Yesterday was my first day of class for the spring semester. It was also, as I mentioned in a previous entry, my birthday. Most of the other students in the class are in their mid- to late-twenties, but we also have two women who are a little older and have school-aged children. When these two women learned that my birthday coincided with the first day of class, they each brought in a cake and arranged for the class to sing Happy Birthday as we walked into the theatre. It was really sweet of them (and it worked out perfectly because I didn’t have time to eat before I left, and class runs from 12–3 right during lunchtime, so I was starving). One of the cakes was doubling as a “New Year’s cake,” and there were little Monopoly pieces baked into it. One of the woman’s children had written up fortunes that corresponded to each piece, so if you found a piece in your slice of cake you received a fortune for the upcoming year. My slice had the Monopoly thimble hiding in it—the corresponding fortune said that I was going to save money. I found it funny that I am allegedly going to save money during the year that I am a poor graduate student.
Class itself was fun too. This class is a continuation of last semester’s workshop on full-length plays, only with a new professor taking over. Our professor had emailed us over the break and asked us to bring in 5–10 pages of something brand new that was part of “the play you’ve been avoiding writing.” It was a tough assignment. I’ve been throwing around the idea for months of writing sort of a dance/music/text fusion piece, but I had no clue where to begin or how to approach something like that. This assignment forced me to at least imagine what the opening minutes of such a show might look like. What I brought into class was pretty bizarre and will probably change entirely when the piece is developed, but it was fun to just get something completely new and different out there. The current full-length I’m working on (the Somerville family play) is very realism based and does a lot of playing around with dialogue and language, so I wanted to try something as far away from that as possible, where I couldn’t rely on dialogue to carry the piece. I do want to finish the family play first though and work on the dance play on the side when I need a break.
I went out for lunch with three other classmates after class ended, which was fun. On normal Thursdays, I’ll have to rush back home after class and put in another couple hours of work at my job, but I took a vacation day yesterday so that I’d have the afternoon free. Two of the girls are from the Bay Area, so there was lots of talk about their breaks in California and how coming back to freezing temperatures and snow on the ground was not a good time. And the three of them are all in a dramaturgy class (fulfilling one of their non-workshop electives), which meets on Fridays from eight in the morning until noon. I can’t imagine being functional that early in the day for four hours (I know, I know, my science major friends who had marathon labs are rolling their eyes at me right now, but I’m just not a morning person). And I don’t have the space in my schedule to take more than the two required writing classes per semester—I’d never be able to fit in my work hours if I took more than two classes.
Speaking of my work hours, I’ll restart my crazy schedule on Monday. Classes will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I’ll work half-days on those days (from 7:30–11:30 in the morning Tuesdays and from 8–10:30 in the morning and then again after class from 4–5:30 in the afternoon on Thursdays). I’ll have to make up the hours I miss on those half-days, so I’ll be working from 8–6 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s similar to what I did in the fall. It was so nice to have a normal 9–5 work schedule again during the semester break, but I’m also happy to be back in class despite the craziness it wreaks upon my schedule. It was harder to keep myself motivated to write when I knew I didn’t have class twice a week and there were holidays all over the place. I believe Holy Cross is also starting up classes again this coming week, so good luck to any current students who may be reading this!