Bigger chunks at Berkeley performance space; sound design

I'm now performing 20 minute chunks of my piece at the Berkeley performance space. Mwd emailed me feedback saying that my last performance was really strong and that she could feel my sass, coolness and vulnerability. Thank god for mwd. I really hope that I can start to pay her soon; she deserves it. The memorization is still not all the way there. I still find myself going into my head to try and recall a line which takes me out of the story. Amanda says that I should be running the piece from memory in it's entirety as much as possible from this point on. That feels like a tall order. At least the blocking is done for now. We took the last three days to do a rough sound and lighting design of the piece. I have supermario music stuck in my head! I sent off the piece with cues to Gregg (lighting design) and Edna (sound design) for our upcoming dress rehearsal. I'm relieved that I decided to stop all work except teaching. I need all the time I can get.

7 glorious days of memorizing all day every day; sound design

Mid-winter break. All of my private lesson clients were fine with the break in music lessons. I did lose one nannying family. Understandable. This entire week I have been doing nothing but memorizing all effing day. I'm about 75% done. I am getting nautious memorizing in my apartment so I've been going on walks, going to Baker beach, Ocean Beach, Golden Gate park to memorize in nature. I found this cool memorizing tool online, you put all the material you want to work on into this conversion application and what you get is the first letter of every word you are trying to memorize. This approach has helped me get the initial skeleton of each section down and then I return to looking at the text and going from there. But oh my god is there nothing worse than memorizing. I guess actors and actresses just get used to it and their technique grows stronger the more roles they have.

I met with the sound designer, Edna and we went over my sound ideas for my piece. I'm going to use supermario music. I asked her to compile all the supermario music she can find and burn me a disc so Mwd and I can start creating the soundtrack for the piece.

Jan and John; coordinating tech rehearsals

Alex's mom, Jan, has just generously offered to donate wine for the pre-show gathering! Awesomeness. Also, my ex-boyfriend John, has offered to house manage and use his carpentry skills to build me a door; my main prop. More awesomeness. I set up the tech rehearsals. The only problem is that my light tech can no longer do the show so I have to find someone else. The search is out...my girl Vanessa may know someone. Mwd has started doing another performance space on Wednesdays which is in the same space as Fridays. You can come and practice your material that you are going to do for Fridays. I hope that I can make it to some of them. I am getting to a point where I just can't juggle all of my work and feel like I am having enough time to adequately prep for the workshop as well. Today I wrote all of my nannying and private lesson clients and asked them if it would be ok for me to take a break for the next six weeks. I really need the time in order to pull this off! It's gonna seriously hurt my budget since I am financing this piece myself. I may need to borrow some money, UGH. Hate. doing. this.