So, the aforementioned Little Miss Additude and the Co-Ordinated Girl are going to drive me crazy. LMA likes to be noticed, and she will do just about anything to be noticed. She likes to refer to herself in the third person, and she has told me about forty times that she isn't in the first act, "but that's OK, I'm OK with that." So why do you keep telling me, kid?
The COG wasn't at rehearsal on Thursday when they were all supposed to be there because (as the other kids said) she was feeling "overwhelmed with homework". What was her homework? Two math problems that the rest of the kids in her class had finished already. She's not overwhelmed, she's just decided she didn't get what she wanted out of the casting. She's the lead dragon (as I keep telling the kids, there is only one dragon, but five of you play him, OK? Just, trust me on this!), but she was going to be the prince if the kid playing the prince hadn't shown up.
Then, for my directing scene for class, I'm doing the final scene from Proof. The girl playing Catherine kinda likes to run the show. And, ummm, that's kinda my job. I realise I may not be very good at it, but could you please try not to, especially if you don't know what I'm talking about in the first place?
She's a decent actress, but she's absolutely obsessed with "business". I hate watching actors who are always doing something, because in life, people do a lot of sitting and standing and doing nothing. While I realise that blocking is not an accurate reflection of life, I at least would rather not have to do a lot of things just to keep an actor busy.
This is especially the case in the last scene of a play. It's after the climax, it's the let down period. You can feel it when you read through a good show, it feels just like things do after a heavy rainstorm, calm, subdued. It's like Puck's speech at the end of Midsummer: "we know everything's over, but we just wanted to have one more scene to let the audience know it's over." To put in a lot of action is the wrong influence. Just let me try it my way, OK? If you can feel it going horribly wrong when you've tried it, then you can speak up, because I'll probably see that it is, but I can't anticipate it, and if you're trying to for me, I don't need that.
This is why I'll never be a real director. I would rather be the head of an acting troupe, if it came down to it. A group where we wrote and performed some collaborative piece, and everybody could say, "hey, what if we did this?" or "wouldn't it be cool if this happened next?", I would be the person to say, "oh, yeah, dude, we should totally do that," or "ummmm, OK, we could do that... anybody got something else?" With a group of people who are already pretty much on the same page, it's the sort of thing I really like about theatre, but I know first hand it can be a total disaster from the minute you have one person who doesn't share your adjenda.
On the flip side, though, some of the kids are pretty amazing. Rabbit Teeth Boy is a really bright kid, he's teaching himself computer programming. There's an 8th grade girl who could be at least a junior in high school, and I have to keep reminding myself that I can't talk to her the way I'd talk to people my age. (I mean, I could if she were like, my niece or something, but not in this situation.) Beautiful Iranian Girl quit basketball for the show, she's an incredibly sweet kid. Short Sarah is at least an intuitive and funny kid, even if she's hard to rein in. The girl playing Lucy will be OK as soon as the fact that she's playing Lucy sinks in and she calms down. (I have a feeling we may have to have a conversation about the definition of the word "humble".)
I probably should've cast the poisonous girls (LMA and COG) as larger roles to quell their inner dissatisfaction turning to outer pig-headedness, but at the same time, they couldn't really play anything else than what I gave them. And I wouldn't have wanted to work with them, plain and simple.
I still don't have a title. I thought I'd let the kids title it, and their suggestions are all pretty awful. There's one that I might be able to do something with. Rabbit Teeth Boy is convinced that it's related to the Chronicles of Naria, and even though I just re-read Wardrobe, I don't see where he's coming from.
Tonight's the Lights Parade. I've never been to one, so I'm taking the camera. The Boy's in it, in the wizard puppet, actually. Pictures when I come back, unless I decide I should maybe get started writing that one act that's due on Tuesday.
Christmas presents this year are going to be baked goods. Everybody's getting some of either two or three different kinds of cookies I know how to make, and I'm going to try to make caramel, because, honestly, how hard can it be to carmelise sugar? Plus, it's way cheaper than anything else, and it looks incredibly impressive, "you made all this?" Oh, yeah.