The Night I Was a Secret Agent

This is how my life works:

I like making the minute details, the little things and situations, the finite moments, into exciting adventures and fun situations. It makes life a little more fun, and it keeps my imagination rolling. Maybe it's an exercise in acting, but either way I enjoy it.

Take tonight for instance: I wanted to go use the computer at the college in Lville after hours. I was on a quest for wi-fi, a miraculous thing that always alludes me when I'm home on break.

The American version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a surprisingly very good movie.  America actually didn't ruin it, even if it had a couple of flaws. Rooney Mara deserves some kind of award for her performance as Lisbeth. Anyway, I totally felt like a secret agent. This badass.

The engine shudders into silence as I pull the key out of the ignition. The amber lights of the parking lot cast an eerie hue over the empty lot which ripples with snow, and my shadow as I slowly make my way towards the dark building is elongated in the evening light. I sling my bag over my shoulder as I pass into the entryway, the heels of my boots clicking on the pavement. Through the glass door I can see the faint fluorescent lighting in the distant hallway. I cautiously swing the door open and enter. The entry hall is silent---too silent---my breath echoes in reverberating gasps along the high ceiling. I gingerly walk across the glistening, newly waxed floor towards the end of the entry hall. Below the single fluorescent overhead light sits a staircase descending to the basement and across from that stands a grated door. In an instant I decide on the door---the basement would be too much effort---and pull on the grate. It slides open to reveal a small room, longer than it is wide, filled with black chairs and a small wooden table. I rush to a large chair in the corner of the room and pull out my computer just as all the fluorescent light switches off. I am plunged into darkness, only augmented by the faint glow of the moon as it passes through the row of windows behind me. Quickly, I flip my computer open and stare at the tiny icon in the bottom right hand corner as it turns from a red "X" to five white bars in a row. Target acquired.

Being a dork makes life so much more fun. Going back to Btown next week! 

Peace out!

Toys and Tea

My mind seems blank, frozen over like the ground outside covered in a light crust of icy snow. It's completely burnt out, shriveled up, and blank...wiped clean from an entire semester's worth of work. My brain has been stuffed to capacity, left to revel in its exhaustion and information overload. I look forward to this holiday season to make sense of everything my brain has encompassed over the past semester, and apply all of it to my life. I wait by the window, staring at the sky hoping to see at least a single snowflake. I wait for the ground to be full of fresh powder, not this icy shell that makes the Earth seem dark and dreary. Once my mind recovers, it will snow again, and the lights will reflect color and radiance in beams of droplets and icy webs. It's almost that time of year.

And it began a couple of weekends ago with the opening of The Toys Take Over Christmas which I worked on as one of the lighting designers this year. It was a little sad to be seeing the show in a different angle, all I could think about was last year and all the fun I had performing in the show, but then I really got into seeing it in a visual way and had just as much fun with Toys. It was a fabulous weekend after the extremely stressful week that came before it with all the work that went in to designing those gosh darn lights. Who knew it was so stressful to turn a light on and make it work? Not I sir, not I. I have a much greater appreciation of the art of lighting. My parents took my niece Iris to the show and she absolutely loved it. Granted, she's one year old but she was laughing during the whole show which is a very good thing.

That weekend also came with the Hairspray reunion production party which was held at this club overlooking the lake. It was a pretty gorgeous venue, and it was amazing to see the whole gang again. I still can't believe almost four months out of this semester was spent on working on Hairspray. It was an amazing, rewarding, and yet tiring experience that was so worth it. I've been telling everyone that when I look back on this semester all I can see is bronchitis (Why did that have to happen on top of everything else??) and cans of hairspray. I loved working with those people, and I'm proud of all of the work I've put in during the course of this semester.

It was a weekend full of surprises and candycanes. I started the weekend with a packet of green tea in my pocket, thinking I'd use it at some point during the day, but I ended up being so busy that the packet of green tea stayed in my pocket all weekend. I found it late Sunday night when I emptied my pockets and pulled out this wrinkled green tea packet, saturated and dirty.

Now as the semester draws to an end, I feel like I am that tea bag, saturated with knowledge and experience and dirty from hours of labor. It's time for a break. It's time for a very merry Christmas.

We exchanged presents last night at the Casa de Meg Ashley Ryan last night:

Oh! And check out this amazing book I've discovered! It's called The Terrible Underpants. It's a pretty special book about a girl who has some nasty underpants that she doesn't want to wear because all the kids laugh at her when she hangs upside down on the monkey bars and they can see her underpants. Also she has a pet wombat. Duh...

Pick this up at your local library. I don't know why this isn't on Oprah's book club list yet...

Hope you have a very happy start to your holiday season!

Peace out!

(It's) Hairspray!

Good evening! I've been on a bit of a hiatus from the blogosphere lately because things have been extremely busy here in Burly World. This past weekend was the wonderfully amazing run of Lyric Theatre's Hairspray which I was so lucky to be a part of. I was extremely excited to finally be performing the show after months of rehearsals, and especially to be performing on the Flynn Theatre stage in downtown Btown, but now that show is over I'm really missing the cast and those same people I've seen everyday for the past four months. Like I said, though, we had an amazing run. Our audiences were fantastic and the show was awesome.

Here's a little story from opening night:

I had two major quick costume changes in the show. They were super fast so I had a dresser backstage to help me. She helped me get my pants on while changing my shoes, and this time I was especially nervous because it was opening night. Major pressure. I get the pants on and I'm just zipping up the fly as my dresser pulls out my hot pink neckerchief. I lift my head just as she pulls it from her pocket and BAM! her fist meets my eye. My dresser has successfully punched me in the eye.

I start swearing profusely (in my head of course just in case my microphone was on), and I clutched my eye.

"I'm so sorry!" my dresser pleads. Bless her heart. She didn't mean to.


"It's okay..." I say as the music for the song starts. I have to come on extremely soon.


And this is how I know I'm a true theatre kid. The first thing I thought of when I got punched was not "OH MY GOD MY EYE COULD BE SERIOUSLY INJURED!" but rather it was:


"OH MY GOD MY EYE IS WATERING! MY MAKEUP IS GOING TO RUN!"


I rushed to one of my cast mates and asked her if my makeup was running. Thankfully it wasn't, and the rest of the show went off without a hitch.

I decided that my momma name in the show was Shirley. She had a pretty well developed character even though she was only on stage for about two minutes.

Opening night concluded with an awesome opening night party with tons of food and drink and wonderful company. The weekend ended with strike which we all helped out with, and while it was long it eventually got to the point where I was dancing with a mop to "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing on the bare Flynn stage. Pretty successful.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see Hairspray! You made our show a tremendous success!

Peace out!

It Took Ovaries

This is what I did this past weekend:

It was one of the most amazing performance experiences I've ever been a part of. On Friday, performance artist and co-playwright Bobbi Ausubel came to Royall Tyler Theatre to teach our Playing With Femininity class (seriously the best class ever---we just spend three hours reading plays about women and experimental theatre pieces while talking about sex, gender, and political issues) her physical technique of exploring character through improvisation, movement, and vocal work, not necessarily through sense memory and "The Method." She explained to us how emotions are held within our bodies, and the only way to act is to unleash these emotions through physical engagement. It was the most natural and invigorating way to act and explore character than I've ever learned. I loved it, and I want to use it in every acting work I do from now on.

Saturday night was the workshop performance. We performed the scenes from the play we had worked on and then Bobbi held a discussion of gender themes and what it means to live a bold lifestyle. She explained how change can only happen if we have the courage to stand up for injustice in our lives, in our society. The audience was amazing, and I had never felt such a connection with the audience before. It was all a shared experience just as gender discrimination and oppression is a shared experience every human being faces. Then in the nature of the play, Bobbi invited members of the audience to come up to the mic and share their stories, women for a time when they were bold, brazen, or courageous and for the men to talk about a woman in their life who had an ovaries moment. Some of the stories we got were funny, some were extremely emotional, some were inspirational, and some were a little awkward. I even got up and shared a story from high school. We created such a community in the theatre that night, and we had an amazing time celebrating women and a bold life.

"High School Gauntlet"

Bobbi Ausubel explaining the project.

I shared a story!

An emotional end to the scenes. "Rana"

For more information about the play That Takes Ovaries, Bobbi Ausubel, or how you can host an open mic, check out http://www.thattakesovaries.org/.

Peace out!

Cough Cough Dead

There's a certain feeling that passes through and invades your body when you are about to get sick. It begins with a sort of cloudiness that fogs and darkens your vision like a thick storm unleashing a torrent of rain and lightning upon your brain. You can't focus, you can't think, and it seems like you could never get enough sleep. Along with this fogginess follows a nagging ache that creeps into every joint of your body and pries into your bones, making you shaky and weak, like every footfall is a great earthquake shaking your system. The pain lingers into your head as your sinuses slowly fill with mucous and snot, pressing against your brain and your face making each nerve under each tooth sting and every hair on your head to burn in agony. Beads of sweat pool on your blood-drained skin and soak into your clothes as your internal climate rises like a slow cooker for your internal organs.

All of these are hardcore warning signs of a cold, or a general sickness. Last week, I didn't feel ANY of these, but now this week I am stuck with this horrible cough, fevers, chills, antibiotics, and an annoying trip to the hospital where I'm asked question like:

"Are things okay at home?"

"Do you do drugs?"

...and, my favorite:

"Have you been around anyone with bedbugs recently?"

"YES! I'M LOUSY WITH BEDBUGS!! GIVE ME A BED!!!"

Someone tell me I'll get better soon...

Why is Ashley not looking at the camera? No one knows.

My Everything Hurts

...and within a period of two days, I was packed up and moved out of my wonderful single in UHeights to the tiny double in Wills, but it's not all that bad. Somehow I found a way to take the lofted bed and fit Megan's loveseat under it. It created quite the batcave effect, which has been a pretty awesome addition to the room so far. I'm just waiting this week out now until Joe arrives on Sunday and school starts.

I'm so completely ready for school to start. Everything is in order, schedules have been made, books have been bought (In 14 different orders on Amazon as well as one from UVM.), and supplies have been organized. Megan and I just talked about how exciting it's going to be to pack up our backpacks Sunday night before  the first day of school. I could not be more pumped and ready to go. I'm also super excited about being a TA and doing Hairspray rehearsals.

These all came today.

I actually had quite the stressful day right before getting completely moved out and going home for the weekend. It began when I went to the UVM Residential Life office, like I was told to do, and waited for ten minutes at the front desk until someone came out into the lobby to ask me if anyone had been helping me. Since no one was, the woman went back in and got me the key to my room. Once I was packed up, I moved a bunch (basically everything I owned) to Wills. When I went to lock the door, however, the key wouldn't turn in the lock. After swearing profusely, I ran to the front desk of my new dorm where the office manager was just about to take off for the day. She got me the right key all the while wondering why ResLife gave me the wrong one and where they got it. Needless to say that key worked.

Then, when I tried to turn my computer (Bertha) on to see if there was wireless in my new dorm, the screen fizzled out and went dark. I screamed and raced to the Computer Depot in the Davis Center with my baby clutched in my arms. There they hooked her up to another computer and determined that the problem was probably physical, so I had to send it in to the company. After talking with a thickly accented Indian customer service representative for an hour, we determined that there was definitely something wrong but my warranty had run out. It was cheaper to buy another computer.

Moment of silence for Bertha...........


Now enter Marcus, my new computer, who is very sleek and runs with Windows 7. I'm hoping Marcus will serve me well. This is my first blog post with him, and it's working quite well. Thank you, Costco! (Yes, we got my new computer at Costco.)


This weekend I also got the chance to go see Chase's directorial genius in Hairspray at the Haskell Opera House. I really missed that place from last summer, and I especially missed Lissy (who was amazing in the show), Chase (who needs a Broadway stage, stat), and Kat (who continues to astound me with her stage managing abilities). It was great to see everyone and take in an awesome show.

It was weird to watch the show and then come back to Burlington to start rehearsing it. But rehearse we did. Matt and I have been carpooling to rehearsals and totally rocking them. Hope you can all make it to the show! There will be links up soon over in the right sidebar. ------------------->


In the end: my back, my neck, my arms, my abs, and my legs are killing me. The dances are hard and I was totally drenched in sweat on Sunday but it's totally worth it. I missed working this hard for theatre so much. I felt so broken from lack of theatre (yet again) after having it the whole time last summer, and having this opportunity to perform on the big stage at the Flynn is absolutely amazing. For people like me, and Matt, and Chase, and Lissy, and Kat, anything is worth it for theatre.


And sweat is worth it.


Here are some more pictures from Megan and my drive yesterday to the Champlain Islands. It was a lot of fun and we found some Vermont nut free chocolates!

Another highlight from this weekend:





Peace out!