Collecting hats

In which our Diva is never quite sure where she picked them all up

On a shelf in my spare room closet, there are four hatboxes full of vintage hats, mostly from the 50s and 60s. A few belonged to my grandmother. Several more (and two of the hatboxes) came from a friends' parents' garage sale a few years ago. And there are a couple I honestly don't remember how I came by.

I seem to accumulate metaphorical hats in much the same way.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love to have a higher proportion of gigs where I'm simply an actor.  Where I can give all my energy to showing up and playing my character, confident that all the other details are someone else's job and that someone else is doing it. But that's just not the career I get (at least so far), and mostly I'm okay with that.  Though occasionally I think I should have kept my big mouth shut before it uttered "I could..." *wry g*


Of course, if I haven't learned to do that by now, I don't think I'm going to. Way back in 1994, when arts organizations having websites was just a novelty, I put together the first one for Rosebriar Shakespeare Company, my second home for most of the ten years I lived in Columbus. A couple years later, I did the same for BalletMet Columbus, where my then-day-job was in an unrelated department of the admin office. Appropriately for a nationally-respected company, they've long since moved on to a far more sophisticated and professional site than I know how to design.

Which didn't stop me from opening my big mouth when Elgin Opera's need for an updated and integrated web presence became more obvious every time I tried to plug an event to my plugged-in social circle. Mind you, I can't complain about that one since (a) we got an infrastructure grant this year to pay me for it, and (b) at the end of a frustrating few months, I now know how to make Joomla do a number of things I didn't previously know how to make it do. Yay, knowledge!

For Scarlet X, I actually could have gotten away with just being an actor. And I could pretend that's what I'm doing, pretend it's a better-endowed project where a very small team isn't trying to do the work of a much bigger one. But you know what? They are, and they deserve credit for it. I'm not the only one stepping up to the hyphenate plate to make this thing happen. This weekend, that meant a bit of copywriting for the website (coming soon!) and promo materials, and discovering that capsule character descriptions (60 to 70ish words) are harder than they look. Still, I was here, I'm decent at slinging words around, and this way we're closer to having a website I can send you to. Everybody wins!

And then, every once in a while, a project happens because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DIYer who can't keep her volunteering hand from shooting into the air. That would be Resonance, where my rather eccentric and eclectic mix of skills, interests, and thought processes happened to converge in just the right way at the right time to land me on a bus going some very cool places indeed. (About which I still can't really tell you anything, but there are a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff that will start bearing fruit soon. Promise!)

There are stories to tell, stories I believe in. And when they need more from me than just acting, they feel that much more mine, that much more like home. I'll take that trade.

No rest for the wicked

In which our Diva has a few irons in the fire

Three-day weekend FTW! Will no doubt want another when it's finished, as I will be using it to Get Stuff Done, but at least I have it do that in.

Stuff to Get Done includes as many costume renderings for Shrew as possible. I was hoping to have them all done by now, but the real drop-dead date is the first rehearsal in mid-June. Will probably be sketching madly away while socializing with company today.

Tomorrow will be all about studying new scene for acting class, brushing up on audition monologues and songs (everyone and their dog has general season auditions in the next couple weeks -- also need to put in for slots for those!), and getting mailings together for agent queries and a couple auditions that require snail mail instead of electronic submissions. Also need to order prints of new headshots.

Search for better-fitting day job continues apace, with sod all to show for it. Suspect at least some of them are getting filed in the "overqualified" (i.e. "she's going to want too much money, isn't she?") category, while others are looking at my rather eclectic work experience and going "Bzuh?" Sent a snail mail resume for one last week that I would really love to get; not saying any more 'cause I don't want to jinx it.

Dear AEA: Your Contract Associate job sounds faboo. Whywhywhy do you have to say "Employees of Actors' Equity Association are not permitted to perform in or stage manage any Equity or non-Equity production"??? [emphasis mine] I do not love you. (Not that this is particularly news.)

Monday is for housecleaning and car shopping. Car shopping is a necessity because (a) the one-car household thing is getting OLD; (b) the one functioning car does not have functioning air conditioning, and I'm so not doing that another summer; (c) better mileage plz!!; and (d) need new car before driving to Toronto in July for reasons (a) through (c). Have been looking very seriously at the smart car now that they're finally available in the U.S. If you've ever parked in the North Side neighborhoods where most of Chicago's storefront theatres are, you will immediately understand the appeal.

Evenings are for writing. Was writing an action scene yesterday (um, yeah, for the Lizzie project. Sure. *sheepish g*), and getting up to walk through the moves (to make sure they made sense in real space as well as in my head) made me realize how much I miss fight work. Good thing there's a Babes workshop coming up in a couple weeks. (For which registration is another thing on my to-do list this lovely holiday weekend.)

So, still lots going on, but all of it worth the doing.

:: vibrates in place ::

I'm having one of those GET ME OUTTA HERE kinda days. The demands of Office of Doom are actually more manageable right this moment than they have been for most of the past three or four months, but that doesn't help.

I want to be somewhere that is NOT HERE, doing work I actually CARE about. I don't want to not work, I don't want to play all the time. I want to WORK. Work that is not this work, because I Do Not Care about this work, no matter how hard I try.

Knowing that I'm pursuing all available avenues to do something about that helps only slightly when I'm in this mood. Probably makes me even more restless, in fact. In the starting blocks, waiting for the damn pistol to fire already.

*deep breath* End of lunch hour. Focus. Other people do care about this stuff, and deserve to have it done promptly and well.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have no ambition. I know enough to know I wouldn't want it, but I'm still curious what it's actually like.

Day Job Blues

In which our Diva continues to negotiate with the Universe for more favorable terms on this Being A Grownup deal

Just got a very, very apologetic call from the place where I had a second interview last week. To the extent that it was obviously really, really close. (Not to mention they've already had to go through this process twice in less than a year, so I'm sure they don't want to burn any bridges in case this one doesn't last either.)

I'm disappointed, but also weirdly ambivalent. It's a BIG job. And I'll confess to having some slight internal cold feet for that reason after the second interview, when it started feeling a little realer. Office of Doom might be stingy with the PTO days, but there's very seldom a specific day/time where I just plain can't take a half-day, or make up the hours later, or whatever, in order to make an audition or gig. Granted, I haven't tested that a lot (yet), but they're generally pretty flexible. (It helps that they're mildly terrified of my leaving. Maybe not even mildly at this point.)

With the responsibilities of this job, there may very well have been some painful conflicts, because there would have been times when I absolutely had to be there. I also got the sense that I'd have more time off in general (while specifics were not discussed, they did mention vacation, personal and sick days as separate commodities), but have been getting slightly apprehensive about possible limitations on when I could take it.

It would also have been a fairly significant pay cut. Not unsurvivable, but certainly noticeable.

I dunno. Maybe just rationalizing. Doesn't matter. For the moment, still at Office of Doom, and now lifting the temporary moratorium on auditioning for new stage stuff (since I don't have to worry about going crazy trying to transition to a new job with rehearsals going on too).

I have the entirely irrational but nonetheless strong sense that this is how it's supposed to be, and something else is going to fall into place soon. I'm choosing to believe it for the moment, because why the heck not?