Houston Day 370 (1 year + 4 days) - Pink update

Nick (not Nick as in Bekah, but Sound of Music and Pinkalicious cast member) has complained that I haven't blogged enough about Pinkalicious.  Personally I suspect he just wants to read about himself, but the other non-Nick members of my audience may also appreciate hearing about this wonderful opportunity, which I really hope will be the first of many at Main Street Theater.

The auditions were months ago, so I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.  Most of the cast members got in touch with each other before the rehearsals started on facebook and meeting each other at other auditions, so the excitement has grown collectively as well.  I did an excellent job at the auditions of concentrating really hard on remembering the choreography - so much so that I didn't pay any attention to anyone and therefore returned some pretty blank looks when people said to me "I met you at the Pinkalicious audition!"
So we finally started rehearsals three weeks ago.  There are eight of us in the cast - Ashley, who I had seen onstage in the Coast of Utopia shows; Nikki & Adam, who adorably have been friends since they were little boys; Nick, who was in Sound of Music with me last year; Adrianna & Teresa, who both come from the Music Theatre program at Sam Houston State University and are really excellent chicks; Marco, who's been doing impressive amounts of theatre in Houston considering he's only 23 and he also has had some bad luck with shows getting cancelled; and me, who you know.

Teresa

Jimmy, Pat (Costume Designer) & Ashley

Nick

The music is great but irritatingly catchy (all cast members have reported inability to sleep because of tunes in the head, and the music even intruding on a couple of people's dreams).  The choreography is flashy and really fun and also really hard work.  Jimmy the director has this funny habit of asking if it's possible to do something really simple, like walk on stage to a slow count of eight, and then firmly informing us without asking that we'll be doing something really quite difficult, like finishing a song on top of someone's shoulders. All the cast members are great at what they do and working pretty hard.  We're all young and relatively new and anxious to make a good impression.

Teresa, Marco, Adrianna and Nikki

These photos are all from our costume fitting the other day.

Houston Day 367! One year and one day after arrival in Houston

Well, we made it through a year! We had a celebratory drink in our lovely little breakfast nook a couple of days ago, almost exactly a year after we were sipping pre-flight champagne in QANTAS Business.  It was a much tastier drink this time around, mostly because last year it was alcohol before noon on a Sunday, when we'd had only two hours' sleep the night before, from a combination of a long-stretching last dinner at the James Squire Bar (where Lucas told Sarah Chadwick about twenty times that he loved her....oh, Sass, I miss you!), having to pack our bags yet again, and sleeping in a hotel right on St Kilda Rd.
This time, as we drank Lucas' inventive version of a classy fruit punch, we discussed the highlights and lowlights of the last year.  We both agreed that my brief spiral into depression for our first four months was a definite lowlight.  The highlights include how much we enjoy getting to know Houston and Texas, how much fun and adventure and meaningful goodness we have encountered together, and our new friends.  There are a handful of people I still can't believe that most of my Australian friends don't know yet - how could good friends who are so much a  part of me not know each other? - but it's particularly been a blessing to have the friendship of Nick and Bekah.  It's just wonderful to have the support of fun people who are exploring this city for the first time too!
So it's pretty much gone as we have expected.  When I think about the details of our life here, there's not a lot that would have surprised me a year ago.  The most surprising thing to me is that we own bikes.  And we use them as transport.  Who would have guessed :)

My bike, a fabulous 90s number from Blue Line Bike Lab.  I call her Jessi.

Houston Day 358 - queerdom and Christians

Still, a lot of people are talking about the North Carolina ban on gay marriage and President Obama's support for it, and about homosexuality in general, and about how that interacts with people's faith and peoples of faith.  (Just FYI, gay marriage is illegal here in Texas.  Last year a judge ruled that a woman and her husband were not legally married, because the woman was not born a woman, although in every other legal situation she was allowed to identify as one.)
Googling stuff about the Biola Queer Underground group, where according to their website queers and their sympathisers seem to live in a lot of fear, led me to explore other tangential issues and I came across this: "Christians are an army that shoots their own wounded".  I am brought to tears.
I feel like I've swung to the middle about the church.  I'm definitely not in love with it anymore, but I think I've moved past the rejection phase.  So please in reading the following remember that although I like everyone have biases, I don't think I feel compelled to either defend the church or condemn it.  I also recognise that "Christian" can mean a wide variety of people, including people who don't identify with a/the church.
Back to that powerful statement.  I'm not going to deny that people have felt that way.  I can even think of a member of my family who might use those words to describe part of their experience with a church.  I have also known and loved a few Christians whose dedication to trying to eradicate sin has caused them to prioritise judgment over compassion, and to call that love.  I have been one of those Christians - particularly towards myself, when I have so often crippled myself with judgment.  So I can totally see how that statement could be true, at least in part, at least sometimes.
I can also see that rejection of and reaction to the church can be hurtful as well.  Christians also feel misunderstood.  Everyone's got those teachers in their life who shape them big time, often without even trying, right? Well one of mine was the Head of the Classics department at Monash Uni.  She was a lesbian first-wave feminist, who'd experienced her own epiphanies in walking away from the church, and I often left her classes feeling ostracised for being straight, white, and religious.  I think I probably hurt some people at Murrumbeena when later, under that same teacher's influence, I was in the throes of trying to figure out what the hell was going on in my faith.  But I'm pretty sure that's nothing compared to the hurt and abuse people have suffered from others "wiping out sin" in the name of Christ.
My hunch is that judgment, i.e., determining whether what's going on is right or wrong, is helpful sometimes but not nearly as much as many Christians I've met seem to think it is.  I think of the story of Jesus avoiding the issue when asked to stone a woman caught in flagrante delicto.  My recent cleanse-induced foray into the bible was about Romans 3:22-23: "There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  And having read that verse dozens of times over the years, a new realisation jumped out at me.  I think, taking that passage in context, that the most important part of the sentence is "there is no difference", not the "all have sinned" bit.  Grammatically it's the main clause, at least in English.  The point is everyone's equality and salvation and righteousness, not everyone's sinfulness.  I'd love a radical shift in focus in faith communities.  "How important, really, is it to judge in this particular situation? What would happen if we bypassed the right-or-wrong issue?"
So I renew the challenge to myself: Respond with compassion.  Respond with humility.  And I'm sorry to those I've hurt in my judgment as a Christian, or of Christians.

Houston Day 557 - politics and art cars and other good American things

So I don't know if this made it on the news in Australia or not, but this week President Obama came out in favour of marriage equality (yay).  My impression (which may be incorrect) is that the campaigns have made it into the news less since the big three Republicans stopped battling and it seems all but sewn-up that Mitt Romney will be the Republican Presidential candidate.
It's in politics that I think the differences between the U.S. and Australia are most apparent.  There's so much more rhetoric here about ideology.  People's political opinions seem so much more to be based on symbol and philosophies and tenets of faith than on what actually happens day-to-day.  I think that's why "socialism" is such a dirty word here; improved access to healthcare and education would be excellent but people dislike what that represents ideologically.
I suspect that the difference between people's attitudes to politics in Australia and the U.S. are the legacies of the different histories of each country.  The U.S. as a nation was founded upon ideals (the Founding Fathers get brought up a bit), and they fought for those ideals.  Then that history about fighting for ideals continued in the Civil War.  Australia, on the other hand....just kind of evolved.  I've heard it said more than once that it's a good thing that voting is mandatory in Australia because otherwise not many people would care enough to vote.  I personally follow politics more here than I ever did back home...I think because it's more interesting here!

It's a quiet Sunday morning in the Buchanan house, mostly because Lucas is still in bed.  Also, the house is clean, because we finally paid someone else to come and clean it.  I can feel that this is going to be a long blog post (just FYI, in case you had other plans).  It's been a great weekend so far.
Yesterday morning I had my last Shakespeare class of this session (you sign up for sessions of four classes).  I've been working on a Mercutio monologue from Romeo & Juliet and it's in pretty good shape.  Going to class is excellent, because I just don't have the skills and the experience and the objective perspective to get out of my head and do this level of work on my own.  Plus it's fun to watch everyone else create their performances too, and learn from what they're doing.  Everyone in this class is preparing for the upcoming Classical Theatre Company general auditions.  We've just started the slew of summer auditions, where most companies begin to cast what they're doing in the next year, so that's exciting.  Keep checking out my auditions page to see what I'm up to!

After class yesterday Lucas and I cycled to see the 25th annual Houston Art Car Parade.  It's a wonderful weird tradition that we missed out on last year because we didn't arrive in Houston until the day of the parade.  People either decorate or paint existing cars (and there are some beautiful, intricate paintings on these cars!), or trick up gorgeous old classic cars, or completely make from scratch a work of art that moves by the use of wheels and an engine.  Houston is a very diverse city (not at all what people think of in caricatures of Texas) and this was reflected in the diversity of "statement" cars: no animal cruelty, support our troops, anti-war, pro-environment, anti-oil, yay America, yay Texas, awareness of breast and ovarian cancers, and an interesting and very complex car, owned by a Hope Stoner named Kirk, which makes some statement about Christianity that I haven't quite figured out.  This was accompanied by a guy on a scooter dressed up as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and an ape mask.

Later in the day I  dropped off a cheque for our lease application fees to a realtor.  We have to move out by the end of June because the landlords are selling our current house, but we're in the process of securing a very quirky bungalow off 4th St (so still in the Heights).  On the way back I went grocery shopping in Whole Foods and it was very reminiscent of our early days here where I could rarely go shopping without homesickness and stress and tears overwhelming me.  I was on a mission to buy items I had never heard of before such as chuck beef and Polish sausage, and still completely exhausted from our first week of Pink rehearsals.  But the day finished nicely with a spontaneous invitation from James and Aria to have dinner with them at their favourite Italian restaurant in Montrose.
Today we are going to see Richard III at Main Street, directed by and starring the guy who played Bakunin in the Coast of Utopia trilogy.  He's doing a talkback after the show about the artistic process, so that should be awesome.  This production also has my Shakespeare teacher's recommendation, and I'm keen to see what Main Street do with Shakespeare.
Tomorrow it's back to work, and I should really try and figure out how to manage my energy levels.
Happy Mother's Day to all mamas, whether your child is a person or a project or a community.  Especially grateful to my own mum right now for booking her plane tickets to come and see me in Pink, and for always being my biggest fan.  (Well, until Lucas came along, and now they fight over that honour.  I am too blessed!)

Lucas and Mum and I on the NASA tour when she came to visit us last year