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

Houston Day 339 - Hello from the Zen center

So this last week I have joined the countless Texans who regularly go on a "cleanse" (because the everyday diet is so unhealthy for many Texans!) but not the kind of cleanse where you just drink lemonade for two weeks and try to pretend you're not hungry (one of my fellow reindeer during Rudolph did that and to be honest, it seemed awful).  It was a program outlined in the Yoga International magazine that I read.  The basis of it was doing yoga every day and eating a very restricted vegan diet.  I wanted to do it as a kind of spiritual discipline: to take this time as I come to the end of this season of a very light work schedule to settle a little deeper into myself, to balance out my physical and mental health before I head into Hope Stone tech week and Pink rehearsals straight after that.  And it's been great.  I feel very zen, and balanced, and rested, and in touch with myself.  Am also experiencing a hunger for spiritual challenge and community that I haven't felt in ages.  I got out a bible this week! Just coz I felt like it!!!
Other stuff going on in our world...I've been taking screen acting classes, as well as some more Shakespeare classes, and have learned & improved a whole bunch.  We went to see our first TUTS show last night, with Nick and Bekah, and also marked the first time the four of us have been to a show together and not just Nick, Bekah and Lucas coming to see my show or Nick, Lucas and I going to see one of Bekah's shows.  The show was La Cage aux Folles and it was brilliant.  Brilliant.  Brilliant.  A great show, and a really top-notch production.  Makes me feel good about the state of the theatre in Houston (although I think all of the actors were from New York :-/ ).  After this week Lucas should finally be done with the lease sale stuff at work, so that takes a load off.  His not-yet-functioning car Lance (the 1980ish Subaru brat he's been working on) got towed to the mechanic, so hopefully at some point we'll have two cars.  Life is filling up to the point now where that is becoming necessary.  And pt is ok here but not amazing...it took me an hour and a half to go to Main Street today to drop off my contract and pick up my Pink script (which, by the way, looks great - I can't way to start!)
Lucas is now home from a long and stressful day at work, so we're going to sit on our front porch and enjoy the mild evening sunshine lighting up the street.

Houston Day 330 - yay, I got cast

Just  a quick note to inform y'all that I went to an audition last night for a new theatre company called Ohana and had a great time and got cast in their first show.  (A last-minute decision to use a slightly dodgy English accent was, apparently, in the director's words, "inspired".)  It's an evening (well, a handful of evenings) of one-act plays called Awesome America!!, and each of the four plays is set in a different random American tourist attraction.  I'm in Perspectives on the John which is about the toilet seat museum in San Antonio (which apparently does exist).  Apparently the company is part of a larger plan to make the east end of downtown Houston the next big thing.  So that's a fun thing to be part of.  I also got rejected by Houston Grand Opera for Show Boat, but let's not focus on that one.

Houston Day 327 - reflections from my library

Teach me how to be someone

Whose heart can explore

While still staying here.

Let this be the year we both travel.

("Goodbye, my Love" from Ragtime)

I'm sitting on Auntie Lallie's old couch on the wide landing in our house that we've designated our library.  It's a beautiful place to be in the early evening because the sun comes through the enormous window over the staircase opposite, and it's also usually pretty tidy, so unlike the rest of the house, I can enjoy the space without having to clean up first.

We didn't decorate it this way on purpose, but I am surrounded by momentos from our travels and from around the world.  In front of me is the wall-hanging Lucas bought in Tibet, beside me is a painting of the outback that used to belong to Grandma, and to my left I can see souvenirs and gifts from Japan, England,Thailand.  There's also a picture in an ExxonMobil frame of us sitting on a longhorn; 3D Jesus; greeting cards; photos, posters and awards from shows I've done and seen; the "bimbo" toy that was made for my first birthday; and one of the many crocodiles given to Lucas during his PhD.  Plus also a billion books (the ones whose quantity made the packers complain).  And that gorgeous photo of me and my sisters taken on my wedding day that reminds me how much I treasure them every time I see it.  This is an interesting room to be feeling reflective in.
In some ways I feel like we've been here so long I'm getting twitchy (gosh I have a short attention span sometimes) and in other ways I'm reminded gently of how new we are here.  When I meet new people and tell them how long I've been here they usually react with a comment about it not being very long.  But I think the twitchiness is mostly due to the six weeks of underemployment (ending in two weeks, YAY)....and also, ironically, I think not being as fully grounded and embedded here means that my mind is not fully engaged all the time.  Sometimes in my life I feel really quite stupid, and then sometimes I am amazed about how much my mind is just always begging for more.

Houston Day 319 - from my new home at Hope Stone

Yesterday, after the lovely Tausha from Citywide Massage dealt with my back, I went to Hope Stone....actually, now I think about it, I've fairly been living at Hope Stone these past couple of days.  I helped out Amy, the 2IC of everything, doing office drudge work for a few hours, then I had coffee (well, roast almond tea) with Jane, the 1IC, mama of Hope Stone at Bungalow, my new favourite coffee shop.  Today I went to two classes, and now I've just checked in the little kids (please God, I hope I've done it right - I still don't get the way admin works here) and the teens are slowly trickling in.
In between all of that, I've been watching a hell of a lot of "Downton Abbey" and doing some fairly hardcore thinking.  When my life slows down between shows, I have time to look around and see how the rest of my life's doing, and often need to do a fair bit of emotional homework on stuff I've ignored while I've been busy.  It's fairly taxing, but good.  Part of what I'm thinking about is trying to decide whether I'll pursue a particular work/day-job opportunity that's come up, or whether I'd rather stay as available as I can for shows, or whether I'll end up letting everyone down trying to juggle multiple commitments.  Hmmm.  I'm also, as per Bekah's improv lessons she's giving me in return for singing lessons, trying to pay attention to what my body language, particularly my feet, are communicating in any given situation.  Think about it - if your weight's back on your heels, and you've got one foot pointing to the side, you're not communicating full alertness and engagement in the situation you're in.
Tonight we're off to see Ragtime at the Miller Outdoor Theatre (yes, this is the one I considered auditioning for way back in December).  Shemica and Vincent are both in it, so that'll be fun to see them.  Once Shemica and I figured out how to understand how the other one talks ("Are you having a go at me?"="I know you ain't comin' for me, bitch!"), we've become pretty good friends.
The Miller is a beautiful theatre - think Sidney Myer Music Bowl.  We've got friends coming, we've got many many cheeses from Houston Dairymaids, and it should be a good night.  And it's Ragtime! I'm so excited to see this show! I hope the production's good.

Houston Day 312 - overshare, Estuary, bittersweet

Apologies if this is an overshare, but I spent a significant portion of yesterday morning on the bus on the way home from Hope Stone via a pharmacy, with a pregnancy test in my bag, ready to take when I got home.  Or rather, it was significant because so much was going on in my mind.  It was an interesting mental exercise in resigning myself to the possibility that my life could look very different from what it is now.  But it was negative, kids.  Don't buy your tickets planning to fly over and meet little Nikolay Buchanan yet.  (You know any child Lucas has will be named after a character in Russian literature, right?)
Have settled a little more into my current rhythm.  Am spending much more time at Hope Stone, taking class and chatting to people.  I'm also taking advantage of so much time to learn a new song and a new monologue for auditions.  The monologue is Tom Stoppard (of course), from a play called Dirty Linen in which a lowly British Parliamentary secretary is involved in a scandalous number of scandals.  In the monologue she names names - in fact, the monologue consists almost entirely of names of people and restaurants where she wooed them, almost in poetry.  It's really fun, and I'm learning an Estuary accent for it too (the kind of London accent that's halfway between the Queen and Eliza Doolittle; think Ricky Gervais).  I feel like I've begun to collect accents.
Lucas has been working hard all this week, preparing for a presentation to some company bigwigs this morning.  I got to see the presentation last night, and didn't understand most of it.  He's so sciencey and smart.  I gather that it went well, so that's good, and his boss let him come home early this afternoon, so he met me while I was wandering around Montrose and discovering a new coffee shop I like.
I'm at Hope Stone now, about to start teaching the teens, and tonight I'm going with Maggie, Shani and Bekah to see a play at Stages Repertory Theatre (who also invited me to audition for them this week.  I can't make the dates work, but it was a nice little ego-boost.)  Tomorrow is another day working at home, learning how to sound like the characters on The IT Crowd.  Then Leslie and her friend Rachel (who I'm really enjoying getting to know - maybe one of these days I could start calling her my friend) are coming over to glory in and enjoy our new Netflix subscription.
So all in all things are good.  Homesickness hit me for the first time in a while last night in response to an email from Sass about Walsh dinner.  Man I want to be at Walsh dinner.  But then I wouldn't be here at Hope Stone, or watching movies with Leslie and Rachel, or teaching Bekah how to sing.  There are too many good things in life.  You can't have all of them at once, and so you carry round this little bit of pain all the time, knowing that there are important people you'll never get enough time with.

Houston Day 306 - BREAD!!!! & other good things

Who cares if it didn't rise? It tastes delicious and I'm immensely proud of it.

OMG! The unappetising lump I put into the oven actually came out edible! I had all but given up hope, but then....BREAD came out of my oven.  Actual BREAD! Am amazing! Am in fact potential baker (Lucas was right).  Will finally earn Stellar Baker Father's approval....*wistful tear*...


The week has definitely picked up steam.  I have come up with a fun idea I call The Singing Exchange - a couple of actor/dancer friends have brought up the idea that they'd like to be able to sing, so I've offered them lessons in exchange for a lesson in something they know.  I sent out that email yesterday and Bekah immediately IMed me saying "I want singing lessons! I want singing lessons!".  She and also Benito will be my first guinea pigs next week.  Also, Bekah has this great idea for a short dance film that I'm going to be in, so that's something else to look forward to.  (I've said it on the internet now, Bekah, we have to do it.) Was chatting to her about that yesterday between Hope Stone visits, and yesterday evening Leslie and her friend Rachel came over to watch Strictly Ballroom and appreciate some quality Australian cinema.  Signed up to Netflix for that purpose and I think it is an excellent addition to our household.

Gayla (=Hope Stone teacher) and her husband Firat (also Hope Stone teacher, just not one I happen to work with) came over for dinner Wednesday and reminded me that I have this massive resource of things to do and people to connect with over at Hope.  So have taken a couple more classes this week, including ballet, for the first time in months.  Attempted to take yoga this morning - plan was to take yoga then have props meeting with Gayla afterwards - but public transport fail saw me missing my bus connection, then taking a bus in the wrong direction.  I didn't notice that one at first, until I looked up to see, not the hip cafes of Montrose, but the 610 freeway and the bus about to head out into the suburban wastelands.  Texted Gayla begging for lift but no response.  (Turns out she forgot about yoga and had her phone off.  Workout fail, Gayla.) I gave up, got off the bus, then walked home in this glorious spring weather.  I was about to get cranky for the first time at inadequate Houston pt, but Leslie has reminded me of my New Year's Resolution with this little present she brought over last night:

The best bit of yesterday came in the form of a facebook message.  It went something like this: "Hi Amy, had to track you down on facebook because you didn't have your contact details on your CV.  [Will obviously never make that mistake again - Ed.]  You auditioned for me a couple of weeks ago, and while I didn't cast you in that show, I thought you were great and would very much appreciate it if you would audition for the next one I'm doing.  Cheers."  Ok, he didn't say cheers, coz that's not a very American thing to say, but you get the gist.

Have filed taxes in both countries.  Have tidied house.  Have hosted multiple friends over at house.  Have made both gado gado and freakin bread.  Have been headhunted for audition.  Have had good week after all.