Break a Leg

Happy Jenday, everyone.

Well, as of tomorrow I will have completed my 31st orbit of the sun.  And I feel...not excited.  As a kid birthdays were the best thing ever: one day just for you.  The anticipation started weeks before the actual day.  "Only 3 more weeks before my birthday!"  This year I had completely forgotten about it until Monday.  Maybe that has something to do with the fact that as children we weren't allowed to do as much and parties were few and far between.  It was a treat just to get together with friends in the park and have cake.  Now, I hang out with my friends all the time and we always have fun.  So it's more of the same.  Not that that's bad, it's just nothing new. 

   Maybe it's time to change my outlook on things.  Lately, my idea of a good time has been to do very little.  This is because I feel like I've been doing so much.  I work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and then I generally have rehearsal or a show or a shoot or...something to do.  So doing nothing suddenly becomes novel.  But after a while the novelty wears off and I'm left thinking, "I need to do something amazing."  Which requires planning and coroboration and a lot more effort than it takes to walk down to the liquor store, get a twelve pack, call one person who is sure to tell everybody else, and then sit back and let the events happen around me as they generally want to.  And yes, that's a pretty lethargic way to think.  Also, getting this close to the day, any grand ideas will have to be spontaneous, which while the possibilities of improvized courses of action are pretty spectacular, often not everybody enjoys themselves or can even participate.  Because that's all I really want: to be surrounded by the people I love.  And not just on my birthday.  Pretty much in general and all the time.

   Which leads to the bigger question: What do I want out of life?  And the answer? Well, generally a bacon cheese burger and a couple beers do the trick.  Think bigger, man! Fame, fortune, glory, financial independence, women, cars, castles, pirate vessels, SUCCESS???  Well, sure.  Do you have any spare just laying around?  No?  But can I have a bacon cheese burger?  Yes?  Hmm.  Ok, yes, you have to work for those things.  And in my way I do.  Or at least, I work, and hope something resembling those things will come along eventually.  But am I working at the right stuff?  They say if you want to make it in tv or movies you have to live in L.A.  HELL no.  I will not live in that cess pit and TRY to make it as an actor.  I'm not really keen on packing up all my stuff and heading to New York to try and start over there.  I like it here.  My home is here.  My friends are here.  My cheese burger is here.  Right now I have relationships with several local theater groups where I rarely even have to audition for a part.  I think the last time I actually went to an audition was about a year ago and, as Yuri will attest, I am always busy with shows.  Maybe that's being a big fish is a small pond, but know what?  I'm kinda ok with that.  And when I'm not busy, I like to spend my time playing World of Warcraft or Yohoho Puzzle Pirates.  And I'm content.

   Could my life be more? Sure.  Do I need it to be?  No.  So why am I trying to defend the choices I've made?  Because maybe somewhere I think it should be more.  But then everybody shows up with beer and what status my life is in isn't so important.  It'll still be there in the morning, and I'll still be...well, working, doing, moving.  I guess the really important part is just not to stagnate.  No, wait...that is important, but it's not the most important.  It's being able to enjoy the people you love.  Because really, no matter how successful you are, they will still be those people. 

And a bacon cheeseburger is a bacon cheeseburger.

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Editor's Note: Happy Birthday, Chad!

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Jennifer's Note: Party at my house!

Happy Jenday, everybody.

As most of you know, we here at Break A Leg are the little guys: aside from the creation of the show, we mostly do normal, low-paying jobs and lead normal, un-glamorous lives...well sorta.  My point is that we have not yet achieved the dream of having somebody pay us to do Break a Leg so that we wouldn't have to, for example, make coffee for an endless stream of caffeine junkies, or work in a hell-hole like Kinko's, or heaven for bid - lick envelopes. 

   Currently, I work at a sign shop doing graphic design and customer service.  I hate customer service.  I refuse to subscribe to the addage that the customer is always right.  Sometimes they are dead f*&#ing wrong.  Here's a situation that I have had to deal with more times than should be legal: a customer comes in to order a sign.  Fine.  That's what we're here for.  We're called FastSigns.  So far so good.  The customer tells us what they want on the sign.  Par for the course.  We place the order and let the customer know when we will have a proof for them to review.  The purpose of the proof is so that the customer can make sure that the sign is set up exactly the way they want it.  This is the point where everything goes wrong.  I will be the first to admit that I am the world's worst proof reader and I'm pretty sure I have some unquantified learning disability.  Ergo, I make mistakes.  I try to counter this by showing my work to another coworker before sending off the proof, but this isn't always possible.  Now, the thing about people, see, and people in the role of customers is that they assume that the sign they want is the sign they are getting, which is a natural assumption, but means that they don't always pay as much attention to the proof as they should.  So often times, people will approve their proofs with some minor but significant flaw in the design.  Approving the proof means they are saying "Yes, this is the sign I want and I want you to make it for me."  Then, they will show up to pick up their sign.  This is usually the point where they choose to pay special attention to every little detail.  This is the point where they notice the flaw.  This is the point where they exclaim that WE the sign makers messed up their sign and demand that we fix it free of charge.  Now, yes, we made the mistake in the first place, but we showed it to them that way and they said that was the way they wanted it.  And now they're saying they want it different.  For free.  They are making us do more work.  Now don't get me wrong: I don't mind difficult problems, but I do mind people that make them more difficult by being total ass monkies.

   For this special brand of person, the ass monkey, I have developed what I call "The Customer Service Stare."  This is a technique is used to display absolute vile derision without overtly making your target aware of it.  First: go dead inside.  Turn off every part of your humanity.  Tuck it away somewhere until you're ready to let it come out later.  Next, let your face go blank.  Do not blink.  Let your jaw go slack and hang open slightly.  If you can manage to drool this is a plus.  Also, relax your posture a little bit so your shoulders are slightly rounded.  The purpose of all this is to indicate with every fiber of your being that you care so little about the person in front of you that you can't even be bothered to exist properly.  Of course, any person you find worthy of the Customer Service Stare is usually so self absorbed that they completely fail to notice.  Which is usually for the best.  No point in exacerbating an already volatile situation.

   Anywho, moving back to my original point...We all have to do something to pay the bills so that we can bring you the magical world of Break a Leg.  But what to do other than find some hopefully not too mind-numbing desk job and cranking out "product" day after day after day?  This is where my day dreams start...

    As anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes around me knows, I am a pirate.  I started my piratical career a couple years ago after playing the part of Antonio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, who is in fact a pirate.  I enjoyed playing the part so much that I just decided to be like that all the time.  I also have a group of friends with whom I attend SCA events.  We call ourselves The Dread Ship Black Rose.  Then, the other day, a coworker of mine made a suggestion that really got me thinking.  Obvisouly these days, pirates are in: Pirates of the Carribean, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and so on.  But some people think you can just throw on an eye patch, scream "yarrr!" and suddenly you're a pirate.  There's so much more to it than that.  There's a frame of mind that you can only acquire from participating in various piraty activities that one may not have the opportunity to indulge in or suffer through.  The progression here is one that I feel is quite natural: Pirate Camp.

  At Pirate Camp adults could learn the finer points of pirate-craft, such as boozing, wenching, fighting, swaggering, and so forth.  By day piratus potentia would learn the rudiments of sword play, semiphore and ship to ship combat.  At night they would learn sea shanties around the fire while getting toasted on rum.  And at the end of the week everybody would get their own doo rag to signify that they are ready to go out into the world and pillage to their hearts content. Hi diddle dee dee, the pirate's life for me. 

   And then reality comes rushing back in and I have to go deal with the fat schmuck in the bad toupee who, no matter what, insists that he didn't pay that much for his banner last time so he shouldn't be charged differently this time even though his previous order was from 5 years ago for half the amount of signage...

   Speaking of pirates and songs and such, I've written a few piratical songs myself and have always dreamed of recording them, perhaps putting together an album.  But what I really think should happen is we here at Break A Leg should make a music video out of one or two.  Yuri has mentioned the desire to do a few musical numbers, but seems to think they should be BaL related.  I would like to suggest otherwise.  So, to all you pirate fans out there: pester Yuri.  Tell him all my ideas aren't necessarily bad ones.  Yarrr!

Jen

I have the flu.  I hate the flu.  There are times when it's nice to be sick.  You get to take the day off work, sleep in, eat in bed, and do nothing all day without feeling guilty about it.  But the flu knocks you down.  Suddenly, you've been in bed for three days and the only thing you can remember doing is getting up to go to the bathroom.  And you can't eat anything.  And you get the sweating shivers.  What the hell is that about?  And that, my friends, is just the start of it...

It all started last Jenday.  I woke up in the morning shivering and coffing.  Oddly, I didn't feel bad, bar those two symptoms.  I got up, showered, got dressed, and went to work.  As the day progressed my energy started to flag.  By lunch time I was in a pretty bad way.  This was really bad timing because I was finally going to have dinner with this girl that I had been trying to have dinner with for something like a year.  I had to cancel.  I went home and got in bed and stayed there...for a day. I was so out of it I couldn't even sit at my computer and play World of Warcraft.  That's how bad it was.

   This is where it really starts to suck.  Everything would have been manageable if I had just been able to ride the flu out in bed.  But no.  I could call in sick from work.  There were plenty of people to cover my absence.  But what I could not call in sick from was The Show.  As I have mentioned before, I am currently in a production of "Moonlight and Magnolias" with Sonoma County Repetory Theater.  this is a zany, fast-paced, very physically active show, where the actors are on stage pretty much the entire time.  And it's a small company, so no understudies.  And the theater is anywhere from 45 minute to 1hr 15 minutes from my house depending on traffic, which can be pretty severe at the time of day I have to drive to the theater: Rush Hour.  (Though why they call it "rush hour" has always been a bit confusing to me because nobody is moving very fast.)

   Have you ever had to do anything that was physically demanding when you were really sick?  It's not fun.  You break out in a cold sweat and you feel like you're made out of smoke: burnt and not all together.  Thinking, focusing, remembering: any mental action is like trying to hold water in your hand.  And you're tired.  So very, very tired.  All you want to do is lay down.  It's all you've ever really wanted to do.  You can't imagine why you wouldn't ever want to do anything else when lieing down is one of your options.  But you can't.  You have to push, pull, strain, stand, jump, run, tumble, roll, move, go.  And all on the edge of a cliff.  And if you fall, you take everybody with you: your fellow actors, the audience, the people who run the theater, the bartender down the street, the Viceroy of Malasia, everybody.

   So there's nothing you can do, but do.  And you get up on stage, and suddenly, you're not that sick guy any more.  You're somebody else.  You're Victor Flemming.  You invented the camera dolly.  You smacked Judy Garland around.  You don't take any shit from anybody, especially not some punk-ass flu.  And you fly.  You feel like you're riding just in front of some huge, menacing wave and if you trip even for a second, it'll eat you whole.  And you do it, you make it to the other side, and you didn't let anybody down.  And then you crash so hard even your hair bruises.  And there's no glory, no celebration.  It doesn't matter.  Because all that matters is sleep. 

   But you can't sleep.  The flu won't let you sleep.  You wrap yourself up in your blankets so tight it's hard to breathe, but it finds a way in there with you.  You drift on the edge of consciousness, almost falling off into that merciful oblivion, but the chills and the sweat and the coughs, and the fever-enduced dreams prevent you from making that final plunge.  And every time you look at the clock another 5 minutes has passed.  And suddenly you have to go to the bathroom again.  You take another shot of NyQuil hoping that this time, this one will finally put you under.  You stumble back to bed, but the act of getting up and going down the hall has instilled the chills with a renewed vigor and you feel like you'll never be warm again. 

   And then finally, after tossing and turning and coughing and shivering for hours, sleep decends.  For a time you can escape the fetid mire.  You float in a land of soft grey nothingness.  You think to yourself "Ah yes, if it would just stay like this.  I could deal with it if it would just stay like this."

   And then the alarm goes off and it all comes rushing back in.  It's time to do another show.  It's time to get up, get dressed, and decend into hell once more.

   And that was my weekend.  I also had some friends up from So Cal this weekend, but I couldn't spend much time with them because I was either at the theater or incapcitated.  I'm over the most of it now, though my head is still stuffed up and every once in a while I cough up a new lung. 

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.

Well, it's Jenday again.  Hooray!  Although, this one is not going to be the fun-filled extravaganza I always hope for when consciousness intervenes on my blissful departure from reality.  The following is sort of a living itinerary with footnotes, references, tangents, and hopefully some bacon.

Currently, I am at work.  I do graphic design for a local sign company.  I enjoy the artistic creation as one would asume.  I do not enjoy customer service.  For instance: this morning the phone rang.  I picked it up and answered it in my most pleasant 10-in-the-morning tone which, I'll admit, needs a little work.  The woman on the other side of the line said we had done some work for her in the past and wondered if I could look it up.  I asked for the company name and typed that up in the system.  I found that the last order she had placed with us was back in 2002.  This information quickly became irrelevant because she wanted a "different kind of sign".  The conversation at this point went something like this:

"You know those mirrors on doors?  I want a sign like that."

I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't know what size those mirrors are.  Can you get me the measurements on that?"

"Well, you know in the phone book where it says "Enroll Now"?  I want a sign about that size.

"Uh, I don't have a phone book in front of me."

"You can't look it up?  I can call somebody else." Click.

Hanging up on me at this point was probably one of the smartest things she could have done because if the conversation had gone on for much longer, I would have reached through the phone, wrapped my hand around her neck, and slammed her head against any convenient surface until the peanut-sized object she had mistaken for her brain fell out of her ear and rolled under the desk where the dog would find it later and have a light afternoon snack.

Then I got to go back to what I do best, which is make art.  One day when I find out how to post images here I'll share some with you.  And the rest of my morning will be happily wiled away by the aspect of creation...and coffee.  Of course, this process will constantly be interrupted by people wanting stuff.  It has taken me 45 minutes to write these last two lines.  Anywho...

The later part of the day will drastically change shape as I have to go up to the Civic Center for some minor little issue that hardly needs mentioning, but I bring it up here in passing, as it were, just to paint for you a more vibrant picture of what the day will hold for me.  Anybody that has ever had to wade through the mire of beaurocratic red tape know just how grim an image that may turn out to be.   The potential for things to go not very well at all is a piece of art I would just as well prefer to remain unpainted.

After that happy fun time, I need to do some laundry, which is difficult because I have no washer and/ldryer in my apartment.  There is however one communal coin-op machine shared by around roughly 30 people.  The amount of laundry that can actually fit in the thing is a depressingly inefficient amount.  I try to go to my parents house to do laundry when I need to, which consiquently usually involves me getting fed as well, but they live 45 minutes away and I already have to make that trek there an back 3-4 times a week to do my show.  I know you're asking yourself "Well, why don't you just go up early before your show one day and do some then?"  The answer is as follows:  I work 9-5:30 and have to be at the theater at 7.  In traffic, it takes about an hour to get there, so I pretty much head straight form work to the theater, grabbing what food I can along the way.  "Well," you say again, "what about the nights when you don't have shows?"  A) Like I said I already have to make the journey more times a week than I really care to, and B) when would I play World of Warcraft?  I was going to do some laundry tonight, but I may or may not have a date...well, perhaps not like a Date-date...I dunno.  It's complicated.

What's my point in all this rambling?  I don't really have one.  I guess, if I were to have one it would be something along the lines of: Shit happens.  The best you can do is put your floaties on and try not to breathe through your nose.

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Jen