2013's Work in Review

Gigs

Main Street Theater

The Magic School Bus LIVE!

Into the Woods (in rehearsal - opens Jan 16th, 2014)

Texas Repertory Theatre

Company

Blithe Spirit

Jeff McMorrough as Rosencrantz, Matthew Keenan as Hamlet,
and me as Guildenstern.  Photo by Pin Lim.

Stark Naked Theatre

Macbeth

The War of the Worlds (reading)

Classical Theatre Company

Hamlet

Image Source

Legacy Community Health industrial

Highlight

The War of the Worlds was an unexpected blast.  To be honest, when I first read the script I thought, "how on earth do you make an hour-long news broadcast interesting?" But we did, and had so much fun, as did the audience, so many of whom said it was their first time at Stark Naked Theatre.  I could feel the audience on the edge of their seats.  Plain old-fashioned good storytelling is a wonderful thing.

Lowlight

Touring children's theatre is both a blessing and a curse.  There was a lot to love about the Magic School Bus tour, but the bone-crushing fatigue of the busiest weeks was among the hardest things I faced this year.  But there's also something to be said about the satisfaction of working that hard - it's kind of great.

Auditions

This year I auditioned for Houston Shakespeare Festival, many voice-over spots, Main Street Theater, Texas Shakespeare Festival, Ozark Actors' Theatre, Stark Naked Theatre, Back Porch Players, Classical Theatre Company, the Houston Theatre Alliance, Tall Tale Pictures and Ensemble Theater.  Twenty-four auditions all told, of which four got me the gig, plus I got cast in three projects based on earlier work.  So we're looking at about one yes for every two nos.

Highlight

The audition for Time Stands Still at Main Street Theater was exhilarating.  There are full performances I haven't enjoyed as much as I enjoyed that audition.  I got to read four times with different groups of people, and the joy and satisfaction of hours of hard slog in preparation meeting magical in-the-moment creativity was something pretty special.  Plus that's just a kick-ass script.  I walked away almost (almost) not even caring if I got cast or not, just thoroughly satisfied with my performance that night.

Lowlight

Nerves on an empty stomach saw me hurling up my guts about half an hour before my first Macbeth audition - nausea is the worst feeling in the world, I reckon.  Good old body, though - it got it together at the last minute, managed a very respectable audition, and got me through to the next round of callbacks.  I even got the gig.

Training

This year I worked on dialects at home with some helpful resources; took Hope Stone's teacher training, contined in Kim Tobin's Meisner class as well as taking her audition preparation class; and took ballet, jazz and tap classes.

Highlight

When you first work with Kim Tobin you get the impression that she can read you like a book.  Now that I've worked with her for over a year I have this spooky feeling she can see into my soul and every so often just knows exactly what I need to hear.  I have often despaired as I progress to new levels and realised just how much I don't know, but Kim gives me a great mix of encouragement and a kick up the ass when I need it, and her studio has become a sacred place for me that has seen so much of my growth.

Lowlight

The teacher training at Hope Stone was valuable but occurred in a very busy time for me (during the Magic School Bus tour of exhaustion), so I wasn't feeling particularly patient when the session ran overtime that day.  Something must have made it through my fatigue-fogged brain though, because my teaching has improved.

Other Work

Hope Stone - teacher and blogger

Main Street Theater - substitute house manager

Houston Grand Opera - lightwalker

I have grown a lot this year, and enjoyed such landmarks as moving from children's theatre into grown-up theatre, earning my first Equity points, getting cast in a film project and getting up the guts to submit a play I wrote to a theatre.  I hope your 2013 has been satisfying - would love to hear about it.

My Thoughts on International Stardom

I'm sick with the psychotic-killer-queen of throat infections so I've been watching a crapload of tv this week.  I've watched Tin Man, another one of the "let's consider The Wizard of Oz from another angle" stories that the world seems to be obsessed with, Glee, Parks and Recreation (which apparently has a Houstonian and classmate of my friend Leslie on the writing staff), and The Slap, on which I was an extra for its first day of filming before we moved to Houston two years ago and which I haven't gotten around to watching til this week.

Look, guys, there I am!...can you spot me?

The Slap didn't air on Aussie TV until after I left, so I wasn't really around for the buzz of whether it was well received or not.  I think it was a mixed reception.  Anyway, I really like it and I'd love to read the book it's based on now.  
It got me thinking about two things.  One, Melissa George.  Oh, btw, it's her international stardom I was talking about, not my own, although given my huge exposure in this mini-series (see picture) your confusion could be forgiven.  She stars as the attachment-parenting-style mother whose kid gets slapped by another adult at a barbeque.  I was looking up interviews with her because I was curious about the four-year-old kid she is openly breastfeeding in a couple of scenes (yes, he was a child actor and no, he was not her kid in real life and unsurprisingly, she said it was pretty challenging), and I came across this article called Melissa George is Kind of a Dick.  It slams her for some comments she made last year on a return visit to Aus about how she hates the big hoo-ha about her being this huge international hit that got her start on Home and Away.  And yeah, saying "I just need them all to be quiet" about our home country is kind of a wankerish thing to do, but I suspect that there are some mitigating factors rolling around in her brain, and not just how strange your life must be if you're famous.  Australia's very complicated relationship with success, for one, and the fact that she had to leave the country to pursue her work to its highest level, and that weird feeling about home that you get when you've lived away from it for a while and kind of like it better somewhere else.
On that note, the other thing it got me thinking about was just how Melbourne it was.  The shops, the cafes, the houses, the people, are all so Melbourne, and it made me smile and inwardly celebrate one of the best cities in the world, but it also reminded me of a reason to celebrate not living there.  Because in episode 2, when Rhys is in Anouk's gorgeous classic inner-suburbs of Melbourne house, old and spacious with polished wooden floorboards to die for and trams running right outside to take you to a lovely coffee shop, he sits on a radiator.  And I bet that radiator is the only thing that heats that draughty house in the cold grey Melbourne winter (that doesn't even include Christmas).

picture nabbed from sweetcarrielove.blogspot.com 

I dream of great theatre on a rainy Thursday morning...

So (by the end of October) fall is finally solidly here.  It's been hinting at coming round for about a month, but now it's lovely and stormy, rainy and grey, and when it's not, there's a beautiful light in the sky in the evenings.  Fall in Houston is something special.  You really feel like you've earned it, with about five months of relentless tropical summer behind you.

Last night as a Halloween special Stark Naked Theatre put on a reading of The War of the Worlds, on the 75th anniversary of its original broadcast by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air.  I had such a blast.  It was a good challenge for me, being huge slabs of text I had to speak in an American accent, and I think I did it justice.  I also just had heaps of fun.  It was a pretty full house, and you could feel the audience hanging on the story.  The other four actors and I did our best to bring the play to life, and one of the best things about the way Philip had set it up was that we got to sit on stage and watch the whole thing when we weren't speaking.  A really fun night, an excellent play.
And it's only a week until the wonderful Antonia Lassar comes to town! Joel and Heidi (friends from Stone Soup in Melbourne) saw her show The God Box somewhere on the east coast when they were travelling the world last year and encouraged me to bring her out here to Houston when she announced her national living-room tour.  So we are! There's a show at our pastor Jenni's house on Sat 9th, a show at Zeteo on Sat 10th and a show at our house on the 12th.  I'm super excited to meet her in person and turn my lounge room into a theatre space! You can see a trailer of the show here and if you're in Houston. check out our event page on the Zeteo website and text me for my address.

Three awesome shows happening in Oct - Nov

Three awesome shows happening in Oct - Nov
Please check out the theatre awesomeness that is happening in my life by visiting the above link.

Upcoming Theatre funness

My darling sister asked me for the backstory of all my theatre bits and pieces at the moment, so here it is, with much love.

• Blithe Spirit is being put on by Texas Repertory Theatre, where earlier this year I was in Company.  I didn't audition for this one, but got a call to be in it after someone else dropped out.  Which meant that I joined them a week into the process, without having seen a script in advance.  I didn't fully realise I had an actor's *process* until I was in a show that didn't give me the time to go through it.  But I'm having a lot of fun, and it will be a hoot, and we open this week.  Best line: "Servants are awful, aren't they?"

• The War of the Worlds is another opportunity that was handed to me on a platter by the company's Artistic Director, or rather handed to me over drinks at Onion Creek.  This one is with Stark Naked Theatre, of Macbeth fame.  One rehearsal, one performance, and you better hope I get all that text out in the right accent.  

• Last year when our friends from Melbourne Joel and Heidi were travelling around the world, they came to visit us by way of [somewhere on the east coast], where they saw The God Box, by Antonia Lassar.  When Antonia announced her tour this year, Joel messaged me and suggested we bring her out here to Houston.  So we are.  

• Into the Woods I did audition for.  I am playing Cinderella's Stepmother and Jack's Mother! Andrew Ruthven, who directed Magic School Bus and was in Company with me, invited me to audition, very kindly gave me the low-down as to why I was called back for two roles that on first glance seem impossible to double and for which I am rather young, and then cast me.  We start rehearsal just before Christmas and open in January.

So there 'tis! I am so happy that I'm a part of the Houston theatre community.

A New Gig

How my first visit with my new friend went!

So last week just as I was thinking "yeah, I really do get bored when I'm doing only one show at night" (my only-do-one-project-at-a-time promise only seems to be necessary when it's children's theatre - beautiful, exhausting, early-morning children's theatre), I got an email from my boss at Hope Stone that went like this:

We had a mom call with a daughter who has terminal cancer.  She is 13 years old and the mother is desperate for someone to interact with her in some way.  She is in bed on oxygen.  She mentioned anything from guided meditation to music or storytelling.  

Her name is Lily.  I thought, here is someone who I need and who needs someone like me.  I can help entertain her, facilitate her creativity, give her a voice through some theatre, and doing that with her can give me a reason not to be stuck at home all day getting depressed.   And trusting to the synchronicity of it all, I set up a meeting with her and her mom and stepdad.  (I took Lucas with me just in case "Lily" turned out to be not so much a real person as the name of their gun.)
The initial meeting went well and so we had our first work/play session yesterday.  We wrote a story together, read through a ten-minute play, and taught each other some games.  I can see that I'm going to need two things: a) patience for when she's not particularly lucid and b) lots of two-hander scripts that are appropriate for a teenager in her situation for us to read through.  We both had a good time and I'm seeing her twice next week.  Hooray!

Labor Day Weekend

A Trip to Bryan, TX

Labor Day yesterday, and as Lucas and I pretty rarely get days off together, we decided to make a mini-vacation of it.  We had from the end of my rehearsal Sunday afternoon and all day Monday.  Houston doesn't have the greatest options for day-trip material.  The wonderful book Scott and Maggie lent us called "Day Trips from Houston" helps (by telling you every single thing there possibly could be to do), but really there's only Bryan-College Station and Galveston that are at all interesting.  I'd been here before with Bekah on a day trip, when we visited the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, but gave the Library a miss this time.

We had a wonderful dinner Sunday night at Christopher's World Grille - great service, excellent food, including the mascarpone-lemon chicken wrapped in prosciutto that I had (what????! Amazing).  Monday we walked around historic downtown Bryan - it's not that interesting on Labor Day when all the shops are closed! - but most of the time we stayed at and hung around the lovely Messina Hof Winery.

Wonderful ship-shaped chandelier in our bedroom!
(there's a fun tongue-twister)

Lucas in a bathrobe, in the bath

Shakespeare's lessons for me today

The Lesson for Today

I'm halfway through the rehearsal season for my second ever Shakespeare play, and loving it.  Great actors, great director, designers, stage manager, and of course, a great script.  There were many challenges in my last Shakespeare show - the biggest one that of playing four or five different minor characters - and I grew so much as an actor because of them.  The fun challenge I'm discovering now is that there's a particular pitfall associated with doing Shakespeare, and I'm falling into it a bit, I think.
This shit's famous.  You get cast in a Shakespeare show and you're the latest in a line of thousands of people who have played the part before you.  Also, in my case, I'm playing a part featured in a particularly famous spin-off, and initially I found it hard to get Tim Roth's Guildenstern out of my head.

So the temptation is that my joy at getting to be Guildenstern #24601 leads me to try and wring every single moment I can out of my time on stage, which leads me to be all over-played and self-conscious.  I have seen it in other Shakespeare productions, too: there's such a sense of privilege at getting to do those famous scenes that you out-Herod Herod a little bit.
I realised this today after reading my favourite book for the umpteenth time in my favourite coffee house (on the advice of Julia Cameron, I am taking myself on weekly Artist's Dates), and this quote stood out to me:

He is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song

and also:

Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting.  His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. 

It brought to the front of my mind the lesson I have been learning almost without realising it at every rehearsal:  I watch our Hamlet mutter "to be or not to be" and "alas, poor Yorick" so quietly and so casually that the rest of us in the cast can't take our eyes off him.  The best actors don't shout out "DID YOU HEAR? THAT WAS A REALLY FAMOUS LINE!" with their performance.
So off I go to learn how to hold all my research and nuances and technical work on the language with a very open hand, with the hope that not everyone will get everything every single time I'm on stage.  And that's why I'm so lucky to be Guildenstern #24601.

P.S.  If you have a few spare dollars, please consider helping this brilliant company out so I can continue doing good theatre with the Classical Theatre Company.  Or at least watch the video in the link and laugh at how cute our director JJ Johnston is.

Houston Day 816 (Australia Day 14): Dance of the Sugar-Plum Corporate Professionals

Dance Class Teaching Workers How to Figure It Out

I wrote this piece recently for Hope Stone - very interesting to look at the impact of dance on the lives of people who are not professional dancers.  (Boise readers - there's a link to a fascinating piece of work that's happening in your city!)

http://hopestoneinc.org/dance-of-the-sugar-plum-corporate-professionals/

Houston Day 812 (Australia Day 10) - dance of the after-school performing arts

Mum & Luke at the College Winter Showcase

It seems my entire family live in a whirl of extracurricular performing arts programs.  Not just my nieces and nephews, who take such courses (Luke, my oldest nephew, is obsessed with theatre atm - YES!), but my sisters, who teach them.




Dad & my niece Emma at Showcase

Yesterday I spent some of the day visiting my old school, where Sarah is Head of Music, helping out with her VCE Music class and the Middle School musical rehearsal.  Her work environment is busy, beautiful, and never-ceasing.  I don't quite know how she does it, but she was obviously born into this job.  Toward the end of the school day I visited Ballarat North Primary to watch my 7yo niece Imogen's class perform a piece about dinosaurs in their school assembly.  Her job was the make the brachiosaurus prop eat the tree prop.  She was very proud and did it perfectly.  I also went to watch her after-school swimming class, and hung out with my dad, who happens to be visiting Australia at the same time as I am.  If you were to check in with any of us around three-thirty, you would have observed us performing the following intricate dance:

• Mum's track: leave Imogen's assembly and go home.
• Dad's track: leave Imogen's assembly with Imogen and her brother Paddy and take them to their house for afternoon tea.
• Claire's track: leave Imogen's assembly, check in with her kids about heading home with Dad, then go to meet her piano students, who had their exams.
• My track: leave Imogen's assembly, wait outside Imogen's school for Sarah and head to the College Middle School musical rehearsal.



Emma's beautiful ballet feet

• Sarah's track (by far the most complicated, as always): leave her own school, pick me up from Imogen's school, pick her own kids up from their school, and take us all back to College for Middle School musical rehearsal.

Then the rehearsal finished and Sarah looked at me blankly, saying "All day I was just aiming to get us all to this point.  I have no idea what happens next." and then we headed to Claire's.

Today I get to watch 7yo Emma's ballet class and tonight I go see Claire playing trumpet for the Ballarat Academy of Performing Arts' production of 42nd Street.  I am having a lovely time.

Houston Day 808 (Australia Day 6)

Fantastic things have been happening in my world.  The Hope Stone blog is taking off, and I would love you to read our latest post at http://hopestoneinc.org/every-summer-has-a-story/.  It'll help you understand some of the awesome things that happen at my side job!

My gorgeous sisters

I'm in Australia right now visiting my family.  It's been such a special time.  I'm writing from my dear friends Ray and Cheryl's house, which will always be home to me because they were our landlords before we moved.  We had a fantastic dinner last night with a bunch of friends, and right now I'm listening to the lovely Sass' radio show Stand Up Straight before I get to visit the radio station tonight!
And right before I came to Australia Lucas and I spent a week in Minnesota with his family.  So much special family time! We played golf (regular-sized and mini), had dinners, played poker, swam and boated in the gorgeous lakes, visited Lake Superior, and generally had a good time.  I love being a part of the Buchanan family and getting to call this dock one of my homes.

Houston Day 788 - Working Dancers

Questions for Working Dancers

 This is research for a piece for Hope Stone about working 9-5ers who also take dance class.   Please answer the questions in the comments below!

1.  What is your job?  Job title, company, workload, how it affects the rest of your life, is it your main passion?

2.  In what ways do you make time in your life for dance and other art?

3.  Why do you do this?

4.  How does your time in dance class affect your work - negatively? positively? at all?

5.  Is creativity valued in your workplace: e.g., are you often told to "figure it out" and come up with your own solution? Do you think it should be?

Houston Day 777 - a quiet Saturday

It's a quiet Saturday morning here.  Lucas is still asleep.  The many birds who visit our backyard are singing.  Tell you what, I never really cared about backyards until I moved into this house and now I don't think I could live without one! I also didn't care much for animals growing up but Lucas is showing me the joy of noticing interesting birds and lizards and raccoons and squirrels as they visit our yard (and dig up our plants).
I have been very diligent the past two weeks since Macbeth finished at keeping busy working at home.  Yesterday I spent hours working through my Speaking American dialect-training book.  Thanks to that book, I have mastered all the individual technical sound shifts necessary to speak convincingly as an American.  Now I'm working on intonation, which is very confusing to me, mostly just because I haven't paid much attention to it before.
We also spent a lot of yesterday hanging out with Nick and Bekah, and also trying to book our upcoming holiday to Minnesota.  Turns out we've picked the weekend some giant festival is on in Duluth and most of the state's accommodation is either a) crappy, b) expensive, c) far away from where we want to be, or d) booked out.
Today is our last quiet Saturday at home before lots of travel - to Austin, Minnesota (if we can ever get there) and Australia.  We'll be going to see a show tonight by a company I've heard a lot about - Landing Theatre - but never seen in action.  And tomorrow I'm taking Lucas on a surprise date.  Sh! Don't tell him what we're doing!

Houston Day 774 - auditions and heartbreak (and blogging and pools)

"Alas, poor Yorick..."

Whew.  Just finished a run of seven auditions in four days.  Four of them were first-round, the others were callbacks for Hamlet; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and The Giver.  I love auditioning, as I've mentioned before, but this weekend really wore me down! The nervous energy and crashes both got bigger, like spikes on a graph.  The most enjoyable audition was the Hamlet callback; I was late and stressed out and fluttersy but then I turned around and my beautiful friend Jeff (who played Banquo in Macbeth) was there and it turned out we were reading together - we were being considered for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  We had a blast.
I'm also struggling with the possibility that I might not get cast in anything, and working through (again) the age-old question of why I pursue this even though it breaks my heart.  And the answer is, because I love it, and because to me excellent theatre is one of the most exquisitely beautiful things in the world, and because the longing and the heart-breaking are somehow all a necessary part of it.

Hope Stone New Orleans

When not at auditions, I've been working at home, either preparing for said auditions, or writing for Hope Stone.  The latest blog post is about Hope Stone's teacher training days, which I took in Houston last year, and which just ran in New Orleans.  I haven't been to New Orleans yet, but I'm enjoying developing an e-lationship with the staff at the Hope Stone there.
I'm also keeping social and doing a pretty good job at fending off those post-show blues.  Jeff and I had a drink after our Hamlet callback, and I caught up with Matt, another Macbether yesterday at Onion Creek - love it that he is as intense as I am and loves to just talk solidly for an hour about the meaning/s of life.  Leslie is moving house soon so we'll help her with that, and the Nickerbekahs are coming over for fourth of July celebrations tomorrow.  (Let's not look too deeply into what I am celebrating - it's probably not American independence, and maybe just the fact that everyone has the day off, and that we have access to Scott and Maggie's pool.)

Houston Day 762 - first Hope blog of the year

I am transitioning into the type of blogger who has deadlines and pay checks :) And I love it!
My latest post is HERE!

Houston Day 753 - listlessness

And more ennui is setting in now that I found out I didn't get a callback from the audition I went to last night.  As my sister used to say, "I am without a list".  I know it may have nothing to do with the skill with which I auditioned (even before the audition I wasn't convinced of my "rightness" for either of the female roles up for grabs), but it's always hard not to take it a little personally.  And, actually, more than that, the issue is mostly that there's always this excitement and possibility around an audition - it would be really fun to have a project on the boil, and there was a reason I went to this particular one - and then that gets damped down.  Oh well, I had fun getting to read with a couple of great actors, and it was good practice at cold reading with my American accent.  And, now I'm free tonight to go to a concert with Lucas.  It's a singer-songwriter from Texas named Sarah Jarosz.  Should be fun.
The weather here is getting ridiculously hot, and I can't seem to find a good day to visit the beach, despite all my sitting-around-at-home-watching-Torchwood time.  BUT we have some travel plans in the offing, so I'll just have to get excited about that instead.  Don't be a child, Amy.  You can deal with no excitement for a couple of days.

Houston Day 752 - here's to this lady who lunches

"Does anybody still wear a hat?"

Things are pretty quiet around here right now.  Still getting used to post-School-Bus life.  Feels weird to have my self-set schedule be the only thing that's getting me out of bed.  I'm spending my days going to yoga, taking myself out to lunch, preparing for the half-dozen auditions I have over the next few weeks, and watching "Torchwood".  Evenings are still pretty busy, with shows and time with Lucas and social time.  Macbeth is going great guns and I'm having a blast.  And Dad is coming over from London this weekend to see it! I love living only a ten-hour flight from him.
You can read some reviews and articles on Macbeth here:

• Houston Chronicle review (inc some photos of me!)
• Broadway World review
• Another Houston Chronicle review that's not so positive (I don't know what on earth he means about Kim's accent)
• Houston Press interview with Philip Lehl, Kim Tobin and David Matranga
• Arts + Culture interview with Philip and Kim 

Houston Day 747 - Three Reasons I'm Better Than You

Reasons I'm Better Than You, Or, The Superior Expat

Gosh, May just fell off the blog radar.  Too much time in theaters playing Ms Frizzle and witches to find the energy to blog!
But during May, I also caught myself playing the role of the Superior Expat a lot.  If you haven't met these wonderful people, you should know that they're the ones who show up in the following situations.  You're standing around the water-cooler (or tour van, or theater lobby), just shooting the breeze, talking about your friend's schooling, or the current state of politics, or your favorite food, or whatever, and the Superior Expat reveals themselves.  They take off their hood of silence (which you preferred), clear their throat, prepare you for some weighty contribution to the conversation, which turns out to be:

Well, none of these problems would happen in my home country.

And they're off.
I know the Superior Expat is annoying when she shows up a bit too frequently, especially without taking the time to appreciate the country she chose to move to, but in my defence, here are a few reasons why my country is better than yours.

1. 

   Our Prime Minister: I actually do think she's a classy bird

   Homesickness. 

   It's as simple as that.  "Out of the fulness of the heart, the mouth speaks", and if I keep in the forefront of my mind how bogan our classy Prime Minister's accent is ("woi the Ustrailian poiple"), how beautiful the Great Ocean Road looks on a sunny day, and how glorious it is that I don't have to worry about medical bills thanks to Medicare for every Australian citizen, I won't forget who I am or where my home and the people I love are.

2. Tall Poppy Syndrome.  

   Australians have a special place of hatred reserved for those who are, or claim to be, or are perceived to be claiming to be, better than them.  (US readers: The name comes from the desire to cut down a poppy that is taller than the rest so that the field looks even.  It probably comes from our convict past.)  So when I talk to Americans who, perhaps because they travel less than Australians (partly because they can't afford to without that socialised economy), think that their government/society/economy/ideology is the best/only/bees'-knees way of running things, I cannot help myself.  I cut down that giant poppy and stuff it in my mailbox. 
   
   

   “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw

   And yes, I know that it's working both ways.  I'm just showing my patriotism by cutting down yours.  It's the Australian way.  (Or, as Julia Gillard might put it, "the Ustrailian woiaey".)

3.  It's the Thing I Have to Offer.  

   I learned pretty quickly that as a foreigner, often your defining characteristic is that you are a foreigner.  (My name to some employees both at Houston City Dance and at Houston Grand Opera is "Miss Australia".)  It can mean that you are perceived as interesting and exotic and sexy, or it can just mean that you have no idea about those old commercials/children's storybooks/quintessential American experiences that the conversation is revolving around.  It can also mean that you don't know how to order in certain chain restaurants (something I'm still having trouble with).  So in order to either play up to my exotic foreigner image, or just keep up with the conversation, I have to resort to telling you about the Kellogg's Crunchy Nut ads/Blinky Bill/gap years working in a London pub (which I never even did).

So please forgive me if I play the Superior Expat a little too often, and I will try to learn to just appreciate this great country a little more.  Especially given that we've just decided to stay here at least another three years, during which time I will have the opportunity to become an American citizen, with all the bitching rights (I mean, freedom of speech) that entails.  Enfranchisement, here I come!

P.S.  Macbeth has its preview show on tonight! Come out and support great theatre in Houston!

Houston Day 709 - Hope Stone tech week Day 2!

Almost 3pm.  Lying on the couch, feeling terribly tired, watching The West Wing (was CJ the leak about the military space shuttle? We'll probably find out in an episode or two! God bless Netflix).  6.15am call time this morning, and a long drive to Cuero, TX, which is a beautiful little town.  This afternoon we have Day 2 of Hope Stone tech week.

I've been struggling with motivation for teaching recently.  Bekah very wisely suggested that it's because I've been working a lot this year so I'm pretty tired (Exhibit A, above), not necessarily because I'm doing a bad job or because I don't belong there.
Anyway, this afternoon I'm contemplating what it means to be going this tech rehearsal.  (I do that.  I'm big on symbolism and I can't do most things without having a sense of what it means.)  So...It means I'm telling these kids that I believe in them, that I treasure their stories and their work (not only in this circle, but also in your life, hey?).  It means I'm telling the Hope Stone community that I belong there.  It means I'm telling Jane that I believe in her vision of "art for all".  Scariest of all, it means I'm telling myself that I believe in my own creativity.  So let's get our ass off the couch, Amy, and go help some kids make art.

Houston Day 706 - meals, Macbeth and Magic School Bus

Meals, Macbeth and Magic School Bus

plus Meisner and meditation and more of what's in my life right now...

Thanks to the people who continued the discussion on facebook from my last post.  From what you both said, I am beginning to think that there's something in this "discipline sets you free" idea.  I also had a good chat with the Magic School Bus girls that day.  The more times you load in a show to a new venue, the quicker you get at it; however our shorter load-in time is not reflected in our call times, so we often have either a really leisurely load-in or a lot of spare time to just hang out in costume.  So we had about twenty minutes up our sleeve the other day in which I invited the girls to share their experiences with diets with me, which led to a really great chat.  And what they said reminded me of two things: that what you see usually isn't the whole story, and being nice to yourself can go a long way.

Advertising came out this week -
I'm pretty damn excited about this show!

Most of yesterday was a pretty brilliant day, and I'm trying to figure out why I had so much energy.   Maybe it was the extra twenty minutes of sleep, maybe it was meditation before leaving for work, maybe it was feeling buoyed up by the first of our Meisner sessions a few of us are conducting at my house, working through Larry Silverberg's "The Meisner Approach" workbook.  We had two Magic School Bus shows that I really enjoyed, I went home and went straight to "Macbeth school" (i.e., my desk, where I sit with my laptop and Ashley's Riverside Shakespeare and do some pretty disciplined work on text preparation), I hung out outside and enjoyed the beautiful spring weather, and then had my last class with the Hope Stone teens before we head into tech week.  We also caught up with some friends at a restaurant we hadn't been to before to see a friend's son play guitar in the courtyard.  Today is back to Macbeth school, with a coffee break with the Zeteo pastor around 2pm, and going to see a show tonight to kick off the weekend.  I think I'm going to try what one of the School Bussers suggested, and take a food journal that isn't just a record of what I eat, but how it's connected to what I feel.  I suspect that being more in touch with myself spiritually will help, especially heading in to the next four weeks, which involve Hope Stone tech week, no less than forty-six Magic School Bus shows, and the beginning of Macbeth rehearsals.  Goodbye, world, I'll see you at the other end!

Houston Day 704 - Fun (or not) with Calories

Fun (or not) with Calories, or, Diets Ahoy

I'm not sure whether this is an Australia v America experience, or if it's just the time in my life, but I seem to be surrounded by people on diets.  The paleo diet is a big thing, as is calorie-counting, but also there just seem to be a whole lot of people on an eternal quest to change their bodies, and once that change has been effected, watch over it with an iron rule.
I totally get it, coz I'm on that quest too, and people should (and will) do whatever makes them happy.  But I really long for a sense of freedom that I often don't see in these dieters - actual freedom, which to me means freedom from the habit of overdoing either end of the spectrum, not just the freedom to eat yourself into a diabetic coma.  I have no idea how to achieve that freedom, consistently, for a long period of time.

Houston Day 695 - an artistic expedition

The Woodlands Waterway Art Festival

This weekend just gone was my first weekend (almost) completely work-free since Company started in February.  So Lucas planned a fun and full weekend for the two of us, including going to an art festival in The Woodlands.  The Woodlands is a suburban outpost of Houston, which I've commented on before.

Rick Loudermilk was the featured artist,
and his art was on all the signage

The Art Festival was cool.  The Waterway was lined with hundreds of booths set up by various visual artists, representing so many different media and different styles - it was so much fun to look and see what great creatives can do! We bought a couple of pieces - one from a Texas artist who is entertainingly named Rick Loudermilk, and who was there with his wife (also a painter).  Her style shares some similarities to his, which was interesting to see.  The piece of his that we bought is a big, geometric, colorful picture of some flowers, in a similar style to the picture on the left.
The other painting we bought is called "The Sea Conquest".  Here is its description:

The chubby girl put a fish on her head and a sea anemone on top of the fish. She doesn’t need to, but she is balancing on her tricycle, conquering the sea

The artist, Tanya Doskova, is from Bulgaria, and apparently her children pick on her for her English-language skills, but I think the way she writes is gorgeous and I love it that she doesn't express her potent, complex ideas in everyday Joe words.  You can see the painting here, and it's well worth looking through the rest of her online gallery as well.  Make sure you click on the pictures to read the descriptions!
So we had a lovely day looking at different kinds of art, and brought home two paintings and some sunburn. A good day, all in all.

Houston Day 691 - The Extrovert's Confession

The Extrovert's Confession 

over the weeks we warm up.  the more stories are shared the more we have ties and memories and things that link us to each other.  and I make her smile, and she told you something you didn’t know before, and we giggle.  we all bubble over with these stories, these facts, that we are so proud to own.  we stand on each other’s shoulders to see how we can be funnier, louder, sparklier.  and quicker, and quicker, we laugh too loud, there’s no time to hear.  we cut each other down in this scrabble to the limelight that our souls are so greedy for.  and it shines on our face and we ride that joy all the way home.  but sometimes we get bitter, even when we win, because cutting each other down just hurt a bit too much today.

I wrote this recently while I was figuring out some stuff.  Please note that it's about me trying to identify the ways in which I hurt and offend people; I'm not trying to spew passive aggression all over the internet in an attempt to punish someone else for hurting me.  I participate in situations like this all the time, and go home wondering why it feels so wrong.

Houston Day 687 - little adventures

I love to travel, it's true!
I love a change of venue,
A change of menu,
The feeling when you
Meet with something strange.
I love to travel.
I love a challenge,
I love change.

- "I Love to Travel" from The Frogs (Sondheim)

Little Adventures

I only just realised over the past few days that my attitude to trying new things has changed since we've moved.  Before, it was like I had two invisible lists in my head, one titled Things That Amy Does and the other titled something like Things That Are Not Really Amy's Cup of Tea, and I knew pretty instinctively which list an activity belonged to, even if I'd never tried it before.  Going to theatre shows? Something Amy does comfortably.  Bungee jumping? Definitely on the second list.

But since emigrating, the lists haven't disappeared entirely, but they've faded a bit, or at least are open to reassignment.  I'm pretty sure that's partly due to the unavailability of many activities on the Things That Amy Does list (you try finding a Melbourne-style coffee shop in Texas: it's possible, but you have to know where to look), and partly due to being forced to make things my cup of tea that previously weren't (e.g., driving on the right-hand side of the road).  I've realised how much joy is possible by looking for little adventures, both with Lucas and on my own!

The path into Donald R Collins Park

So the adventure we went on yesterday was mountain-bike riding.  I'm totally rubbish on a bike, and the last time I rode a mountain bike was when I was fourteen on an Outdoor Ed trip through the Grampians, and I was pretty rubbish then too.  But we scored some good bikes from a colleague of Lucas' who was dumping a bunch of stuff before being transferred to Malaysia, so yesterday we went to Collins Park in northwest Houston in the glorious spring sunshine and I (pretty terrified) took to the trails.  I have the bruises to prove it! Going downhill is much more fun than going uphill, but I shall learn! 

Houston Day 683 - Amy & Bekah's fun day trip

This week, due to Easter, I have the wonderful (and much-needed) blessing of four days completely show-free.  Bekah also had yesterday off work, so we had planned a day trip to Galveston, but alas the stormy weather forecast made us decide to stay in Houston.
We had a great day anyway! We started off with breakfast at the Monarch restaurant, visited the Museum of Fine Arts, took a yoga class, had lunch at Whole Foods, and then spent the rest of the day watching The West Wing.  Lovely restful quality time - love that girl!

Anytime Lucas or I mention Galveston to someone who doesn't live in Texas, they sing us a song.  Here it is (sung much better than anyone we talk to sings it).  Bekah and I still haven't made it to Galveston beach - this is the second trip we've cancelled due to rotten weather.  Silly subtropical storms.  But this climate does mean that green things are growing like mad all over each other right now.  We have multiple trees in our garden that are home to other trees climbing all over them like vines.  Better take advantage of this gorgeous (albeit occasionally stormy) spring weather before the brutal summer rolls around!

Houston Day 667 - Union Status?

(Yet More) Thoughts on Actor-hood and Actors' Equity

I, and most other young actors I know, struggle with the question of when you get to call yourself an actor.  No one crosses you with a sword and says "I hereby dub thee a professional/working/good actor" (whatever adjective or benchmark it is you have set in your mind).  On the other side of the coin, no one pulls you aside and says "hey, buddy, you're obviously not going to get enough work, so you should quit now".  So it's all about setting your own goals, and getting good training, and pulling your self-confidence together to chart your own journey.

For me, since moving here, the desire to have some kind of validation has manifested itself into an obsession to join the union, Actors' Equity.  You can check out their website to see all the reasons why that's a good thing, not the least endearing of which is the Cantzen Shoe Fund, a bequest made by the late Conrad Cantzen to help out-of-work actors buy nice shoes to wear to auditions.  I've realised that for me, and for many others, the question on the audition form about union status has really become a status symbol in our minds.  I'm not yet a member of the union, and I haven't even yet earned any points in the Equity Membership Candidate program.  I am getting callbacks for a couple of the companies in Houston where you can earn such points, so I trust it's a matter of time and being ready for the right role turning up until I begin to be able to do that.  But recently I realised that even if I were offered union membership now I wouldn't take it because I'm not consistently getting union work, and it would prevent me from doing my current non-union job at Main Street Theater for Youth.  And Lucas, ever the wonderful, has been encouraging me to enjoy my current jobs (which I certainly do) without feeling like it somehow diminishes my goals.

I do want to be consistently getting union work, and I do want to be a member of Actors' Equity, BUT something cool happened today that let me know in another way that I am progressing.  When I was a teenager I took a master class at NIDA, and the actor teaching that course spoke about learning to love auditions, and knowing that you have developed a good dramatic technique when you can love that impromptu, terrifying, unrehearsed situation.  And this morning, I thought, "Gosh, I'm so busy right now I don't have much time to go to auditions.  Gee, I miss auditions."  (Yes, I was exactly that bizarrely colloquial in my thoughts.) And it reminded me how far I've come since my first auditions in Houston.  I have come to LOVE auditions*.

*Theater auditions.  Screen auditions still turn me into an embarrassed mess.

Houston Day 661 - Sondheim & Sorkin guide you through my life

Two Quotes Indicative of This Week 

"Listen, everybody, I'm afraid you didn't hear - or do you want to see a crazy lady fall apart in front of you?"

Click here to see a nice piece the Houston Chronicle wrote about us!

That's a line from Company, although kind of a line from my life right now.  Last week's heinous schedule (it got even worse since I wrote this post) got me sick, and with my asthma never really under control since we moved here I'm afraid of not getting better for a long time.  Soooo I'm freaking out, a little disproportionately, it must be admitted, about letting down the show (which opens this week, btw!), and about being a liability, other things along that line of reasoning.  Rational Amy is reading The Feeling Good Handbook right now, and learning how not to freak out quite so disproportionately.  Other reasons why that line is a line from my life is that the character's name is Amy, and the guy she's marrying is an awful lot like Lucas.

CJ: "Is the reason you guys didn't get married because her name would have been Lisa Sherborne-Seaborn?"
Sam: "Yes.  That's the reason."

As Lucas says, the sound in our house that indicates that I'm sick is a drum roll, followed by "Previously on The West Wing."  Two days of marathon watching are helping me rest (plus the fact that we're off Magic School Bus this week).  And I can tell I'm getting better, because I have the desire to cook, which only ever happens when I'm recovering from either the post-show blues or a bout of illness.  Plus my throat has stopped hurting and I haven't felt the need to vomit since Sunday.  Hurrah!

So we're all ok, I will be fine, the show will be great, and you will come and see it.  It's a real treat to be working with a brilliant director and brilliant designers and hardworking, fabulous actors on one of Sondheim's most famous pieces.  So, you know, come see it.

Houston Day 650 - Lucas is Wonderful

More Reasons Why My Husband is Awesome

Despite not being in theatre, not only does he know what a stumble-through is, he knows that when it comes at the end of a long and less-than-stellar day, his wife needs a little extra love.  Look what I came home to last night.

P.S.  Readers of Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood appreciate how P31 I am being now.

Houston Day 642 - life right now

A Typical Day

...is a little crazy.  I am joining the ranks of Houston actors who work multiple shows at once.  This is a typical day at the moment.

6am - alarm goes off.  Lucas and I are trying a little trick to help us feel more connected to each other, which is spending four minutes at four points in the day focusing on nothing but each other.  The first point is supposed to be as soon as we wake up, which is very challenging and neither of us are very awake.  Or if we are, we're not very pleased about it.

7am - call time at Main Street Theater.  Get in the tour van with stage manager and five other actors.  Do hair (wig prep) and makeup in the van.  One of the lovely things about touring with a stage manager (which I didn't have in my tour job in Australia) is that they drive, and I can zone out.

9am - one or two shows at an elementary school.  Contemplate fabulous patent-leather bright-red high heels and quell voice in back of brain that says it's too early in the morning for such shoes.  Don said shoes and wig and become Ms Frizzle.  "Have you heard of our teacher, Ms Frizzle?....the Magic School Bus...come with us on our bus and we'll learn about it....tiny stuff matters....the way it could be (imagine the world you're determined to see)...going green....our wonderful world!" (See, you just got your own little private performance right there.)

11am - on a high from performance, get out of costume, throw hat on to cover wig hair, reload van, hop back in it, still laughing and joking with other cast members, and drive away.  At some point, my body comes down from that high and I get cold, tired and ravenously hungry.  Laughing and joking peters out.

noon - get back home.  Spend the next few hours in a daze.  I'm not entirely sure what it is I do in the afternoon.  Go over music for Company rehearsal? Theoretically, yes.  Work on writing/casting/preparing Hope Stone Kids show? Theoretically, yes.  Sleeping, binge eating and watching The West Wing? Definitely, yes.

5pm - teach weekly class at Hope Stone.

6pm - begin the trek out to Texas Repertory Theatre in Houston's famous traffic.

7pm - rehearsal at Tex Rep for Company by Stephen Sondheim.  Enjoy but also get frustrated by the challenge of such difficult music, with a bunch of actors (myself included) who find it very hard to remember that the world is not all about us, and that therefore my comments/questions/jokes about every single bar of music is possibly not as useful to a congenial rehearsal atmosphere as we think it should be.

midnight - get home, go to bed.  Find it difficult to sleep with the opening bars of Company so loud in my head I think Lucas must be calling me Bobby.

I am so grateful for the opportunities I have to work in Houston (getting paid to do Sondheim? Whaaaa-?), but right now am finding it difficult to manage said workload! I'm not the only person in Company to also be working a kids' show during the day, and in fact I'm not even the only person in Company to also be in Magic School Bus.  And that other person somehow manages to work at a costume shop in the afternoons.  And have fabulous hair while he does it.  Damn you, Zack.
Lucas has been challenging me recently to be more present and not always focused on the next task, because it takes away my enjoyment of each moment, and also makes him feel like I don't value time with him.  I will make this work, or alternatively just be in a daze until Company closes in April.  See you all then!

Houston Day 633 - Feliz anniversario!

Magic School Bus opened today! We had a great show for a great audience, with only tiny mistakes to remind us we're alive.  I remembered that one of the beauties about kids' theatre is that there's an audience there that you can play directly to and have some fun with.  Ms Frizzle's first entrance was marked by applause, which of course set me in a good mood for the rest of the show!

Beautiful Colorado!

Lucas in Boulder (literally)

We continued our tradition of taking turns surprising each other with anniversary holidays this year, with me taking Lucas to Boulder, Colorado.  We flew to Denver and then drove to Boulder, and ate and drink delicious things, and hiked (very slowly) up a mountain, and wandered around Boulder's lovely shops and bookstores.  And Lucas gave me a fabulous present, which was.....he's organised for us to take Spanish lessons together! We start this Saturday! Feliz anniversario!

On our hike we visited a very old, very Little-House-on-the-Prairie, abandoned log cabin!

Houston Day 620 - financially better off?

A Financial Comparison Between Texas and Victoria

So I've come to a conclusion, based on some bad maths and a drive through East Texas this last weekend.  I think the average Victorian (that's my home state in Australia, for all you Yankee readers) is wealthier than your average Texan.

I've suspected this for a while.  As in Melbourne, there are a range of areas and a range of people who live in them, with varying amounts of money.  The poorest neighborhoods in Houston look a lot worse to my eyes than the poorest suburbs in Melbourne.  Is it just that Americans really know how to build ugly and boring towns and/or that having grown up in Australia I prefer the aesthetics of Melbourne? Because my drive through a different neighborhood last week, where I couldn't find the building I was teaching in for ages because barely any buildings were put together enough to have a street number, might suggest otherwise.

There seem to be so many more
abandoned houses in Houston than back home:
evidence that the GFC hit this country harder than Australia

We personally enjoy a lot more money here than we did back home, mostly thanks to an ExxonMobil salary.  And we're not alone - Houston has a lot of wealthy people and a lot of industry money and I've commented before on how that means a lot more money in the arts.

A typical house in River Oaks,
one of Houston's wealthiest neighborhoods

This subject came up again in my thoughts as Leslie and I were driving home through East Texas after an audition in Kilgore.  I noticed a surprising amount of abandoned or smashed-up houses and asked Leslie if that was normal for country towns.  She said yes, but that the houses further off the main roads would be nicer.
So I did some research.  Now we're getting into some areas that I am not naturally very switched-on about, like the difference between the average and the median, how to factor in the exchange rate, tax, etc.  But I tried.  And it seems to me that while the cost of living in Australia is astronomically higher than in the USA, you're still financially better off being an Australian resident (the kind that gets access to Medicare) than an American one, unless you're the kind of American resident that moved there to get an excellent, above-average job.
Add to that the factor that college loans and healthcare are a far greater financial burden on Americans than they are on most Australians, and I think my hunch is correct.  Anyone wanting to do the maths themselves (please, you'll do it much better than I) can look at these websites:
Texan Census
Cost of Living Comparison
Median Income in Australia
Melbourne's Worst Suburbs
A Guide to Houston Neighborhoods
Something Quite Complicated from the Australian Treasury About Tax

Houston Day 615 - Australia Day

Happy Australia Day/Happy Survival Day! Like everyone's favorite Aussie, I still call Australia home.  (What's that? ... You mean Peter Allen has not always been our historically-and-still-sometimes-very-homophobic-nation's favorite ambassador? Well, strike a light.)

I do still call Australia home, and the homesickness levels have been pretty high after returning home from our trip home.  Yes, my emotions are exactly as confused as that sounds.  Being in rehearsal this week has definitely helped.  My brain is totally fried after only three days of learning new choreography for Magic School Bus.  We ran my solo number toward the end of rehearsal today and one of the runs involved me doing the cute hip-shimmy choreography, opening my mouth to sing and then just laughing my head off because my brain froze up and couldn't remember the words.  I've been wondering why I'm so mentally tired and realising that while the aforementioned homesickness is probably not helping, part of it is not having done a musical for six months.  The director made a comment today about me being a musical theatre actress (as opposed to a straight theatre actress) and my consequent supposed ability to speak dialogue and dance at the same time....we'll see, Andrew.  We'll see.

After rehearsal I treated myself to some sweetened condensed milk and a read of A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which I'm reading for the Zeteo book club.  Brilliant book.  In particular, it has reclaimed Proverbs 31 for me into something I can read without feeling guilty or unwomanly.  Check out her blog where she touches on it here.  And then tonight I am cooking and cleaning the car and packing for my road trip to Kilgore, TX, where there's a whole lot of nothing, but an excellent Shakespeare Festival.  I think they should employ me, and I'm going to do my darnedest to convince them of that in my audition.

Houston Day 613 - all aboard the Magic School Bus!

The Magic School Bus Live!: The Climate Challenge

In keeping with what appears to be a developing tradition, starting the New Year with some kind of transport-themed show, I started rehearsals for Magic School Bus this week.  Last year was Freedom Train ("you got your ticket?"), and maybe next year I will have learned from this year's show and be taking some kind of alternative-energy-powered transport, just like we have progressed since last year and are not currently enslaving anyone in this year's show.

Right now we're learning the music, arranged and harmonised by our wonderful MD Kathy.  The confusion of learning six-part harmony/counterpoint (totally for our enjoyment only; I think the kids in the audience might not fully appreciate it) is magnified when she keeps on confusing me with one of the other cast members, whose name is Claire.  It helps (or maybe doesn't help) that, as siblings often are, I have been trained from a young age to answer to "Claire" (or Sarah, or sometimes even to my mum's sisters' names).

So it should be a good show, provided Claire and I can play the right parts. And turns out we do have a show that our family and friends can come to see, at Main Street Chelsea Market, 7pm on March 18th.  I think it costs $5.  And you will learn all about how

"We see CO2 and we see CH4,
And every day we see a little more.
Molecules are small, but they can add up fast:
Tiny stuff matters."

Sciencey.