In the corps de ballet!

I’ve been remiss. Sorry. I’ve been getting in very, very late, and far too tired to update my OD. I last wrote Tuesday night, after our dress rehearsal and Thresher review. Wednesday morning I got up early and met Lucky for a full day of interviews for the summer. I’m going to be in charge of a team of 6-8 pre-law interns, whose job will be to update the code books that the company I work for publishes with the newly amended material from the 79th Texas Legislature. I got my first bit of business management experience in the summer of 2003 working this same program; I learned a lot then, and more since, and I’m now poised to be a super-badass supervisor for that program, I think. We’ve been interviewing to decide whom to hire, and we seem to have a lot of really good choices.

The interviews were LONG. Lucky, my boss, is a talker. We scheduled an hour for each interview, and we needed close to the whole thing for most of them. Lucky and I traded off questions about leadership and teamwork and attention to detail and preferred work environments and responses to conflicts. It was an interesting and informative experience for me — this was my first time running job interviews — but it was also rather tiring. We had two full days of it. Fifteen one-hour interviews. And we’ve another full day of it next week. Ugh.

Anyway. Opening night was after the first very full day of interviews, and I was tired. The audience was large but not loud, and lots of things were feeling slightly off in my own performance. I missed a line at the end of my Act I solo, and I got confused in the choreography with one of my Act II duets, and much of my timing and energy felt not quite right. My antics didn’t exactly fall flat, but they fell flatter than it feels good to have them fall. I let that upset me, and then I had a fight with Lauren, and that upset me further, and then I was moody and depressed and got really drunk after the show, and probably wasn’t AWFUL to be around, but definitely wasn’t a whole lot of fun, either.

Friday (last night) was very different. I watched some basketball over a free lunch from the publishing company, then went to the drug store and bought a decongestant and some cough drops, and went to the used book store and bought some philosophy books super-cheap, and went to campus and had a long talk over dinner with Lauren where we ironed a lot of things out, and met Shari for coffee, and showed up for the show. It was a late show, because it was after a Shepherd concert. 10:00 curtain, which turned into 10:30, because HHH, our music director, was in the concert and it went longer than we’d expected it to. The audience was reasonably large for a late Friday night, and very responsive. Everything felt better. They laughed at my entrance, and at my funny faces and gestures and lines. The cast had good chemistry last night. It wasn’t perfect, and we can all point to lines that didn’t go *quite* right, but the show was FUNNY, and the music was excellent, and I was proud of my performance. It felt good.

Wanna read our review? It’s here. It’s kinda lame, to be honest, because it doesn’t focus on the important stuff, like the orchestra, or the singing, or two-thirds of the principals. But it’s a review, and it says a lot of positive things. Here are bits of what they had to say about me:

Alumnus [OD user Jack Point] plays Bunthorne, an ordinary gentleman who poses as an aesthete to impress the local maidens. With a flourish of his quill and a clearing of his throat, he lures them away from their betrothed fiancees, the soldiers of the British Dragoon Guard. Bunthorne basks in the attention but lusts after Patience (vocal graduate student Alexandra [badass soprano Alex]), a milkmaid untaught in the ways of love.

[OD user Jack Point] and [badass soprano Alex] shine as they ham up their ill-fated courtship. [OD user Jack Point], who founded the Rice Light Opera Society in 2001, has a charismatic stage presence that commands attention. He does well with Sullivan’s lively, though unremarkable, score.
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[OD user Jack Point] and [badass soprano Alex] make themselves utterly ridiculous but succeed with the kind of deadpan delivery comedic satire demands.

There’s a webcast. Instructions here. 10:00 tonight, 8:00 next Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Central Time.

A number of us went out to Mai’s after the show last night, and that was fun. I got in at around three or so, and went to bed after not long. This morning, Kelsey called and told me she had an extra ticket to see Romeo and Juliet with the Houston Ballet! So we went, and it was really amazing. I don’t have as much experience as I wish I did watching ballet, but I really, really loved it. Watching ballet will make me a better actor. I’m still processing the things I learned. Don’t ask me to tell you what they are, because I’m nowhere close to being able to articulate them, but I learned a lot about stage presentation this afternoon. A really important experience. And wonderful to see Kelsey!

(Subsidiary note: I’ve learned the *real* moral of the decalate — guys should try to be LIKE Teasing Tom!)

One more show tonight, and then tomorrow morning I fly back to Providence. Audrey is picking me up from the airport, and we’re hanging out, and then I’m getting caught up on a week’s worth of classwork. Wednesday, I return to Houston again. Silly? Yes. Idiotic? Yes.

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Other news: my paper on imaginary values was accepted at the Toronto values conference in May! Crystal, Emily, (Heather?), you’d better believe I’m planning to spend some time with you.

Ok, time for a little bit of philosophy, then dinner with HHH. Then a show!