Raccoon Eden

We've got a family of raccoons living in our back yard - a mother and three mid-sized juveniles. I'd seen the mother run through a few times (in broad daylight! What?!), but last night was the first time any of us realized she had brought her babies over. They ran right across our back patio while we were eating dinner, stopped dead center, stared at us for about a minute, and then ran off and climbed up the grapefruit tree.

They haven't figured out how to get into our trash cans yet, and our dog doesn't spend time unattended outdoors, so we figure there's no harm in letting them be. While most people consider them pests, they haven't caused us any trouble so far and they're a native species. Maybe if we had a family of Nutrias or Armadillos in our back yard it would be different, but Raccoons don't burrow and they don't chew through wood and when you think about it, fifty years ago when no humans lived out in this part of the city... they were here first.

I can see why they'd like our back yard, though. It's shady, we have a metric ton of fruit trees, and the dog doesn't go poking his nose around where it doesn't belong. So for now, the raccoons get to stay and have their little slice of paradise. :)

Old dogs

This is Barney and he is twelve and a half years old. He is exceedingly fluffy, he smells terrible, does nothing but sleep, and he snores incredibly loudly. He has the kind of life that makes me think it's pretty good to be a housepet. But he's really clearly getting old - just over the last few months I've noticed that he's developed a paranoia about heights. He used to take flying leaps into the back of my mom's mini-SUV, and now he won't even climb into the back of my minivan when it's pulled up to the curb, and that's not a very high climb. He had a kind of rough fall one time when he tried it and now he insists on being carried. Which is only okay because he's only about 35 lbs and it's not very far.

But I love him, and that's why he gets a blog post with two photos today. Because isn't he pretty?

Yes?

I thought so.

Je voudrais aller a Paris, je pense...

For being a proudly Jewish dramatic writing major, I'd never in the past managed to make myself into a fan of Woody Allen. Maybe it's his persistent nebbishness: I never actively disliked him - I just wasn't a fan. I was perfectly ambivalent about Woody Allen movies, as strange as that may be.

And then I went to go see Midnight in Paris tonight, and it was brilliant, and oh, my goodness, you need to go and see this movie. Tomorrow. Do it. Because it is great. I mean, it's not a secret that I love literary inside jokes and time travel and magical realism, and this movie has all of them in droves. And it's lovingly shot. It's a love letter to the city. I want to go to Paris and try to speak what measure of French I have managed to retain. (Un peur, je suppose. Si j'arrete imaginer des mots, un peur plus...?)

Anyway, it's a great movie, and I'm not just saying that because I'm really fond of Owen Wilson.

I also within the last day finished reading Robert Sapolsky's book A Primate's Memoir about his work with baboons in Kenya, and it was fascinating right up to and including the point when all of the baboons got TB and died (although that was also really tragic and terrible). It was a nice change of pace after reading Sarah Gruen's Ape House, a novel which by all means should have been good (acclaimed author, interesting premise) but which was, in reality, just plain terrible.

Swimming Lizards

I went to the zoo yesterday and was wandering around the reptile house when this guy came over and started posing for me, right at the water line in his habitat. He was such a ham! I just had to take a picture!

And then once we got out of the reptile house we got caught in a torrential rainstorm and there were screaming children everywhere and I did not get to see the Bonobos like I wanted to but it was still a blast, because the Jacksonville Zoo is amazing. I mean, it's easily one of the best zoos in the southeast - it makes me wonder why it's not more well known! 

Hidden treasure, I guess! 

Just a quick plug and then I'll shut up~

My friend Abi has started a blog! She is seriously one of the smartest, funniest people I know and people should read her because she's awesome. And because I want her to share her Summer Quinoa Salad recipe with me because it looks delicious. And because she works somewhere that seriously looks like it's part of the set of an X-Men movie (hello radio telescope).

And, uh, this, because it is relevant.

I didn't know what this blog post would be about when I started typing it and I still don't.

So, I'm not really riled up about anything at the moment so this post is going to be more a logging of miscellany. As much as I'd love to do part two of last time's conversation ("Having minority characters does not make you diverse"), I'm going to hold off on it because I had a really good conversation about it in private and... unlike complaining about female characters, when I start talking about race people start looking at me like "You're white, shut up." So it's going to wait. Along with a discussion on why claiming certain people don't have the "right" to write certain character types is bullshit. All that and more... in another post.

I'm kind of amused that, two weeks later, most of my pageviews are still coming from links posted on fansites... but also mildly weirded out. Are you guys reading the rest of my posts? Or are you just looking at that same post, OVER AND OVER AND OVER again??? Because, um, if you're just using that link to get back to the blog so you can read other stuff... I have two separate methods of following in my sidebar that don't involve inflating the pagecounts on one post. And if you are just reading that post over and over again... is it really that fascinating???

I finally actually started to do some serious revision work on Like a Dog in Space yesterday, figuring out where I can add things back in and what I need to do to get it back to somewhere around its original length. Because I cut so many characters, I've got significantly less to work with in general, and changing the structure for the better means my opening moves faster - but also that I've just got stuff that used to take fifteen pages to happen happening in about seven. Which is good, because it gives me more time to mess around once that does happen... I just have to think of things to put there! Ivan and Valeri can only have so many awkward conversations, and the biggest thing I need to bulk up is their connection... which I actually think I need to build up before Ivan even comes to life.

The other thing I can do to take it back out to full length and put some coherency and world background in is add some of Mister Papers's long speeches back in, but that's easy. He likes to talk and even if I had to start over from scratch, he'd be easy. I could write that character forever. He'll probably turn up in another play given enough time. He can do that.

(Sometimes I try to think about how any of my plays would be connected/in the same universe. But there's no overlap between Florida and an unspecified town in New England, so it's like... even if Other People's Garden Gnomes and Allan Chang is a Totally Bogus Ghost were in the same universe... who would ever know?)

Anyways, I'm planning to do a more work on that today (Lies. When I don't have deadlines, nothing gets done.) and also figure out what kind of cool adventure we're going to have on Friday. I've wanted to go down to the Space Center for a long time, but I went in fifth grade and after looking at their website I'm not so sure if it's worth it... it kind of looks like it has't changed much since 2002. I think they're even still playing the same IMAX movies. But the price has gone up! So... maybe it'll be the Alligator Farm again. We haven't been there in a while. Or perhaps the Zoo.

Unless anyone has any suggestions about adventures? :)

Also this amuses me.

Having female characters does not make you a feminist.

Watch out, I'm about to make another misguided post about feminism and Hollywood gender standards. Also, we might start talking about superheroes and race, because, you know what? When I was a little kid, The Green Lantern was a black dude. I know that the Hal Jordan is the "original" character to hold the title, but John Stewart is the guy I watched on Justice League when I was a wee little nerdling.

SO, LET'S TALK ABOUT SUPERHERO MOVIES.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT, LEEZ?

LET'S TALK ABOUT X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

So, in general, X-Men as a franchise is pretty good about providing interesting, strong female characters. I mean, this is the series that brought us Rogue and Jean Grey and Storm and Kitty Pryde. Which is nothing to laugh at, because they're badass, but they're not in this movie. First Class has four main female characters, which is already more than most superhero films which will typically just have a love interest (we'll talk about that when we talk about Green Lantern. We're getting there.) And it passes the Bechdel Test, which is something not many superhero movies do.

So, is it feminist?

Let's look at the four female characters we get:

Angel: stripper.
Emma Frost: High-end stripper, like for governors and stuff.
Moira: FBI agent (masquerades as a stripper).
Raven/Mystique: Hero's sister, ends up naked by the end of the movie, may or may not sleep with Magneto, who may or may not grow up to be Sir Ian McKellen, who may or may not have played the character as militantly, metaphorically homosexual. (But probably did.)

So Angel is a stripper who defects to the bad guys at the soonest sign of a fight. She's not a very deep character and that's okay because she's mostly around to wear skimpy outfits and provide a bit of color to our otherwise pretty damn anglo-looking cast.

Emma Frost is a villainess, who runs around in her underwear, who gets chained to a bed, whose main power is turning herself into an incredibly cheesy diamond effect. Frankly I think January Jones is a really boring actress and the character was really flat beyond just hanging out and being eye candy for Kevin Bacon.

Moira... is in her underwear within five minutes of her first appearance. She is reasonably useful in a fight, but she shoots Charles in the spine and she winds up the butt of a joke that seems like it's trying to emulate Mad Men but the rest of the movie is so unapologetically modern that the 1960s setting feels like an afterthought, like they needed a reason to point nukes at each other.

Raven/Mystique is probably the most interesting female character, but she gets reduced as the plot goes on until she is A) naked and B) sleeps with Erik C) to distract from the fact that he and Charles are basically having the most epic bromance since Kirk and Spock. Or something. Actually, why the fuck did she sleep with him? Because he thinks its sexy that she's blue and Hank just rejected her, so her standards are lowered? I mean, not that Erik isn't good looking or anything, but there's something weird going on in the character motivations there and it seems to cheapen the character.

So what have we got here?

• A token.
• Fan service.
• A woman in a man's job, ultimately proven inferior and susceptible to emotions.
• A teenaged girl who isn't making rational decisions because the boy she liked called her ugly.

Bechdel test passing or not, this isn't actually looking all that good. We've basically got a bunch of stereotypes, and they're not really doing anyone any favors except maybe the fanboys. But at the same time, most stories don't work if you just switch the genders, because then they become all about the gender. Like, a story about a prince who goes on a quest during which he learns all kinds of things about himself and at the end rescues a princess can be about all the things he learns along the way. But if you switch it and make it about a princess who rescues a prince, all anyone is going to focus on is that it's now about a girl.

But moving on to Green Lantern.

I am not going to call this a great movie, but it's a fun movie and it was raining today.

Green Lantern has, like, two female characters. Maybe three because they made one of the masters of the universe a woman. I'm going to zero in on the love interest because, let's face it - here is a compelling character setup... who is of absolutely no relevance to the plot past the midpoint.

The character Carroll is a test pilot. The first time we see her, she's chewing out Hal for being late, and she's already suited up and ready to go. Awesome. She puts in some good moves out in the planes, but she doesn't win the day. But that's because this is character setup - Carroll plays by the rules, Hal showboats. Fair enough. And then she's a business genius - awesome! Good for her!

And then she nearly gets crushed by a bandstand, kidnapped by the villain, and is just totally absent from the final conflict. Wow. Did the writers just forget she existed? At least Mary Jane got to dangle over the Hudson. So, basically, this is a character who just kind of became useless and went away. And she had a promising setup, too.

There's kind of this line between "extraneous love interest" and "female character who happens to love," and Caroll hits the "extraneous" side hard. She serves no purpose to the plot. Her role at the beginning could just as well have been played by another male fighter pilot and it wouldn't have made a difference.

At the same time, though, it's stupid to take two characters who for the duration of the film have had little to no chemistry and throw them together for some misdirected moment of character development. Erik and Mystique? I mean I understood why she would go to him, but their conversation felt rushed and didn't come to any kind of character-appropriate conclusion. First he tells her she's too young, then he tells her he prefers her blue, and then he has sex with her. MAGNETO, TAKING ADVANTAGE OF EMOTIONALLY DISTRESSED YOUNG WOMEN SINCE 1962. Congratulations, you're a lech. The logical end to this scene would actually be him talking her out of his bed, instead of her talking him into it, but apparently when a girl sneaks into your bedroom and she's naked and she's blue and she wants someone to tell her she's pretty, the appropriate response is to have sex with her. Yes. Of course. And even though she's had interactions with Erik prior to this and they do have some sexual tension, he's never really built up as a viable romantic rival to Hank and asdfghjk this just really bugs me.

Superheroes and race will have to wait for another day because I wound up having a three-hour discussion about it with Lydia while I was typing up this post and it really does not fit here, but we basically figured out why making Peter Parker in to Peter Park doesn't work but rebuilding Spider-Man from scratch does.

Mysterious amazon deliveries...

There was no note in the box.... Any idea who sent me this? It's perfect and I'd wanted a copy for a while... but who was it???

A secret admirer???

I am really baffled by this... Investigating shortly. That is, right now.

EDIT: Oh. Oh. It was Houman. MYSTERY SOLVED.

The things you miss when you don't live here.

So I was about to walk my dog earlier today (smoke and ash or not, Barney still needs to go outside), but we'd barely gotten out the front door when I noticed a hulking pit-bull looking creature lurking at the edge of the cul-de-sac. Now, I am not the kind of person who is inclined to think that pitbulls are evil by virtue of being pitbulls, and in fact if your pitbull is on a leash and you tell me they are friendly, I will be all over that dog like "Oh my god I am so happy to see you, PUPPY." However this thing was unleashed and huge and wandering around the neighborhood. So I took Barnie out in the back yard and then went to go see where the huge beast had gone off to.

I tracked it back to my neighbor's house, where it had gone back into the back yard on its own but the gate was open. I knocked on the front door.

"Hey, um, do you own a huge pitbull-looking dog?"

"She's a mastiff, but yes."

"Your gate's open, she was down by the cul-de-sac, but she came back on her own, I think."

Which is always a kind of weird thing to be like. I mean, "Your dog's out" is one thing, but "Your dog's out, but she came back, and in fact I don't know what I'm doing here" is another.

And then all 140 lbs of mastiff (named Xena, apparently?!) came lumbering over to say hi and drooled all over me and was generally a sweetheart and it turns out it was kind of dumb that I was scared of her, but probably still good that I didn't let Barnie get near her because he's kind of dog-agressive, and weighs about a sixth as much as her. And I still think it's reasonable to be cautious of a huge dog wandering around by itself, even if you are generally a dog person, because it's not a dog that you know and it could do some serious damage. But I also thought it was interesting how quickly I changed from "stay away!" to "hello come here let me rub your belly" as soon as I was told the dog was friendly.

Anyways, that's about all for the moment.

Break's Over, the Take Over

So, I spent a week or two doing nothing, which I think is perfectly within my rights when I've just finished a production - time to get my thoughts in order, right? But then last night I had a dream about three pretty important people telling me to get off my ass and get back to work, so I think maybe that was the sign I needed. In the name of starting slow (I'm still not feeling up to messing with Dog in Space again... too much of a good thing?) I'm probably just going to spend the next few days getting Other People's Garden Gnomes to a place where I can submit it for possible publication.

God, I shouldn't be nervous about that prospect but I am. Maybe it's because I interned there. It's not even that I'm scared of rejection - I'm scared of putting my work out there. Which is a stupid thing for a writer to be scared of, I mean, I've done it before.

It's begun to ash. Like, as in a verb. The wildfires have been going so long that it's falling from the sky. The smoke is really, really thick. It should be blue out today but it's more white. I can't even see the sun and the light is coming through orange, even at midday. It's almost like an apocalyptic movie if not for the fact that we're all cozy in our air conditioning and the plants are still green. Like, we're not scorched at all... but somewhere the world is burning.

Well, back to work!

Also, my blog hit counts are basically back to what they were pre-YPF. Told you it was temporary. ;)

Tempura fried everything

I keep saying to myself that I'm going to do some serious writing this summer break, which is hard because I don't know where to begin. I try to psyche myself up, assuring myself that I always have a few false starts when I work on a project and if I just power through them I'll punch through the other side and make something wonderful, but really... without deadlines, I'm not getting much done.

I went out for sushi and tempura tonight with a friend, and we spent about an hour talking about how we looked a lot like hipsters (Me with my bangs and what he called a "hipster bun" and a cardigan, him in horn-rimmed glasses and a very hipster button up) but weren't hipsters... I'm pretty sure if you spend an hour talking about not being a hipster, you by definition now are a hipster, congratulations.

And then I had the bright idea of putting an entire tempura mushroom in my mouth, which ended about as well as putting an entire tempura mushroom in your mouth can ever end. (Hint: it burns.)

We played hot-potato with the leftovers before passing them off on one of the guys working the night shift at Gamestop, who is a friend of my friend, and who he is buttering up in hopes of scoring a job, and then grabbed bubble tea while trying to stall before driving back. It was raining pretty hard, but it showed no sign of stopping so we decided to bite the bullet and head in. It was like driving under water. I was doing ten to fifteen under speed limit on the highway and for once no one cared. The lightning was INTENSE.

And then when I got home it happened to be the one place in the city where it was merely drizzling. But then the rain started a bit later and it was a frickin' monsoon.

A typical June in northeast Florida?

Pretty much.

So I'm thinking of picking up a foreign language next semester...

What do you guys think? I could do a higher-level French class (Good to retain what I know, possibly the most useless language to take, though) or Spanish (useful as all get out, but I'd probably just mix it up with French), or Hebrew (good if I go to Israel next summer like I'm thinking about, and I already read it and speak a tiny bit), or Mandarin (probably the most "useful" next to Spanish, but I doubt I'd get much use out of it and it's supposed to be tricky to pick up) or Russian (Really, all I want to do with my life is learn how to read Cyrillic, because it looks awesome.) course sign ups for Speaking Freely don't go up until fall semester, so I've got a while to think on this, but I'd like some opinions. So! What language should Aliza learn next semester?

What to work on next?

I had two options for this month: Revise Dog in Space or do another draft of my screenplay from last semester.

Tonight I feel like working on the latter.

Also, saw X-Men First Class tonight and enjoyed it a lot! However, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer?

...I'm glad they used entirely CGI animals, because it's the ethical choice and adult great apes are basically impossible to use in entertainment - they wind up using juveniles who are "retired" to research facilities when they become too much for their trainers to handle. But the CGI looks really uncanny valley. Not bad, just horrifying.

Also, those Orangutans were the wrong color. I went back and looked at the screencaps. Orangutans are orange, not black. Anyone who has ever seen any Orangutan could tell you - they're redheads. And anyone who has ever seen a chimpanzee can tell you that the alleged chimpanzees in the trailer... look nothing like chimpanzees, or even bonobos. They're just creepy.

I feel like I need to see it just to pick it apart.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I went to Savannah, GA yesterday for a bit of an adventure.

(But mostly cleaning my cousin's apartment.)

But really I think it might be one of the prettiest cities in the country.

All little old row houses and shady blocks and magnolia trees and cobblestones.

And parks.

Parks everywhere. Every four blocks or something, there's a park.

It's gorgeous.

We live in a wonderful world.

I'm flattered, guys. I really am.

What. What. What is this.

This is more hits in a single day than I usually get in a month. From more countries than I have ever been viewed in. And lets talk about that bizarre spike. I mean I know why I have so many hits and it's because those pictures and not because of me but this is seriously unreal. Because over 600 hits. In a day.

I'm flattered. Really.

But I know that it's temporary.

YPF Roundup.

Guys? Reposting my photos with proper credit is fine, but please stop editing them. I'm uncomfortable with it.

Well, back in Florida! Those four words are kind of anti-climactic, aren't they? I remember on the last day of the 2010 festival, I killed time at the theater for like an hour after the show before leaving, on the idea that I didn't know if I'd ever come back. I was fifteen pages into an idea that didn't really feel very new or exciting and although I had begun trying to think of something else, nothing was really sticking yet.

I had a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology fresh in my mind, a google history full of searches about Russian Space Dogs, and a five hour plane ride in front of me. At 30,000 feet I popped open my MacBook and wrote down the basic idea for Like a Dog in Space: What happens to ideas when they are forgotten, and what do the ideas themselves do to avoid being lost? I had Ivan. I had the prototypes for Innovation. I had a frame story about a schizophrenic Astrophysicist and his little sister which will have to wait for another play to get used. I had Milena and Gennady.

I had no idea what I was doing. I took the idea in as a set of two for my Playwriting I class, and we decided it was the one I ought to pursue. And suddenly, with deadlines set and a professor waiting for me, things came together. The play got written. I had a complete first draft to show my family when I visited at Thanksgiving.

Four months later, I took a hacksaw to the play and in the course of four days cut four characters and thirty pages. A month after that, on the 50th anniversary of Vostok I, I got a call that I was heading to Blank YPF. You cannot make these things up. That's the timing.

So it's a play all about ideas, and about space and exploration and it's all very meta but it's also Pinocchio in Space and every time someone describes it to me as such, I get kind of happy because really, really, when you strip the meta stuff away it's about trying to discover, looking outside-in, what it is to be human. What about our experiences makes us so unique? And I think what the conclusion the play draws is that being human is a constant re-evaluation of what things are important to you, and what your goals are, and what's going to make you happy, and sometimes the things you think will make you happy are completely out of your reach and sometimes the things that would have made you happy... by the time you realize what you should have said, the moment is past. Ivan and Valeri meet once as bright young scientists on the dawn of one of the most explosive decades of human advancement.* They meet again, decades later, and it's no longer the right moment. They can't pick up where they left off, because they've become two entirely different people. And in that moment, Ivan wishes that he had stayed.

*[The timeline for this stuff is really, really amazing.

Sputnik is 1957. Vostok I is 1961. Apollo 11 is 1969. That's a beepy satellite to a man on the moon in twelve years. What's a little healthy competition between nuclear superpowers if it helps you step foot on another celestial body?]

So on Sunday, I hung around after the show for about an hour because, the fact was, once I left... I really wasn't going to be back. And some of these people had known me for four years now, had watched me go from Awkward Sixteen-Year-Old to Slightly Less Awkward Nineteen-Year-Old. I thought I was going to cry.

And then I didn't. Instead I, in no particular order:

• Talked to a couple from "Gale Harold's Chinese Fan Club," who said they'd come all the way from China to see him in the play? And they actually talked to me and took a picture with me and told me how much they enjoyed it, which is... more than can be said for more of the people who mobbed him every night. So, shoutout to Alex and [I am really sorry but your name escapes me] for being cool and world travel-y, and there is probably a picture of me on one of the fanboards, in Chinese.
• Enthused to the production costume designer about "Where the heck did you get ISS Mission Patches I mean seriously where are those from." Apparently army surplus. What. But apparently he's sending me some.
• Was serenaded that "you're nobody until somebody loves you." The song choice makes more sense in context but it was still in front of my parents.
• Was given a plush dog, who was promptly named Laika.
• Took lots of pictures. Most of them wound up blurry, because my mother bought her camera in a vending machine in the miami airport last fall. Here are a few that are okay.

There are a lot more relevant pictures on the official festival website, which I have to request that people DO NOT steal and claim as their own because the photographer is a really nice guy and you'd have to be a jerk to steal his work I mean really who does that. :|

And I'm back in Florida. Still a depressing statement. But it was a good week and I have my work cut out for me tackling the rewrite. Tomorrow I'm driving up to Savannah with my aunt to help clean out my cousin's apartment while she's in the hospital, and hopefully I will find at least /some/ time to think on the car ride. I've also been advised to bite the bullet and get a new phone because the iPhone 5s are looking as distant as ever. So that might happen soon.

Anddddd... we now return you to your regularly scheduled youtube link spam. On that note, here is a group playing the Doctor Who theme song on a set that includes a Didgeridoo. Only in Australia.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night.

#historicalfiguresinunlikelyplaces

Last night I had a dream about Buzz Aldrin (the astronaut) talking to me about skydiving. Seeing as Opening Night for Like a Dog in Space went fantastically, I am going to take this as a sign that the universe is smiling at me. Which is a pretty cool feeling to have, all in all. I mean, I don't really know why my subconscious chose last night to pepper my dreams with retired spacemen, or why they were talking about extreme sports, but it left me feeling kind of warm and fuzzy, so it can't have been a bad dream.

Anyways, opening night was brilliant. A friend who I knew was coming showed up, and then I was surprised by another friend who I hadn't seen in about two years, and a fun time was had by all! All three shows this week are really, really strong, and the other two playwrights are really sweet and smart and talented. Like, I could not have asked for a better group of people to spend my last YPF with, and they give me a lot of hope that the festival's going to be A-OK in the future, because they're already giving me a run for my money and they're 2-3 years younger than me.

If you're in LA and reading this blog post in the weekend it was written, I strongly encourage you to come see the show, if not because Emma, Nicole and I are awesome then because the week's cast is amazing and fun to work with and has all kinds of cool credits under their collective belts and it's a 99 seat theater so there are No Bad Seats in the house, pretty much anywhere you sit you will be close enough to feel them spit (if that's what you're into). Or if you don't go this week, go another week, because it will still be just as cool, it just won't be us.

I got some "Soviet Flowers" and lots of hugs:

All of my other pictures are on other people's cameras. This is... just as inconvenient as it sounds, really.

My brother got in last night but he hasn't seen the play yet - that's what he gets to do tonight, or maybe sunday? I'm not sure what the plan is yet. He did steal my contact lenses this morning, but I promised not to tell that whole story so I guess I'll leave it at, "That happened and it was frustrating at the time but hilarious afterwards."

Also my brother says about the flowers, "In Soviet Russia, Flowers smell you!" which is actually kind of funny.

My face hurts from smiling and I only slept like five hours last night because I was really jumpy and excited and I am actually really, really okay with this because I get to go back and do it all again in less than 12 hours, which is awesome.

Also, people who leave during intermission and don't stay for the third play are losers. Because, I mean, I got A WHOLE EXTRA ADJECTIVE in the curtain speech ("fantastic, marvelous little play after intermission") and people still left during intermission and it's lame. Like, the ticket price has gone up since last year, you might as well stay and get your money's worth!

Also, shout-out to my lovely, brilliant, beautiful cousin Faye who is currently spending a month in the hospital after pelvic surgery and a waterski accident. :( I love you and hope you have a smooth recovery!!!!

Also, MINIATURE WATERMELONS ARE ADORABLE. WE ARE EATING ONE FOR BREAKFAST RIGHT NOW AND IT IS THE CUTEST THING EVER. (But not Too Cute To Eat.)

Also, I saw two grown women in full-body pajamas "planking" in the Hollywood and Highland Complex yesterday. Like, I was aware that this was a thing, but do people understand how silly they look? And also, why would you want to lie on those stairs? the whole thing seems vaguely unsanitary to me.

Also, that was a lot of Alsos.

Sensationally yours,

Leez.

STRESS DREAM.

One of my friends (a blonde one, and I can't remember anything more specific) had decided to become a politician, and she had these two fantastic pseudonyms she was using that I can't remember except they were sort of dark, "Lou Cipher" type puns. And then she was really mean to me and drove around in a convertable and set stuff on fire and I was like,

"WHAT. WHAT. WHAT."

And then my mother's phone rang at 6:16 in the morning and woke me up.

I'd probably remember more of it if she hadn't been talking so loudly!

And there's the other foot

Right when I'd finally, maybe, proven myself as a responsible adult, I made a stupid beginner mistake and screwed something up. But the show opens tomorrow, so NO TIME TO STRESS ABOUT THAT, TIME TO STRESS ABOUT THIS INSTEAD.

PICTURES SOON I PROMISE.

We had tech today and the show is looking really really great (except for the one moment when we kind of looked up and were like, "Without context, this looks like an AIDS play," and even that moment looked really good). So if everything comes together, then it just comes down to audience reaction and "IS THIS TOO CEREBRAL? I HOPE IT'S NOT."

But at the same time I hope it at least looks and sounds smart. Which it probably is.

Mom's in LA now and we went up to the Griffith Observatory for a bit after tech. It's really gorgeous up there, you can see the entire city, basically. We went to a slightly corny but really fun planetarium show which was interesting in that it had a live narrator with a really soothing voice - I haven't been to a planetarium with a live narrator since I was a little kid, and my student priced ticket was $5! In NYC a planetarium ticket has to be bought in conjunction with your museum pass and it's, like, at least $11. So that was interesting.

Also, they still had pluto in all their models and it was kind of nostalgic.

Final dress + Opening night tomorrow! Fingers crossed!

The hipster bangs have it.

It's like I cut my hair and suddenly instead of being the chubby awkward girl, suddenly I'm the fun curvy girl, and I really like the change. I don't understand it, but it's kind of great.

It was definitely a well-timed, well-needed change.