Break a Leg

Hey, everyone.

The last episode of the school series is up!

Francesca helps Chase live out one of his fantasies while David finally manages to get a date with his fantasy girl. Everything is falling into place until an unexpected, decomposing delivery from Larry brings everything to a screeching halt. All this and more in the latest episode of Break a Leg!

You can see it on our front page or you can go to YouTube right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQHtOGp-zb8

Don't forget to comment, rate, subscribe and favorite the video on YouTube! Thanks guys!

Also, now that all the latest episodes are out, I really suggest (if you have the time and patience) to watch Ep. 4-9 straight through. No matter what our pretenses are and no matter how much we tried to make each episode stand alone, they're still a whole lot better when you watch them in a row, so, just a suggestion!

Anyway, thanks, guys! Hope you like it!

-Yuri

Hey, all.

So, since Tahko, our local blogging actor, just got a leading role in a show in Carmel (a really nice little town a couple of hours away from San Francisc) I figured I'd take over his Blogging Actor blog for today.

I started as an actor. My first role was in 7th grade where my drama teacher convinced me to audition for Aladdin. This was for two reasons -- one, I was in her drama class (I had to take it, it was one of those) and was one of the only people who could read a sentence without losing my place on the page, and two, because I kind of looked like a baby Aladdin when I was in 7th grade.

The show really got me into acting, though. I started acting in plays in high school and only got into writing in college, where I got into the habit of putting on my own shows and then casting myself in them. It's just so much easier that way. 

One of the best experiences I had, as an actor, was in an acting class at my college with a teacher who was asked to take over for a semester because the original teacher couldn't teach that year. The woman they got was a serious method actor and director. Let me quickly explain method acting for those not sure what it is:

Method acting is a type of acting where you really try and get into your character -- really feel the emotions they're feeling. You've all heard of actors staying in character for months before a shoot, or gaining weight for a part or pretending to not have legs for a few weeks -- that's method acting. And a little crazy.

Anyway, the semester was divided into two classes -- the first quarter was Acting I, the second quarter was Acting II. She taught both. The problem was that Acting I was a class that regular people took to fulfill a requirement and Acting II was for actual actors.

So, Acting I had around 50 people in it and our teacher was ruthless. You'd go up and do a monologue, and she'd stop you two lines in, "Why are you saying that? Are you mad? How would you react? Why are you mad? Really feel it. You don't look like you're feeling it." So, she would do this with regular, non-acting people who wanted a free ride. She'd make someone cry, literally, daily. There was a girl who was a playing a hooker, and it was like a 15 minute conversation of, "Yes, but WHY are you a hooker? What would make you be a hooker?" to which the girl responded, "I'm not a hooker! I've never been a hooker!"

In short, it was comedy gold.

She gave me two compliments in that class, and they made me feel like I was the King of the damn world. I learned more than I ever did in that class and, while I, myself, have a more moderate view of method acting (yes, you should feel the emotions, etc. but if you starve yourself for a month to play a starving man -- you're not really acting anymore, are you? You're actually starving. I'd think it'd be harder to really figure out how to play that when you're not dying of starvation.) -- it's what really improved my ability.

Still, acting is one of those things (like most arts and, really everything) that you never stop learning. As far as experience and practice goes, I need so much more it's hard to explain. I intend to start diving into other parts (if I ever have any time) and really challenge myself. 

So, have any of you tried acting or are interested in pursuing it? Have any questions about it, or auditioning or anything? Let us know, I'm sure we can help you out at least a little bit.

Have a good weekend, everyone. And stay tuned for monday's episode -- it'll be the last of this arc and we'll be back to conversations for a little while.

Hope you've been enjoying the eps!

-Yuri

Disclaimer by Yuri: Drew emailed me and told me that I don't need to write a disclaimer for this one, because he doesn't cuss as much in it. The key word being "as much" which what he really means is he isolated it to one, hilariously crass paragraph. I don't mind, but, for those who appreciate the finer things in life, like a Snuff Film joke, you've been warned...

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I thought I'd talk a little bit today about something that hopefully everyone can relate to. It's something we all have to some degree or another, something that we can never be entirely rid of without resorting to drastic, in some reported cases even homicidal, measures. I'm talking, of course, about neighbors.

Maybe you can all help me out in the comments by letting me know if my wife and I have one of the following three conditions:

• ridiculously bad luck
  
• ridiculously high expectations
  
• a curse

Let's begin in the beginning, for before there were neighbors there were sub-neighbors. Yes, roommates. After living in San Francisco for a little over a year I had broken up with my girlfriend and needed a place to live. Fast. My beautiful studio apartment in the Western Addition (one block from Alamo Square Park; look it up, you've seen it before) was costing me double what I could afford and I had to get out before they raised the rent even higher than the current (gasp) $825 per month price tag.

Now kids, that was a really good deal for San Francisco even then, over ten years ago. Today that kind of money might get you a crappy in-law or a nice bedroom.

In any case, I was in a play with someone who had a room available, so I checked it out. Nicely sized, had a radiator, only around $400 per month. Yes, you did the math right, for half the studio apartment I could share a three-bedroom flat. San Francisco maths do not add up.

Turns out I had moved in with two bears. Literally. I know, that's using literally incorrectly, but it somehow applies. The shower regularly resembled the conference floor of a shaving convention, and I don't think either of these guys ever actually shaved. Guess what else they never actually did? You guessed it, clean.

My wife more or less started living with me there (I was kind of a dick that way, I admit. They were sports to not ask for more money or anything). Pretty soon we noticed that our silverware was disappearing, I mean like, gone. We once peaked in the bedroom of one of them that we suspected was doing the pilfering, but never again. That place looked like a newspaper factory, Gap, and Linens 'N' Things had all crashed into each other and exploded. I think we saw some dirty plates and cups too, and if my forks were in there I didn't want 'em anymore.

Moving on, we moved on. Just a few blocks away really, so we got to keep the same laundromat and taqueria. Our video store in fact was where we ended up shooting (many years later) that scene in Episode 8 where we tried to ship Dead Nick Shiny).

Our first experience with our neighbors was the lady across the hall continually parking in our spot. She gave that up and decided to just park in the only driveway, blocking the entire building. Then she'd go to sleep. We battled her and her twenty-something son for months there, and the landlord would call and yell at her all the time over it too. Then her son would have loud parties in the driveway, which was underneath our living room.

We actually patched things up really nicely one night when I drove to a rehearsal, leaving my wife locked out of the apartment because her keys were in the car. She sat in the hallway for ours and the same neighbor from across the hall invited her in, gave her soda, etc. After that she would cook and bring us leftovers sometimes.

Then, like a bad television show, people moved in above us. They actually moved in after midnight one night and were in and out of the garage with the noisy spring-loaded door, which happened to be underneath our bedroom. We asked the old bastard that was someone's father to shut the hell up, but in a nice way, and he said kiss my ass, in his own nice way.

They then started throwing wild loud parties every Sunday night (wtf?!), so we started calling the cops every Sunday night after they stopped answering the door when we knocked. One outstanding incident was when the upstairs guy, drunk, yelled at the cops for how much we were calling them, then offered to start calling the cops on us. The officer then informed him of the penalties of filing a false police report. Nice.

Then my wife got pregnant and we moved again, into a dreamboat of a two-bedroom with a massive living room and huge westerly-facing bay windows. We're on the top floor with no buildings attached to us whatsoever. How bad could it get?

We first met one of our downstairs neighbors when we asked the daughter to please turn her loud-ass music down. I mean, put on your headphones and turn up the volume all the way. Now take them off and imagine the music coming from the floor below you is exactly as loud and clear as when you had on your headphones. She complied, seemed nice, said she was sorry and didn't know someone had finally moved in. Cool, right? Then somehow offered that she also never drove the car in the driveway. It made sense at the time I think, we were talking about something remotely related, but whatever.

Except we always saw her driving the car. Always. Like, she saw us see her driving the car. The lying-for-no-reason only escalated from there.

Her father got pissed because I moved my trashcans to another place in the garage, said they were blocking his bicycles. His three bicycles with six flat tires. Okay. The daughter kept blasting her music, we would ask her to turn it down, but predictably it turned really sour. She no doubt got tired of us asking all the time, so then it became she would turn the music up instead of down. Kinda like she was saying "You see what I did there?"

I mean I get it, the apartment was empty for six months or so before we moved in. But shit bitch, it's not anymore, shut your ass up. Oh, and move band practice out of the garage. I didn't give a shit before but now I hate you and want it out.

It went on like that for a while, and we all eventually ended up in mediation, where the father told three different stories as to why his adult daughter couldn't be there. Then he told a great one, wherein his daughter, when she was a kid, poured rice all over someone. And he did nothing to discourage her. Because it was a phase. And the loud-ass music is a phase too so shut the hell up. Then he said he'd been living there for twice as long as he really had, told a few more untruths that made no sense. He ended up finally tossing his daughter under the bus, said she made all the noise and was a real problem to handle, and that he wasn't going to do a thing about it.

Then she moved out and she's only noisy when she comes home from time to time.

I skipped the time that she set up her drum set in our parking spot, then ignored us when we got home and opened the garage. Like a dog that just pissed on your Playstation and lies in the corner pretending to be asleep.

Break it down for me.

Happy Jenday once again! 

   Today, I would like to talk about fate.  There seems to be a lot of it rolling around out there.  Often times just when you think you're getting the hang of things, fate pops back up and says "Hey! Miss me?  Here's the next part!"  Is this the same as destiny?  Not necessarily.  I think the distinction could be that destiny is where you're going.  Fate is what happens to make you get there.  Neither do I believe that fate has anything to do with the decisions we make.  Fate is what causes us to make those decisions.  This creates a chain of events which we, as humans, broadly term "life".  For instance...

   When I was a kid my dad ran his own landscaping business.  In California in the late 80's and early 90's we were living in a drought situation, which, as one might guess, isn't so great for people that dealing in making plants grow.  Things were getting tricky and eventually my dad had to get a job in Oregon.  So, 3 days before my freshman year of high school started, we loaded up the truck and moved to...well not Beverly. 

   Brookings, actually.  Small logging and fishing town, lots of trees, good surf, and a whole lot of nothing for 26 miles in either direction.  This is because all the towns along the southern Oregon coast were once Pony Express stops, and 26 miles was about as far as a rider could go in a day. It was in this school that my social life was reborn.  You see, I hadn't been very popular in junior high.  No no, I know you're thinking "What??", but it's true.  I was a bit of a geek, which wasn't as popular in those days as it is today.  And it was in this school that my passion for acting was realized.  It was also in this school, during my junior year, that everybody in my class had to take the ASVAB, which is sort of the military version of the SATs.  Had I been in the California school system, I might never have taken that test.  But because I had taken the test and because I'm smart enough to tell my ass from my elbows, recruiters came looking for me.  I hadn't really given any thought to life after highschool, and a brief stint in the military seemed like a good way to get out in the world, get money for college, and find out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  As it turned out, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, was not be in the Army.

  While in the Army, I was was stationed variously at Ft. Leonardwood, Missouri; Ft. Huachuca, Arizona; Ft. Gordon, Georgia; Yong San, South Korea; and Ft. Hood, Texas. 

   Now this is where things start getting convoluted.  When you have a security clearance, like I did, it takes a while for the clearance to get from one post to another.  So, while I was sitting in Texas waiting for my clearance to arrive from South Korea so I could actually get to do my job, I had to sit around doing a lot of odd jobs.  One of those odd jobs turned out to be life guarding for one of the pools on post.  The pool was right across the street form my barracks.  So, instead of getting up at 5:30am everyday and engaging in mindless exercise, I was getting up around 11am and strolling across the street to work on my tan. 

   This, by the way is the only time in my life I have ever been tan.  I would walk around and people would say "Man, you are tan!" and I would say "I know."

   Then, August 23rd, 1998 at around 5:30 in the afternoon, there was nobody at the pool but two regular kids and I was the only lifeguard on duty.  I went to try a double flip off the diving board, landed wrong on my right foot and fell into the water.  As it turned out I had what's called a "lys franc" fracture, which means you pretty much dislocate every bone in your foot and tear all the major ligaments and tendons.  Good times.  I finished my military career with a slight hobble.  I also finished it with an honorable discharge and a 30% disability rating from the veteran's administration.  Basically what this boils down to is that my soccer career is over.  I moved back in with my parents, who, one month after I got out of the Army, moved back down to my homeland of Marin County.

   I started going to the College of Marin, a local community college.  This is where I met Yuri and the gang.  I wanted to start studying acting again.  This stemmed from the events that happened in the "How It All Started" thread on the boards.  It's already written down there so I won't dazzle you with it again here.  Because of my disability rating I was eligible for the Vocational Rehabilitation Program, which would pay for me to get an Associate's Degree.  However, the government doesn't consider acting to be a worthwhile location.  So I started studying graphic design instead.  I tried to take some acting classes, but I always had to drop them because I was always getting cast shows...vis Yuri, and now Break A Leg.

  I guess my point is this: so far the universe has conspired to get me to this point with these people at this time.  And I 'd like to think that somewhere, somehow, that is significant in the grand scheme of things, and that fate has something more in store for us here at Break a Leg. Which introduces us to Fate's big sister, which is Hope.

Hey Guys, So some time has gone by since our fateful trip to the big and dirty apple. We made a lot of new friends and met some very creepy cab drivers. But in the end, the memory that sticks the most is of our friend Gino who graciously showed us all the wonderful sights of his hometown. And even though none of it was new to him and he had to pay $30 dollars to go up a building that he's seen 500 times before, he still did it with a smile on his face and love in his heart.
And with that, I give you our trip to New York.

Well... it was something really close to love, anyway. What was it.. oh. Hate. I think it was hate.

-Justin