Houston Day 188 - backstage at Sound of Music

I'm in the nunnery (the female chorus dressing room) sitting on the floor against the mirror.  Three nuns are watching tv shows on their laptops, one is underlining something in a book, another appears to be getting computer advice from a younger postulant, one is skyping her husband, one is fixing her hair, another is reading, and the last is searching through her stuff for something.  And I just skyped Jenn & Drew in Australia! Yay, thanks guys.
Janet leaves tomorrow.  It's been so lovely having her here.  Australia feels closer than it used to.  I'm feeling remarkably well-adjusted and at home at the moment - I think if Janet had come a few months ago it would have been a very different story.  I have enough to do that challenges and stimulates and fulfills me, and a variety of friends - it's not the same as in Melbourne - of course you don't build the depth and breadth of friendship in six months that you do in seven and a half years - but I'm so enjoying getting to know everyone here.  And I accept that Houston's not the world's most liveable city, or even in the top three or wherever Melbourne is, but it's got things that Melbourne doesn't, and above all I'm willing to forgive its shortcomings because I feel at home here now.

Houston Day 187 - Happy Thanksgiving!

....and it was indeed all it's cracked up to be.  Woke up to find Janet watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the three of us spent the morning alternating between laughing and yelling (and, I confess, dancing) in front of the tv, and cooking up a storm.  Janet had also discovered a Thanksgiving playlist on the NPR website, so we cooked to that music, which was mostly just songs about food....including a rap song somewhat bizarrely  all about red beans and rice, and a lovely duet between Louis Armstrong and someone else entitled "All That Meat (and No Potatoes)".

Janet & Lucas choosing beer

The day before, however, involved a very stressful trip to the supermarket to buy all we needed to host the big feast.  The layout of the 11th St Kroger is still not intuitive to me, and there were some pretty frustrating traffic jams, particularly around the baking aisle.  Also, the store had completely run out of pumpkin, so Lucas had to make his pumpkin pie from a tin.

the veggies looked great before I actually cooked them

Like everyone who's hosting their first big meal, I called my mum a couple of times for cooking advice....felt like some sort of rite of passage.  And whilst I enjoyed preparing roast vegetables a la Sue, I screwed them up a bit and they came out burnt and chewy.  But thanks for helping me while you were travelling Mum!

I also got advice from my dad on how to make a good sauce to go with fruit salad.  Fruit salad is apparently a requirement of Bekah's Thanksgiving, and it made me very happy to hear her say "you've totally made my Thanksgiving with this fruit salad".  I've never really enjoyed playing hostess, particularly not when it involves copious amounts of cooking, but I had a great time yesterday! It helped that everyone contributed something, so Bekah made the turkey (well, she cooked it, she didn't make it; that would be strange).  Janet bought us some electric beaters and made a pav for a touch of Australiana...it was great, and went very well with Dad's raspberry sauce!

Janet's pavlova

Christine from Exxon came over too, bearing her family recipe of pumpkin ice cream pie, and Maggie stopped by between other parties and packing for her holiday to bring pecan pie.  The big football games were on, but unless I concentrate really hard on following the game I don't actually have any idea what's going on in American football, beyond the fact that big men in tight pants are rolling around on the ground together.

Maggie, Christine, Nick & Bekah

At last, at last (around 3pm), it was time to eat.  We ran into a little road block when we discovered that we didn't have a good carving knife and no-one really knew how to carve a turkey, but finally we sat down to a feast we could all be proud of! It was a very celebratory day.  I loved it.

Bekah attempting to carve

Maggie helping out

Now I am sitting in a quiet house eating leftover pecan pie for breakfast.  I am very thankful for old friends and new friends, and lovely food, and a lovely house with which to share hospitality.  I am grateful for my family on the other end of the phone, and for every second that I get to feel like I'm at home in this new country.

the end result - a delicious feast!

Houston Day 185 - signing up to be a mercenary

In between hosting Janet, who's visiting from Melbourne (yay!), Sound of Music rehearsals (I'm backstage now), and Rudolph shows (feel should add something in parentheses....um....it's going well), I'm supposed to be wading through the pile of paperwork and instructions my new agent gave me.
I have a sum total of a half-day's experience in screen work, so right now I'm just looking at "we need a certain type of body on camera" work, which sometimes might include specific skill sets.  You never know when a tv show or movie or commercial will require someone exactly five foot seven who looks Asian and plays classical guitar.  So this means I have to answer long long surveys about my looks and my skills, once for the agent and once for each of the four online casting databases I'm signing up for.  And here are the questions I am asking myself as I answer their questions:
Eternally damnable questions such as what to include...I used to think there was this magic line between professional and amateur, but there's not. I do include my last show in Australia, "Scenes from an Everyday Affair" in my list of professional accomplishments, because I flatter myself that it wasn't just for fun that I rolled around an intimate cabaret venue in my underwear.  Wait, does it make it more sordid if money was involved...? And do you want to know how much money was involved? $5, plus reimbursements for the props I bought.  That's right.
Yet more questions:
1.  Do I tick "wind instrument" if I've already ticked "flute"? Will that mislead casting directors into thinking I play another wind instrument?...coz it would just make me feel better to tick more boxes...
2.  Do casting directors seriously open this online database looking for someone with "whistling skills" as their defining characteristic?
3.  Who or what is "rappelling"?
4.  Why can't my secondary interests be more employable? i.e., why is Latin not listed in the foreign languages?
5.  My only TV experience is with the ABC, but I can't write ABC coz there's an American ABC...so it's the Australian Broadcasting....Company? Corporation? Canoe? No, wait, canoeing is in the "athletic skills" section...
6.  Resume comments section...presumably for me to comment, not the readers...."wow, i seem to have done lots of things that class as "live entertainment"" seems a little inane, so maybe I'll leave that blank.
7.  Who the hell knows their hat size?

...more adventures in the world of my career.  But I smile as I quietly grumble, because I have an agent I like, and more theatre projects and friends in this world than I could possibly have time for.  And also because they're singing "The Lonely Goatherd" right now, and you can't possibly be grumpy about that.

Houston Day 179 - more travels through space and time

Lily Tomlin's character (whose name I forget): Mr Markovski, have you ever travelled through space and time?
Albert: Yes.  No.  Time, not space.  Actually I have no idea what you're talking about.

I <3 Huckabees

Today was a little journey back in time.  I travelled back to the phase of a few months ago, when I was easily confused by all the bright lights, foreign accents, excess of choices on offer and unwritten rules of stores here in Houston.  The United States Postal Service can now join CostCo on the list of unlikely places that have reduced Amy to tears.
When I was young and naive, I thought that things like non-western toilets would be the hardest part of travel.  No.  Squatting near the ground to pee is nothing compared to not understanding instructions, or even worse, the instructions being assumed rather than explicitly given.  This is exactly what happened when I went to Japan and had no trouble with the non-western toilets, but enormous trouble with the western-style toilets with so many buttons, options and things that needed me to understand the instructions.
After breaking the rules at the post office (and wrapping up a package in a manner not inconsistent with a physical comedy sketch), I then proceeded to Bed, Bath & Beyond to purchase bedding for the guests who are staying with us over the next couple of months.  Still distracted by the Great Post Office Fiasco of 2011*, I nearly ran someone over in the parking lot, and then spent waaaay too much time contemplating the aesthetic, financial and allergenic ramifications of setting up the guest bed.  It's been a while since we went shopping for homewares, and I forgot how easily stressed out I am by it! However, I am pleased with the result!
So, Janet, Mum, Lex & Monica, welcome to our home! Come and enjoy your guest bed (not all at the same time, please).  And new Houstonian friends who I now know are now reading my blog, you are welcome to crash anytime.

*hyperbole used for effect

Houston Day 178

Yay, Rudolph went pretty well.  At last the company van is fixed so Tracey, Alice, the cast and the set all travelled together to our first show.  There were some nerves, and some almost-but-not-quite arguments, and some fear that my seatbelt wouldn't let me out (who designs a car and makes one seatbelt with a different mechanism to the rest, which is not at all clear how to operate?), but we got there and got set up in plenty of time.  The audience was a good size and fairly responsive, and when we discovered that the CD had scratches on the last few tracks we carried the rest of the show off a capella.  Ah, touring shows.  Every day, the same show, a different drama :)

Houston Day 177 - Rudolph opens tonight!

New things I have started doing regularly since moving to Houston:
1.  cycling
2.  eating grapefruit
3.  saying "y'all" (and "mum" is slowly gravitating toward "mom")
4.  buying food in bulk
In other news, we've got our first Rudolph show tonight.  This show is incredibly hard work physically.  It goes for less than an hour and we squeeze in about ten dance numbers.  I was afraid that once we put on the reindeer suits (and helmets, and scarves) it'd be so hot and such hard work I might actually faint.  But we did a dress run yesterday, and not only did I not faint, the director seemed fairly happy with it.  Although one of the reindeer did slip and fall over.  I think she's buying herself better shoes today.
So I shall throw my fear out the window, and say, bring it on! I am trying to train myself out of being afraid of things being too hard.  So many problems I have had in my life stem from me freaking out that something might be so hard I can't do it.  Things are allowed to be hard, that's ok.  It's actually rewarding, and it doesn't necessarily mean I can't do the thing that is hard.  It just means I can't do it easily, instinctively and without thinking.  I suspect being an over-achiever at school has something to do with this.  Reminds me of a quote from my favourite book: "A clever person so rarely has to think he gets out of the habit."  Not that I'm saying I'm so clever I don't have to think, but it's just that when I've decided I'm good at something I sometimes get upset if I actually have to put effort into it.  Which is childish, and a waste of time.
Speaking of my favourite book, I have been reading it again over the last few days to alleviate stress.  It's The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name).  The premise is that a genius of a single mother is raising her even-more-of-a-genius child on almost no money from a crappy typing job, and worried about him having no male role models, she plays him the movie Seven Samurai all the time.  At age 11 he finally finds out who his father is, and his father is a rubbish travel writer, contemptibly stupid to both mother and child.  There's a line in Seven Samurai which goes: "If we were fighting with real swords, I'd have killed you by now."  And the genius child goes to meet his father, and thinks "If we were fighting with real swords, I'd have killed him: I can't say I'm his son, because it's true."  But then he decides to just pick celebrities or academics who he respects and goes to tell them he's their son, because "a good samurai will parry the blow."  I take that to mean that only someone who doesn't believe the lie is worthy of being his father, but I'm sure there are more subtleties to it that I'll pick up on reading it for the sixteenth or seventeenth time.
I first read it when I was fifteen, and had the same feeling you get when you first read Samuel Beckett or Tom Stoppard: "I'm pretty sure I enjoyed that, but I know I didn't understand all of it."  So it's totally borne a once-a-year rereading since then.  I didn't really appreciate the ending on the first or second read.  It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I picked up how strong the theme of suicide is, and the heartbreaking parallels between the suicidal mother and one of the chosen fathers, who kills himself about three-quarters of the way through the book ("I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not consider it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank").  Only on this reading have I become intrigued about the theme of travel: the kid's biological father is a travel writer, and most of the chosen fathers come to his attention because of interesting expeditions and adventures: a musician who goes to deepest darkest Africa to study drums, a journalist who crosses all kinds of restricted borders and gets imprisoned somewhere remote, a linguist who flies on homemade silk wings over Mongolia, Tibet and China, an astronomer who lives with a tribe in the Amazon for a while and teaches one of the Amazonian kids mathematics.
If you feel like indulging me and enjoying the book with me, read the following lovely passage, which happens just after we meet Father No.2, the charismatic astronomer, who totally believed he was his son until the kid fessed up and told him the truth.
"If I hadn't said anything to Sorabji I wouldn't ever have had to waste time that way ever again.  In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn't do enough for his longlost son.  ...  I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize.  Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.
"I had another look at the Kutta-Jukowski theorem.  It wasn't so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize.  It's just that if you're not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes.  If you can't go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize.  Whereas this was just stupid.
"I put down my book on aerodynamics.
"Sorabji looked out from the [television] screen with flashing eyes.
"I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.
"What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.
"If we had money we could go anywhere.  Give us the money and we would be the heroes."

- The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt, p378

One day I will learn how to pronounce all the foreign words, whip out my American and English accents, and do the audiobook recording.  Ah, a new career goal.

Houston Day 174 - bye Tom & Huck, it's been real swell

...for the most part, although the beginning of the process was frustrating in the extreme.  And then there were some other hiccups too...a couple of times kids in question time asked where Huck Finn was, and Shemica had to come up with a better answer than "well, honey, that actor was fired".
The best thing about Tom & Huck, aside from doing a fun show with fun people, is that it got me follow-up gigs with Express Theatre.  Rudolph (Christmas show) opens on Tuesday, and we start rehearsals for Freedom Train (black history month show) in January.  I'm feeling quite at home at Express now.
One thing, not just at Express but everywhere, that is becoming easier is the language barrier.  I know geographical variations of English are such a tiny language barrier compared to my friend Kristen who just up and moved to China a few years ago, but it has been a bit of a cause of stress, particularly because it took me by surprise.  A couple of things that have made me feel better are: 1) the knowledge that the one kid at Hope Stone who I can't understand frequently baffles the other teacher too and 2) the discovery that the African-American vernacular is considered by some linguists to be technically a creole or a dialect distinct from other kinds of English (thank you Wikipedia)...so it's possibly forgivable that I sometimes struggle to understand the conversation when I'm the only white person in the room.  It's kind of similar to talking to some of Dad's Scottish neighbours.  A couple of the folks at Express are very sweet and take care to 'translate' for me so I have learned some new words & phrases, including one which I won't share because I don't know how to spell it.  I've taught them some Australianisms too.  This week's lesson was the difference between "chookas" and "choccas".  I was explaining "choccas" as a shortening of "chock-a-block", which was met with a blank look, and the realisation that the word is an abbreviation of an already colloquial term.  Really, Aussies, sometimes we go too far.
Nick & Bekah came to our last show today, which was really thoughtful.  I hadn't asked them to come, because being childless adults they're not really the target audience, but Bekah insisted on coming to support me.  She's a great friend!
So the post-show blues have exactly twenty-one hours to do their worst before I go to my next rehearsal.  I think I can handle that.

Houston Day 172 - Lucas' birthday!

At Hope Stone again.  It provides a lovely rhythm to my week.  Before the teens get in I check in the very little kids for their class, and today when I got here the professional company was rehearsing, so I got to watch that too.  I treasure this hour every week, of quiet community in a creative space.  I feel so welcome, even though I'm only just getting to know everyone here.
Lucas is 30 today! ...which also means that it's been exactly a year since he got the job offer.  I remember it so clearly - I used to have four-hour breaks between teaching shifts in Cranbourne, and he called me and sang "America" from West Side Story to break the news.  Then he took the day off work, drove to Cranbourne, and we stared at each other in shock for a few hours.  I think we can say it's been a successful year since then.  It was definitely hard to go....a friend of mine was prepping a show about new beginnings and asked me for some thoughts for stimulus material for her dancers, and I wrote something like
Before I can go
I must first leave
And pray that it is worth it
Worth it? Hard to say so far.  I think so.  Even the depressing bit, when I was unemployed and bored and cried a lot for a few months, has I think passed, and had its lessons, etc., etc., etc.
Today is a very busy day for me, so while Lucas will be enjoying dinner with twelve new friends at a gorgeous restaurant near our place tonight, I will be at rehearsal.  But we celebrated last night - we went to a Peruvian restaurant together.  It was in a kind of industrial, unattractive area of town, which really showed me a way that I've changed that I dislike...I was getting inwardly critical of the place just because of the area, when in Melbourne the coolest restaurants are amazing gems of beauty and class behind a dingy alleyway front (think Panama Dining Room, or just about anywhere on Smith St).
Oop, gotta go & start drumming with the teens.  See y'all later.  (Yep, that's something I say now :) )

Houston Day 170

Shut up.  Eating Tim Tams in front of the telly is a totally acceptable way of spending my morning, thank you.

In other news, I have an agent! :) Her name is Cyndi, and she's the head of an agency called Pastorini Bosby, which seems to be the best/biggest/only agency in town.  I really like her - I met her last week and felt like I could be really honest with her, and she encouraged me to ask lots of questions, and she listened to me, and told me things I found really informative, including about the unions, which play a much bigger role here than in Australia.  So agents here in TX don't deal with theatre work, just screen and voiceover.  There's not that stranglehold on information that exists in the Melbourne theatre world, where you won't even hear about the good theatre auditions unless you have an agent.  In fact, I have been emailing someone at a theatre company in Austin about work there and she sent me an update recently saying, hey, you should be aware we're having auditions in January.  I love it.
Anyway, meeting my new agent was a really positive experience.  Very happy.  She wants me to do some more screen acting training, because I need to learn how to turn off the children's theatre habits.  So, I will enroll in something after the New Year, and between that, Hope Stone and hopefully some other form of paid performing work (opportunities in the pipeline but not definite yet), don't think I'll have time for Ragtime.  :( Pretty much my decision was made when I turned up to Sound of Music choreography rehearsal last night, and it was like I had never learnt the chore, my memory of it was that bad.  When I do multiple shows, one of them suffers, I have just discovered.

I shall eat the last Tim Tam, and then maybe do some work before heading off to Rudolph rehearsal in half an hour.  Or maybe I shall just watch SVU.

Houston Day 169 - busy busy busy

It is 5:39am and I have given up on going back to sleep.  Haven't slept very well the past two nights because I am stressed about juggling my busy schedule over the next couple of months.  The Sound of Music Director finally called me on how much I haven't been prioritising that show, with the result that I am missing Lucas' birthday dinner to go to rehearsal :(
This morning's particular worry is the upcoming auditions for a performance of Ragtime at the Miller Outdoor Theatre.  I really want to do it because a) it's Ragtime and b) it's at the Miller Outdoor Theatre and c) the rehearsals are one street away from my house.  Those reasons are all undermined by the $550 participation fee, and the fact that I'm squeezing auditions in between Rudolph shows, Sound of Music rehearsals, and visitors from Australia.  But then, a) it's Ragtime, and b) it's at the Miller Outdoor Theatre.  I think I'll just clarify what the rehearsal schedule will look like, to see if I even can make that work.

Tom & Huck cast - me, Derrick & Shemica

This weekend just gone Lucas and I had a little mini-holiday.  He came to see the Tom & Huck show on Saturday, and then we checked into a hotel in The Woodlands.  Saturday night we went to a fundraiser dinner in Conroe, about an hour away from our place, that Lucas' work friend James had invited us to, for his kid's school.  That was kind of the reason for the holiday - to make a fun weekend of it, rather than just a massive long drive.  Check out the map here.
The Woodlands is a strange beast.  Before we moved here, we were told "if you have kids, you want to live in The Woodlands; if you don't, you want to live in The Heights."  The Woodlands is all a bit perfect, and artificial, and...underwhelming.  Think of Caroline Springs and Disneyland having a baby.  I think I detected more of that stereotypically Texan/conservative American attitude (which is less common in Houston proper).  E.g. 1: the woman we met in the hotel elevator who thinks that travel to anywhere further than Hawaii is not really worth it.  E.g. 2: this mug I saw in a Texas memorabilia shop which assumes that Texan=religious=patriotic=yay military=appalling punctuation.  (O'Lord? God is Irish???)

E.g. 3: the woman I walked past in World Market who "hadn't ever realised that other parts of the world have all these different kinds of food."
But it was really fun to have a weekend together.  I popped my Macy's cherry and bought some new slippers (it's definitely getting colder), and our visit to World Market rewarded us with Tim Tams, interesting beer from Mississippi, Bundy ginger beer, and good curry paste.  Saturday lunch was at a cool Irish pub on the Waterway (which is The Woodlands' less impressive answer to San Antonio's Riverwalk).  Fall here is beautiful.  It's not the same as autumn in Melbourne....for one thing, the weather is consistent enough to make the change of seasons quite a different experience (remember my complaints about three straight months of 40-degree weather?), and for another thing, here the cold doesn't mean grey or wet nearly as much as it does in Melbourne.  So I'm doing things like walking around in the mild sunshine while the leaves change colour wearing warm hats and chunky knit sweaters.  I feel like I'm in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, or a romantic comedy.  It's rather lovely.

Houston Day 164

Rudolph rehearsals are going fabulously.  We have a full cast, a great director, and the SM sitting in with us from the start.  I really like this director's process.  It's a tight schedule, but she's making time for us to all work creatively as a group, rather than it just being about her directing traffic.
Lucas is in Austin for the rest of the week for a conference so I'm by myself in this big house.  I have enough time today, though, to clean the house to make it feel nice to hang out in! I was going to listen to an audiobook (The Children of Hurin, by Tolkien but published posthumously) or the radio...a fellow National Public Radio fan just called me to say it's really interesting this afternoon, but it seems to be mostly about Greece's economic crisis right now, which I'm sure is a massive concern for many people but I've heard enough about it recently to not care that much....Am I a bad person? Yes.  On that note, I'm playing the bad guy in Rudolph! Unusual for me, so it's a fun challenge.
So clearly no big news happening right now, but life is generally nice.  Fall continues to be beautiful.  I continue to eat too much leftover Halloween candy (yes, we sat out on our front porch feeding candy to small children in costume on Monday!) and make myself feel sick.  Lucas and I continue to be rubbish at housekeeping, but at least we have a great dishwasher these days.  I miss everyone in Australia (well, at least the people I know....well, at least the people I know and like....), and the strategy against homesickness right now seems to be to avoid thinking too much about Australia, songs about Australia, Australian accents, and Christmas in summer.  Because I almost got choked up thinking about Prime Minister Gillard the other day, and that can't be good.