In other news...

We kicked ass at the drama festival thing. Yay. The play what I devised* was recalled and got second best play of the festival, Zombie got best actor, Semolina Broccoli got Best Supporting Player, Mrs FW and I got mentioned as runners-up in the acting categories and Lorraine and Semolina's play won the whole thing and will go through to the next round. This does mean that Working didn't get through because only one team from each company could qualify, but I still get to tag along as a replacement for one of the original cast who can't make it. Which I think qualifies as being jammy.

I'm very excited because Mrs Drunken Accomplice is PREGNANT! From henceforth she shall be The Sober Accomplice until such time as she has ceased breastfeeding. Congratulations to all the Accomplices, especially Foetal Accomplice.


*MuleBoy reminded me of a story I like the other day. Someone I work with met Hello Darling on a train. Hello Darling said that she was going to see The Play Wot I Wrote in London. It later got back to Hello Darling that my colleague had said afterwards that "you'd think she'd have better grammar if she'd written a play". Love it.

Embarrassing things

So, I shall come clean. I have a tendency, as I think is well documented in here, to doss about a bit on t'internet at work. My current presence on my blog at 9am on a workday morning confirms this, I think. For the last couple of months (deep breath), I have been playing on the world's most embarrassing site for a 27 year old woman who has friends and a boyfriend. But I can't seem to stop. Big Sis accepted this when I told her, knowing my mentality, but Mrs Funny Whistler was rather disconcerted. It is called GoSuperModels and, basically, it's MySpace for people who really want to pretend to be models. Unfortunately this often tends to be 11 year old girls who can't type and overuse smileys. However, this was just my first impression as I used the site merely to play modelling games and buy clothes. Genius concept - play games, buy clothes. Now I'm addicted for an even worse reason than my need to pretend that I'm a model with an easily extendable clothing budget. I've got friends on there. Now, one of my friends is a mother-of-three who goes on there to make sure her daughters are safe and one of them is a 22 year old freelance web-designer who gets bored when she's working from home but the friends that I get on really well with are 14 and 15(!) We have the same music tastes, which is how I got into their club in the first place (clubs are a big thing in GSM) and they genuinely make me laugh. The other thing, quite important to me, is that people aren't allowed in the club unless they type well as the club does not tolerate webspeak.

Obviously, the age thing can make me feel awkward, but I do tell them how old I am and don't pretend to be anyone I'm not. I do get freaked when they start to talk about being alone forever because they don't have boyfriends but have to stop myself from contributing to a discussion about that because I'm sure I was equally melodramatic at that age, if not more, and shouldn't really start saying things like "don't be stupid, you need a slap", if only because people didn't say it to me. So I talk to them about GSM and music, we play word association games and "would you kiss this person?" games, during which I was surprised to find out that someone else would kiss Simon Pegg. There was me thinking he appealed mainly to 20/30 something women. That said, everyone on there is in love with Johnny Depp, which is an age gap and a half for most of these girls.

I think it's probably odd that I never got into MySpace when I'm pretty obsessed with this but there are a couple of reasons why it works better for me. 1) MySpace is about how you look in some ways. I put a Sara Silverman picture on my MySpace profile to begin with and got a deal of response that dropped off after I told people that that isn't me. GSM gives you an avatar and that is your physical identity. I prefer this as I like to pretend that I don't look like me. 2) MySpace doesn't have games or shopping facilities. This is rubbish.

So yes, I am a teenager in an adult's body, but I think you knew this already. I like to think that the GSM thing is more an expression of the part of me that likes to pretend she went to an American High School (seriously) and was a popular girl and is going to be a model. My obsession with America's Next Top Model is probably also an expression of this. Just don't hate me for it.

Strange Pasttimes

So, am living in a small vortex of nerves today. I normally get nervous before performing but there's nothing quite like having no safety net to keep the adrenaline going way in advance of the event. With Dude (an improvisational comedy night along the lines of Whose Line Is It Anyway, in case I haven't mentioned it before), my brain has established a quite remarkable feat which is to suppress any anticipation or knowledge of the event even happening until the day before, ensuring many nights of sleeping where there should be sleeplessness and fear. Unfortunately brain is not performing a similar task at the moment. With our current foray into a local amateur drama festival, we have reprised a piece that I am surprised I said yes to, given the inordinate amount of fear it inspires. I can only justify the decision by saying that I think I forgot how fricking terrifying it is to prepare and perform due to the rose-tinted specs of time and other people saying how much they wanted to see it again. As an actress who loves scripts and generally shouldn't be allowed to talk in real life without an edit function (a recent party where I talked a huge pile of crap really loudly is still making me shudder in recall, particularly where I insisted that meeting me was the highlight of everybody's life and then wouldn't let it go. It was one of those dreadful times when my ego had shouting privileges), I have a certain terror of being script-less. In this sense, scripts are the safety-net whose absence is making me sweat (ooh, it rhymes!) We (Mrs Funny Whistler, Big Sis and I) are embarking on a mostly wordless piece, devised by ourselves about four years ago about two women who piss each other off in the office and then have a bit of a boogie with the cleaner. I suppose I am fairly confident about it - I've been talking myself through it every night before going to sleep, which turns in to a shopping list:

MFW enters, wait for her to shred and type
In (hair in hat*)
Coat
Sit
Bag
Bra
Toys
Hair
Fidget
Magic Piece of Paper
Punch
Windows
Apple
Phone
"Hello. Oh, hi Rob. Yes, I know, I know. Oh yeah. Mmhmm, uh-uh"
SHREDDER
Sneeze
Fan
Filing Cabinet
Text Message
Tape
Revel in Desk Size
Tape War
Dance of the Chairs

*new idea from Big Sis so deserving of parentheses

But, if it isn't funny, what happens then? We had a technical rehearsal on Sunday where we did the Dance of the Chairs and not a smile was cracked, even by friends to make us feel better. Admittedly, the dance works because it comes after a gradual escalation of silliness and doesn't really work on its own but it was a huge blow to our confidence. Dad came to watch our subsequent panic-fuelled run-throughs to give us tips and his main piece of advice, which I am clutching, is that it isn't that funny. I had been playing it like a loon and he said that this gave the wrong impression and that, by toning it down, it would be more quaintly humourous than side-splitting. Oh, the relief. Now, I can quiet it all down, adding pauses and fun rather than clownish expressions and a manic pace. Finally, in our last run-through, we got the tone and pace right - clocking in at the twenty minutes required for the festival's rules. Now, it's just about whether I remember this as we fail to get any laughs tomorrow night. And whether Apple comes after Punch. And I cannot stop worrying.

I guess it has hit me so strongly as tonight I get to see the festival in action for the first time ever. I am nervous for our group who are performing and nervous because it is a reminder of what we have to go through tomorrow. That said, I am really looking forward to tonight because the tantalising glimpses of song, movement, music with wine glasses and the appropriate use of a cast member's hair have whetted my appetite. Let's hope I will be able to concentrate without my mantra of bra, toys, hair...