Archives for posts with tag: theatre

last night we pulled off a small coup here in the city. When I say we, I mean Don and myself (and in the greater sense The Exact Theatre Co). In conjunction with the Arts and Cultural Council for Greater Rochester, we gathered all the major theatre players here in town for a group meeting. This included Geva, our Equity theatre.

At the end it was agreed that we (everyone at the meeting) would work to form a collaborative organization to promote the theatre arts in Rochester NY! How much does that rock???!!! Plus we made a ton of great contacts!

Also a number of people at the meeting knew who we were. That was kinda weird. Including having the Artistic Director of Geva comment on our decision to stage the Balcony. Needless to say, it’s also kinda scary and now I know that we need to stage a killer production of it. Now that we have a “name” we need to live up to it.

Last night I was out until after 1.00am with a sick car. The complicating factor was it wasn’t my car… So here’s the situation, my parents went away for a weeks vacation and they left the keys to the brand new Porsche… wait, that’s someone else’s story. Mine goes something like this:

Nissan 240Z

The Nissan 240Z

My close friend/martial arts instructor Mark has a hobby… collecting Z Cars. Mark has two of these cars so far: one that he wants to use for stock car rallies and the other a “parts” car. As part of getting the one car ready to rally, Mark needs to restore/fine tune the first car.

Yesterday, he had to go to Watertown NY to pick up a motor for the car that was coming down from Canada. There was no way that he was going to be able to fit it in his Jetta. So we arranged that we would swap cars for the day. He would use my Blazer to pick up and transport the motor, while I zipped around town in his Jetta. I enjoy borrowing the Jetta because it’s a stick shift and I don’t usually get the chance to drive them (I learned to drive on a powder blue VW Rabbit stick shift). So everything was right with the world. Mark was off picking up his motor. I was zipping around town. Then it happened…

I was returning from RIT at about 11.20pm after attending some *shudder* student plays there (the horror, the horror). All I wanted to do was go to bed. As I approached Highland Park, suddenly, the clutch went to the floor without any resistance and the Jetta was not shifting. I’ll translate this for those who are not wise in the way of stick: that’s bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad! After a lot of work I managed to get the car into first and trying to keep the tactometer as low as possible, managed to limp the car into the Highland Diner parking lot; all the while thinking: “Great… I killed Mark’s car.”

The next hour and a half was a very lonely time. I tried calling Mark, but it kept rolling into his voice mail. “Good” I thought, “that means there is someone home.” I left a message, a pathetic message what went something like this:

ahh… hi Mark, it’s Matt. Ummm… Got some bad news. Sorry. It looks like the clutch went on the Jetta. I got it into the Highland’s parking lot. Sorry. Give me a call back when you get a chance. Umm…. No I mean give me a call back as soon as you get this. Sorry ’bout this. I’ll be with the car. Talk to you later. I mean soon. Call me when you get this. Sorry about this. *click* — I tend to say sorry a lot. It’s a habit I try to break but can’t seem to do it. Sorry.

I refused to leave the car, in part because it was a long (though not undo-able) walk to my home and more importantly you just can’t abandon a friends car like that. So I sat there, trying to stay awake (I had no desire to spend the night in a Jetta in a parking lot), calling mark every five minutes only to continually get his voice mail. On the plus side I got some great sex tips from Love Lines and then heard the thrilling end of the World Series Game (thank God for Radio). By quarter to 1.00am I was really starting to wonder if I’d be there until morning. It was somewhere around that point that I did fall asleep only to me almost immediately awoken by my cell phone (which is far louder than I remembered it….). Any onlooker must have thought the guy in the Jetta was having a seizure when I jolted awake and did my best to answer the phone.

Mark took everything very well, he was over there within fifteen minutes. He inspected the clutch; we decided that >hopefully< the clutch cable had gone and it would be an easy fix. We stuck a note in the window saying he’d be back the next morning to have it towed and drove me home. Since the motor was to be dropped of at a shop today it was still in the back of my car. We decided that he should keep the Blazer to finish the “Motor Quest.” So this morning I’m without car and working from home. Still there is something strange about getting dropped off at your house by you car (or truck in this case) and then watch it drive away…

tonight…

We’re having a round of auditions for the plays I’ll be directing as part of the exact theatre company (I am planning on starting that blog one of these days). After that I think I’ll be going with friends to check out the martial arts silliness of “the one”.

tomorrow…

Henry Rollins baby! More to come on that…

It’s been a little while since my last entry. In part that’s because I haven’t felt like I had anything to say and in part that’s because things have been soooooo busy. This weekend along has been pretty manic. To start of with I took the GRE. As you might have read or heard, I’m looking to go to grad school and the GRE is the Grad equivalent of the SAT. My test was administered at a testing center on computer. The thing took just under four hours (bleh!) in a room that was far too warm for me to be wearing a sweater. The good part is that I got my scores immediately back. I didn’t do to badly (1780) but I discovered I had forgotten some basic math and managed to bomb (in my opinion at least) the verbal section of the test. That really infuriated me. I tend to consider that my strongest area. But the $#@^ test managed to ask me questions about words that I had never heard of, let alone knew. I’m seriously considering reading a dictionary cover to cover to shore up my vocabulary.

Friday night, Don (my Exect Theatre Co coconspirator) and I took in a play at UofR called Closer. Great set. Nice Blocking. But as for the play and performances… well… Great set. Nice Blocking. I can’t recommend this piece. We couldn’t tell if it was just a bad play or a bad interpretation. Probably a little of both. I ended up going out and getting a drink to wash the taste of the play out of my mouth,

Saturday morning I was up by 6.30am and driving out to the middle of no where. Actually Bath New York to be exact,; about an hour and half drive from Rochester. There, in the middle of woods and farm country, I took part in a all day intensive Kali workshop. Kali is a Filipino weapons based martial art that I have been involved with for years. We were working sticks, knives and other nasty things from 8.30am to 5.30pm. My arms and hand today are a little sore. My right palm has a burst blister protected by a Sesame St Band-Aid on it (I sorta like the juxtaposition [see GRE people I can correctly use big words!] of it). I got a huge amount out of the day. The workshop was running for another day (they’re most likely out there doing material as I write this), but I had to get back to town.

As soon as I got back I was out the door again (after a hot shower and change of clothes) to take in my former professor and good friend Peter playing as part of a Jazz Quartet. They sounded great! As of late Peter had been feeling that he might been losing his chops on the Clarinet. But he, and the folks he was playing with were really on. I was a wonderful way to cap off the day: sipping a good (though expensive) red wine, listening to a live performance of Honeysuckle Rose. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have had the second glass of wine as I nearly feel asleep during the third set.

This morning I woke up to discover that my ailing computer is in worse shape then I thought. As such I’m going to take radical steps: format the hard drive and reinstall everything. So if you don’t hear anything from me for a few more days, it’s just because I’m trying to get the computer up and running.