I was so sick earlier this week. My brother’s cookout on Saturday was fun, but by late-night Sunday I was really sick with some sort of stomach virus. I ended up having to take both Monday and Tuesday off from work. You know it’s bad when you work from home and still feel the need to call in sick because merely turning on the laptop and working from bed is too difficult. I only work a half day on Tuesday though, so it wasn’t as bad as missing two full days. And I did manage to drag myself into class on Tuesday. I felt much better by Wednesday, but my schedule was all thrown off by getting sick and I’m still trying to recover. I didn’t get my writing assignment for Tuesday’s class done, because I had been planning to do it Sunday night and after work Monday, which of course never happened. So now I have to get that plus the new writing assignment done for next week. And I need to keep revising my full-length play.
And now we’re here, a Friday morning in late March, and it’s snowing as I write this (actually, the snow appears to be winding down). I know that snow in late March is hardly uncommon around here—I remember in 1997 when I was a freshman in high school we had a blizzard on April 1 and school was cancelled—but it’s always so disappointing to think that a week ago you were wearing short-sleeves and flip-flops to a cookout and then today it’s back to the winter hat and mittens. On a normal Friday, I’d just be curled up in my room working from 8–6, but today I’m only working from 8–2. I’m taking a half day because we have another “skills lab” at school, which is when we get to meet with the MFA directors and BFA (that would be “bachelor of fine arts”) actors at BU’s College of Fine Arts (CFA). I think I talked about this in an earlier blog when we did our last one.
I always love meeting with the CFA actors and directors. I think this afternoon, if I manage to get a revision done after work but before I have to leave the house, I want to bring in that crazy short play I wrote earlier in the semester that involved a boss and his employee at Disney—it was written for my “overheard conversation” exercise. I think I want it to be part of my “evening of theater” final project for my Tuesday class that I mentioned last week, so I want to fix the ending a little. I think for that project, I’m going to try to do a one-act and a few ten-minute plays that all take place in an office. Some will be comedy, some might not be comedy, and they will each examine different types of office experiences.
…And now it’s a few hours later, and I’m back from the skills lab. It was a lot of fun. I did bring in that Disney play with a revised ending, and the actors went all-out and had fun with the craziness of it. We all couldn’t stop laughing the entire time, which is an encouraging sign for the play. I wanted to take a video clip of the performance to post here, but we only ended up reading through the piece once, so my plan of waiting till our second read-through to record it didn’t work out so well. But I learned that the revised ending is a lot stronger and funnier. And that the section leading up to the ending of the piece is sort of circling back in on itself instead of “raising the stakes,” so I still have revisions to make. As always.