A Nature's Guide to Clubbing

Are you an avid clubber? Do you enjoy raining yourself in glitter and sweat and grinding against total strangers to music with the bass so loud it feels like it pulled your heart out of your chest and shook it? Well if you do, then this blog post is not for you. For the rest of us, this guide to the jungle world that is the clubbing scene will help you identify a number of different species you will encounter on your journeys. Hopefully this guide will help you maneuver the laser lit rooms and avoid highly dangerous predators.

The Grinders
The first species you are likely to discover spends most of their clubbing time on the dance floor. The males and females form symbiotic physical relationships in which the female moves her butt in a circular motion around the male's crotch area to the beat of extremely loud rap music. This could also be considered a mating dance, however, anyone who comes in the near vicinity of The Grinders may find themselves victim of their grinding ways.

The Woo Girls and The Abercrombie Guys
Here's an example of The Woo Girls from one of my favorite T.V. show How I Met Your Mother:

The Woo Girls and the Abercrombie Guys are offshoot breeds of the drunkards. The Woo Girls are an extremely excitable bunch as evidenced by their exclamations and skanky clothing. The Abercrombie Guys are developed from the genus of frat boys as evidenced by their preppy yet dirty clothing and pitchers of beer in their hands. These species are generally harmless.

Gangsta Wannabes

In an actual city, this species would actually be gangsters. But in Burlington, VT, they're just weird. I think they forget where they're living.

Creepy Security Guys

This species is native to the clubbing scene. Mostly male, this species is signified by ultra tight T-shirts and muscles bigger than their stature actually allows. Mostly, this species walks around creepin' on other species in an attempt of intimidation. It doesn't work.

The Tongues

This species also forms physical symbiotic relationships, this time in connection with the oral cavity. They are distinguished by their lowly coordinated tongue movements and the glisten of saliva on their faces. This species is relatively harmless, yet shamelessly disgusting.

...and then there's us

When we walk in the club, all eyes on us.

Peace out!

Ryan Performs in Places: Mama Shirley

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a character I created when I was in Lyric's Hairspray this past fall. Her name is Mama Shirley. She is the sassy mama of the nicest kid Tammy, and she is very proud of her baby. This just goes to show that I'm willing to do anything for theatre. Anything.

So without further or do, some exclusive backstage footage from Hairspray:

Commitment.

Peace out!

'Twas the First Week of Classes

'Twas the first week of classes,
And all through Burlington, Wills, and Spinner,
All the creatures were stirring,
Theatre kids, bros, and biddies too.

Outside was cold, but the theatre was warm,
And the classes were starting right on time.
There was essay writing, Sherlock Holmes, and T.A.ing,
Eurotheatre group bonding, Beowulf, and masks.

After class was all the fun, and dreams of weekends ahead...

There was 30 Rock and Brennan's food,

And Ashley hula-hooping for three hours while watching The Jersey Shore.

Of course we must not forget our British accents!

So... 'twas the first week of classes,

And we were all happy to be back.

Still waiting to get in groove,

But I know it'll happen soon.

So goodnight unto you all,

It's rehearsal time for me.

Peace out!

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!

Days Like These

My alarm buzzed in its glaring tone at 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning. Weary, I rolled over and smacked my hand over the snooze. As the measly bits of early morning sunlight drifted through the room, I knew I had to get up if I was ever going to get everything done in this crazy, messed up day I had planned for myself.

And what a day it was...

My first task for the day was to take down some signs for a conference that had checked in the night before and use them to make my own signs for the hockey camp I had checking in this weekend. That went pretty well seeing how there was no one on the road that early in the morning, and it was hilarious to blast bad rap music while throwing signs out on the sidewalk. Then I had to grab door signs, candy, and cards to do room checks for the hockey camp. That got a little creepy seeing how the dorm complex was completely empty and every room in that place looks like a mental institution. I half expected Samara's ghost to be standing in the corner eyeballing me.

After an hour and a half of hanging signs and tossing maple candies into rooms, I ran over to Living/Learning to check the Puerto Ricans out that had been staying there since I started in May. For some reason, it took them a whole hour to drag their multitude of luggage over to the main desk so they could give me their keys. They were totally nice enough, but they propped the door to the main desk area open which set off this huge alarm. It blared throughout the entire hall, and I'm just running around being like, "GIVE ME YO KEYS! GIVE ME YO KEYS!" After about fifteen minutes, a member of the UVM Police stopped by for a little visit and I had to explain that there were a bunch of scientific Puerto Ricans checking out.

After that ordeal, I ran to make a quick lunch before working at the front desk until four. Then I had to run over with all of my check-in gear, including a stack of parking passes, to get ready to check in some of the hockey camp counselors. The check-in was supposed to happen outside, so I grabbed a small, round table for upstairs in the common room. Unfortunately, I didn't factor in my complete lack of strength as I attempted to hoist the puny, surprisingly heavy, table down the stairs. Then I rolled the monstrosity out the door and onto the lawn. I put everything, including the parking passes, down onto the table and went to go get a chair.

While I was gone, there must have been a monstrous gust of wind because the parking passes were blown everywhere. I spent ten minutes having a makeshift Easter egg hunt with the parking passes. I had just grabbed the last one when my client for the hockey camp drove into the parking lot.

Then I had to carry the table back upstairs...

At least Megan and I made the most fabulous nachos ever that night.

Peace out!

Keepin' It Classy In Cape Cod

As I walk down the glass hallway that leads to my room, rain and thunder pound away at the walls, and I realized that I left both of my windows open. I ran down the rest of the hallway, hurriedly unlocked my door, and dashed into my room to windows. I slipped and hydroplaned across the wet tiled floor and slammed into the windows, stubbing my toe and falling on my ass. This is no joke.

Btown just had a huge storm. While I was walking to the library it looked like the sky was in half with beautiful sunshine, and the other half was completely black. While I was coming back, it was like the storm was chasing me.

The banner I just made for my next group arriving to UVM.

This have been good since Megan and I came back to Vermont from our wonderful trip to Cape Cod, but I still wish we were there. It was a trip we've been trying to keep secret from the Internet because we were trying to surprise Ashley. We definitely succeeded in surprising her, and in rocking out the Cape. We did so much and we traveled all around, it would be really hard for me to go into detail for our entire trip. So here is a list of all the beautiful things we did. Hope you enjoy:

- We hiked around in Franconia Notch and the Basin

- We stopped in Plymouth, NH to surprise Eden then the three of us visited her awesome new apartment
- We stopped off in Cambridge on our way through Boston to find Harvard University, then got lost in Boston, and screamed as we drove through tunnels
- We named out GPS "Susan" and swore at her
- We sat in traffic, got flipped off, and got cut off
- We successfully surprised Ashley when she answered the front door and saw us standing there.

"WHAT THE FUCK! SINCE WHEN ARE YOU HERE!? FUCKING FUCK!"

- We got chewed by bugs
- We learned that Cape Cod belongs to Jesus

- Ashley gave us a tour of the Christmas Tree Shop
- We watched clouds descend onto the land
- We fought seagulls, hawks, and llamas
- We attempted to take a picture on the beach, but the sky was too bright, and Megan got sand in her eye

- We traveled to Provincetown and stopped by the National Seashore along the way

- We explored Ptown

- We went to an authentic Portuguese bakery and got fried dough and other yummy baked goods

- We made it to the end of the jetty

- We went clubbing at Pufferbellies in Hyannis twice, and met Ashley's friend John
- We met a group of Irish who were working on the Cape during the summer and were being discriminated against and being threatened to be kicked out of their apartment. But they were hilarious and had the best accents ever.
- We had a Ben and Jerry's buffet

- I broke my glasses, and then got them fixed in Falmouth
- We went to a toy store

- We went to a beautiful lighthouse on our way to Woods Hole

- We couldn't find parking in Woods Hole
- We couldn't go to Nantucket
- We went to the JFK Monument in Hyannis
- We went to a Zooquarium in Yarmouth and met a variety of different animals, especially the peacock we named Shannequa...because (s)he's sassy.

- We hiked two "Braille Trails" meant for blind people but I think if a blind person tried to walk either of these trails, they would die. Seriously dangerous.

- We frolicked in the woods and on playgrounds

- We met Vince and Laurie's (Ashley awesome parents') mannequin named Wayne

- We went to the beach and got totally sunburned.

- We attempted to ride this crazy paddleboat thing, but it was very hard to paddle in the ocean's currents and after about a million times flipping it over ad falling on rocks, we were done.

I paddled like Sawyer from LOST. Get it.

- We explored Main Street Hyannis including a creepy arcade with a sketchy bathroom where I thought I was going to be raped. Or murdered. Or both.
- We went to Nickerson State Park and tried to have a campfire. Emphasis on tried. Ashley and I did have a sword fight however, and we did eat Oreos with melted chocolate on them. Oh, and we hula-hooped, and we showed a group of kids how to use a piece of equipment on the playground.

- We went to the National Seashore Visitor's Center and checked out the surrounding area. I found a stage and danced on it.

- We went to the Drive-In and watched Cars 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But it was really more about the Drive-In experience. It's so much better than a cinema.

- We met Ashley's very shy cat named Bandit.

- We went to Scargo Tower in Dennis and saw a lake shaped like a fish

- We walked the beach

-We went to the Salem Witch Museum on the way home and discovered how prejudice in America causes modern day witch hunts. Way to go America. Again.

We had an amazing and wonderful trip. Thank you Laurie and Vince for letting us squat in your house for a week. Thank you Ashley for showing us Cape Cod. We loved it.

Peace out!