with a budget in the low hundreds, they did quite well. The show was about three hours long and started at one, so I got out at about 4:30 to meet mom, who had been sitting outside for about an hour. We went home. After some time has passed, about an hour, we get a call. Uncle Tom is in emergency surgery due to lack of bloodflow to his abdomen. Savannah just wanted to let us know.

The phone rings. Mom tells me to answer it, since I'm only six inches away. The TV is a little loud, so i moved towards the dining room to hear better. It's Jennifer, my cousin. She sounds horrible and asks if my mom is okay. Figuring she's talking about the surgery, I said, 'Fine, I guess. Do you want to talk to her?'
'Oh God...yeah, maybe I should.'
I motioned to mom that the phone's for her. Dad offers her the cordless, but she walks over to me by the old phone and takes it. I returned to the fridge in my search for something sweet. That's when my damn 20/20 hearing kicks in:
'...He didn't make it...?'
And I knew. I closed the door and kept my eyes on mom, who's slowly breaking down. She ends the conversation and almost immediately I'm in her tightest grasp I've ever felt. Grandma blurts in with her usual 'Who was that?' and I want to smack her. Mom announces the news and we quickly become one mass of people in the kitchen, all hugging each other. Grandma's pissing me off with her 'Oh's and 'It's okay's so I turn to her.
'Will you just shut up?'

Mom's downstairs now with dad, being comforted. Grandma's watching the damn Braves game (even though they're losing). I'm writing this because I am mad. When I'm mad, I eat, write, and play the piano. And i'm mad as hell. He was doing perfectly fine, and now this. False hope, a small glimmer of sunshine through the crack in the prison wall, and the crack is now sealed. The hope shattered. At least twelve lives ruined.

God, the bastard, has some sick sense of humor.

Back to school tomorrow

Yay! I can finally have a life again! Went back to SC over the weekend. Tom is alert, talking, and trying to escape. He's also calling the nurse a 'bitch.' It's nice to have hm back to normal (for the most part, he's still a little loopy from coming off the morphine, and he's withdrawing from smoking and drinking).

For our final in the Musical Production class, we have a small written part (25%) and a performance grade (75%). For the performance, we have to pick a song from a musical and perform it onstage before the class. Elizabeth and I are doing the title song from The Phantom of the Opera. She damn well better play 'Christine' one day. She's only seventeen and she's got the voice for it and she's a better actress than Sarah Brightman (notorious for her bugged-out eyes; look her up on Google). the only part that sucks is...me. I'm perfectly fine singing tenor (not all that easy for a bass/baritone) until i get to a high G that 'the Phantom' sings in his first verse. Everything else I sing fine (which means I'm working on making it sound less painful). I'm sure that within the last few weeks until the final that I'll improve my voice and do wonderfully. I already know Elizabeth will. The part was actually written in her range. i rehearsed Friday afternoon and started reaching the note, so hopefully in a few days I'll have it right. All I need to do now is get the karaoke CD to the show or at least that particular track from the CD (I hate using voice reduction, even if the orchestrations are better on the original CD).

I downloaded Monopoly and Operation for my cell phone over the weekend. They're a lot more fun than the little game that came with the phone. I'm still waiting for a Clue(do) and Clue(do) (S)FX game that works on my phone (LG 1300). I've seen both of them available (and the (S)FX one looks awesome! Almost like the quality of a game for the GBA system) but they don't work on my phone (yet, the website says that they'll be adding new models soon, so i can keep hoping for one to work on mine).

Hello

I'm back. Uncle Tom had some bleeding around his brain and had to be hospitalized. Mom and I went up yesterday morning and got back today around noon. He was heavily sedated when we saw him yesterday, but he was moving today! He opened his eyes and physically responded whe prompted to squeeze someone's hand as a 'yes' or 'no' sort of thing. For a man who's in the Neuro ICU ward of a hospital, he looks pretty healthy (if you ignore the machines and tubes in the room with him).

So, I said that I had played Mr. Mushnik in Little Shop. The week after spring break we started after-school rehearsals. As the understudy, it was my job to know everything about my character and be ready to jump in when needed. Well, after observing about three rehearsals, Mr. Feldman called me over to him at the beginning of class one day to tell me that Paul (the principal performer for Mushnik) had been suspended for about two weeks and that I would be covering for him at rehearsal, and possibly the show itself. I didn't really know how to feel. Inside, I was very excited at the prospect of possibly playing what became my first major role in a show, yet I knew it would've been horribly rude to act that way on the outside, so I kept it all in and just went hom that night and grinned until my face hurt.

You probably want to know exactly why Paul had been punished so severely. I'll tell you in the fewest possible words (because the wheol story is really quite stupid and even I don't know all the details). Ready?

You sure...?

Okay...

He exposed himself. Not mooned someone, but EXPOSED himself. Apparently that's worth a week of OSS (out-of-school-suspension) and an additional week of ISS (in-school-suspension). actually, he only ended up serving the week of OSS and maybe a day of ISS. No idea why he didn't serve the whole punishment, but the bitter side of me wants to think it had something to do with him being a senior. Think about it: how many freshman/sophomores/juniors would've been allowed to come back a week early from something like that? I'm sort of surprised nobody said anything (well...nothing that Paul or Mr. Feldman could hear...)

Anyway, rehearsals were so much fun. The plant puppets arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and we started working with them at that nights's rehearsal. The plant was awesome! All four of the puppets (each one quite larger than the last) were designed using the original designs done for the Off-Broadway production by Martin P. Robinson, yet were made with modern-day, sturdy, lightweight materials so that the puppeteer didn't need to be a weightlifter to move them (even though the little bastards were pretty heavy...) All of them were covered with red fuzzy stuff on the inside that made death a little softer than if there hadn't been something soft to slide on. I have to applaud Preston for his puppeteering skills. He worked his ass off moving those things around, and even did the last three performances with a practically broken leg (he had injured himself the night before by not being exactly centered during Seymour's death and moving the wrong way when Seymour died). He really was a trooper.

So, opening day comes (we do day shows for the nearby middle-school kids) and the kids were, to completely honest, a sucky audience. They didn't get the jokes, they didn't applaud until the curtain call, and they voiced their opinions whenever they felt like it. opening night audience wasn't very big (Thursday night never is a big crowd) but they were a great audience. Friday day show went much better (this set of kids actually got most of the jokes!) and Friday night had a great, entusiastic crowd.

Saturday. The best night for last season's Grease and the same for this season's Little Shop of Horrors. They were the best crowd I think any of us had ever played to (though only 7 tickets away from a sell-out) and they actually cheered during the song Mushnik and Son after I had finished this one part that was "very Jewish" as one audience member put it (she herself is Jewish and complemented me on my accent and mannerisms, both of which, she said, were frequent in her household). Sunday wasn't the best performance, but we had a great audience who loved it nonetheless (even though I pretty much dropped Tyler at the end of our song).

Everyone has said such things to me/my family like "This was Sam's part from the start" "Paul got the part because he looked it more and because he's a senior" "Thank God we got a Mushnik that can actually sing!" etc. They make me feel good, and at the same time kind of sorry for Paul. However, I remind myself that he brought this upon himself and that in the real world if you take over a role, there's no time for being sympathetic towards the person who lost it. I know it sounds cruel, but it's true. If you just go around being the understudy who feels bad when you have to step in, you won't get anywhere!

But enough ranting. The show was a real treat to do and I am honored that Mr. Feldman even considered me for the part of Mushnik, let alone let me take over the role. Elizabeth said that it was very rare for Mr. Feldman to have the understudy take over premamently unless the principal performer was really gone until day before opening (which is what was supposed to happen with Paul) and that he wouldn't have done it unless he liked what he saw and really thought that I could pull it off. Elizabeth Telford is the best person I know, and I really hope that I can work with her again during, and beyond, high school. God bless her.

Anyway, the people who actually read this thing (whoever you are) now know that I haven't given up on my blog and that I'm still alive. Dad needs the computer (brand new, BTW) to do his paperwork, so I'm gonna go catch up on my geometry (...whee....) so that I don't get a zero on my take-home test (which is actually over a very easy topic).

Wish me luck at the Leo Banquet this year!

Quick Update

I'm leaving the house soon to go visit a sick family member a few hours away from here. I'll be back in a few days. Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive and that Little Shop was awesome (especially since I played Mr. Mushnik)! More later.

TTYL